Whitney Houston and Jermaine Jackson made sweet music together — in and out of the recording studio, a new report says.
The two had a yearlong affair in the early 1980s, before Houston was a superstar and while Jackson was married to Motown founder Berry Gordy’s daughter, Hazel, the London Sun reported.
When Houston died in a Beverly Hills hotel room last month at the age of 48, Jackson was so devastated he couldn’t bear to attend her New Jersey funeral.
“No one understood the scale of his grief because they didn’t know what they shared,” a friend of Jermaine’s said.
Jackson, 56, has previously acknowledged that he and Houston were attracted to each other while recording a duet almost 3 decades ago.
But he denied they were intimate, writing in his memoir that “ultimately, we had to go our separate ways and it killed us both.”
He claimed he took younger brother Michael Jackson’s advice when he turned his back on temptation and remained faithful to wife Hazel.
But the Sun’s source said Jermaine actually “gave in” to his feelings — and wound up breaking Whitney’s young heart.
“They were lovers,” the friend said.
“In those early days with Whitney, he was smuggled into her hotel rooms, they worked extra late in the studio and she even had a codename for him.”
The London Sun claims, Jackson wouldn’t leave the mother of his 3 children and his relationship with Whitney was over by 1984.
The following year, Houston released her cover of the song “Saving All My Love for You,” with a Jermaine lookalike in the video.
Jackson went on to divorce Hazel and later remarry, and Houston wound up in a marriage with Bobby Brown.
Reportedly, Jermaine and Whitney remained close over the years, and friends say she comforted him after Michael Jackson’s death in 2009.
Recently, Jermaine Jackson has refused to speak publicly about his relationship with Whitney.
