disoriented. joining me is allison samuels from the daily beast and newsweek and alicia corals. good morning to you. allison, i ll begin with you. you were at the hotel what houston died. what do you know about her final moments? not a lot is known about her final moments except that she was about to do an interview with vh 1. i was in the room where they were filming behind the music. whitney was supposed to come directly to do behind the music on brandy. they were already set up for her. they were waiting on her. her assistant had come down probably an hour before to say okay, she s coming. are you ready for her? and 30 minutes later, we get a knock on the door saying she can t make it, she s not coming. she s dead. wow. the complete everybody was in shock. because literally, 30 minutes before we were waiting for her. i was going to say hello, i haven t seen her for a while and have a chat. 30 minutes later, her assistant who was in shock, you could hear
to get through the shock? my understanding is there wasn t really enough time. people were already arriving, people were already there. there wasn t enough time for them to actually stop it. as puffy said last night, this is a party. whitney would have loved this. that s who she was. she enjoyed having a good time and laughing and being with people. so in many ways it was a fitting tribute for that to continue, for the party to go on. alicia, what do you think whitney houston s lasting legacy will be? i think err lasting legacy will be her voice. we covered that party, if you want to call it that last night. clive davis who introduced her at that event 20-something years ago said whitney would want the party, the show to go on. she had all these trials and trib layings, you saw her downfall. you cannot deny that beautiful voice she had before the drugs ravaged it. you cannot deny it. that thankfully, will live on certainly. alicia corals and allison
with gymnastics or figure skating or the like. do you get to intersect much? maybe that s the key. happy mess. maybe that s the key to success. no. she s been working at nbc sports for a long time now. she loves doing figure skating and loves doing gymnastics and is there s a big, what is it, four continents, there s a huge figure skating event going on this weekend. thank you for being with us in office politics. pleasure. pleasure. thank you for allowing me to clean up before you got here. not. not so much. kind of messy office, but we still love him. you can watch harry smith s reports on rock center with brian williams on wednesday nights at 9:00 eastern on nbc. straight ahead, the big three in the romney rebound.
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locally? you talk about being in that room which i find stunningment hearing she s not going to make it and then she s dead. what was the reaction of your colleagues? oh, we were all in shock. because we were setting up and we were like so excited that whitney is coming. a lot of us hadn t seen her in a while. this is going to be amazing. the air went out of the room. we re like, you almost thought it was a joke in many ways. you can t be serious that she s dead when an hour ago, 30 minutes ago, they were saying oh, she s coming down. the entire hotel, some people were aware of it, some weren t. it s a surreal moment where some of the guests were not aware. whereas, the people working, a lot of the people with the grammys, were walking around in a daze. like is this really true? there was this big event that clive davis was hosting. i m wondering was there any talk about canceling that or at a time like this, do you need to be together so that you can try