Amid Police Presence, Fans Congregate for Houston’s Funeral in Newark

Todd Heisler/The New York TimesMourners gathered near New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, N.J., for Whitney Houston's funeral on Saturday. More Photos »

NEWARK — The guest list and the parade of limousines with celebrities emerging from them seemed more suited to a red carpet event in Hollywood or New York than to a gritty stretch of Sussex Avenue near the James M. Baxter Terrace public housing project here.

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Among the speakers at the service were the actor Kevin Costner, who played her bodyguard in the 1992 hit film of the same name, and Ray Watson, her real-life bodyguard for many years. More Photos »

Yet speaker after speaker at the funeral of Whitney Houston on Saturday afternoon kept coming back to her strong attachment to New Hope Baptist Church, where her prodigious talents were first recognized and where the funeral was held.

“We came back to what produced her in the first place, where she sung in the choirs,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said after the service.

Police officers on horseback stood sentinel at the entrance to the red brick church, near an illuminated sign that flashed alternating messages: “Whitney Houston” in pink letters, followed by “We will always love you,” a riff on perhaps the singer’s most famous song.

And fittingly, the church’s interior often resounded with song during the four-and-a-half-hour service. Though Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keys and many other performers were well-known to the mourners and millions more watching on television and online, choirs also proved powerful, soaring presence.

Ms. Houston’s former husband, Bobby Brown, arrived before noon dressed in a leather suit, but stayed only briefly. In a statement to CNN, he said that he had left after being asked to move three times.

Among the speakers at the service were the actor Kevin Costner, who played her bodyguard in the 1992 hit film of the same name, and Ray Watson, her real-life bodyguard for many years.

Mr. Costner noted that both he and Ms. Houston had grown up in the Baptist church and described her anxieties during a screen test for “The Bodyguard,” her first film. He said that while many actors who could have played his part, Ms. Houston defined her character, Rachel Marron.

Though she made the film as she approached the height of her fame, she suffered doubt, and “the inexplicable burden that comes with fame,” Mr. Costner said. “I’ve had it,” he added, looking out at the crowd, which included show business luminaries like Tyler Perry. “I know the famous in the room have had it, too.”

Mr. Watson told of the last hours of Ms. Houston’s life. She had been behaving abnormally at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles, where she died on Feb. 11. But that afternoon she listened to her favorite gospel singer, Fred Hammond, as was her pre-performance ritual, just before Mr. Watson left her to prepare for the Grammy Awards the next night.

“Fred Hammond was rocking. I said, ‘yeah, she’s in the norm,’ ” Mr. Watson said. When he returned, Ms. Houston was dead. “It seemed like my whole world just —” his voice trailed off. “I lost a friend, a boss, a sister.”

Another speaker was Clive Davis, the founder of Arista Records who had helped establish Ms. Houston as one of the most successful pop singers in the world, and whose party she was to attend the night she died. He said that in the days before her death, Ms. Houston, whose abuse of alcohol and drugs had diminished her vocal strength, told him she was on the mend.

“ ‘I’m getting in shape; I’m swimming an hour or two a day, no cigarettes, I’ll be ready for August.’ ” Mr. Davis recalled her saying. “Well, Whitney,” he said in his eulogy. “I’m going to hold you to it. Everyone in heaven, including God, is waiting. And I just know you’re going to raise the roof like no one else has done before.”

Fans had begun arriving in the chilly darkness on Saturday.

In the predawn hours, the police established a metal perimeter that sealed off the streets around the church and kept both fans and reporters at a distance.

Six hours before the funeral, Hedwig Berthold, 40, and Rhonda Owens, 32, teachers who had spent $600 each to fly here from Miami, sat in their Nissan rental car, hoping to avoid being asked to move by the police.

“We came to celebrate her life and say goodbye,” Ms. Berthold said. On Friday, they signed a guest book at the Whigham Funeral Home, where the Houston family held a private viewing.

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Okinawan Views on U.S. Military Presence Are Nuanced

But wander up Henoko’s narrow streets, and the villagers will tell you a different story. They say the activists are outsiders. Most residents, they say, still support the village’s “painful decision” of more than a decade ago to accept the planned air base, with its noise and risk of crashes, in exchange for jobs and compensation payments.

“Of course, it would be better not to have the air base, but we are not dogmatic like them,” Masaaki Shiroma, a community association leader, said as he nodded toward the tent encampment.

This southern island can often seem united in its resistance to the new airfield at Henoko and, more broadly, to the large number of military bases that the United States has maintained here since the end of World War II. But look more deeply and a nuanced picture emerges, one that seems to offer a possible chance of some sort of compromise.

There is much truth to the image of an angry Okinawa, an island of 1.4 million residents about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island. Much of the resentment over the large American military presence is focused on one base, Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, a busy heliport that has come to symbolize the island’s burden because of its dangerous location in the middle of a city, Ginowan. The United States and Japan first agreed to move the base in 1996 to appease Okinawan outrage over the rape of a schoolgirl by three American servicemen, later choosing Henoko, in the island’s less populated north, as the site to build a replacement airfield.

But construction never started because, local leaders say, the Henoko agreement failed to address Okinawans’ resentment at the oversize American presence on the island, which is host to two-thirds of the 37,000 shore-based United States military personnel in Japan. The biggest setback came two years ago, when the prime minister at the time, Yukio Hatoyama, broke an election promise to move the base off the island entirely, which only seemed to confirm Tokyo’s willingness to allow the Americans to remain on Okinawa.

Both the American and the Japanese governments still formally support the original plan to move the Futenma base to Henoko. However, opinion polls show that about 80 percent of voters on Okinawa now oppose it, enough for many analysts and politicians to proclaim the agreement to be as good as dead.

But look across Okinawa’s divided political spectrum and the depth of that opposition varies. For those on the left, the Futenma base had become a symbol not only of an unfair base burden but also of a history of discrimination by Japan, going back to its 1879 annexation of this once independent Kingdom of the Ryukyus.

A similarly large bloc of voters on the right, though sharing some of this anger, supported the Futenma relocation plan until recently. They voice more concern about national security issues and support the bases as a way to help offset the rising threat of China, just across the East China Sea. They say they also want the jobs and other money the bases bring to Okinawa, by many measures the poorest of Japan’s 47 prefectures.

Many conservatives turned against the Henoko plan two years ago, in the popular outrage that followed Mr. Hatoyama’s broken promise. The Okinawa chapter of the right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party broke ranks with the party’s national headquarters in Tokyo and opposed moving the base to the village. In late 2010, the island’s L.D.P.-backed governor, Hirokazu Nakaima, won re-election by switching to an antibase platform.

“We had to reverse our position for political survival,” said Sunao Ikema, the secretary general of the L.D.P.’s Okinawa chapter.

In interviews, Mr. Ikema and other L.D.P. members did not exclude the possibility of changing their position once again, this time in support of the base, once public passions showed signs of cooling. But at best, conservative leaders and political analysts said that allowing construction of a new air base on Okinawa would take time, and would probably require scrapping the current agreement for some other approach.

The governor, Mr. Nakaima, declined a request for an interview, but Vice Governor Kanetoshi Yoseda indicated that it would be difficult to go back to supporting the relocation without clearer signs of receding public passions. Some analysts say that could come in June, when conservatives will try to regain control of the 48-seat prefectural assembly, where they now hold 22 seats. That prospect has many on the left alarmed that their side may be losing momentum.

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