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, 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 Jackson friend told the newspaper.
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Jackson, 56, has previously acknowledged that he and Houston were attracted to each other while recording a duet almost three 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 surrendered to his feelings — and wound up breaking Whitney’s young heart.
“They were lovers,” the friend said.
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“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 code name for him.”
But Jackson wouldn’t leave the mother of his three children and the forbidden romance was over by 1984.
The next 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 disastrous marriage with R&B bad boy Bobby Brown.
The former “Jackson 5” star and Houston remained close, though, and she reportedly comforted him after Michael Jackson’s overdose in 2009.
Jermaine Jackson did not respond to a email asking him to comment on the Sun story.