Clive Davis says Whitney Houston was “making a valiant attempt” to give up drugs before she died

Whitney Houston‘s mentor Clive Davis says before the singer’s shocking death in 2012, she was trying very hard to get clean.

The superstar singer was found unconscious in a bathtub in a Beverly Hills hotel on February 11 and didn’t respond to CPR. She was 48. The coroner’s report ruled her death accidental, and attributed it to drowning as well as “effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use.”  Benadryl, Xanax and cannabis were also found in her system.

But Davis tells the New York Post,  “I was with her 48 hours before her death…she was showing me what she had done in rehab. How she had given up smoking, how she had cleared her throat of nicotine. And she was wanting to start going into the studio.”

“I never would have thought, 48 hours before her death, that she would pass, that there would be that horrendous, premature end to her life,” Davis continues, adding, “She was making a valiant attempt during that period to give up drugs and rehabilitate herself.”

Davis is a producer on the new biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and is portrayed in the film by Stanley Tucci.  He tells the Post that the film “answers all the questions that the public wants to know about Whitney, whether it’s her sexuality, whether it’s how she reacted to any innuendo that she was not singing Black enough, or whether it was the impact of drugs, or whether it was recording with me.”

Clive adds that fans should see the movie in a theater “with a good sound system because it really, meaningfully showcases all the great songs and, of course, that voice.”