Whitney Houston: Going home

A hearse under heavy police escort arrived late on Monday at a funeral home officials said was handling the arrangements for late pop star Whitney Houston.

The hearse travelled from Teterboro Airport, where officials had said Houston's body would arrive on Monday night on a flight from the Los Angeles area. The Daily Mail reported her body was flown on a private jet belonging to film director Tyler Perry, who offered his help to the Houston family.

Several officials familiar with funeral planning said arrangements were being made by Newark's Whigham Funeral Home, which handled the 2003 funeral of Houston's father.

Houston died on Saturday at a hotel in Beverly Hills. She was 48. Officials say she was underwater and apparently unconscious when she was pulled from a bathtub.

Dozens of Houston fans went to the funeral home, where they played her songs, sang, lit candles to remember her and hoped to get a glimpse of her casket.

Houston was born in Newark and was raised in nearby East Orange. Her family raised the possibility of holding a wake tomorrow and a funeral on Friday at Newark's Prudential Centre. City officials were awaiting the family's arrival to complete the funeral planning.

A picture of Houston appeared on Monday night on the electronic board outside the arena, one of the nation's busiest entertainment venues, with a New Jersey Devils game on Friday night posing a logistical challenge to a planned funeral that day.

Houston's relatives also were debating whether to have a smaller service at New Hope Baptist Church, where family members have sung. They planned to meet yesterday with officials to finalise the details, according to someone who had knowledge of the planning but wasn't authorised to speak publicly about it.

An impromptu memorial for Houston was held during a sadness-tinged Grammys, with Jennifer Hudson saluting her memory with a performance of I Will Always Love You. Viewership for the awards show soared over last year by 50 per cent, with about 40 million viewers tuning in to the programme.

"It was the greatest honour of my life to be able to be the one to pay tribute to Whitney's memory," Hudson said in a statement on Monday. "It was from my heart. I haven't stopped crying since she passed."

Pharmacy links Whitney and MJ

Whitney Houston bought prescription drugs from the same Mickey Fine Beverly Hills pharmacy that supplied Michael Jackson, according to investigators.

Although the Los Angeles coroner said it was too early to know for sure how the singer came to die in the bath of her hotel suite, attention was focusing on whether she might have died not from drowning but a lethal combination of prescription drugs and alcohol.

Detectives told the website TMZ that while various prescription bottles were discovered in her suite, there were few pills to be found.

— Daily Mail, with input from AP