Copyright (c) 2005 by Sharon Osbourne
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Springboard Press
Hachette Book Group USA
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com
First eBook Edition: October 2006
ISBN: 978-0-7595-6894-5
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1: Brixton
2: Mayfair
3: Wimbledon
4: Leaving
5: Los Angeles
6: On the Road
7: Split
8: Ozzy
9: On the Road Again
10: Sailing
11: Leesburg
12: On the Run
13: Palm Springs
14: Home
15: Free
16: Pacific Palisades
17: Ozzfest
18: Making It
19: Crisis
20: The Knock on the Door
21: The X-Factor
22: Payback
Epilogue
Coda
I dedicate this book to my darling husband, Ozzy.
Thank you for being my partner and my best friend and for changing my life for the better. Thank you most especially for our babies. My love for you is endless.
Acknowledgments
All the people at Time Warner who made this such a happy experience for me, especially Antonia Hodgson and Viv Redman.
Pepsy: without you I would never have been able to put my words onto paper. Thank you for making my book a reality. I've found a new friend.
Ian Willis: we have never met, but your wonderful book American Rock 'n' Roll: The UK Tours 1956-72 unlocked the door to so many great memories.
My coworkers: I thank you for your loyalty. Lee Ali, Silvana Arena, Hardy Chandhok, Tony Dennis, John Fenton, Dave and Sharon Godman, Michael Guarracino, Kymberly Johnson, Dave Moscato, Marysia Murray, Dari Petrashvilli, Lynn Seager, Howard Smit, Claire Smith, Saba Teklehaymandt, Melinda Varga and David Withers.
My loyal friends: there are not a lot of you, but you all know who you are. Thanks for always being there for me, and even though I never call or write when I say I will, you accept me the way I am and I love you all for that.
Elton John and David Furnish: thank you for always being there with your friendship, guidance, love and, most of all, laughter. Puss loves you both.
Simon Cowell: for seeing something in me that no one else did.
Posy, my best friend since age ten.
Gloria and Terry Butler, lifelong friends.
Michele Anthony: the smartest and most loyal woman in the music industry.
Belle Zwerdling: you were my first friend when I moved to LA and I am proud that you are now a friend of my husband and children.
Shelli and Irving Azoff, who have always been there for me.
Colin, Mette, Michelle, Caspar, Jonathan, Fleur and Jake Newman: over the last thirty years we've all become one huge dysfunctional family together. What about the Newbournes? I thank you for always being there for us. Love you loads.
Gina, my dear niece: I love you and your gorgeous husband, Dean, and your divine babies, Amelia and Ollie. Your love and support have been unconditional and I thank you.
My brother David: we've come a long way, haven't we? Thank you for your support throughout these last difficult years both through my cancer and with our father.
Jessica and Louis Osbourne: much love and respect. Your father and I are proud of you both.
And finally my children: Aimee, Kelly and Jack. Each of you has been a gift from God for me. How proud I am of your individuality, your wisdom and your passion.
Prologue
I am at the house, standing by the gate. Kelly is running across the courtyard, blond hair bouncing around her little cherub face. She's like the golden angel on the Mormon Temple on Santa Monica Boulevard, and she's holding Jackie Boy by the hand, and I want to call out to them, and tell her to mind the fountain, that it's deeper than it looks, and that they shouldn't go sitting on the edge. And then Aimee is smiling up at me, pulling at my sleeve, wanting me to go with her, to show me something. And I feel so happy, and safe and calm. To know that the house is mine again; the same tall, tall palm trees, their trunks the color of charcoal, and the creeper hung with the purple flowers, and everything like it used to be. I want to tell Dadda but I don't know where he is. So I watch my babies kneeling by the fountain, one at each corner of the cloverleaf, peering over the edge and listening to the water tumbling from one shell down to the next, and then to the next . . . but where is Dadda? He won't believe it when I tell him. I try calling out his name, but the tinkling of the fountain gets louder and louder, drowning everything else out . . .
. . . and then, like a cold liquid, like that cocktail of chemo trickling through my veins, I realize it's not the fountain I can hear, it's the fucking telephone. And I'm not even in California, but in Buckinghamshire in the kitchen at Welders, sharing the sofa with Minnie in front of a cold fireplace.
"I love you, Minnie," I tell her, in my just-for-Minnie voice. And she opens her eyes and smiles. Nobody else believes me when I say she smiles, not even Ozzy, who loves her nearly as much as I do. But she does: although she's a Pomeranian, Minnie has a mouth like a cat.
And now it's Beau's turn to give me a sloppy morning kiss. He's such a beautiful, beautiful dog. "And so you should be," I tell him, "when I think of how much you cost." Shitloads. Kelly, carried away in some charity auction. But, excuse me, Kel, a Labrador?
Kelly's problem is that she adores puppies and feels compelled to buy them. But as soon as they begin to shit and piss and smell, she's gone. Full-size dogs just don't do it for her, and Beau is about as full-size as they come. So naturally, just like her other rejects, he came to live at Doheny in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately, sharing a shit-patch with a pack of midgets turned out to be not his idea of fun, nor theirs either, and when he went for Minnie one morning, I knew That Was It. It wasn't his fault, it was the situation. He's been in England ever since, where our 120-acre corner of English countryside seems to suit him very well. And now Minnie and he get on great. But he still needs somebody to love, so until we find him a new mummy or daddy, it has to be me. And I feel my eyes begin to prick.
What do other people do when their children leave home? Curled up on the sofa, the fire just a heap of ash with a few ends of half-charred wood sticking out, and no noise, no slamming doors, no arguments, no bickering, I feel cut off from everything I ever felt or ever thought I knew. Ozzy calls it our own Chinese Water Torture. A slow and painful and inevitable death of something that was once so vibrant and alive. And I think of my father sitting out the end of his life in his room above Hollywood Boulevard, listening to his Frank Sinatra records and wearing diapers. He's even got a picture of Sinatra on his bedside cabinet, a black-and-white ten-by-eight in a silver frame, with the famous signature slashed across the bottom. And at the top, "To Don." It sat on his office desk for years, there to impress, one of the props, like the cigars and the Rolls and the Rolex and the diamond cuff links and the Mayfair address and the Savile Row suits. Don's friend, Ol' Blue Eyes . . .
He never even met him, let alone got him to sign a fucking photograph. He just forged it, framed it and there you are. Easy. "No one hurt, eh, Sha?" No one hurt. In the end I think he
even believed it himself. And now those nurses that feed him and wipe his arse probably believe it too. He loved all that connection with the mob, Joe Pagano, Charlie Kray and the rest of the two-bit hoods. He even liked to call himself the Godfather of Rock.
I thought I needed him. But I didn't.
And now it's my children who don't need me. They say they do, but it's all bullshit. I know it, they know it.
But I need them.
For months now I've been trying to get my office to print up a weekly schedule, with our names down the side, showing where each one of us is and what we're doing. Just to keep track. But Jack says it's me being controlling. And it scares the shit out of me, because that's what my father was all about. Control. But do they really want me phoning in the middle of the night because I don't know what fucking time it is wherever they happen to be? Right now Jack is in some jungle boot camp learning how to kickbox for a TV show; Kelly is somewhere in the dance-music triangle of Miami-LA-New York, while Aimee is here with Ozzy and me in England. Can it be normal to have your children on three different continents? Is there anybody out there who can tell me what to do?
The only person who needs me now is my husband. He says I saved his life, but it's not true. He saved mine. If it wasn't for Ozzy, I'd have ended up in jail like my brother, like one of those crazed women in Prisoner Cell Block H. Or dead from an overdose of sleeping pills, looking for a way out.
And as I think of my husband, whom I love with all my heart, I realize he must still be asleep, and that it must be earlier than I thought, because by seven I know he'll be down here looking for me, worried that I'm not there beside him. He hates sleeping alone. But he needs his sleep so I tiptoed out and came down to the kitchen to read my script, hoping that the fire would still be burning. I put a couple of logs on but by the time it really got going I must have nodded off.
On normal days Ozzy always wakes first. Always, always. In Malibu, where the waves crash on the shore not ten yards from our beach house, the tide never seeming to go out or in more than a couple of yards, he'll wander onto the deck from our bedroom and stare at the ocean, watching for dolphins or whales dipping along the coast. In LA he'll put in the hours on his treadmill, working out in his gym and watching the History Channel at the same time, with the volume turned up way too high, his hearing shot from too many years on the road.
My husband has always been a morning person. Long before he and I got together, when I really didn't know him at all, I'd see him wandering hotel corridors or hovering in lobbies, while the rest of Black Sabbath would be totally out of it until way into the afternoon. And then they'd turn on him. Why was it always Ozzy's picture in this magazine or that magazine? Why was it always him they interviewed? Why not Tony or Geezer or Bill? Why not one of them? Possibly because he was the only one of you fuckers who was ever awake when it counted, I would tell them--though that was many years later. While the band was still unconscious, sleeping off whatever debauch they had perpetrated the previous night, their singer would be downstairs looking for people to talk to: musicians, journalists, girls, hotel staff, even me. He wasn't choosy. It was the company he wanted, though if anything else was offered he wouldn't say no--one of the reasons his first marriage came to an end. One of the reasons he's always had such trouble keeping away from the bottle. A bar is the one place you can always find someone to talk to, if only the bartender.
Now he just wanders around whatever house we happen to be in, humming melodies into a little tape recorder, talking to whoever is there at the time, playing his music at a hundred thousand decibels. Because once my husband is awake, that's it. He can never get back to sleep again. Never. Not like me. Sleep has always been my way out. My one escape. There were times when things got really bad that I'd take a couple of pills and not wake up for forty-eight hours. Ozzy says I would sleep through a nuclear explosion. But I love my bed. Love, love, love my bed. Which is where I'd be now if I didn't think I'd wake my husband with my cold feet.
Tucking them under me, I stare at the clock on the dresser, which says 6:45, trying to remember if it's the one that works. Beau looks at me, his head cocked to one side, and I realize I should let him out.
The sound of the sofa leg scraping on the floor is enough to set off a yawn of excitement, and his paws scuffle on the tiles as he scampers from side to side, and his great tail is going like a metronome. I slop sleepily across the room, turn the key and open the back door, and he's off, slurping noisily from the fountain on his way. And the sound of the water breaks my dream. The fountain. I was back at the Howard Hughes house. I hardly ever dream, but when I do it's always that. I was back at the Howard Hughes house, and it was mine again.
"And you, Minnie--do you want to go out too?"
She looks up at the sound of my just-for-Minnie voice.
Only if my mummy's going too, she says. In fact, I didn't need to ask her. Minnie never leaves my side unless she's forced to.
As I settle back under the blanket on the sofa, I notice that the clock is still showing 6:45. At the last count there were eleven in this kitchen, and only one of them works, and now I know it isn't this one. It's not that the others are broken, it's because they never get wound. Anyway, a kitchen full of ticking clocks would drive me, and everybody else, insane. Like most things I own, I buy them for what they look like, because I'm a magpie and I like to be surrounded by beautiful things. So I have clutter on every table, chest of drawers, shelf, wall, you name it, in every room in each one of our three houses. And I'm always adding to it: pictures, photographs in silver frames, rag dolls, angels, books, boxes, lamps, chandeliers. I have more chandeliers than most people have lightbulbs. And as I look around the kitchen, with its tiles of medieval musicians with their instruments, like tiny figures in a Brueghel painting, and the dresser and my blue-and-white china, my mind goes back to the kitchen where I grew up, the Brixton basement with its linoleum, its fifties glass-fronted cabinet, its miserable coal fire that was the only form of heat. And how everything in that house, apart from my father, was always dirty. And how I thought that everybody lived like we did; that arguments were only ever settled by a fist in the face, that repo men were as likely to be outside the front door as milkmen. That smashing a lightbulb into your brother's ear was a perfectly reasonable way to behave. That all fathers had guns. It was only when I got to be about twelve and went to stay at my best friend Posy's house for the first time that I discovered other people's lives weren't like that.
I woke in the middle of the night with what I thought was diarrhea--ever since the operation to remove my cancer it's either been one thing or the other. All or nothing. Story of my life.
So I crept out of bed and ran to my bathroom, but this time it was nothing more than old-fashioned butterflies in the tummy, because, after three days of intense one-to-one rehearsals with the director, it's crunch time for my acting career: the first fullcast read-through of The Vagina Monologues, and I know it's key, which is why I'm down here going over my lines for the hundred and seventeenth time.
I have never done anything remotely like this before. The audience might be buying their tickets to see that motormouth Sharon Osbourne in the flesh, but my fellow performers don't give a shit about who I am. They've probably never even seen The Osbournes or The X-Factor and must be wondering what the hell they've let themselves in for. The last time I set foot on a West End stage was forty years ago: Cinderella at the London Palladium, with Cliff Richard as Buttons, me as a mouse.
All I want is to not let anybody down, not the cast, not the audience, not the director, but especially not Aimee, who's been so patient with me these last few days: getting my breathing right, my phrasing right, all that technical theater stuff she knows about. And finally, of course, the gentlemen of the press will be just gagging for me to fall flat on my arse. But when I think who's done it before--Kate Winslet, Glenn Close, Sharon Stone--I've got my work cut out. No autocues, no retakes, just me, the audience and the words.
And that's what I must learn to trust in, Irina Brown the director says. The words. Let them work for me. And she's right. The testimony of these women is so powerful that the more you look into each character, the easier it gets. Though "easier" here is a question of degree. Right from the start she made it clear that the crib cards we're allowed to take with us onstage are for emergencies only, and by the time the show opens we will all need to know every line by heart. If not, she says, we'll be short-changing the women whose emotions and lives we are borrowing. And they deserve better than that. And of course she's right.
At the beginning, I honestly didn't think I could do it. But I'm getting there, by just reading the script over and over and watching the Eve Ensler video, the woman who wrote it and who performed it originally as a one-woman show. And, like I used to tell it to my X-Factor kids, success has as much to do with hard work as raw talent. I know I have as much raw talent as a fucking lobster, but at least I'm working hard and am now comfortable with what I have to do.
This isn't the first time I've been approached to do The Vagina Monologues. A theater company in Chicago contacted me in early autumn 2002 and I remember feeling totally overawed. I mean, what did they want with me? Although I've been called a drama queen by my family for years, I'm no actress. The Osbournes might have played like a comedy, but it was totally unscripted, the shape of each episode only emerging at the editing stage. No lines, no rehearsals, no retakes, no nothing. But if those people in Chicago thought I could do it, perhaps I could. What did I know?
Throughout all my years with Ozzy, I had never been in the limelight. People in the music industry knew who I was, but that was it. As far as the world (and I) was concerned, I was a wife, a mother and a businesswoman. But with The Osbournes all that changed. And after I was diagnosed with cancer, I had this need, an obsession you might even say, to experience everything and anything. Time was too precious to waste and I wanted to take in as much of life as I could before it was too late. It wasn't like I saw my future in the theater; although I'd spent years as a child moving from one stage school to another, I couldn't sing and I couldn't act. However, after all I'd come through, and the brave women I'd met on the way, I didn't want to say no. But Ozzy put his foot down. I was only two months into my chemo and was still really, really sick.
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