Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne; Penelope Dening

  Yes. I know what I want to do. I want to weep, weep, weep.

  It's a writ, or as Michael calls it, a claim. Same fucking thing. The Vagina Monologues. Monologues Ltd. is suing me for PS260,000. It comes as no surprise.

  "So, Sharon, what do you want me to do about this?"

  "Throw it on the pile with the rest of them."

  Outside the window the dogs are going crazy. It's Jennifer, come to take them for their morning walk.

  "You want some of your special tea, Sharon?" Saba is from Sudan, and I swear she is graced with a sixth sense. I turn on the bath, take the most expensive bath oil I have. Pour it in. All of it. I light the most expensive candle I have on hand. Brand new, in its own special pot. Faaabulous. Burning money is about the only way I know to feel good about myself.

  2

  Mayfair

  In early 1964 we moved to 71 Berkeley House, Hay Hill, Mayfair. It was a move designed to show that Don Arden was going up in the world. But going from Brixton to Mayfair in one leap was like going from Woolworth's to Tiffany's with just a credit card in your pocket and nothing to back it up but a job stocking shelves.

  My father was all about show. He loved that thing of having important-looking offices and lots of staff. And he loved the fact that he could have an apartment in Mayfair and a Rolls-Royce.

  I would much rather have stayed where we were. Because the previous term, just before I turned eleven, I had started at Italia Conti, a stage school run by a rather wonderful woman, very beautiful, very theatrical and very dignified. It was just ten minutes' walk from Angell Road, whereas now I'd have to go miles. For the first time in my life I had a real friend, Posy Kurpiel. Like me she had an unusual background, coming from Romania originally, and for most of her life her family had lived in a trailer in the West Country, but they had recently gotten themselves a home in the Elephant and Castle district of south London. David was also at Conti's, though only just. When he'd reached eleven, he'd somehow gotten a place at King's College Wimbledon, but had been expelled for fighting and playing truant when Dolly took him to the dog tracks in Wandsworth for a spot of greyhound racing.

  I had always known I was going to be a dancer--my mother had been a dancer, her mother had been a dancer, so it was like it was in the blood. In fact, I was dancing even before I started grade school. This was classical ballet. My teacher was named Biddy Pinchard, and I went there once a week and I absolutely adored her. I loved it all: the barre work, the ritual, the little performances, the clothes. Dixie would make my tutus and my outfits and every so often there would be a trip up to the West End for some new ballet shoes, which came from Freed's in St. Martin's Lane.

  But after the move to Hay Hill, I hardly saw Dixie; she had married somebody my parents hated, so I hadn't even gone to the wedding. We were still living in Brixton then, and I'll never forget my mother yelling, "You're not going! Do you hear me? Not going," and me pulling the blankets over my head and crying my eyes out, because of course Dixie had asked me to be her bridesmaid. So it was a holiday camp for the weekend instead. Fucking Butlin's in Margate.

  I'd been too young even to begin to understand the tense relationship between my mother and Dixie at that time: "Every boy your sister brings back here falls in love with me, and she can't stand the fact that they prefer my company to hers," my mother told me once when Dixie had stormed out. And then when Dixie did marry it was: "You know why she married him, don't you? Because he was the only one who didn't fall for me."

  "She'll be back," she said, after the wedding. "You'll see, when she needs money, she'll be back. They always come back."

  I still managed to keep in touch, and when Dixie got a job at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden as a bookkeeper, she would get me tickets for the ballet when she could, and I absolutely loved it. I only stopped going after I married. Ozzy and ballet do not mix.

  It was around this time that I got to know Dorothy Solomon. The Solomons had an apartment on Park Lane, only a few minutes' walk away from us in Hay Hill. They were friends of my father's--Phil Solomon managed the Bachelors, who were a very big singing act out of Dublin, and about the only non-pop artists who consistently topped the British charts in the sixties.

  In many ways you could say that she changed my life. It was Dorothy who introduced me to luxury. Everything about her was glamorous. From the way her clothes moved, to the rustle and the feel of the silk and the cashmere that she wore. And when I sat next to her, just to breathe in the smell that surrounded her was like entering paradise. When I asked her about it, she told me it was a perfume called Intimate and she gave me a bottle of Youth Dew by Estee Lauder as a gift. I had this feeling that there was a lot more out there than I knew about.

  Her husband was a big-time gambler and racehorse owner. Their apartment on Park Lane overlooked Hyde Park and was full of beautiful paintings and antique furniture and chandeliers and shiny polished floors. And I used to love going there, just to be able to sit and move around in those surroundings. But the center of it all was Dorothy, who looked and dressed like the ladies in the magazines I used to read. And that was the right word for her. She was a lady. Her clothes weren't made by the dressmaker across the street, like my mother's. They were couture, and she would have a Gucci handbag, and her jewelry and her nails and her hair were always done.

  My mother's hair was never done; nothing was ever done. Only when she had to go out somewhere with my father did she make an effort. Otherwise she was a wreck. Yet she was lovely. She had classic Irish looks, red hair, pale skin and pale eyes. Not warm eyes--hers were like Fox's Glacier Mints. It wasn't like she didn't have the money. My father would have given her anything--part of that thing about showing how well he was doing. He did anyway, things like jewelry and fur coats, but they were never really her. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had bonded with my mother. I loved her because she was my mother, but I didn't like her because she embarrassed me, just as I now embarrass my kids.

  I hated the way she kept our house, moving the dust around, shoving stuff under beds, into cupboards, clothes not washed before they were put away. It wasn't about having grand things, it wasn't about having expensive paintings on the wall like at Dorothy Solomon's. It was like at my nana's house: about nice towels, fresh tea towels, a clean fridge with food in it.

  Shampoo didn't exist in our house. I would wash my hair with dish soap. The leftover soap in the basin would be cracked and slimy at the same time. You could never find a hairbrush that wasn't covered with dog hairs. We'd run out of toothpaste. There'd be no toilet paper. There was no attempt to make anything nice. In my bedroom, for example, there was a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a bed and that's all. My only decoration was a picture of a little ballet dancer that Dixie had embroidered and framed when I was about five or six, and I used to have it hanging very close to my face so I could see it when I was in bed.

  In Brixton, our next-door neighbor had done the washing, but once we moved to Mayfair we did it ourselves. We didn't own anything like a washing machine. I used to just fill the bath, lay my uniform in it, add the detergent and then use my hand as a brush. For the rest, I'd go to the launderette. Mayfair, of course, didn't have launderettes, so I'd take the subway to Earl's Court from Green Park, and then sit there watching it go around and around.

  The whole thing was insane. Here we were, living in Mayfair, but I'd have to go to the concierge and ask to use his phone because ours was cut off. He had a flat at the other end of our floor, so I used to give his number to my friends, and he'd come knocking on the door and say, "Miss Arden, there's a call for you."

  His name was Mr. Watts, and he looked like something from Upstairs, Downstairs. And he had the typical thing of the black tailcoat, pin-striped trousers and the dirty collar and cuffs. He was a nice, friendly old boy and one of his sidelines, to get a bit of extra cash, was making breakfast for people in the building. So when I used to go into his place in the morning to get or make a phone call, there
he'd be frying up the greasiest food for Sir Whoever-it-was and Lady This One. Then from ten o'clock onwards he'd be down in his cubbyhole by the front door taking deliveries and keeping the riffraff out.

  In fact, the Mayfair apartment, for all its smart address, was actually smaller than Angell Road. We'd go up in a huge elevator with two sets of iron gates that you had to physically close before it would start to move, rattling and clanking its way up to the seventh floor. But we had only three bedrooms: my brothers shared one, my mother and father had the master bedroom, and I had this little tiny box room. The only real improvement was that for the first time we did have two bathrooms.

  My father had seen rock and roll as a license to make money, but it wasn't, and turnover isn't income, and if he earned PS4,000 one week, he'd spend PS5,000, and then we'd be back in the shit. And the phone would be cut off, and the electricity would be cut off, and the water would be cut off, and the cars would literally come and go. The timing of the move to Hay Hill had been about as bad as it could have been. Beatlemania had arrived and blown everything else out of the water. So he tried to bring in artists the Beatles said had influenced them, like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and the Everly Brothers. Phil and Don were just lovely to me and my brother. They always found time to talk to us, made us welcome backstage and always remembered our names. You could tell that they had been brought up really well. They were a total contrast to the Rolling Stones, who my father put in as the opening act and who weren't at all what I'd been used to. Unlike the Everlys, they weren't interested in being nice to a twelve-year-old girl and I remember feeling quite intimidated. The Everlys also toured with Manfred Mann, and they didn't like my brother and me being backstage either. When they saw us in the wings, I remember them saying, What the fuck is this? Is there a children's party backstage?

  In London they all mostly did well, but nowhere else, and this was when my father began having real cash-flow problems. All he could rely upon now was his ability to gauge the audience appeal of untried artists, which he had never had to do before. Meanwhile he would try other kinds of acts. Always American.

  Jayne Mansfield was the Pamela Anderson of her day. She had begun in Hollywood as an instant film star, but by the sixties she was divorced from her husband Mickey Hargitay, and was on the cabaret circuit. My father met her through an American lawyer named Marvin Mitchelson, who had gotten her Mexican divorce made legal in California, so he decided to bring her over for a tour of workingmen's clubs in the north of England. Because she had this glamorous identity, he would take a whole floor of a hotel. As this would then be sealed off, everyone would leave their bedroom doors open, and if my mum and I weren't going to see her perform at night, we'd have a good old mooch around her room trying things on. What fascinated me most were her bras. I had just started to be interested in such things. They were huge, something like 44DD, and that's not an exaggeration. So I'd be wandering around wearing them strapped around my chest and my feet stuffed into calf-length white leather boots with kitten heels that were then her big thing. As a tour, it was another disaster.

  Then my father finally struck it lucky. In 1964, on the northern leg of the Chuck Berry tour, he'd put in an opening band called the Alan Price Combo that Peter Grant had recommended--he was now acting as a scout for my father. This time his obsession with all things American paid off when he persuaded them to make their first single an old New Orleans classic they'd played on the tour, and "The House of the Rising Sun" went straight to No. 1. The Animals--as they were renamed--became only the second English band after the Beatles to have a number-one hit in America.

  The last person that my mother wanted to see in her smart new Mayfair surroundings was Dolly. Since we'd moved from Brixton we'd hardly seen her. I can't say I was sorry, because I still hated the way she stank and how she fawned over David and didn't notice me. One Saturday, my mum and I had planned to go out, when Dolly turned up. She'd managed to find her way to the seventh floor. I opened the door, and there she was: same old hairstyle, same old red bow, same old butt hanging out of her mouth, smeared with lipstick. She had somehow found her way to the apartment, and my mum was so pissed off that we just walked her back to Green Park, put her on a bus to Wandsworth Common and didn't even give her a cup of tea.

  She never did it again. Perhaps my mother paid regular visits to Elsynge Road, but I doubt it. The next time I saw Dolly was quite a while later. It must have been the summer, because I remember the roses on her street were out. Her apartment was at the far end, on the first floor in a big old mansion block. We got into the building without any trouble, but then we had to slam on the door for a good few minutes before this person who looked like a witch eventually let us in. She hadn't heard us knock, she said, because she was in bed. And it was obvious as soon as you got inside the door that she'd been there for weeks. The place stank of cat piss and shit. There were cats everywhere, and we couldn't see a thing. This apartment was always dark anyway, because it was so big and went back so far, but now it was pitch-dark because the electricity had run out. While my mother started tidying Dolly up, I went to try and get some milk and tea and some change for the meter from a row of shops on St. John's Road. Eventually we left her with a pile of shillings, though as she would have to climb to reach the meter I didn't see how she would do it, given the state she was in. And then, just as we were walking over the bridge at Clapham Junction, I felt this itching, and I looked down at my legs and saw that I was covered in a creeping carpet of black fur. And then I realized what it was. Fleas! Eventually my mother found a taxi and I was screaming with horror over these things that were feeding on me, and she got me back to Hay Hill, she threw me in the bath, chucked in a whole bottle of disinfectant and scrubbed me till all the fleas were dead. But she didn't seem that bothered about me or her mother, it was just, "Don't you dare tell your father."

  Apart from Dolly, we knew nothing about my mother's family, but I now suspect that she was probably born illegitimate. People like your grandmother are always showing you their photographs and talking about your grandfather and the other relatives you're too young to have met but Dolly never did. All she had in the way of photographs were pictures of her with her troupe, the O'Shea whatever-it-was girls. They were famous for this thing she'd invented called the pony trot. Dolly was at the back with six girls in pairs in front of her, huge feathers on their heads and reins attached to their backs that she was holding, and they all wore thick flesh-colored tights and little brown laced ankle boots.

  But whenever we went down Acre Lane in Brixton, my mother would point to a huge Victorian house, far bigger than ours, and say that that was where she'd been brought up. That she'd lived there with her grandmother, and it had been her home. And the only photograph I ever saw of my mother as a child was when she must have been about six, standing with a severe-looking woman in the garden of this house in Acre Lane. And this woman, with her long dark skirt and white pinafore and stiff white collar and cuffs, was my great-grandmother. I know nothing else about her. Not her name, not where she came from, nothing.

  One day we were in Shepherd Market--the red-light district of Mayfair--and me, my brother and my mother were on our way to the sandwich shop next door to the liquor store. Suddenly my mother stops, goes into the liquor store, and of course we just follow her in. So then she starts introducing us to this man.

  "Ira, this is Sharon." Shake hands.

  "And this is David." Shake hands.

  "Children, this is your uncle Ira."

  This Irishman with a Jewish name was my mother's brother! Until then we had no idea she had any family at all, apart from Dolly. Whether Ira was a full brother or a half brother, she never said. It wasn't something she was going to talk about. But there certainly wasn't any great family reunion. After that we would see him occasionally. What I do know is that Dolly went to live with him for a while, but then when dementia set in, my mother got her into an old people's home in Elsynge Road, just down from where she'd lived for all th
ose years. Eventually Dolly got pneumonia and died, and all those secrets died with her.

  There was so much that I didn't know and didn't understand about my mother, particularly her mental health. She started to change about a year or so before we moved to Hay Hill. One Sunday we'd gone down to spend the day with the Kaye Sisters, just an outing, which was something we did quite often in the summer.

  The Kaye Sisters were a singing act my father would use in his shows. In the fifties the sisters thing was big--the Beverley Sisters were another example. The Kaye Sisters' big hit was "You Gotta Have Something in the Bank, Frank," advice my father would have done well to listen to.

  Anyway, one of the sisters had married the manager and had done quite well for herself, and they had this apartment on the waterfront at Brighton, overlooking the sea. And we drove down to see them in our brand-new car, a canary yellow Ford Consul. The sun shone and we went on the pier, played the slot machines and had fish and chips, and generally had a great day. Then, on the way back, it must have been somewhere around Croydon, without any warning this drunken driver comes straight towards us, clips the car on my mother's side, and there's a terrible crunching noise and we start veering across the road. None of us was hurt--apart from my mother, that is. With the force of the collision, the hook at the back of the passenger seat, the thing where you hang your jacket, got embedded in her temple.

  She was in the hospital for weeks and weeks--it was a month before we could even go and see her. As Richard had a job in a factory at the time, and Dixie wasn't there either, it meant our father had to look after us for the first time in his life. He had to get us dressed, he had to make us breakfast, he had to get us ready for school, and it was a big lesson for him to have two children to take care of on his own. When we finally got to visit her it was quite frightening. Her head was covered in bandages, and she was very quiet, hardly said a word to any of us. And we didn't say a word either, as Don had warned us that if we made any fucking noise we'd get chucked out. As he didn't have a car, we'd have to go by bus, and it took nearly the whole day.