My mother was never the same after that. I think it must have been some form of depression. She was always sleeping and always sick. When my father invited anybody over for dinner, it was always a fucking drama. And when he wanted to go out partying, she wouldn't go. Whether this depression was connected to the accident or the money problems, I don't know. But the accident must have been quite serious because she got a settlement of PS10,000, and you could buy a whole house for that in the sixties. Of course, my mother saw none of it. My father took the money and put it straight into the company.
Towards the end of 1964, Peter Grant suddenly disappeared from our lives. It was a real shock--we had known him for what seemed like forever. It was like one day he was waiting for us outside the school gate, and the next it was taboo to mention his name. All I knew was that something had gone wrong businesswise. But from then on it was war. Whenever he and my father did happen to meet in the street, there would be scuffles and punches until somebody managed to pull them apart. And for the first time in my life I felt uneasy. Here was my father, who I thought was the most wonderful person in the world, beating the shit out of the nice man who used to buy us sweets and pick us up from school.
Much, much later I discovered that Peter Grant had been the tour manager who had taken the Animals to America for my father in 1964. And that when they were in New York, he had taken them to see Allen Klein (who later became the Beatles' business manager) and persuaded them to leave Don Arden and go with Klein. To say Don bore him a grudge is to misunderstand how my father operated. Even though it was Peter who brought the Animals to my father's attention in the first place, he never forgot and never forgave, because Peter Grant was tantamount to being family, and a betrayal in the family carried the death warrant. And this went on for years and years, because Peter went on to manage first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin, and the music world is a small place.
It wasn't long before David and I were beating the shit out of each other at Conti's, and Miss Conti said that one of us had to go. Naturally, as David was the blue-eyed boy whom everyone adored, it had to be me.
So then I was sent to Ada Foster's, miles away in the other direction in Golders Green, and getting there every morning was a fucking nightmare, and from the moment I stepped through the door on the first day I hated everything about it. Unlike Conti's, where you could wear anything you liked, here they had a uniform: pink pinafore dress, gray shirt and pink-and-gray- striped tie. And when you went for auditions you had to wear this repulsive pink leotard and woolen knitted tights that were incredibly itchy. As for the people who ran the school--Mrs. Foster, her daughter and her husband--they were horrible.
After two terms of misery there on my own, I begged Posy to leave Conti's and come and join me, and amazingly, her parents let her. Having her there was the only thing that kept me sane. In fact, her journey up from the Elephant district by subway was quicker than my bus from Park Lane, and we'd meet up at Golders Green bus station then catch another bus together for the last stage of the journey to hell.
To make the time pass more quickly when I was on my own, I'd get all the magazines and lose myself in their pages. From Woman's Own to Honey to Nova and even Vogue,when I could get the money, I drank them up. I longed to be glamorous and I'd read anything about Twiggy or Jean Shrimpton or Verushka, studying their makeup and finding out everything there was to know about them, their lives, what they did, where they went, who they went out with, how they'd gotten where they were. It was my dream world. I wasn't under any illusions that I could ever be a model myself, because I was too short and dumpy and they had legs like lampposts. I was an okay dancer, but I probably already knew I was never really going to make it. I was losing my drive and my commitment and as a dancer, without that commitment to do class for several hours every day, you're out.
When we went to auditions, other girls would be desperate to get picked, while I didn't care if I got in or not. For a lot of the kids it meant everything. I remember Olivia Hussey, who'd been with me at Conti's, getting down on her knees and praying before we went in. God obviously appreciated the effort because she went on to star in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. For me it was like, Oh good, a half day off school.
I did get the occasional part. I did two Christmas seasons of theater at the London Palladium, once with Cliff Richard in Cinderella, once with Frank Ifield in Babes in the Wood, and I did a few ads like children's clothes for Marks & Spencer. For the first time in my life I was earning money, and it felt great.
In those days, 50 percent of a child's performance fees had to be put into a savings account that you could only draw out bit by bit. One year, when I was about thirteen, my passbook didn't come back after it'd been sent off to have interest added, so they gave me a duplicate. A few weeks later the original one turned up, which meant I had two identical passbooks, with identical amounts of money in them, and an idea occurred to me. What if I used both books? So I did, and spent it on clothes and records. A month or so later, there came a knock on the door early one Saturday morning and I heard my mother shout to my father, "Don, the police are here. They want to talk to Sharon."
I knew immediately what it must be about and pulled the sheets over my head as if that could make me disappear, and when my mother came to get me I was shaking with fear. I agreed that I had taken money out of both books, but told the police I didn't think I was doing anything wrong. My face must have told a different story. My father paid the money back, and I got some mild sort of reprimand, but in fact I think it made him laugh to see his daughter as a chip off the old block. It was the end of my criminal activities forever. That terror was just not worth it.
I was always auditioning. I must have auditioned ten times for Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music. Each time there was a cast change, there I'd be. I'd go onstage, throw myself around for a few minutes while bashing out a few bars of "Do, a deer, a female deer," or for Fiddler it would be "Kids! I don't know what's wrong with these kids today! They're noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy." I suspect I got a certain pleasure out of singing that because it could have been me. I'd get down to being one of the last few and then get booted. And no wonder, when I think how I behaved. I was really obnoxious to the people who were auditioning me.
"So, Sharon, perhaps you could tell us, what do you read in your spare time?"
"Playboy."
I was a brat, an absolute brat, because I didn't give a shit. It was just, fuck it, I can get a bag of fries on the way home.
My parents didn't care what I did. My mother was always in bed and my father was either in shit or in clover. But as far as the world knew he was the Godfather of Rock in his smart office in Royalty House, Dean Street, center of the music industry. He might have missed out with the Animals but over the next few years he would have the Nashville Teens, then the Small Faces, then Amen Corner, then The Move. Not a bad list: but then there were also the ones no one's ever heard of: Attack, Johnny Neal and the Starliners, Raymond Froggatt, Neil Christian. All belonged to Don Arden at one time or another.
I say Don Arden, but nothing was ever in his name. My father's number-one rule was never put yourself on the front line. His entire empire, all the companies, all the management contracts, all the mortgages, all the bank loans were signed not by him but by my mother. And then when one of these companies would go bankrupt (as they did regularly) it would be my mother who would have to go along to the bankruptcy hearings. Here today, gone tomorrow, like Top Ten hits, only to be replaced by another one, exactly the same, but with a different name. All it needed was new stationery. That was it. That was all.
But whenever my mother was involved in yet another of these bankruptcy proceedings, she would get really strung up and emotional and take to her bed for days at a time. She was a pawn, just as I had been when I'd been forced to open the front door to the cops or process servers on Angell Road.
Eventually she said she just couldn't take it anymore and that was it; she never worked with my
father again. But luckily for him, there were other mugs in the family ready to pick up the pen. First off the conveyor belt came David, who joined the business in 1966, when he was fifteen.
Now that my brother had left Conti's, I was allowed to move back there again. The bad news was that it was really too late to stop the rot: I had lost the dedication to dance. That real desire. And I would procrastinate: "I'll go dance tomorrow." Tomorrow, tomorrow. Always tomorrow.
Eighteen months later the tomorrows ran out and I said good-bye to what had passed for my education. I was fifteen years and three months old, the earliest the law allowed you to leave school in those days. I had no qualifications, not a one. Not an O level, not a high school diploma, nothing to my name except a few useless dance certificates. Nobody in their right mind would have employed me. And nobody did, although I did try. And then came the inevitable: "After the summer, Sha, you'll come in and we'll teach you the business."
By this time the office had moved. Dean Street had gone--rent defaulted on, too many police at the door, who knows--and we were now in Carnaby Street, the heart of Swinging London.
Although I was still too young to sign things--in those days you had to be twenty-one--I was learning the guiding principles of how my father ran his business. I was the receptionist, the person who did the meet and greet at the door. I was also in charge of the switchboard, one of those old kinds where you had plugs and wires that if you weren't careful would turn into a spaghetti junction. And finally all those years of accents and improvisation were about to bear fruit, when I put in my calls to the bank manager.
"Is this Mr. So-and-so?" To be said with a Brooklyn/Bronx/ Queens accent. "This is New York . . . a person-to-person call. Please hold . . . I have a Mr. Don Arden on the line . . . Putting you through . . ." In those days you couldn't dial direct.
Sometimes I'd have to go and see Mr. So-and-so in person, my role changed to that of the loyal daughter, desperate to shield her blameless father from shame and ignominy. More improvisation, including the use of the word "Daddy," which I rarely called my father. When I was younger he was Dad, but from the moment I started working for him, he was Don.
My speech, carefully rehearsed on the bus from Soho to the City, would go along the lines of: "My daddy has bagfuls of money in New York, and he'll be back on Monday, and then he'll have all this cash, plenty to pay off everything we owe you, and more. . . . Please just wait another few days. . . ." This bank was the infamous London and County Securities, and after it collapsed in 1973, the very same Mr. So-and-so came to work for my father.
And, guess what, I turned out to be good at all this bullshit. Finally something I could do that my father approved of. And so I did it for him again and again, lied for him again and again, to bank managers, to artists, to anybody he asked me to.
In fact, I quite enjoyed being at the office, being part of the extended family, because that's what it was like. My father always socialized with the people who worked for him, which was why he'd felt so betrayed over Peter Grant. There was the usual array of heavies--although the one who had replaced Peter Grant, another ex-stunt man named Patrick Meehan, was different from the rest. He had been with my father since the early sixties, having also started as a driver for Gene Vincent. When Peter Grant and my father had fallen out in 1964, Patrick Meehan moved to working in the office and doing the day-to-day. He was very well put together, quite well educated, and always conducted himself in a dignified business-type manner, though I never really liked him. He was always a bit superior, like he was a schoolmaster.
He had a son, another Patrick, a friend of David's, who was working at Thomas Cook travel agency and always hoping to break into the music industry as a producer. He used to have little rehearsals when there was any spare studio time. Mrs. Meehan was always really nice to me. She was Italian--they all spoke Italian when they were at home--and had tremendous style. I remember her once buying me the most beautiful leather bag from somewhere very expensive and glamorous in Bond Street. It was olive green and I loved the smell of it.
Another of the heavies was a man called Wilf Pine. This time it was my brother who brought him in. It was in 1968, just before I started working there, and Amen Corner looked as if they were going to go the way of the Small Faces, who had dispensed with Don Arden as manager in 1967. My father had never gotten along with singer and front man Andy Fairweather-Lowe. According to David, who had come across Wilf Pine when he was booking The Move into a dance hall on the Isle of Wight, Pine was "handy" and "talked their language," and he also knew another member of the band, so my father thought it worth bringing him in to deal with the situation. In fact, it proved only a stay of execution.
I hated Wilf Pine from the moment I met him. He was a real lowlife, and was always talking about sorting this one out, knocking this one off. And you just knew that if you didn't do what he wanted, he'd beat the shit out of you. Perfect for the work my father had in mind, but I kept well out of his way.
It was through Wilf Pine that my father made his first real connections with big-time gangsters, both in London and in New York. He had met the Krays briefly, because they were often at the Astor Club in Mayfair, where we would sometimes go, but Wilf's connections went far deeper than that.
When the Carnaby Street office had to go (more process servers, more repo men), my father moved the office into the apartment in Hay Hill, and we all moved out to Margate, to the little house he had bought for weekends when we still lived in Brixton. It must have been seventy or eighty miles out of London, and just getting in and out every day was another fucking schlep.
By this time Richard had left home, which led to an improvement in the atmosphere at the apartment. David and Richard had had to share a bedroom and it was a truly horrible relationship. David had picked up my father's attitude to his brother. He was very dismissive and violent towards him. One time he got him down on the floor and smashed a lightbulb into his ear. So basically, after years of verbal and physical abuse, Richard just said, "Fuck it, I'm off. I'm going." And he married his girlfriend and opened a shop selling model soldiers in Kingston, which had always been his passion. Anyway, one afternoon I'm in the office and David makes a sign that he wants to talk to me.
"The old man's gone nuts this time," he said. He and my father had been down to see Richard that afternoon, and they had driven back through Wimbledon and Don had pulled the Rolls up in front of a house that was brand new. Less a house, more of a mansion, David said, overlooking the common.
"And so he goes, 'Love that.' And now he says he's going to get it, whatever it costs. But I tell you what, Sis, that place is gonna cost a fucking fortune, and he's just not got it."
April 20, 2005, morning
Doheny Road, Beverly Hills
I want to wake up in the morning and not feel terrified of the knock on the door. I want to wake up with no debts, no commitments, no lawsuits, and then I want to fuck off and buy a little house in Italy and learn Italian. And if my children want to come and see us, they can. But I need some place of calm. I need my animals and I need to be settled. Most of all I want to wake up and not hear that voice screaming inside me, Oh God, how do I get out of this, how do I get out of that? I want a funky little house I can put my bits of shit in that I love and wake up happy. And if I want to lie in bed, I can lie in bed. If I want to do the garden, I will do the garden. If I want to do anything, I can do it.
I can't live for other people anymore.
3
Wimbledon
Somehow the devious old fox did it. Somehow he managed to persuade the builders or the developers or whoever it was to let him have this palace for PS5,000 down and the rest in a year's time, and 45 Parkside was his. I couldn't believe it when we went to see it. A huge house on the most expensive road in one of the most expensive suburbs of south London. It looked straight out over the common, and the backyard stretched as far as the road behind it.
Being brand-new, it needed everything done. At the time,
my father had a band out of Manchester called Sampson that wasn't doing very much, so he hired them to do the decorating. But, of course, what with having to furnish it and carpet it and get all the curtains made, the money soon ran out. Before too long the gas was cut off. Then the electricity was cut off and the repo men were called in. For two weeks we lived with candles. My job was to arrange weekly payments. So I would have to go out and stand there on the porch, full of embarrassment. "Please, can we work out a payment plan?" . . . "I promise that by next week I'll have it" . . . or pleading with them not to take this, or not to take that.
The most important difference moving to Wimbledon made to me was that I got a cat. My mother had always had dogs when we were in Brixton, but strangely I didn't like them then. I didn't actively dislike them, I just never had a connection. And then there were all David's animals, budgies, rabbits, guinea pigs, snakes, lizards. But they were things that no way could you get affection from, and that were kept out back in hutches that Nigel Heathhorn had made.
I called my cat Mrs. Smedley, after a brand of frozen peas, and I found her the first weekend we moved in. She was black and white and really fluffy, and as soon as I saw her in the pet shop in Wimbledon High Street that was it: she was mine! Mrs. Smedley was more like a dog than a cat and would follow me to work and sit on the wall until the bus came. In a way, she even came with me.
"Good morning. Can I help you?"
"Is Don there?"
"I'm afraid Mr. Arden is in a closed meeting and can't be disturbed."
"Oh, right. And--er--if I could have your name, Miss . . . ?"
Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography Page 5