When Freddie phoned the next day, it wasn't to say thank you for the lovely party.
"Darling, I hope you're not going to be mad with me. But I want to change managers . . . you see, I adore John!"
I was heartbroken. We had managed them for little over a month and Queen was--and honestly still is--my favorite band ever. But you know when somebody makes up their mind in circumstances like that, there is nothing they or you can do. For once my father was very good about it. He knew it was something beyond anyone's control. It wasn't like they thought John Reid was a better manager, or he could do more for them, it was just a friendship. Not that it stopped my father offering Adrian PS1,000 if he would "fuck Freddie." But I always remained friendly with Freddie and the rest of the guys, and would go and see their gigs whenever I could. I absolutely adored him.
One of the reasons my father could be so magnanimous with Queen was that since 1972 he'd had a gold mine of his own: the Electric Light Orchestra--better known as ELO.
April 20, 2005, morning
Doheny Road: in my bath
"Sharon?"
A female voice from the landing. I reach over and run some more water from the hot tap.
"Well, if it isn't Mel-linda from Down Under," I say in my Dame Edna voice. She's heard it before. In fact, several times a day. But what the fuck. Melinda is Awe-straye-lian and I am sure she gets terribly, terribly homesick for the old mother tongue. Melinda has been with us now for four years. She started as Kelly and Jackie Boy's nanny, which basically meant she had to get them up and get them to school. Now they've gone, she nannies me.
"Can I come in?"
"Course you can, Mel-linda, luv. You've seen a didgeridoo before . . ."
Melinda Varga is my counterpoint to Michael. She rants, she raves, she cries. Most importantly, she laughs.
"My God, Sharon, it smells like a Turkish massage parlor in here. What the fuck happened?"
"I had a little accident with the bath oil . . ." says the naughty girl.
"Not the Jo Malone . . ."
You bet your bottom dollar the Jo Malone. The whole fucking bottle.
4
Leaving
In spite of my father saying that we were never, ever, on pain of death, to have anything to do with the Meehans, David and I were still in touch with Patrick Jr. The music business was too small a world, at least for kids like us, to hold grudges like that. And in fact he had done nothing wrong whatsoever. Could you really blame him for handing in his notice at Thomas Cook when the chance came to manage Black Sabbath? And we'd grown up with him; he was like a childhood friend.
Whenever my father would see either of the Meehans or Wilf Pine, invariably there would be a fight, a scuffle on the pavement, a squaring up, a punch thrown, threats, whatever. Yet still there was always that relationship between the Meehans and the Ardens.
For example, after a couple of years running his model soldier shop in Kingston, my brother Richard went to Don to borrow some money to tide him over. Things weren't going well and he was in danger of losing the shop, he said. At the time--around 1973, I think--my father was going through a bad patch and so had nothing to lend. But instead of telling him no, he swallowed his pride and went to Patrick Meehan Sr. (who had always had a soft spot for my half brother) and got him to lend Richard the money, even though he was at daggers drawn.
Patrick Jr. would occasionally ask David and me over to a party at his house, and so we'd go and there'd be the Lamborghini or the Ferrari in the drive, and the swimming pool and this, that and the other. The Meehans were always good in business, in the way that my father never was. Even though Don went on to have huge success with ELO, he never had the infrastructure that the Meehans had. I don't think they had any more money than my father--it was still all smoke and mirrors--but they just seemed to manage it better.
Whereas all my father wanted was the wealth, the Meehans wanted the social position to go with it. So they had the house in the country, and it was, "Oh darling, you must come to our yacht, and Lady Bumfuck is going to be there," and "Let's pop over to Argentina for a spot of polo." It was by no means a lifestyle they were born into. They just adopted it. Yet still, because of the Wilf Pine connection, they were surrounded by heavies and two-bit hoods. They made sure they took care of Wilf--it would have been extremely misguided not to--but at the heart of the Meehan organization it was father and son. The whole of that world was father and son oriented, no need to look further than Don and David. But if you were a girl, then you weren't really part of anything. It was just like, give-her-a-job-until-she-gets-married, keep-her-busy sort of thing.
Just before Christmas 1974, Black Sabbath had a big show in London at the Rainbow, and Patrick Jr. invited David and me along as his guests. I hadn't seen any of them since the day they came into the office nearly five years earlier. And now they were huge. After the gig we went back to the after party at Patrick's house, and I got horribly, horribly drunk.
I didn't really drink very much in those days. I hated the taste of alcohol and would have things like vodka and orange to try and disguise it. Ozzy wasn't at the after party, and I spent most of the evening talking to Tony Iommi, Sabbath's lead guitar player. My brother inevitably knew him better than I did, because he was always out on the road, but that evening I was enjoying the attention I was getting, which is perhaps how I ended up drinking too much. Anyway, I liked Tony. He was very unassuming, very low key, and although I never found him that good-looking, my girlfriends thought he was gorgeous. Having said that, if he had made a move, then who knows what might have happened. But he never did. His taste was for leggy blondes, not a short, fat, furry matzo ball. For me it was that thing of showing off to the girls: Tony Iommi is my friend and I can hang out with him anytime. Which of course I did. But he was just a friend.
The party ended for me that night in Patrick's wife's wardrobe. Feeling suddenly very unwell, I opened the sliding mirror doors, fell in and threw up all over her shoes. And when my brother found me, he grabbed me, pulled me out, shoved me in the car and yelled at me all the way home.
I would still see Patrick from time to time, and one day I was telling him how pissed off I was with living out at Wimbledon, and how I really wanted my own place, but of course couldn't afford one. Although my father would pass out banknotes when he felt like it--Buy yourself this, Buy yourself that--no way was he ever going to buy me somewhere to live. He wanted me where he could see me. Then Patrick said he was moving out of his house in Adam and Eve Mews, so why didn't I rent that?
"Just take it for a while, and if and when you can afford to buy it, then we'll cut a deal."
I could scarcely believe it. Adam and Eve Mews was just off Kensington High Street. Nowhere near Mayfair, nowhere near Wimbledon. It was a quiet little cul-de-sac, miniature houses where grooms used to live when everyone had horses, and the yard was still cobbled. And it seemed too good to be true. I had the cinema less than fifty yards away, restaurants I could walk to and Kensington Gardens just around the corner. But most importantly, for the first time I would have a home of my own, to do with exactly as I liked. So I said all right.
"I'll come into the office and we'll work it out."
So the next day there I was sitting in these smart Mayfair offices, the former NEMS headquarters, talking to Patrick Jr., when suddenly someone came crashing through the door with a gun out in front of him. My father. And I was looking at him and he was looking at me, and neither of us said a word. But the expression on my father's face was stunned amazement. He had no idea that I still had anything to do with the Meehans. So after glaring at me, he goes over and puts the gun to Patrick's head.
"How dare you, you little piece of shit!" Oh fuck, there goes my house . . .
"Now hold on, Don. Let's not get excited."
"Withdraw it, you cunt, or you'll be sorry."
"Seriously, I don't know what you're talking about."
"I'm warning you, you motherfucker . . ."
"And
I'm warning you. If you don't leave now I'm calling the police."
Whether Patrick Jr. knew what my father was talking about, I don't know. I certainly didn't. But it turned out the Meehans were in the process of suing my father for the money Patrick Sr. had lent Richard to keep his model soldier business going, and that the first my father knew about it was a notice he'd seen in the paper that morning. And so of course he went fucking mad. In fact, I sometimes think that my father was genuinely mad, in the sense of not the full shilling, which is why I forgive him so much of what he did in his life. He would act in a way that flew in the face of any rational behavior. I mean, what did he think he would achieve by pointing a gun in Patrick Jr.'s face in broad daylight in the heart of Mayfair with secretaries and other clients and who-knows-who-else around? Anyway, Patrick said that he would get the writ withdrawn, and my father left. Meanwhile all I thought about was the mews house that I had just waved good-bye to.
But this wasn't the end of the story. Patrick did, in fact, call the police, and that night they turned up in Wimbledon. We were all at home. No prizes for guessing who got to answer the door.
"Ah, Miss Arden. Your father in, is he?"
"No," I said. And he wasn't. As soon as he'd seen the squad car pull up, Don had done a runner, out the back door, through the yard, to a gate that took you to another road at the rear. The plainclothes policemen showed me the search warrant. I shrugged. "You can look for whatever you want," I said. They didn't find anything.
As for the writ, Patrick Jr. didn't turn up for the hearing, so the case was thrown out. Perhaps that was him keeping his word.
What made the business with the gun so insane was that my father could easily have paid back the loan. ELO had proved just the cash cow he needed. In addition to the management and promotion side, he now had his own record label, Jet Records, which naturally ELO were signed to. Hay Hill had gone, and we were working out of two large houses joined together in Gloucester Place, just north of Oxford Street, where we employed around fifty staff.
All this expansion meant huge overheads. And although we were awash with money, it was being spent like water: there'd be David asking for money for his racehorses, me buying paintings and antiques, and my mother simply hoarding it. "What about getting yourself a nice car, eh, Sha?" he would say. Or a piece of jewelry. At least he knew I'd wear it. What better way to show the world just how wealthy he really was? He would buy stuff for my mother but she would keep it in the box.
For once ELO hadn't been filched from anybody else. There are only ever a finite number of talented musicians, and the cast of characters was always interchanging. ELO was a Don Arden homegrown product. By 1971 The Move had disbanded, but Roy Wood had stayed with my father. Roy is an amazing innovative character, and he had always had this dream of mixing classical music with rock. So, together with Bev Bevan, the original drummer from The Move, and a singer-songwriter named Jeff Lynne, from a band called Idle Race, also from Birmingham, Roy came up with the Electric Light Orchestra. So Roy and Jeff worked on the idea, wrote one album and did a couple of gigs, but it just wasn't happening. A clash of egos, basically. Then Roy walked away: although ELO was his brainchild, he was probably the weaker and the nicer of the two. Roy started up Roy Wood's Wizzard and left ELO to Jeff.
I have always been especially fond of Roy. I have known him since the days of The Move. I must have been about fourteen, and he'd say to me, "Here's fifty quid, go get yourself something nice to wear at the gig." And he would mean Top of the Pops. So I'd go there with a couple of friends from school, and he'd introduce me to people like Marc Bolan of T-Rex. One time, I remember, he bought me a bottle of Diorama. He is just a very nice man, very kind and sort of like a teddy bear. And Roy Wood's Wizzard is still out there, and he brought his daughter--Holly Wood--to Ozzy's last show in England. But I never feel he's had the success that he deserves.
Nobody really thought the rock/classical mix would last. But Roy was right: the Beatles had opened the door with their use of orchestra and strings, and with them no longer around the field was clear. It wasn't long before ELO's "art rock," as it was being called, was a phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic. They had their first chart success in 1972 and were touring right through to the nineties.
Another signing to Jet Records was a singer-songwriter named Lynsey de Paul, who, of course, my father also managed. She'd had a big hit with the theme tune for a TV sitcom called No--Honestly and I was her day-to-day person in the office, basically because I was the only woman. She was very vampy, blond and white-skinned, and she played the piano. A beautiful-looking girl really, with thick blond hair and beautiful eyes and everybody wanted to fuck her. The nearest I ever came to getting any of that rub to off on me was when she sold me her bed.
When she decided she needed a vacation, I was the obvious person to go with her, and because it was winter, we went to the Seychelles. Once again, I was drinking. And once again I disgraced myself. Not vomiting this time, but pissing. And not in a wardrobe, but into Lynsey's conveniently positioned suitcase.
I was basically very, very unhappy. Although Adrian and I had been together over five years, I knew in my heart we were going nowhere. By this time he had moved out of my parents' house and bought a place of his own in Sutton, still in south London, but further out. It was a cute little house in a new street. I'd helped him decorate it; we'd chosen everything together, curtains, lamps, pots, pans, the dinner service, sheets, towels, the lot. But it wasn't mine. And I think I sensed this wasn't going to be a happily-ever-after story. But he was still working for my father, so I'd see him in the office every day, and it was sometimes very painful because of course I thought I was in love with him. I'd have to pretend I hadn't been wondering where he was when I'd called and he hadn't been in--all that shit. And so I'd have to be this good-time girl, always ready with the one-liners, having a wonderful time, always ready to party and show the boys how bloody boring their stick-thin girlfriends were.
He'd said he'd be waiting for me when I got back to Heathrow. He wasn't. So I got a taxi to his house. And let myself in. And my gut was telling me that this was all wrong. But I open the door and I go upstairs. And he's in bed with his hairdresser. And she jumps up and pulls on a kimono. My kimono. And then I go absolutely fucking ballistic. I start throwing everything through the window--lamps, pots, then her clothes and her shoes and calling her every kind of cunt under the sun, and him every wanker, every little piece of shit.
And Adrian is pleading with me: "The neighbors, Sharon, please think about the neighbors." Fuck the bloody neighbors. I wasn't going to have to live with them. I went downstairs and continued the mayhem, throwing stuff out of the kitchen window, and then I start on the living room and there's glass everywhere. And then I get a knife and go back upstairs.
"You can take that off, you hear me, you cow, you piece of shit!" And I grabbed the kimono off her and then ripped it into shreds with the knife. Very dramatic. Very Shakespearean. I gave the most brilliant performance. But after ten minutes I was utterly exhausted.
Basically I had destroyed the house. There was just one problem: Adrian was still working for my father and due in the office at ten the next morning.
To be fair, he was in an impossible situation. He worked for my father, he was going out with me. How could he tell me it was over? I think that subconsciously he had worked out a way of my finding out for myself.
Of course, I was completely devastated, completely obsessed. I'd see him every day. He was there in my face. And I was mean to him, I was horrible, I was like a woman possessed. But I couldn't stop myself. And he had gone off with his fucking hairdresser from Vidal Sassoon's, and she was very beautiful, very talented, very artistic and very thin.
It broke my heart. And, to make matters worse, Mrs. Smedley had disappeared while I was away. I went searching for her on the common, put up notices on lampposts, but it was useless. Wimbledon Common is a huge, wild stretch of land, the nearest thing you get to the co
untry in London, and it must have seemed too enticing. But it's a haven for foxes, and she probably made one excursion too many. And I wept and wept and wept. For her, for Adrian, for me.
So when Lynsey de Paul said she was going out to Los Angeles to live with her boyfriend, Bernie Taupin, I just said, I'm coming with you. With Mrs. Smedley gone, I had nothing more to keep me in England.
And, oh, the relief. To the world it looked as if it was happening naturally. Sharon Arden going over to California to take care of her father's business. After four years of touring around America with ELO, my brother had had enough of being out of England. So I would take over. And there would be more, with David finding new artists and shipping them out. We already had an office in LA, so the transition wouldn't be difficult and I wouldn't be entirely on my own. My father had always wanted to live in Los Angeles, and now--thanks to ELO--he could have his dream. A house in Hollywood . . .
But in the meantime, I was obsessed. I would cry every night, I would wake up in the morning and for a few brief moments my mind would be blank, then there it would be again, pounding around my head. I would go to receptions, and he would be there with her and she was so beautiful and lovely and so gracious. She was never horrible to me. I was horrible to her, because I was a witch. OK, we'd gone out for five years, so what? He was a free agent. He'd finished with me. She didn't take him away from me. He just went.
Yet even when I moved to America my pain wouldn't go. I cried every night, and I would call him and cry on the phone and he would come and visit me. He came twice to visit me in LA. Always completely chaste. He would come as my friend.
Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography Page 7