Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne; Penelope Dening

  Then, about two years later, when I was back in England for some reason, I was driving down the King's Road in Chelsea heading towards Sloane Square, and there's a crosswalk there, by Peter Jones, where there are always people, and I stopped the car. And I saw this couple walking across the crosswalk laughing and kissing, and I looked at them and I saw that it was Adrian and his girlfriend, Vivien.

  And they were so much in love and so happy. And I sat there behind the steering wheel and watched them go across the crosswalk, and I drove around Sloane Square and came back the way I'd come, and I watched them walk up the King's Road. And they never saw me. And I thought, what am I doing? I mean, look at them. Look how much they love each other. And it all fell away. It was as if everything lifted away from my body. All the jealousy, all the resentment, just went. And it was only then that I let it go. And Vivien became my friend, as Adrian had always been my friend. They were together a long time.

  April 20, 2005, morning

  Doheny Road: my bathroom

  "Now about tomorrow, Sharon . . ."

  It's Melinda being efficient.

  "Yuurrrrs."

  "The flowers are being delivered to security at seven."

  "Just as long as he doesn't see them."

  "I'll get Sam to put them in the laundry room. Oh, and a package has come for him. I think it's from Elton. Shall I give it to him now or wait till tomorrow?"

  "Let me think about it."

  Tomorrow is a big, big day for my husband. Tomorrow he will have been sober for one whole year. No drink, no drugs, no bottles of painkillers thrown down his neck. Not a one. This is the longest Ozzy has been clean since I first met him. And he's just a totally different person. His life has changed. I would like to say changed forever, but as they always warn you in AA, it's one day at a time. So I'm giving him 365 red roses, one for each difficult day, and throwing a surprise party: a barbecue in the garden, for fifty people, immediately after the AA meeting that's held at the house every Wednesday.

  The celebration he thinks he's getting is a special dinner this evening with his sobriety sponsor, Billy Morrison, and Jen, his wife. Best glasses, best china, best cooking, best everything except wine. Cranberry juice or iced tea. Faab-ulous. The balloons (fifty-two for the number of weeks) have already arrived, and David Withers, our cook from England, is working his butt off doing both the dinner and the barbecue at the same time: all Ozzy's favorite things for the dinner, and enough ribs and kebabs and chicken legs to keep the dogs happy for a year.

  I smile. From downstairs I can hear "Touch Me and I Bleed." With the new songs Ozzy and his cowriter Mark Hudson have written in the last few days, Ozzy's rock opera about Rasputin is finally coming together, and it's fucking brilliant. And I feel as if my heart could break as Ozzy's voice and Aimee's soar upwards in a duet.

  "Sharon?" Here's my husband now, standing at the bathroom door. "Did you hear that?"

  I wipe my eyes. "Mmmm." I'm out of the bath and I'm doing my teeth.

  "You know something, Shaz: Aimee has a real gift. She has such perfect fucking pitch it's scary. I mean, she hits every note full on. I don't know why she won't use it."

  "Because it's just not her time, Dadda."

  "I remember when she was about fourteen and she would wander around the house singing opera stuff. She needs to have happen to her what you did to me. D'you remember, Mama?"

  "Mmmmm."

  "And what was that, Ozzy?" Melinda picks up the ball. Great girl, Melinda.

  "When I was in Black Sabbath I'd sing from the wings. And it was Sharon who said, 'Here's the mike, fucking use the stage,' and she showed me how to do it."

  There's a pause as he walks through to my dressing room and I know he's staring at a pile of clothes taking up half the floor.

  "Sharon . . ."

  "Yeseeee."

  "Are you having a jumble sale or something?"

  "No, I'm packing."

  "What for?"

  "For Thailand. We're going to see Jack do his match, don't you remember?"

  "When are we going?"

  "Next Monday, after we've been to see Kel in New York."

  "Sharon . . ."

  "Yes, Dadda?"

  "When are we going to stop following the children around?"

  5

  Los Angeles

  Lynsey de Paul and I flew to Los Angeles in April 1976, when I was twenty-two. It was eight years since I had first fallen under its spell, when my father had taken us there for a family vacation in 1968. I had been back several times since, but I never forgot that first time; hippies would sit in the middle of the street and give you flowers. The first hotel we stayed in was the Hyatt House on Sunset, known as the Riot House because of all the bands who stayed there and wrecked it. And when you stood on the balcony you could see right over the city from the Hollywood Hills to the coast. Then we moved to the Beverly Wilshire, where in those days they had a huge soda fountain, part of the drugstore that was in the lobby, and I remember seeing Simon and Garfunkel in the elevator.

  The person who showed us around was Marvin Mitchelson, the man who'd introduced my father to Jayne Mansfield. He was one of the top celebrity divorce lawyers and became famous as the man who invented palimony, the California deal where you didn't even need to be married to get your share of the money. He and his wife took us to all the hippest places, like the Whisky a Go Go, the elite club at the time, where we heard Smokey Robinson, and then the Rainbow and the Factory, where you took an elevator right into the ground and Red Buttons was with us.

  With someone like Marvin Mitchelson oiling the wheels, nothing could go wrong. Or that's what we thought.

  "Who farted?" my father asked as we went down in the elevator to the Factory. It wasn't farting, it was me belching. And my belching smelled of shit, the first symptom, as it turned out, of Hong Kong flu, an epidemic that was sweeping the world and had just reached America. So while the rest of the Arden family was going out and about and enjoying themselves, I was lying in a darkened room with a temperature of 104 degrees, and all my mother could do was sponge me down with alcohol rub. The good thing was that when I got back to England, I found I had lost a shitload of weight.

  Eight years later, when Lynsey and I arrived at LAX, Los Angeles's less-than-wonderful airport, immigration asked her what she did, and she said, "Singer-songwriter."

  "And your friend?"

  "She's my bodyguard."

  Once we got through, I grabbed hold of her arm, twisting it hard.

  "Don't you ever refer to me as your bodyguard again, you little cunt."

  There was no love lost between us at this juncture. We checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, Lynsey to see how it went with her boyfriend before she moved in with him, me until I found a rental. Within days she'd checked out.

  The Beverly Hills Hotel was where my father always stayed when he came to LA, and so the staff all made a great fuss over me. Ever since that time, that pink palace has been my security blanket: I never like to stray too far from it.

  Not everyone was nice to me. There was a guy named Greg who had been running the LA side of things for my father out of a small office on Sunset. Basically he didn't want me to be there at all, as I was queering his pitch. There were obviously certain things I needed to know, but he was fucked if he was going to teach them to me. He treated me as some twenty-two-year-old kid, and he was a big bastard, which didn't make life any easier.

  I found us new offices in a brand-new development in Century City on the fourth floor of 2049 Century Park East, one of two triangular towers, where the other tenants were doctors, dentists, lawyers and accountants. In 1968 it had been green fields with a railroad for freight trains running down the middle of the street to the coast; now it was all marble and glass skyscrapers built on land that had been sold off by MGM.

  The rental house I found belonged to Sidney Sheldon. He had been a playwright, a Hollywood screenwriter--he wrote Easter Parade, which starred Judy Garland and Fred Astaire
, and even won an Oscar--but went on to become the most translated novelist in the world, with every single one of his novels a number-one bestseller. Whenever he writes a book, he goes to the place he is writing about, and in 1976 that was Italy. His house was 214 St. Pierre Road, Bel Air, a semi-gated estate of large properties between Beverly Hills and Westwood, built around a golf course. His was the first house you arrived at once you came in through Gate 15 and it came with everything, including a Filipino housekeeper, so all I had to do was buy new sheets and towels. It even had a guest cottage attached, which meant people could come and stay without you having to deal with them in your jammies.

  Being Don Arden's daughter made it very easy for me to meet people. And in that first year I got some really good girlfriends who became a big part of my life. I was lucky, I was working. If you come to a new country and you're not working, it's much harder to make friends and become part of the community. Looking back now, I realize I must have been lonely. For so many years I'd lived in this hive of activity, where your house was also your business, where all the talk was of business. But I soon learned that if you've got enough to do, you can just push your loneliness to one side and fill it up with work. And that's what I did.

  I went out with a few men, but it was always me paying the bill, or me getting tickets for this and for that. Gay men were my salvation. I became very good friends with Michel who ran the Dome restaurant on Sunset, and he introduced me to just about everyone. Then I had my circle of gay friends from London who would call whenever they were in LA. One of these was John Reid, Elton's then manager, whom I'd introduced to Freddie Mercury and who in turn introduced me to Elton. Elton's career was well under way, and it was like a phenomenon, watching as it exploded until it seemed you couldn't turn on the radio anywhere in the world without hearing that familiar voice.

  Life in California was better than I could have imagined. Paulita, the housekeeper, would wake me up in the morning and feed me huge breakfasts. She would come to the office and feed me huge lunches. She would do everything for me. Like so many people in Los Angeles, she was working her butt off to send money back to her family in the Philippines.

  Then, just after New Year, when I had been at the house about six months, she arrives with the breakfast tray as usual, but then tells me about how she needs ten thousand dollars to bring her children over and get them educated. And of course I listen and nod, as you do. But I'm thinking, ten thousand dollars? It's a lot of money now, but thirty years ago it was five times, ten times as much.

  "I don't feel good about this, Don," I said when I next spoke to my father on the phone. And as we talked, he told me that after he'd been over at Christmas he'd noticed two shirts had gone missing. And David had mentioned he couldn't find some jewelry he'd had. And when I put the phone down, it was like: there's something funny going on here. There was that ring that hadn't turned up, and a necklace I hadn't seen in a while. At the time I'd thought I'd mislaid them: wrong drawer, under something. But what about all those towels I'd bought when I moved in? When I'd gotten the guesthouse ready one time, we seemed to be very low. Towels? In the end I narrowed it down to Paulita or another lady who would come in to help when there were guests to stay. And when my father flew over a few days later, I had to tell him that I was convinced it was her.

  "Leave it to me," he said. He didn't want me involved. He told me later what happened.

  First he calls her into the office in Century City and says, "Paulita, you've been stealing, haven't you?" And she says she doesn't know what he's talking about. So then he ties her to the chair, tilts it back on its legs, takes off the thick gold Cartier chain he always wore around his neck, wraps it round his hand and starts punching her in the face.

  "So that's how I get it out of her," he told me. "'Yes, I've been stealing.'" So then I says to her, 'Paulita, now I want you to take me to your house.'"

  And together with a heavy he'd taken with him, they went to her place, and my father said he'd never seen anything like it. Up in her attic were tons and tons of stuff. It was total chaos: boxes, bags, piled high. Not only things she'd stolen from me, but things she'd stolen from Sidney Sheldon and another one of the people she worked for, Gert Silverstein, an interior designer in Beverly Hills. And stuff from department stores, still with the price tags on. At this stage my father called the police. He didn't tell them anything about the punching and the rest of it; just faced them with the evidence. The police called the Sheldons and Gert Silverstein. The Sheldons were still in Italy, but Gert Silverstein came and he couldn't believe it. And Paulita at this stage was still there, and suddenly she picked up a paperweight and went to hit one of the police officers. She was arrested and charged. And I had to go to the prison where she was being held to make a deposition, and when she thought no one would see she was pointing her finger at me and mouthing: I kill you, I kill you, I kill you. She went to jail for about five years.

  MIDEM, the music trade fair, is held in Cannes every January. Everyone who is in the business goes to buy and sell publishing rights and contracts, and artists go there to perform, and every record company has parties. It's like the film festival for the music industry.

  And in January 1977 I flew from Los Angeles to Nice, via Paris, with my mum and my dad. And Patrick Meehan was there, and Patrick Meehan's father was there and Patrick Meehan's Italian mobsters were there, thanks to the Wilf Pine connection that had by this time gone international. And the Meehans had chartered a yacht, and theirs was the main party boat that year, and everybody was talking about the drugs and the hookers. And the Meehans were in their element: zey speek French, dey spika Italian, they're the bee's fucking knees.

  So one evening we were in the casino at the Carlton, the smartest hotel on La Croisette, and it was all chandeliers and waiters in tailcoats--there's nothing dark and dim about gambling in France as there is in Las Vegas--and everybody was there. Including me: I'd been invited to dinner with a guy named Don King, who ran K-tel, a compilation label. He was very nice, and actually it was a date.

  My mother and father were somewhere around but where, or what they were doing, I had no idea and didn't care: I was enjoying being flirted with. Then suddenly I heard screaming and there were people running as if the place was on fire. So obviously I got up along with everyone else to go see what was happening. And what did I see but my father, in his silk dinner jacket and his smart handmade Jermyn Street lace-up shoes, and he'd gotten Patrick Meehan Jr. on the ground and was kicking the shit out of him. Suddenly one of the Meehan bodyguards picked up this glass coffee table--a huge thing, all chrome edges and legs--and was holding it over his head, about to smash it down on my father.

  So I didn't even think about it. I made a dash at this guy and threw myself at him. As he lost his balance, he lurched sideways, the weight of the coffee table pulling him down. And then we started really fighting. He went over, and while I was trying to hold him down, he continued to punch me, so I curled up into a ball. I had brothers: I knew how to protect myself. I also knew by now that my Italian mobster had a gun strapped to his calf. Everyone was crowding around, and a lawyer named Gerry Rubenstein was trying to break it up, but other people had gotten involved in the actual fight, and it had gone from two, to four, to six, to eight. When casino security arrived, we were separated into teams as if there was a line drawn down the middle. By the time the police turned up, everyone was silent and in shock.

  My father was quite badly beaten. No bones broken but he had a black eye. I was bruised and my arm was bleeding from where the glass table had cracked, but nothing that needed stitches.

  We all got interviewed by the police, but nobody said a word. Not the Meehans, not my father. There were no charges; we just had for pay for the damage. The Meehans and my father went fifty-fifty.

  Obviously my evening of romance was at an end. There was I, my first date in a year, sitting with this guy buying me steak and frites, and I'm thinking this isn't bad. And within seconds I'm getting punc
hed by some shit-arsed Italian meatball.

  It was really ugly and horrible but it could have been much worse. That table could have killed my father. It could have sliced his head off. And it was insane, crazy behavior, everything I hated, and here I was being drawn back into it again. I'd gone to America only to be pulled back into this whirlpool of shit.

  When I had arrived in LA, I couldn't get over how clean everything was: the sun and the blue sky and the cool breeze and no mess in the streets. It was manicured perfection, and then there were the people. I was amazed at how everyone could be so good-looking. Of course, I didn't realize then that they were as manicured as the lawns. Even people who have everyday jobs are manicured: a waitress still goes and has a facial, still goes and gets her nails done.

  Everything in LA is about the way you look. The first thing people say is, "God, you're lookin' great!" Not how are you, how's the family. Then the next thing is, "You've lost weight!" People were always saying to me how I was losing weight. And why? Because they thought I was fat, so that would be a nice thing to say, they thought, which shows how shallow people can be.

  When the penny begins to drop, you want to go, Fuck off. But I just came back with: "Wrong, actually--I've put it on."

  "Oh, well, you don't look like it!"

  "Yes, I do!"

  "But you look like you've lost weight."

  "Actually, I know I haven't." And it was true. I could be twenty pounds heavier since the last time I'd seen them and they'd say the same thing. I was angry because I was being made a fool of. And people would shrug, but I knew what they were thinking about me.

  I might have been a nobody, but my father was one of the most powerful men in the music industry. I was so naive that I didn't realize this might make a difference. It took a couple of years for the glitter to lose its sparkle.