"Can I borrow this? I'll bring it back." It never comes back.
"Can I borrow your car? Mine's in the shop."
"Can I borrow a couple of grand? You know, right now I'm short."
"Could you get me sorted with clothes?" A young guy asked me this one time, as he'd just gotten his first job with an agency. He didn't mean could I give him advice. He meant buy him suits and trousers, because I could. And what's more, I did.
That whole business of Paulita had made me very uneasy about renting, and when the lease on the Sidney Sheldon house came to an end, my father said this time we should buy; no more problems with staff we hadn't chosen ourselves. I saw a couple of places, but there was always something that put me off, and I had by now decided I wanted a view.
Then a real estate woman named Thelma Orloff called. She was hugely wealthy, and famous for having gone out with Cary Grant when she was younger. Not that she mentioned that when we passed his house on the way to view the place she had in mind. All she did was nod at a big pair of gates at a hairpin bend and say Cary Grant lived there.
Benedict Canyon runs up into the hills from Sunset, just past my hub, the Beverly Hills Hotel. The road had begun to climb when we turned a sharp right. Up, up we went, skidding on the remains of a mudslide. Then we took another side road, to the left this time, then stopped by a large pair of wooden gates. Once inside she parked the car in front of a long line of garages. Behind them I could see the fence of a tennis court. Then through another smaller pair of gates into another smaller courtyard, this time with the house framing it on three sides, the fourth side, to the right, opening out onto Benedict Canyon. I walked across and looked over the edge. At that time of year it was green and lush.
"Great view," I said.
"Just wait," she said, already turning the key in the front door. "As Al Jolson once said, 'You ain't seen nothing yet!'"
The house was built in a traditional Spanish style but with a thirties film-star take, single story, with pale adobe-covered walls, terra-cotta tiles and terra-cotta roof. I followed her in. From the outside it had looked inconsequential but as soon as you opened the doors you were in a huge series of spaces open up to the rafters, a cathedral ceiling as they call it in California, and on the left of the front door the whole ceiling slid back, separating in the middle. Arches went off this way and that way. To the right a view across the canyon again, and still she marched on across the vast high-ceilinged room that was flooded with light coming from a wall made up entirely of folding glass doors, opening onto a terrace where I could see nothing but the dazzle of sunshine. And then I walked outside, and stopped in my tracks. There it was: Los Angeles, spread out like a vision of Xanadu, and nothing but garden and cactus and desert plants in between. You could have been on a little promontory in Mexico.
"Lovely, don't you think?" she said.
I couldn't speak. It was spectacular: the view, the house, everything about this place was spectacular. I had fallen madly in love. And then she was off again, down the series of terraces to show me the swimming pool, the pool house, the this, the that. But all I wanted was to say to her: Yes, yes, I want it, where do I sign?
And then it was back into the house again, up the one small staircase that took you to the tower room--the room that eventually I turned into a library and dressing room for my father. On the side near the canyon was a smaller room that I made into David's area. Then into the kitchen and staff quarters that backed onto the inner courtyard. And lastly to the guesthouse, which was the other side of the small courtyard that was covered with a purple-flowered creeper. And as soon as I walked into it, I knew that this would be mine. The rooms were small, it didn't have the view, except over the canyon, but here I could be free: I had my own little kitchen, my own bedroom, my own sitting room. My parents and David, I knew, would love the view during the short periods when they were in LA, but I could have it all the time. My mother didn't like Los Angeles and so my father only came out when he had business. A week, perhaps, every month.
"I've found a house," I told him when I called. It was three in the morning in Los Angeles, but I couldn't sleep.
"How much is it?"
"One point seven million."
"How much?"
"But, Don, once you see it --"
"How many bedrooms?"
"Well--three in the main house, but --"
"Three! That's over half a million a room. You're nuts."
I bought it the next day. And how come I didn't need my father's signature? Because he never put his signature on anything. My father would arrange the financing, but the house would be in my sole name, like nearly everything else in his world: companies, loans, mortgages. I was only twenty-three, yet I already had two years of signing for my father under my belt. I was used to it.
And Thelma Orloff didn't even blink.
It had been built by Howard Hughes, who gave it to Jean Peters after their divorce. Although it looked like a thirties house, it was probably more recent; nothing in Hollywood lasts long, and houses are pulled down as soon as somebody dies. Egos are too big to want anybody's dreams but their own.
Jean Peters was a starlet Howard Hughes had helped push up the career ladder in 1946, when he was working at Twentieth Century Fox. Over the next ten years she worked with Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando. They had married secretly in 1957 but they'd been involved for over ten years. They were divorced in 1971 and he'd given her this as a parting gift. It was on a huge plot of land, about three acres. There were three other houses on it. One was a teardown, but the others could be refurbished.
And then I began to fill it with beautiful things. I chose every single piece of furniture, every lamp, every painting, every piece of sculpture, every sheet, every towel. I put my heart and soul into that house. I kept everything simple, everything in character--you would really have ruined it had you tried to do anything different. No paint on the walls, just the natural plaster. The woodwork--beams, doors--was left natural, not so much brown as gray from weathering. I had the pool done in dark blue mosaic--it was just rough blue concrete before but I like to feel smoothness under my feet--and had stars put in on the bottom.
One of the first things I bought for the house was a big old-fashioned telescope, which I kept in the living-room area. And the first thing I did every night when I came home was go to the spyglass and look out across the city to the Mormon Temple on Santa Monica Boulevard. On top is a golden angel blowing a horn that glints at sunset. It was my ritual, a way of anchoring myself. And at night, with the city lit up, it was breathtaking. And I built a hot tub on the top terrace where you could sit and look out at it all glittering beneath you. To show I was here to stay, I bought a Great Dane named Jet, after our record label. In America they usually clip their ears so that they stand up, but I could never do anything cruel, so his ears always flopped over.
Before I moved in, I had another cottage built, a replica of mine but on the other side of the courtyard, directly behind the staff quarters, because--in spite of the size of the house--there were no other guest rooms. I built a guardhouse by the front gate. I did up the pool house and had two changing rooms made with showers.
I had hoped I might find something left of Howard Hughes and Jean Peters, intertwined initials perhaps. But there was nothing except an ancient projector and a projection room that eventually I turned into a library bar and filled with books and black-and-white photographs.
Everywhere I look in my life, everything is to an extreme degree. It's the same with my housekeepers; I have either had monsters or angels. Paulita had made me terrified to take on anybody else, but then Rachel came into my life.
Rachel was born in Texas, and since the age of thirteen she had been in service. She told me how her first employer would send her to collect packages from Neiman Marcus in Dallas and how she'd had to go around the back, because if you were black you weren't allowed in the store. Later she came to California, where although
there was still discrimination in the 1970s, it was nothing like it was in the South. Her money either went back to her family, or she would give it to the church.
Rachel had no children, and she had never married. I was twenty-three and she was fifty-something, and so I think I became the daughter she never had. She insisted on calling me Miss Sharon. She was a very special woman. She would cook for me and take care of me, and I absolutely adored her. I can remember one time when she wasn't well, I went to Santa Monica to see her and she couldn't believe that I had come to her house.
Of course, one way of her loving me was to feed me. In fact, I had met her first at the Sidney Sheldon house where she had done the catering for a party. So I would eat, eat, eat.
April 20, 2005, morning
Doheny Road, Beverly Hills
I'm having lunch with Gloria Butler at the Ivy, and by the time I get out of the house I've already changed three times. Although it's only April, it's so hot out there. I flick through the rack at the end of the bedroom and pull out a pair of cutoff linen trousers and a Nehru-necked embroidered top in lime green cotton voile. Oh the joy of not having to wear black all the time. But then Melinda tells me she can see my bra. And that will never do for the Ivy since there are always photographers waiting outside. I solve the problem by wearing a white tank underneath.
No makeup. In the old days I used to trowel it on, but since I lost all my weight, I only use it when I absolutely have to. But today not even moisturizer, as my first stop is the skin doctor. I haven't had pimples since I was a teenager. But I have one now. A motherfucker of a volcano about to erupt on my chin. I think it's the toxins coming out after the colonic. Ozzy thinks it's leprosy.
My husband has always been a hypochondriac; when he has a headache, it's a brain tumor. But if it weren't for him insisting I have a yearly checkup, my colon cancer would have killed me.
I haven't had breakfast. Saba pushes a piece of toast into my hand and I grab a couple of chocolate truffles from the bowl in the hall. It's something I have in all the houses. I always have to have mints or chocolates to grab on the way out to keep up the blood sugar levels. Perkins, one of our security guys, has already opened the door of my Bentley, my lovely Bentley. Minnie thinks she's coming but she's not. Not today. Not to the doctor's, not to the Ivy. And I know that until I get back she will sulk. I put on my dark glasses. Who am I kidding? The volcano is nowhere near my eyes. The security cameras show some girls standing in front of the house, probably waiting for Jack. Little do they know he's several million miles away in a third-world country learning to fight with his feet. Hah! The front gates glide open and--a manic wave to the fans--I'm off, nearly running over a dog walker. Everyone has a dog walker in LA. They should be called dog followers, because that's what they do.
The skin doctor is at the junction of Roxbury and Wilshire in Beverly Hills, the bit they call the Golden Triangle. I take Sunset, then swing left down Rodeo Drive, with its phony art deco monstrosities and mock-Tudor bungalows, then across Santa Monica into the stretch everybody's heard of: Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Armani, Gucci, Prada, with its trees like bouquets, and so clean you could lick your ice cream from the sidewalk. Then right onto Wilshire, past Barneys, my fav-orite department store, then right again into Roxbury. I hand my keys to the parking attendant and take the elevator up. For once I'm on time.
"Mrs. Osbourne?" The receptionist looks flustered. "We weren't expecting you so soon."
"I'm sorry--I had my appointment down for twelve."
"Yes, that's right. But the doctor thought you might be late, I mean--er--held up, so he took an early lunch."
Years of bad behavior return to haunt me. I can see her neck turning a bright crimson.
"Look, I can call him on his cell . . . I'm sure he won't mind. He should only be about twenty minutes."
"Don't worry." I smile. "I've got things to read. I can wait."
6
On the Road
When I arrived in America in 1976, my father got me a green card by paying a senator a shitload of money. My father didn't know this particular senator, but he knew someone who did. Artie Mogul was then the head of United Artists Records and knew a lot of people in high places. A work visa wasn't enough for what my father had in mind for me. He needed me to be a permanent resident, complete with Social Security number, because without that I couldn't sign tax returns or do the other money manipulations he needed me to do. I would fly to New York and I'd be ushered into a room and there'd be tax advisers from Washington. And my father would be there, and he'd tell me that I'd be going to Singapore in a week, or Switzerland. And there'd be this tax shelter, this company to be set up. And this went on year after year: "Sign this here . . . Sign that there."
And was I thinking, Hey, wait a moment, how come he doesn't do this himself, what's wrong with his own signature? No. I'm thinking, How important am I! Isn't this amazing that my father trusts me this much! That he needs me this much to do this for him! It was like an honor. I mean, he loved me this much.
These attorneys with their expense accounts, their silk suits, their degrees from Harvard and their fine houses and their children in private schools, they all knew I didn't have my own lawyer, that I wasn't represented. I was an uneducated kid who left school at fifteen without a piece of paper to her name. But, what the fuck, they got me to sign anyway. Who cared that I didn't understand what I was doing? My father was making money hand over fist, which was why he needed to give less of it to the tax man.
Even when things were going well, my father couldn't resist a scam. He got off on it, just like he got off on going around with Mafia hoods in New York, walking into some greasy spaghetti dump in Little Italy with "the boys." I went with him a couple of times and it was like watching a fucking B movie. They were badly dressed in shiny gray suits, and ugly with bad teeth and smelling of garlic and guns in their boots. Not an Al Pacino or Robert De Niro among them. It was pure fantasy.
An example of a Don Arden scam. In the early seventies when ELO was new and hot, three labels in America were desperate to sign them: United Artists, Warner Brothers and EMI. So how did he choose which one to go with? He didn't. He simply delivered ELO's tapes to all three and pocketed a huge advance from each of them. Fraud? No, no, no. This was just "playing the game" or "business." In the end there was some sort of compromise: ELO ended up with UA in America, EMI in England and Warner Bros in Fuck-all-land.
Artie Mogul, then head of UA, was involved in a long-running scam with my father, in which I played the messenger boy.
The idea was simple. My father would tell Artie Mogul that he had tapes of some new band he had "discovered"--let's call them the Two-headed Twat. UA would agree on an advance to the Two-headed Twat. I would deliver the tapes and I would sign the contract. "Here you are," I would say, "you now own the rights to the tapes of the Two-headed Twat." A check for, say, $100,000 or $200,000 would be given to me with a smile. I would bank the check and I would give each of the four people involved a payout. Split the sum four ways, and write four equal checks to Artie Mogul and the two other co-scammers. Oh, and my father. There was no such band. It didn't exist. As for what was on the tape? Nothing. Farting, nothing. Yet each month another artist with a ridiculous name would miraculously appear, and there'd be another delivery from Don Arden's daughter. They didn't pay millions--nothing to excite anybody's attention, just a couple of hundred thousand dollars a time--fifty grand apiece--nothing too greedy, but it was on a regular basis. And I never thought twice about it. Everyone used to laugh and I laughed with them. In those days I looked at it this way: it's a huge corporation, nobody knows, it's nobody's money anyway, who gives a shit? It wasn't hurting anyone.
And what was in it for me? Why, the pleasure of knowing that I had been such a help to my father. I might go to Tiffany's or Van Cleef and buy a piece of jewelry and put it on my Diners Club account. But I didn't own it. It wasn't mine. On the company payroll I was paid between $200 and $500 a week. Obviously this w
as worth a lot more than it is today, but I wasn't well paid by the standards of the industry at that time; several people in the organization got more than me. I was never considered an executive, because my father would never have given anybody the position of an executive. We were all worker bees and he was the queen. The Diners card--and later, when they came in, all the credit cards--had to be in my name, as my father couldn't be seen to be an entity; he simply had a second card on "my" accounts. I didn't even see the bills. They'd be sent to the company and the company accountant would pay.
When I wasn't signing for my father, I was busy at the rock face, managing our LA-based artists. I had Britt Eckland, who was trying to launch a singing career but, as she had just split up with Rod Stewart, it was hard going. For the first time in my life I witnessed someone with a broken heart. I saw that beautiful woman turn into an anorexic wreck, get heavily into drugs and lose her hair. I'm not blaming Rod, because I don't know what went on, but he did break her heart.
Then there was Glenn Hughes, a singer/bass player who'd been with Deep Purple, who I put together with a guitar player named Gary Moore. At his peak, Glenn had been a gorgeous good-looking guy, but now he'd done a Jim Morrison: he was grossly overweight and unhealthy looking. To make it worse he'd always had beautiful long hair, and he'd cut it off. So it was an uphill job. In those days to have any chance of success you had to have thin legs and wear tight trousers. You were in competition with rock gods like Robert Plant and Mick Jagger.
But Glenn was addicted to anything he could put in his mouth, and he'd come to the house and be eating chocolate and drinking, and whining about his weight and saying, "Oh God, I can't finish my record," and one day I was so fed up with this constant self-pitying drone that I just spat in his face and gobbed in his beer to stop him drinking it. He was dumbfounded. All musicians did drugs or drank, but this was the first time I was having to deal with the result, because if he didn't do something about it, I was wasting my time. Thirty years later, Glenn Hughes is clean and sober, looks amazing and is doing fantastic--he's an AA miracle.
Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography Page 9