Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne; Penelope Dening

  I have no idea how my father and Tony Curtis became friends, perhaps through Marvin Mitchelson. Tony was a genuine fan of ELO, to the extent that Don got him to introduce them at stadium concerts on more than one occasion. In 1977 a friend of my father's was getting married and wanted something quiet and simple, so Tony Curtis suggested they use his house. So there was this guy, his bride, Tony Curtis, my father and mother and me.

  Tony was living in Bel Air at the time, and his house had this room with a wonderful window with a great view of the hills. And it was sunset and it was all lovely, and it gets to the part where the rabbi starts to sing. And the moment he started, another sound came up, like a group of backup singers. It was Tony's three dogs, who'd been banned from the ceremony itself but had been standing on the other side of the picture window, their noses pressed up against the glass. Once the singing started, the dogs collectively put their heads up and began to howl at the sky. They were wailing up a storm but everyone ignored them except me.

  I started to giggle. My father gave me a look, but I couldn't stop. And then it was the old problem. I started to piss. You could hear it. I did everything I could do to stop it, crossed my legs, pulled at my muscles, but none of it did any good. Soon the black suede boots I was wearing were like black patent leather. The ivory-colored carpet had been Scotchgarded so instead of it soaking in, there was one big pool. I did what I could to help it soak in, making these weird movements with my feet. Thank God, only my father and mother noticed. After the ceremony, Tony said how he had never in his life gotten attached to houses or possessions. "It's too dangerous, because you will always be heartbroken." I wonder if he thought that when he saw what I'd done to his carpet.

  I was still in touch with Tony Iommi. Whenever he came to LA he'd call me; I was like the little sister, and I had all the connections. So he might ask me where he could find a sweat suit, or if I could get him a massage. He liked to go places and meet people, so I'd take him. Or if my father was away, he might come up to the house. If it seemed a little clandestine, it was only because if Don ever found out Tony had been there, he'd go utterly insane. Tony was a reminder of the Meehans' betrayal.

  One time he asked me to a Sabbath gig when they were playing Long Beach, just down the coast. This was around November 1976, and I hadn't been in LA that long. I'd seen Sabbath a few times over the years, and occasionally I'd bump into Ozzy in a hotel somewhere wandering around, though I'd never really talked to him.

  So I was in the dressing room backstage, and it was one of those things where Ozzy and I happened to be sitting opposite each other, around a coffee table. And we must have talked for about half an hour, and he just made me laugh and laugh. And I remember thinking, God, this is such a sweet funny guy. And he has such a lovely face and such a lovely smile. What I couldn't understand was how the others were always making fun of him. "Oh, it's only Ozzy." Ozzy was "the goofball," "the idiot." If anything went wrong, it was always Ozzy's fault. Even then, it seemed odd, because the public absolutely adored him, and when people thought about Black Sabbath, they thought about Ozzy, yet whenever the band spoke about him, he was like the band joke.

  Then, a month or two later, around the time of the MIDEM fight, I had a call from Tony saying how if I was going to be in Europe we should try to hook up. They were doing a gig in Amsterdam that worked for us both. "Just don't tell anybody else you're coming," he added.

  Tony was always very private with his personal life, and never liked the other guys knowing his business. So I fly over, get to the hotel, and we meet up, have dinner and then he goes off to the gig. He didn't want me going to the gig, he said, in case any of the band saw me, but he'd see me later. So, it's Oh, all right. And I went to my room, watched some TV and waited for him to call. Nothing. I waited and waited. What a waste of time. I was being made to feel like a little tart, even though our relationship wasn't about that anyway. And around two in the morning, it was suddenly: Fuck this. What the hell am I doing here? So I booked the first flight out at seven that morning. I was just leaving, the hotel as quiet as a morgue, when who do I see but Ozzy, doing his usual can't-sleep wandering thing.

  "Sharon?"

  "Hi, Ozzy."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Don't even ask," I said. But suddenly things didn't seem so bad, and there we were laughing in the hallway and chatting as if it was the most natural thing in the world, even though it must have been four in the morning. We could have been talking for only five minutes at most, because I suddenly realized where I was, and what I was doing.

  "Look, I've got to go, I've got a flight . . ."

  "Oh, OK."

  "So, see you, Ozzy."

  "OK."

  Then sitting in the taxi on my way to the airport, the noise of the windshield wipers thumping across the windshield, it was like, Oh my God, he is just so cute and so funny.

  Ozzy says that for him that five minutes in Amsterdam was the moment he knew that he fancied me. He says that I reminded him of a cherub. But I knew he was married; not only married, but married with two children. But it was like my ears pricked up at a high-pitched sound that only dogs can hear.

  By the time my father next came out to LA, his anger at the MIDEM fight was displaced by hand-rubbing self-satisfaction. He was about to buy out United Artists Records from Transamerica, which owned the company at the time. It was a joint thing with his friend Artie Mogul, he said. He was going to be president, Artie was going to be the chairman. David was going to be doing this, I was going to be doing that.

  "It's gonna be amazing, Sha. Just you wait."

  Then one morning the telephone rings, and I pick it up.

  "Sharon? Hi. It's Artie. Don there?"

  I'm in my bungalow, so I pass it through to my dad, and I know it has to be about the deal, as it was about the time it was going to come down. So I put on my dressing gown and go over to the house to hear what's happening.

  Even before I open the door I know something has gone very wrong. I can hear my father screaming into the phone, effing and blinding: you lying sons of bitches, motherfucker this, cocksucker that. And Artie Mogul has called to tell him that the deal was done. But that it didn't include him. They had signed it the night before, and my father was out.

  The veins on his neck were standing out like ropes, you could see them pulsating, and I thought they were going to burst. I was furious too. I hadn't been a party to everything that had gone on, but to a good half of the conversations I had. And, of course, it was then obvious to me that Artie Mogul never had any intention of including my father in the deal. But at that time ELO was UA's most profitable group, and they needed them on board before the deal could be closed, and if my father had had any idea of what they were up to, he'd have taken ELO elsewhere.

  My father then went to the lawyers and served them with every sort of paper to try to get the band away from them. Over the next few weeks Artie Mogul tried to reach Don on the phone, but by then he had gone back to England, so he had to deal with me.

  "Sharon, hey, listen. Let's you and me try to sort this thing out, there's nothing that can't be fixed."

  "No, Artie, you listen to me. You're a piece of shit, and if I ever see you I'll fucking kill you. Because you're a liar, a bare-faced fucking liar."

  But he was just one among many. The business was full of lying, cheating mobsters. There was barely a decent person among them. Everywhere I turned there was another liar, another bullshitter, another fake.

  Eventually my father settled, which gave him the right to take ELO someplace else, and he took them to CBS, run by Walter Yetnikoff, which later turned into Sony. But it was too late: the catalog was slowly being destroyed.

  How? Very simply. Artie Mogul gave the ELO masters--the tapes, the artwork for the album covers--to a man named Morris Levy, the biggest bootlegger in North America, who was involved with the mob in New Jersey.

  And so the market was flooded. And when it became obvious what was happening, Artie M
ogul held up his hands and said, "Not me! We're not pressing them!" No, quite right they weren't; it was Morris Levy pressing out millions and millions and selling them worldwide and making a fortune for himself and for Artie Mogul and his henchmen. As these were all bootlegs, they weren't being accounted for in terms of publishing or record royalties, so the band didn't get a penny.

  As soon as he was free of UA, my father got ELO into the studio and got them to tour, and Jeff wrote great songs and they had one hit after another. The main damage to the band was done by Morris Levy, who bootlegged their double album Out of the Blue, a brilliant piece of work, and milked it and milked it and nobody got a penny from it but Artie Mogul and Morris Levy.

  In 1977 it was my job to take ELO out on the road. I'd toured with my father and with David, but this was my first time solo. I was the novice and ELO the veterans. I had very little to do--just charter the planes and make sure everybody got on, pay the hotels and deal with any problems. Because they were such veterans there were no problems, except those caused by me. The money from each show would go straight to the agent who had set up the tour, so I had nothing to do with that side. I was soon extremely bored: a flight every morning, snatched food, sound check, gig and another hotel room, and we did something like forty cities in fifty days.

  David had tour-managed ELO's four previous US tours, and Jeff and he had gotten along well, and Jeff didn't hide the fact that he was irritated at having me along. I felt like I belonged to a completely different generation. I mean, I was twenty-three, while they were in their thirties, and married. They were all tour-hardened professionals, had been doing it for years, and were basically sensible and normal. If there had been some young boy in the band I wouldn't have minded, but there wasn't even anyone in the crew. As a result I was very badly behaved and would get drunk every single night because I was so fucking bored. Rachel came with me. She acted as our dresser, she washed and ironed and mended and did her best to keep me under control, but mainly she laughed.

  "Oh, Miss Sharon, now you come to bed! Come to your bed!"

  I remember one time at the Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta, Andy Gibb--the Bee Gee who had a solo career and died young--invited Jeff and Bev Bevan and me up to his room, and I threw up over his record collection. I don't know if it was the same night--how could I possibly remember, given the state I was in--but in this same hotel there were these enormous fountains, and I was so pissed that I was just flopping around, in and out of the water, until Jeff dragged me out.

  In Washington there was great excitement because none other than the President of the United States--Jimmy Carter, it was then--had invited us all to the White House. So the night before, I'd had everyone back at my suite--which I often did, the idea being that I'd end up paying for the drinks. I was already out of my skull when I noticed there was a place where the wallpaper was coming unstuck. It was that time in the seventies when flocked wallpaper was all the rage. So, just to see what would happen, I began to pull at a corner, and it came away as easily as an old Band-Aid, and suddenly a whole strip had peeled off.

  "What say we just wreck the room?" I said to the guys. And so that's what we did. Not just more wallpaper, but the TV, the oven, the hot plate, all went out through the window. We utterly destroyed it. The next day the hotel called the police. And the others go: "We had nothing to do with it. She did it all by herself!"

  As for the White House, nothing was going to stop that. They went; I stayed behind dealing with the police and paying for the room.

  Flocked wallpaper was a particular source of destructive pleasure to me in the seventies, and I attacked it at least one other time. It was at a CBS convention when Walter Yetnikoff was in charge, those things where they fly everyone in from around the world and do their bullshit. That year it was held at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City. Yetnikoff was one of the most unpleasant people I have ever come across in all my years in the music business. At that time I was only a girl, but he was always incredibly rude whenever I would see him. To me, he was the kind of man for whom the term "chauvinist pig" was invented, who thought that all I was good for was lying on my back or scrubbing floors. So my girlfriend and I--she had also suffered from his unpleasantness--decided to show him what we thought of him. In those days there was a shop on the ground floor of the Century Plaza selling tacky clothes, so we went in and bought really repulsive dresses and put them on his account. We didn't wear them, it was just like a Fuck You. And we ate in the restaurant all week, and signed everything to his room, because nobody checked anything.

  So the last night of the convention we go up to his penthouse suite, and he's sitting there on the floor smoking dope with a promoter from San Francisco named Bill Graham, both of them much older than I was, and here am I, the new breed. And they have the shrimp, the oysters, the champagne, and they were going in and out of the bathroom. Yetnikoff was a big cocaine user.

  So while these two were otherwise engaged in the bathroom, I took all this seafood that came presented in huge South Sea island-type shells the size of babies' baths, and threw it off the balcony. And nobody even noticed. Everybody in those days was stoned. Then, because I was so drunk and so bored, I started to wreck the room, starting naturally with the flocked wallpaper, in my small way showing my total lack of respect for him. He wasn't a musician, he couldn't read or write music, he had never sung, he didn't have a musical note up his arse.

  In those days, almost everybody in the industry knew about music, and there he was, nothing but a two-bit lawyer, running the biggest record company in the world. He was the beginning of the end. From then on the lawyers took over. And you would go into his office and there were pictures of him arm in arm with the artists. Arm in arm with Barbra Streisand, arm in arm with Bruce Springsteen, arm in arm with Michael Jackson. But when asked at a charity event a few years later if he wanted a picture taken arm in arm with Ozzy, he said no. And if I could have cut his heart out, I would have. But his callous behavior motivated me: I'm going to be bigger and better than you and when you are fired and at home in front of the TV, I will still be doing this. And that was like an oath I gave myself. I will see you out of this business, and I have. Arsehole.

  Through Tony Iommi, I kept in touch with what was happening with Sabbath, and by 1978 the news was not good. Things were beginning to seriously unravel with the Meehans. It might have taken them eight years for the penny to drop, but Sabbath now knew they'd been stitched up like kippers.

  By the time Sabbath played the Marquee that February night in 1970, the groundwork for their future success had already been laid. They had already toured; they already had a huge fan base. It was organic and from the street, and when the Meehans picked up their management, it was simply the right time and the right place. The truth is that Sabbath would have made it whoever they had gone with.

  All the people around them were self-serving, so it was one shark fighting another shark, all biting each other's tails. Sabbath's members were complete innocents and had no idea they were being ripped off. They had no concept of how much they were worth. They were paid a weekly wage, but in the early seventies credit cards were not in everyday use, so everything would be sent direct to the office, their phone bills, clothes bills, everything. That's the way it was in those days.

  "You want a car? Sure, you can have a car. What car do you want? You want a Rolls-Royce? OK, here's the Rolls-Royce." So the car would be delivered. But it wasn't their name on the registration document.

  Or they wanted to go on vacation. These were working-class boys from Birmingham--they didn't know they could have gotten a private plane to fly them to the Caribbean and charter a yacht. They'd take their kids for two weeks to the beach and think they were doing well.

  They'd say, We've seen a house we want to buy, and these boys' experience was so limited it wasn't like they saw it advertised in Country Life. They would never imagine they could have ever afforded palatial or extravagant. And so the house would be bought. But it
was never their names on the deeds. Ozzy had "bought" his parents a house, but when Sabbath left the Meehans, his parents got thrown out. Like all the other Sabbath houses, it turned out they were owned by one of the Meehans' companies.

  Worst of all the sharks circling around them were the music publishers. Their music publishing had been signed away "in perpetuity." Ozzy now says he didn't even know what the word meant. "We were four guys in a fucking barrel. I thought 'perpetuity' was a fucking disease."

  It was the most obscene thing in the world to take four young guys who were so untarnished and bleed them dry. But that's exactly what the Meehans did, by lying to them, using their money as their own. They had absolutely no respect for them, as people, as musicians, as anything. And that's really what started the rot, because it set the tone for Sabbath's entire professional careers. They felt worthless, they didn't trust anyone. Nor should they have. Everyone around them had lied and cheated, till Sabbath felt they had nothing left to give. At the end of the day the Meehans took away their will to play, which is a terrible thing to do to an artist. Because what were they working for? They never got any real money, any encouragement or any sense of self-worth.

  Then one day Tony Iommi called me from England. Sabbath was in a bad way, he said. They had left the Meehans, but now it was all turning into a nightmare. Did I think that Don would consider taking over their management?

  April 20, 2005, midday

  Mickey Fine's Drugstore, Beverly Hills

  "Well hi, Sharon! God, you're looking great!"