Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne; Penelope Dening

  A couple of days before I'd gone up to see my father in the office in the tower above his bedroom--somewhere I didn't often go--and there was this great big stone monkey there, like a gorilla made out of concrete with hideous glass eyes. New, not antique, like something you might pick up at a truck stop, the sort of place that sells signs saying "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps" or "My other car's a Porsche."

  "So where did you get that, Don?"

  "Oh, somebody gave it to me. Isn't it fabulous?"

  So I'm looking at this thing going, Yeeeesss, quite fabulous.

  And it was horrible. Horrible. The only thing in the entire house that I had not bought. And now another thing that I didn't buy: a pair of see-through pink panties. The note was signed Meredith. So I went into his address book, also in the briefcase, and there was a number for a Meredith. And I called the number, and my father answered.

  "I think you ought to come home," I said. I didn't think twice. Because suddenly all those things people had said began to hammer in my head, how Don had this suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel for his prostitutes, and then there was a note I'd found under the windshield wipers on the Rolls saying, "I miss you, why haven't you called?" And this was the man I thought was so squeaky clean.

  So I went upstairs to the tower room, picked up this stone gorilla and lugged it down to the front door. It was about two feet high and made of concrete. On the head of the monkey I arranged the pink panties. And then I lifted up my skirt, and I squatted down and shat on it. So there was this fucking gorilla, vaguely Buddha-like, pink panties on its head, topped by a turd.

  And by this time Colin saw what I was doing and was jumping around going, "No, no. Sharon, stop it!" Because of course he'd known about my father and his mistress all the time. Everybody knew except me. And Rachel had heard the commotion, but she was laughing her head off, saying, "Oh my God!" Even she had known. She'd tried to warn me. When I was away on tour she'd say things like, "Miss Sharon, please, please come home. The house needs you, Miss Sharon." And later she told me how Meredith would be there when I was away, ordering the staff around and going into my bedroom and going through my things.

  I didn't think my father would come. I didn't think he would have the nerve, but I decided to keep Colin up just in case, because I was scared.

  "You're bloody staying."

  "Look, Sharon, I'm dead on my feet, I'm jet-lagged . . ."

  "You're bloody staying here." And so he was pacing around the house with his hands in his pockets like a father-to-be outside a labor room.

  And then my father came in. He was fuming, and his shirt was undone at the neck--something that rarely happened; he was always dressed perfectly. He came storming in, and of course he had to pass the monkey to get in the door. And he looked at it and went pale.

  "How dare you get the dog to shit on my monkey," he spat. He thought I had gotten Jet to shit on the fucking thing. Colin put him right.

  "It wasn't the dog," he said. "It was your daughter."

  And then my father started screaming at me: "How dare you go through my private things. Whatever I do is none of your business." He was absolutely right. He could have fucked who he wanted, he could have fucked the Supremes, he could have fucked the Four Tops, it was none of my business. But I was stunned because my father was so moral, so opinionated about everybody else who was having affairs on their wives. My world had shattered.

  Over the next few days I was in a terrible state. The doctor prescribed me some Valium, and one night I took an overdose. It wasn't on purpose; it was simply that every time I woke up I thought they weren't working, so I'd take another one or two. It was Colin who found me. And it was so terrifying to see how easy it was to take too many when you're woozy and you don't know what you're doing. And now, when I read about people committing suicide by taking too many pills, I wonder if it really was that, because it's so bloody easy to do it accidentally.

  And then I started drinking. The whole structure of my life had imploded. Everything I thought was good and right, and everything I'd fought for and fought other people for, was all bullshit. Everything that people had said about my father was true. I felt conned. I felt utterly conned. Two days later I spoke to my brother, although we were hardly in constant touch. He knew: it had been going on for about a year, he said. A whole year.

  I didn't tell my mother. Firstly, it was none of my business and secondly my father would have fucking killed me. Yes, I would stand up to him. I had the courage to say no, I'm not doing that, or you're wrong. But only up to a point. I never really thought he would physically attack me. But he didn't have to. The tone in his voice when he was angry was so frightening it would really rattle your insides. Like with my mother: he only went for her verbally, but when my father went verbally, you would rather that he hit you. It was much easier to take. But I was scared he would lose his temper so bad that he couldn't pull himself back, and he'd lash out and I'd end up getting hit by default.

  My mother found out when she next came to California. She didn't come often, she didn't like LA, and in 1979 she was sixty-three years old. It happened when she was going through some of his papers and found a prenuptial agreement between Don and Meredith. Yes, my father had asked Meredith to marry him. And the prenuptial was things like: when we get married, you don't get this, this and this. And when my mother told me, I just said, "I know."

  A month or so later, when I was back in England, she talked to me about it. Her husband had never been faithful to her, she said. One time she'd sent a suit to the cleaners so had gone through the pockets, as you do, and found a key to the Cunard Hotel in Hammersmith.

  "I've always known that he cheated on me," she said, "but it's something that I turn a blind eye to. I lost one husband through cheating and I'm not going to lose another." And that was it.

  But the day she found the prenuptial she confronted him. In the Howard Hughes house that very evening. I wasn't there, I wasn't party to it. So they did whatever they did about it. Then she went back to England.

  From then on whenever they were together it was always very strained. And my mother would call me, crying on the phone, like when she found an insurance claim filed by Meredith for pearls that had been stolen from the Dorchester in London when my father was supposed to be living in Wimbledon. And she only had me to talk to, and then I would have to have a go at my father. I was the go-between. I was the voice that she didn't have. I was the raging bull that she wished she was. She had always been passive. She should have beaten the shit out of him and thrown him out. It turned out my father hadn't slept with my mother for years and years. On the one hand I felt terribly sorry for her, but I should never have allowed myself to be her mouthpiece. As I said, he could have fucked the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Supremes and it had nothing to do with me.

  April 20, 2005, midday

  Mickey Fine's Drugstore, Beverly Hills

  I pick up my medication and look at my watch. Do I have time to stop at Barneys? I need some new bras. I went to get one this morning and there was only one in the drawer. Saba says Kelly has taken them all.

  My cell phone goes. It's Michael in my office: an ongoing problem with the stage set for Black Sabbath. I tell him I'll call him back when I'm in the car. Since my husband had his accident, he and Sabbath do Ozzfest together. And now the band that comes on before is trying to dictate what our stage set can be, because they need this and that and the other. And if it means they can't use some of their set because of our set, it being a construction problem, then our priority is Sabbath. They come first.

  "Listen, Michael. My job is to take care of the band, and the band has to be treated like superstars. No other band, I don't care who they are, takes precedence. I will not let them use their stage set if it means Sabbath cannot use theirs. They can shove it up their arse. I cannot send Ozzy out there naked. It makes my husband feel like a second-class citizen. They can have balloons, whistles, fucking fire engines. They can set the
mselves alight for all I care, I don't give a shit, as long as the stage is cleared within fifteen minutes, ready for Sabbath. So find me a professional stage-set designer. I don't want some half-baked roadie sitting at home doing a drawing on the back of an envelope. I need a fucking professional. OK, so what else, Mikey?"

  "Insurance. Nonappearance."

  "I told you, Michael, I do not want nonappearance. I will get up and sing if Ozzy can't sing. Zakk will play if Bill Ward is sick."

  "But it's a tour cost --"

  "Of course it's a tour cost, but I need to put that money on the stage to make my band look the best they can. If Ozzy can't sing, I will fucking go on. I am not spending money on insurance. They never pay up. They will always find a loophole so as not to pay when you make a claim. Forget it."

  8

  Ozzy

  Whenever he was in LA, Jeff Lynne would stay at the house. In early summer 1980 he was in the guest cottage with his girlfriend. He had his own entrance and I wouldn't see him from one day to the next. The tour was long over and ELO was in LA recording its next album. That's how it works. You write the album, you record the album, then you do the tour of the album, which is when the money comes rolling in.

  And it was about three o'clock in the morning, one of those late-night piss jobs, and he'd come over to the main house and I'd just poured him a beer. And then he came out with his bombshell.

  "Sharon," he began. "Your father's been stealing from me."

  I looked at him. "What do you mean, stealing?"

  "I mean, your father is a fucking thief."

  "Jeff, do you know what you're saying?"

  "Your father owes me four million dollars."

  "You can't mean this --"

  "Your father has stolen from me and I want my fucking money."

  His voice was low. There was no shouting or anything. It was just quiet and matter-of-fact.

  I knew that my father was having problems with ELO, particularly with Jeff. Jeff was great in the studio, a great songwriter, a great producer, but he was horrible live and he didn't enjoy it: in fact he hated it. But the drummer, Bev Bevan, loved to play live. And these two, Jeff and Bev, were the nucleus of ELO.

  ELO was our cash cow but, thanks to Morris Levy's bootlegging, there was no money coming in from the back catalog and so my father was desperate to get them out on the road again, because tours generate much more than record sales. And basically Jeff was refusing to play ball.

  I knew things weren't going well in the business because I'd come home and find things gone. Like my car. I'd bought a classic sixties Mercedes and had it redone to perfection, cherry red, ivory leather seating, beautiful mahogany wood dash, the interior completely refurbished, and it was an absolute jewel. And one day I came back to the house and the car had disappeared. I knew then that my father was up to his old tricks. He'd decided he needed some money, so, boom, the car went. He had other cars, but no, it had to be mine. "We'll get rid of that one." But that was my car, wasn't it? Not according to Don. Nothing was mine. It was his.

  And then he'd start on my jewelry. I'd go back to my bungalow and think we'd had a theft. I had a cabinet where I kept all my jewelry, a wooden apothecary's cabinet with all the little drawers, the porcelain handles and gold lettering with the names of the drugs that originally had been kept in it. It was about three feet high and I had it in my dressing room. And he would just go in, take what he wanted and hock it, take the cash and that would be it. Not a note, nothing. And I could say nothing, because nothing was mine. I could use it, but that was all. My father was the biggest Indian giver who ever existed. He would say, Sha? I want to buy you a painting. So he would buy me a painting, for my birthday or whatever, but then I'd come back one day and it would be gone.

  "It's not yours. I bought it."

  As long as you were there in his house, under his roof, that was fine. You could use these things. But if you left, you left with nothing. You owned nothing.

  So, feeling suddenly as cold as ice, I tried to think what to do as Jeff looked at me, and I said, "Look, if Don owes you the money, I know he'll give it to you."

  He said he didn't want to put pressure on me, but he just thought I should know that his lawyers were now on it, and they said that Don owed ELO $4 million in royalties.

  The next day I called my father in New York. I told him what Jeff had said, and he went ape shit.

  "How dare he say that," he screeched on the phone. "That motherfucker, I'll kill him." Later, when he calmed down, he said he was working on the situation, that he was getting the cash together from all different sources and he'd pay him and make it right.

  I stayed out of it. Accountants had to be given access to the books, and appointments had to be made, but I had nothing to do with any of it. As for trying to sort it out with ELO, it had gone beyond anything my brother or I could do in the way of salvaging something.

  "The situation is fixable," my father had said. But the situation was not fixable, the damage was done. In time, he got them the money, but there was no changing their minds. They wanted out. They wanted nothing more to do with him. Losing ELO was a huge blow to my father, and later on he told everyone that I was the reason they'd left. That I had spent the money he had owed to Jeff. I became his excuse for everything.

  There are times in your life when you know that things will never be the same again. And for me this was the turning point.

  I was trapped. I had gone to America to get away from exactly this, but it had followed me, and now I was clawing to get out. Half of me wanted to be loyal to my father and to take care of him as I always had done. The other half just wanted to go away, to get a life. I knew there was another way of living, and I wanted to find it. But I just couldn't get out.

  My brother went along with everything my father said. And I always felt he resented me. In the past I'd coped with unhappiness by eating, but for some reason this was different and I started to lose weight. I was at my wits' end. My father's affair, the company going bad. It was like a train wreck.

  I had lost contact with Ozzy and I was simply trying to hold myself together and think what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go. Get out of the music business.

  I don't want to be seen as a victim, someone who was taken advantage of. When I was younger, it was true that I didn't know what was happening. But by this time, I knew that much of what my father did was wrong. But I chose to turn a blind eye and say nothing. I would do what he wanted me to do, albeit under duress. I could have left before, but I chose to stay because I liked the lifestyle and didn't want to give up the luxury. But now I had made my decision. I had to go.

  And that's what I told my father. And he was still saying, "You can't do this to me," and then, "I need you to sign one more paper." It was always one more paper. Just one more. And then one day I had complete and utter meltdown.

  It was about two weeks after Jeff Lynne's bombshell. My father already knew I wanted out, but I wasn't following through. That evening, something broke and I started screaming at him, and punching, and thumping his chest, and he was trying to calm me down, holding my arms.

  "I just can't take this anymore, I just can't! I can't!"

  And then I started throwing anything I could pick up, smashing everything. I began on the living room in the main house, then went over to my bungalow and continued to destroy. Swiping everything off the tables, wiping them clean with one sweep of my hand, picking up antique lamps, throwing them, throwing everything. I even destroyed a Ming vase. It's terrible destroying something of beauty, but there are some times when you just can't control yourself, and there are some times when you are so frustrated, you are so beyond the point of reason, that there's nothing you can do. It's when you know you are powerless and you just can't take anymore.

  And at the end of all the destruction, I got down on my knees in a state of total exhaustion and I must have cried for days. I had nothing left. And I took to my bed and I didn't move. My father was probably concerned, b
ut he didn't come near me, he knew to stay away. But then, after a couple of months it started again: "Could you just sign this for the last time?" "Could you just make that phone call for me for the last time?" And everything was for the last fucking time.

  It was now about six months since Ozzy and Randy had left LA. They'd been staying at Ozzy's house in Stafford with his wife and family, with Randy going off every weekend, being driven by his roadie to Scotland, Cornwall, Wales. He never stopped wanting to learn, wanting to find out.

  My brother had failed to turn up either a bass player or drummer and this was now an urgent problem as they would soon be ready to record the album. So David put in a bass player we all knew named Bob Daisley. He was an Australian living in London who'd been in a couple of bands my father had managed--Widowmaker was one. Technically he was good, but I'd come across him a few times when the band he was with at the time was supporting ELO on their American tour, and he wasn't one of my favorite people.

  But he wasn't coming in as one of the band, we just put him on salary, what's called pay and play. Randy was in an entirely different category, and because my father basically couldn't give a fuck about anything else except his new woman, he also didn't get Randy's talent, so he was signed to me for management, publishing, everything.

  That still left a drummer.

  In my book, a good drummer is crucially important to a band. He needs to stand out as an individual, as a special personality, and in the history of rock there have been just a handful of classic drummers: John Bonham from Led Zeppelin, Keith Moon of the Who, who died in 1978, and Cozy Powell, who had been in lots of different bands but who is the only drummer to have had an individual hit record: "Dance with the Devil." Needless to say, no one like this was either available or interested.

  I talked to Ozzy on the phone from time to time, and he seemed up and happy, and I was pleased for him. The studio was booked, the engineer was booked, but there was still no drummer. Then Bob Daisley recommended a friend of his to David.