Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne; Penelope Dening

  We stayed one night. I spent my wedding night signing paper after paper for my father--it turned out to be the only reason he came. Ozzy's mother and elder sister, Jean, stayed on, but my parents left as soon as they could the next day. They took the few wedding gifts that the band and the crew had gotten us back to England, because that's where we were going to live so that Ozzy could be near his kids.

  April 20, 2005, 5:00 p.m.

  Malibu

  From the road these houses look like shacks; only from the beach side do you see how palatial they are. This land is not meant to be lived on, but people defy nature by building here. In the winter and spring there are mud slides and they try to hold them back with concrete and cement. And the salt from the sea spray destroys everything: plastic, metal, wood. In the summer there are constant fires, and about every five to ten years something catastrophic happens with the weather, and they keep rebuilding and rebuilding and rebuilding--people don't care, because it's so beautiful here.

  The ocean sparkles with light. The surf washes over the sand in loops fringed with foam, and there's not a footprint to be seen. In California, no one can own the shore itself, but they can make it very difficult to get onto. To the right is the little town with a Victorian pier, and to the left you can see the great sweep of the bay where sky and sea merge into the same aquamarine and indigo.

  Normally the first thing I do when I come to the house is light the candles, then I'll call up the general store and get some logs in and some food for the dogs. But not today; I only have time to go through my dressing room for thin summer clothes.

  Ozzy and I have been renting here for twenty years and I've been coming for thirty. When I worked in LA on my own I would come down on weekends and spend the day here. I have seen it grow and it's just beginning to get overpopulated but I still adore it. And just down PCH is the pet shop where we bought so many of the dogs. Minnie, Alfie, Lola, Ruby. And Sugar, who lives in England.

  We had been looking for years to buy a house in Malibu, and every time there was an open house I would go, but I never found the right one: too much work, not big enough or too expensive. Then, when I was living in a rental here with my cancer, I started to look properly, and found this house. A couple had bought it, totally redone it, so there was hardly anything to do. And because they lived in it full-time, it had all those things I needed: big bathrooms, plenty of closet space, and it was a great mix of contemporary and traditional, and the price was good, so we bought it.

  12

  On the Run

  The tour in Japan lasted two and a half weeks, and then we went back to England because Ozzy hadn't seen his kids in a while. Having nowhere to stay in London, we had no real option but to go to Wimbledon, and when our flight details were changed, I called my brother to ask him to arrange a car to pick us up. When we landed at Heathrow, no car. Should I have been surprised? David had never acknowledged our wedding, never sent a telegram, nothing. Even when we had spoken on the phone there hadn't been a word of congratulations. And when we got to Wimbledon and I asked if I could see my wedding gifts--I wanted to write thank-you letters--my mother said they'd been lost on the flight.

  So we'd been back a day and my father and brother suggest taking Ozzy to the pub for lunch. A normal thing to do. So they take Ozzy to lunch, and proceed to tell him that I'm insane, that I am the reason ELO left my father, but that Ozzy doesn't have to worry because they can get the marriage annulled on the grounds of my insanity, and in the meantime they can put him into hiding.

  When Ozzy came back and told me what had happened, he was absolutely terrified. There he was, thinking he had married this woman whom he'd known for years and suddenly he discovers that, according to his father-in-law, his wife is a fucking head case. He knew things weren't great between my family and me, he knew all about the money and all of that shit, but this was a whole new level.

  "You've got it wrong," I told him. "You must have been drunk." It was so extreme that even I could not believe my father would go that far. The next day we had planned to take my mother for an outing to Kent, to have afternoon tea at some country house she wanted to visit, but as I came back to the house, I walked in through the gates and suddenly I was surrounded by her dogs. And although I hadn't been around much, these dogs did know me, and I like dogs and they like me. But, for whatever reason, the Doberman suddenly jumped up and hit me with his head, and then the two Pyrenean mountain dogs set in and knocked me to the ground and were tearing at my arms and my body, and I was screaming and trying to protect my head. And finally my mother emerged from the house and called them off, and I was taken to the hospital just down the road in Roehampton. Ozzy just ran. He couldn't believe what was going on in his life, and he went up to Staffordshire on his own.

  I wasn't only bleeding from my thigh, I was bleeding from my womb. It turned out that I had been pregnant, and I'd had no idea. I miscarried the next day. I was in agony from the miscarriage and from the bruising, and I didn't know where to reach Ozzy, and I just kept to my room feeling desperate. Two days later Ozzy reappeared. We took one suitcase each and took the first flight back to Los Angeles, and went straight to the Howard Hughes house. I was moving out.

  It was reasonably straightforward. The things that Rachel had already crated up could be put right into storage. The staff promised me they would take good care of Jet and Mr. Pook; I had been away on tour so much that I knew they would be well looked after, and I had no real option. And I'm just with the moving guys packing a few more crates with my stuff before I leave, when the bookkeeper arrives from the office up the hill. Batyu Patel.

  "Sharon, there's just a couple more things we need you to sign."

  "I'm not signing another thing, Batyu. I'm out of here."

  "I promise you, this is the last thing. How can you not do this one last thing for your father?"

  So just to get rid of him I said, "Fuck it, all right." One last and final fucking time. I signed my name at the bottom of a tax return.

  And I took one last look across the City of Angels spread out before me from the terrace, and then turned to Ozzy.

  "Right, that's it." I left with two suitcases full of clothes. My jewelry, of course, had gone a year before. As our yellow cab snaked down the hill, I could feel my eyes stinging, but I didn't look back.

  My instinct told me we had to move fast. We took the red-eye to New York before my father could work out what was happening. He was in LA but staying at the house he had with Meredith. As soon as we landed, we went straight to CBS, which did the pressing and distribution of Ozzy's records for everywhere except England. We were leaving my father's record label, we said, and we were in litigation with him. "And we will sue you if you give him any money."

  It turned out we had just beaten Batyu, who had taken another red-eye to New York. He turned up at CBS an hour later to claim Ozzy's pipeline money, the money that is withheld by a record company from the royalties of an album in order to fund the production costs of the next.

  So then, of course, the shit hit the fan. The next thing we needed was a lawyer. But as the days went by we were drawing a total blank. Nobody was interested. Nobody wanted to cross Don Arden. Not for anything or anybody. And I continued to call around to my friends, asking for any information, because the secretaries were all my buddies and they knew better than anyone what was actually going on. And what the girl grapevine was telling me was that not only was my father in New York but my mother was too, that he had flown her in from London, wheeled her in to CBS and she'd been weeping about how crazy I was, that I was mad and deranged. And through my girlfriends I found out that they were staying at the Plaza Hotel, so I called my mother up, told her I'd been pregnant but I'd lost the baby when the dogs attacked me and how I really wasn't well.

  "So what I wanted to say was could you come over and sit with me?"

  Click. She hung up.

  I genuinely had wanted to talk to her, but not about the miscarriage. I wanted to say to her: what
are you doing with this man? He has destroyed you as a woman, he has embarrassed you, he has humiliated you, he has no respect for you, and now he is using you against your child.

  I wanted to face her with the facts and ask, "How could you go and sit in a fucking record company with people you barely know, saying that I was a terrible daughter and a thief?" I didn't want to scream or yell, I didn't want to touch her, I just wanted to say, "How can you side with this man against your own daughter, when he's going to fuck another woman tonight, and he's lied to you your whole life together? How can you do this?"

  I knew I didn't know my father. The romantic image of the loving husband, the caring father, was a complete sham. And now I realized that I didn't know my mother either. Had she forgotten what I had done for her? Those middle-of-the-night calls, using me to attack Meredith because she was too frightened? I mean, what did I care about Meredith? Yet it was as if I took everything my mother said to heart. Like that time in the Polo Lounge. Perhaps it was because the Beverly Hills Hotel had always been my safe haven, special territory that couldn't be sullied. Nino the maitre d' had been his usual welcoming self.

  "I have reserved your favorite table," he said.

  Reserved? Ozzy and I hadn't reserved anything. We hadn't even known we were coming till a few minutes before, but OK. And this table was a big booth in a corner. So we sat down and ordered our food, and the vast bowl of salad arrived that Americans often have for lunch. We'd just started to eat when Nino walked over with two women and proceeded to pull out chairs for them at our table, and they sat down and ordered champagne while they looked at the menu. And, although the restaurant was full, the Polo Lounge wasn't the kind of place where you shared tables and I knew instinctively that this was Meredith, and that my father must have made the reservation for lunch, which was why Nino thought I had booked, and now she was here with a girlfriend. And I was rigid. Stunned. This was the first time I had seen her, and I had never realized she was the same age as me. So there she sat, across the table, smirking at Ozzy, because he had just shaved all his hair off so he was completely bald. And the pair of them were sitting there smirking, and her hand was fiddling with her glass of champagne, and I saw she was wearing what's called a cocktail watch, a black satin strap with the face all diamonds, an evening watch. I stretched across the table and picked up her wrist.

  "My husband paid for that," I said. And she tried to pull her hand away from me. "Also," I told her, "it's incorrect to wear an evening watch for lunch." Then I took her glass of champagne, and poured it on top of her head. Then I picked up my vast bowl of salad and balanced it on top of her hairstyle, but I didn't do it very well and seconds later the contents spilled down her face and over everything. Finally I emptied the ashtray over her. Then, getting up to leave, tipped the table over for good measure.

  I was shaking. He was still married to my mother. My mother still came out to Los Angeles, and she still would go eat at the Polo Lounge. Why did he have to flaunt this woman on our territory?

  When we got home Ozzy called my father. "Why didn't you tell us? You knew we were in Los Angeles. It needn't have happened."

  "Die, vegetable. Die."

  And when my mother hung up the phone that morning in New York, I knew I was alone. And that from then on my life would be totally different.

  Ozzy and I had virtually nothing. We had no cash, we had no credit cards. I had lost my driver's license; Ozzy didn't have one. All we had were our passports. We couldn't rent a car, we couldn't stay in a hotel. Then, in a moment of inspiration, I went to see Bill Elson, Ozzy's agent at ICM. I told him exactly what had happened: that no lawyer would touch us and that we were completely and utterly broke.

  He knew from personal experience what a bastard my father was, and yet Bill gave us money and found us a lawyer. And when Don heard what he had done, he sent some of his hoods around to lean on him. But Bill wasn't the kind of man to give in to terror or threats, and he stuck by us. By now the word was out on the streets: Don Arden had said he was going to kill me. He wanted me gone, and he wanted his cash cow for himself. So Bill found us somewhere to hide, an island called Hilton Head, off the coast of South Carolina, where he went for summer holidays with his family, and this was such a nonplace, so not showbiz, so not Mafia, that my father would never have found us in a month of Sundays.

  Every day we were in Carolina, I would wake up and vomit. I couldn't eat and I couldn't even drink water. Ozzy had to force me to take tiny sips. All I could think of was: my father is stealing from my husband. Here was this man whom I absolutely adored, who had given up everything in his life for me, and my family was trying to destroy him. I didn't care about me. I was crying for him. I was ashamed. Deeply, deeply ashamed.

  We stayed there while the lawyers hammered out a deal. My father wanted one and a half million dollars for Ozzy's recording contract. We had to waive the money we were owed for merchandising, the tours, the royalties, we had to forget everything else, and we had to do one last album. Ozzy had neither the time nor the inclination to write. We agreed to do a live album of Sabbath songs.

  Could we have hung on? No. While Ozzy was still in litigation with my father, he could have gone on performing but not recording, and careers rarely survive that kind of isolation, and it could have lasted five years. It happened to George Michael, it happened to Prince. It would have been endless. We had every right to sue for the money that had never been paid on the tours and record royalties, but we didn't have the resources, we didn't have the time. We wanted them gone. We wanted the cord cut.

  CBS agreed to lend us the money to pay my father the million and a half, against future earnings, and we went into huge debt. It took five years to repay.

  And of course the contract had to be signed. And as my father was determined to torture and humiliate me, where else but the Howard Hughes house?

  Ozzy and I flew to Los Angeles. We stayed at the Hilton--we didn't have enough money for the Beverly Hills Hotel. Then, in the early evening, we took a yellow cab up the familiar road. The cabdriver didn't know it, and took the sharp bend at Cary Grant's house too quickly and Ozzy and I were flung against each other. The guard showed us in as if we were strangers. Nobody spoke to us. None of my old staff were there, but the animals were. They couldn't be told to ignore me. Jet and Mr. Pook rushed up and began fussing over me. And then there was just my mother and father and Colin Newman.

  It's the strangest things that you remember. While Colin read out this contract that was handwritten on an ordinary piece of paper, I just wanted to scratch my bites. It had been the height of mosquito time in South Carolina and I was absolutely covered.

  My mother said nothing. And I felt so bad for Ozzy. He had always been very fond of my mother, and she didn't even acknowledge him.

  I walked back into a house where there was nothing that I hadn't either done or bought. I loved that house. It was a part of me. Now all we had was each other. Nothing else.

  Colin read out the agreement, Ozzy signed it, and we turned around and the guard led us out. It was all done within twenty minutes; we didn't even use the bathroom. Then we took the yellow cab that had been waiting for us back down the hill, past the Beverly Hills Hotel to the Hilton.

  We picked up our bags and flew back to New York to record Speak of the Devil. We felt utterly defeated. He'd beaten us. This was his kiss-off. In our naivete we thought we would never hear from him again.

  So I booked the venue, called in Rudy, Tommy and Brad Gillis, the guys rehearsed, then did two live shows, which were recorded, and it was fucking horrible. It's horrible to have to perform when you don't want to. You do it with resentment. And then for Ozzy to produce an album that he didn't love, he felt he was prostituting himself. And the album was terrible. And I felt so ashamed at how my family could be so mentally cruel to this man. That I had brought him into a family that was so corrupt.

  In the past, my father had done his best to get Ozzy to sign over his publishing rights. While we were
on tour he'd sent one of his lawyers out with one of his hoods, but we'd resisted. Always resisted. And thank God we did. Because the only thing we had to raise money on now was his publishing. When we finally got back to England we went to see Richard Branson, who was so kind and considerate and got us out of a hole by buying Ozzy's publishing for PS500,000. Because it wasn't just us: there was Ozzy's first wife, his children, the children's school fees to think about. We had nowhere to live, not even a car, and I was pregnant again. But not for long: I had a miscarriage at about fourteen weeks. It was very upsetting, as these things always are, but as I'd gotten pregnant just like that, the doctor told me it was nothing to worry about.

  During the European leg of the tour, I wanted to maximize Ozzy's profile and so set up loads of promotion. If you're working with somebody who is an addict or drinks too much, you don't take it personally. If they choose to fuck up their career, you're not responsible. My philosophy is: you're big enough and old enough to take care of yourself; I can only tell you what I think and advise you. You don't get emotionally upset by it. You walk away. But with Ozzy it was different, because I loved him, and it would completely destroy me. I don't know what it was about Europe, but he would always be over the top. When I look back now I can only see the funny side, but this was career-destroying behavior.

  Take Paris. The head of the French record company says he would like to take us to dinner. We had never met this man before in our lives, but he's arranged three days of press interviews and it's a very positive vibe. So we go to this private club, the sort at the end of a courtyard where there's a wooden door with a hatch in the top that opens to check who you are. And this is obviously The Place. Very elite. And it's full of movie stars: Catherine Deneuve is there, Roman Polanski is there. The record company guy is very welcoming, very courteous, and so we sit in this booth, sipping our drinks, when Ozzy turns to this guy, our host, and says: "Punch me." So the head of the record company blinks a couple of times, hunches his shoulders nervously and does a French-type pout and says, "I don't understand."