"You cunt. I said punch me. In the fucking face. Now."
And this guy is looking at me for help: "He is joking, right?"
"I fucking told you, you French cunt, punch me in the face now."
So the guy's looking really worried now, as if to say: what do I do?
"Are you deaf?" Ozzy goes on. "I said, punch me in the face, you French cunt."
"You wanna be punched in the face, Ozzy?" I ask him.
"Yes."
So I punched him in the face.
"Thank you," he said. "Now perhaps we can order dinner."
So it was like gone as far as France was concerned.
Next came Germany. Germany is a huge market for Ozzy's genre of music, probably the biggest market in Europe. And the German record company has organized a formal dinner, because they are also entertaining a young American couple that has won this radio contest in the States to see Ozzy's show and have dinner with him afterwards. So we're all there after the gig, and Ozzy is out of his mind.
He strips off all but his socks and shoes. Picture it. Everything out. And he gets up onto the table, puts his right index finger under his nose to look like Hitler and with his left arm extended starts to goose-step up and down the table doing the Heil Hitler salute. Then he comes to a halt in front of the head of the record company, who was all hair and beard, and picks up this guy's wineglass and plops his balls into it, dangling them in the wine, then bangs the wineglass back on the table.
Apart from the sound of Ozzy's shoes clumping on the wooden table, and the tinkle of a glass that he'd knocked over, there was an eerie silence.
"You're all fucking Nazis over here," Ozzy said. "You killed six million Jews, you fuckers." Then he climbed off the table, straight onto the head honcho's lap, straddling him, then wrapping his legs around him, bare arsed, wine all over his balls, and said, "Kiss me, you fucker," grabbed him by the back of his head, pulled it, and stuck his tongue down his throat. Meanwhile the two kids from California, the contest winners, are sitting there transfixed like deer caught in the headlights.
By this time I was looking for my napkin on the floor because I couldn't keep a straight face. I mean, there was his little arse bobbing up and down and I could even see the pimples on his bum and I was just laughing up a storm. The band had their hands stuffed in their mouths. The record company, however, did not find it funny, and from then on this guy had it in for Ozzy, and we didn't go back to Germany for years. As for France, we never go there now. It's possibly the only country in the world where Ozzy never sells a record. He can go to Russia, he can go to Korea, but France, forget it. It doesn't exist.
Anyway, it was good-bye Germany, good-bye France. On the plane back to the States I was ripping up the contracts into fucking confetti. We were supposed to be going to Italy, but I hadn't the stomach for it.
Whenever we were back in England, we'd go straight up to Staffordshire to see Ozzy's children. And constantly staying in hotels is no fun, so as soon as we could, we began looking for a house. I wouldn't have chosen to live around Stafford--my only experience was living in London--but the last thing I wanted was to be accused of taking Ozzy away from his family, so of course I agreed.
We looked at a few, but I couldn't see myself living in any of them. So then Ozzy said there was a house he knew that was on the market that was really nice. His old house. I was mad enough to agree to go and see it. He'd given it to Thelma as part of the divorce settlement, and now she wanted to sell it and move to Birmingham. So there she was showing me around the house where they'd lived together. I can't believe now that I let it get that far. I don't know if it was worse for her or for me. Thank God it turned out to be more than he could afford . . .
The only way for Ozzy to make money was by touring, and so we continued, in South America, in Japan and in Europe, and back to North America. And gradually we began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and when we were in Jersey City, Ozzy decided it was time I had a better engagement ring, and gave me $1,000 to buy a diamond. So I picked out a nice stone in the mall and had it set into a thin gold band, a traditional claw setting.
And then I found I was pregnant again, and again I lost the baby. As this was the third time in a year I went to be properly checked out. They found out that when I got to three or four months, my cervix would open and that would be it. It could be prevented, they said, with a Shirodkar stitch, like a noose put around the neck of the cervix. But it could only be done after the baby was conceived, at around twelve weeks, and before that I would be vulnerable to the same thing happening. So the next time I got pregnant, they said, touring was absolutely out. I had basically to stay in bed and do nothing.
The timing wasn't great. As Ozzy was away from England so much anyway, he'd been advised to take two years out, where you live abroad and don't pay UK income tax. However, the rules were very strict (the scheme doesn't exist now), and he was only allowed a very few days back in England. I can't remember now why I decided on Antibes as our base. Neither of us spoke a word of French, but perhaps somebody had said the climate was like California. It was on the Mediterranean, and with Nice airport less than half an hour away it was close enough to England for friends to visit and for Ozzy to fly in and out easily.
We rented a house on Cap d'Antibes that was fully staffed, with a husband and wife and a gardener, and it was fabulous. We would go and shop in the market in the old town, and Ozzy's family would come down, his mum and his sisters, and my niece Gina, Dixie's daughter. Dixie had completely aligned herself with my mother, so that was that door closed. That's the way our family operated.
But there were times, long weeks, when nobody came, when Ozzy was away touring, and I had no alternative but to rest, not allowed to drive, not allowed to do anything. And in fact it was the same for all three of my pregnancies. The first three months were always hell.
It would be nice to say that Ozzy behaved impeccably. But he was a complete and utter bastard. He was out of his mind, drugging, drinking, cheating. Ozzy was constantly with someone, if only because he cannot stand his own company and hates to be confined to a hotel bedroom. It's a kind of claustrophobia and he panics. But although I knew that if and when he did pick up girls it didn't really mean anything, it still hurt. Also he was a terrible liar so I'd always find out. I would know the signs: when I'd call he would hang up on me, saying, "Can't talk." And then I'd hear the receiver clattering down in some hotel bedroom somewhere and I'd look at the receiver in my hand and feel the tears well up. It was a very lonely part of my life, and I missed him terribly.
It was hard to cope on my own in a foreign country with no one to talk to. So I would just store it up and by the time we next saw each other it didn't take much for it all to boil over.
"But I don't even know her name," he'd say. "I don't even know whether I did the fucking act or not." All very reassuring. We had a very volatile relationship in those days. I would always initiate the violence, and though it was wrong of him to hit me when I was pregnant, at the same time I would whack him as hard as I could where it hurt. I knew he felt dreadful about himself, always saying, "What's wrong with me?" I knew that deep down he truly loved me, and that was the only thing that pulled me through.
Once the Shirodkar stitch was safely in place, I was free to get back on the road. And the next time I was in LA I had a meeting with the European Asian bank, which had financed the purchase of the Howard Hughes house six years before. They were based in Singapore, and this was one of the deals I had signed for my father. The loan was huge because he'd had no capital and no collateral. All he had to do was pay the interest on the loan. This unusual form of unsecured mortgage came courtesy of an "arrangement" he had with one of the managers. In exchange, this man would come over to California every year and stay at the house, where hookers would be laid on, and he'd get to meet this star and that star--people like Tony Curtis and other friends of my father's. So for years this bank manager had covered my father's arse, but then he lo
ses his job and the auditors go in and basically my father is busted. They told me that in the six years he had the house, he had only made one of these payments: $50,000 on a $1.7 million loan. The unpaid interest was, of course, added to the original sum borrowed and now it was pay-up time. As my father didn't begin to have that sort of money, the bank had no option but to repossess the house, they said.
As soon as I had moved out, Meredith had moved in. As for the things I had put into storage, my father found out the name of the movers, got a court order and said everything was his: my camera collection, my record collection, my books, my shit, my photos, personal letters, clothes, even down to bits of memorabilia I'd had since I was a child. Everything disappeared, though I have a fair idea where at least some of it ended up. But I never saw any of it again. My father wanted nothing there of mine, including my animals: Jet was given to Air Supply (my father's then cash cow), while Mr. Pook was thrown into Benedict Canyon from a moving car. The staff managed to scramble down and find him and took him in. They were lovely people and we were still in touch, which was how I heard Dudley Moore was interested in buying the house. If my father managed to sell before the bank repossessed he could pay what was owed and there was sure to be some left over. However, there was one detail in this scheme that he had overlooked. The house was in my name.
If it had been anything else, then he'd have forged my signature, no question. But in America, when you sell a house, you have to be there in person, you need a notary public and you need ID. To prevent any misunderstanding, I got the name of Dudley Moore's business manager and called him and said that I was the owner of the house he was interested in buying, and that I would never, ever assign the title to anybody else. And then I called the broker and said the same thing. And then I called the bank. "I will never assign this house so you might as well repossess it," I said. So that's exactly what they did. They repossessed, my father was evicted, and he never got one single dime.
Today, even with the other houses and land sold off, the Howard Hughes house must be worth forty million dollars. I don't dream very often, but when I do I'm back there, with the children as babies, and I've bought it back. I could have somehow raised enough capital to pay off the bank myself because, as my father knew, it was worth much more than the money that was owed. But I didn't even try, because I knew he would only have burned it, with me and my children in it. He was no stranger to arson. He'd done it before in London. It was never proved, but everybody knew.
I had crossed the line. From then on, my name was erased. I was known as the nigger-fucker. (My father came from a generation where black people were called niggers, and in his world that was the worst thing a woman could do.) It was out-and-out war. I'd get a phone call from Dell Furano, the guy who still does our merchandising, saying that Don had been on the phone. "He knows you're in New York, and says to remind you that New York is a very dangerous place. And says to tell you to watch your backs." A few years later he tried the same thing in Los Angeles. This time I had all three babies with me, and he happened to see us walking down Sunset. As there are only a handful of hotels to call, he found out where we were staying, called the room and the nanny picked up the phone.
"Tell them to leave town," he said. "Otherwise something might happen to their children." We stayed exactly where we were. But it wasn't just bravado. That man was capable of doing anything.
We'd always said I would have the baby in England, and about a month before Aimee was due, Pete drove me back from Antibes and we rented a furnished apartment on a short lease in a mansion block in Collingham Gardens, just off Gloucester Road, in Kensington. And Ozzy took some of the days he was allowed in the UK to be there with me when Aimee was born. She arrived on September 2, 1983.
New baby, new house.
We finally bought a tiny thatched cottage near Eccleshall, Staffordshire. Outlands Cottage, Offley Rock, was all we could afford. But for me it had one great plus: it was ours. However, the first day we moved in--we hadn't even unpacked the van--Ozzy set it on fire. To make me feel welcome, he'd put too much coal on the grate and the thatch went up. By the time the fire department had finished, it was little more than a shell, so I decided I would completely remodel it. The thing I had most disliked was the mean, ugly little modern staircase, and so I found some wonderful carpenters in Devon and they built me a huge Gothic staircase. I had antique fireplaces put in, and in the end it was amazing, with a beautiful custom-designed kitchen and two fantastic bathrooms, although it was also completely ridiculous in that you couldn't move. I spent a fucking fortune doing it up because I was determined to make the house itself somewhere I wanted to live, because Eccleshall was like hell.
Although otherwise our cottage was totally isolated, we had to pass another little house to reach it. Our neighbors didn't have a toilet, a bathroom or a television, so this old couple used to shit in a shed at the end of their garden, usually whenever I happened to be walking past. And I just found the whole thing so depressing. The woman was like the farmer's wife in Babe. She always had the apron and she always had the Wellington boots. We were putting up a television aerial on the roof of the house when there was a knock at the door. It was Mrs. Babe, wanting to know what it was we were doing. She was none the wiser after I'd told her.
It didn't bode well when I lost the new engagement ring. I went mad looking for this fucking ring and we stripped the house and stripped it again, and then two days later I was outside chatting with the builders who were having their tea. And there's this one guy with his legs crossed and there's something twinkling on the bottom of his boot. And there, stuck between the ridges of this steel-capped work boot with all the mud and the shit is my ring. The band was broken, but the diamond was fine, so I got it set in a thick gold band, and now Ozzy wears it on a chain around his neck.
As for village life, everything revolved around the pub, and so when Ozzy was home that's where we went. And it was bingo night, and it was darts night, and I was the Yank who had stolen Ozzy away from his northern lass of a wife, so no one wanted to know me. Even more terrible, I would openly tell him to stop drinking, that he'd had enough, things like, "You're not driving me like that, give me the keys." But wives didn't say that kind of thing in Eccleshall. The pubs up there didn't even stick to closing times, and these people would go on and on drinking till everyone was drunk out of their minds. I thought it was insane behavior, particularly as Ozzy didn't even have a driver's license at the time--but I couldn't do a damn thing without drums going in Birmingham relaying it all to his first wife.
I was desperately lonely and so alienated. His children would come over and everyone knew Thelma, and I was the wife-stealing Yank. And I can honestly say that when I had married Ozzy, overlooking the Pacific a year before in Maui, I had not imagined I'd be spending New Year at the Red Lion with the ladies who picked potatoes.
But there was one shining light in all this: Pete Merton's mother, Phoebe. Pete was living with us in the guest bedroom and when he saw what a state I was in, with no one to turn to, he mentioned me to his mother, and the next day she was there. Everything I know about babies and bringing up children, I know from Phoebe Mertons, and I'm eternally grateful to her. Over the years, she was always there for me, prepared to drop everything and come and help when I was sick or had other problems. A few years back she won an OBE from the Queen for having raised so many foster children.
In the last few months of pregnancy I had begun to realize just how difficult it would be to work with a baby. Ozzy's career didn't run itself, and I was now his sole management: negotiating his contracts, setting up his tours, employing crew, organizing the merchandising, stage sets, opening acts and the rest of it. So when Aimee was a week old, I got somebody in to help. Lynn Seager had always worked in the industry, so had great experience, plus a great personality, and we immediately hit it off, and twenty-something years later she still works for me. We set up an office, one room just off Charlotte Street, and I was so lonely in that c
ottage, I would take the train up to London, lugging Aimee around in a sling, go to the office, then get the train back all the way to Stafford again. I can still hear the words that echoed around the station like the voice of doom: Stafford. This is Stafford. Stafford, Stafford. This is Stafford.
Then, before Aimee was four months old, I found I was pregnant again. With Ozzy away on tour, I just couldn't manage on my own in Staffordshire, so I went back to Antibes for the summer: a different house, but just as comfortable.
Then one day Ozzy went to the doctor. This wasn't unusual, because he is a terrible hypochondriac. If he has a pimple, it has to be skin cancer. He has a twitch in his back? He needs a new back. So he had just gotten back from America and was complaining about not feeling well, and first thing in the morning he goes to the doctor. I'm giving Aimee her breakfast, some kind of hot porridge-type cereal. And he comes back and says he's got something to tell me. I'm spooning this stuff into Aimee's mouth and I'm listening.
"I've got an infection."
I just looked at him. Then I picked up Aimee's bowl, a thick-rimmed Peter Rabbit bowl, full of porridge, and I slammed it over his skull. And I brought it down on him with such force that it broke, and suddenly blood was pumping out of his head, and it was everywhere, and I'm like, Oh my God, what have I done?
My immediate reaction was to hold him and say, I'm so sorry, so sorry, and I'll take you to the hospital. But I didn't. Because my next thought was: Fuck. Now he's going to beat the shit out of me. And I had my unborn baby to think about. So I picked up Aimee from the high chair and took her outside to the yard where Lynn and a couple of friends we had staying were sitting in the shade having breakfast. But I didn't tell them. Not a word. I just asked Pete to get him to the hospital. But Ozzy refused to go. He came out in the yard and sat there, with his head covered in blood and porridge, which was his way of making me feel guilty. And he still has a nasty scar on his head where the hair doesn't grow. And I do feel guilty to this day.
Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography Page 19