And he became a laughingstock, because his reputation as a pig had gone before him, and every manager in the industry called me and was like, Yes! Finally a manager has turned on an artist. Because it is always the artist who fires the manager, as I had been fired before. And it was always "my record wasn't a hit because of my manager," or "my tour wasn't a success because of my manager." It was the first time the tables had been turned. Very wisely, his publicist told him not to comment. The band split up the following May. He was so talented that it turned around and bit him in the arse. From that day on I swore to myself, never, ever again. And I never will. It is the worst job in the world. As for what to do for the rest of my life, I would just have to find something else. Nothing ever goes as planned, never has. I can never plan. I try to but it just never works out.
We were soon hearing on the grapevine that our episode of Cribs had become the most requested thing on MTV. The MTV demographic is young people between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, and kids can call in and ask to see things they particularly like again. And if they get enough calls, that's what happens. And these fly-on-the-wall Cribs were always being asked for, but ours more than anybody else's, it seemed. So then I called MTV and said, "Let's talk. I want to know what we can do together." I had a couple of lunches with the people who do programming on the West Coast, gave them a video of the September Films Ozzy Osbourne Uncut, and what I was basically suggesting was an extended version of that. And they bought it. Three shows.
Naturally, as nothing could work without our children's cooperation, they had been involved right from the start. And while Kelly and Jack couldn't wait, Aimee declined, which she had a perfect right to. I suggested she might like to take on a producer's role.
It took a long time to get going. Since doing the Cribs episode we had bought a new house; in the end the traffic on Beverly Drive had sent me insane. I wanted out. So we sold it before buying anywhere else. I bought the house on Doheny Road because it was the only one that came near to fitting our requirements and by then I was desperate. But it was like, love the location, love the road, hate the house.
The owner was some African potentate/king/president. But the price was good because he was having to get out quick. His taste in interior design and mine did not coincide, so I decided the only thing to do was to rip everything out and start again.
We gutted the place and reconfigured it. Downstairs we made two rooms--Ozzy's and my sitting rooms--from one. Upstairs it was the other way around: our bedroom used to be two rooms. By the time we finished, everything was different. The hallway was different, the staircase was different: I had it copied from a picture I found in a magazine. The doors were all changed. The hinges on the front door were taken from molds of Kelly's hands. The chimneys stayed in the same place, but I hated the mantels. Pillars? Imported. Beams? Imported. The wonderful old wooden floors we have now? They didn't exist. Mr. Potentate had had disgusting carpet. The wood of the floors is old (though not original to the house) but the shine has nothing to do with age, just layers and layers of marine varnish, repainted every three months. The pool was originally just outside the games room, a horrible bright-blue thing that dominated everything, and I wanted something that would blend into the landscape.
Everyone has nightmare builder stories, but this was the worst. We found one--highly recommended, as they always are--paid him a deposit and never saw him again. We found a second, he gutted the house and then, when it was down to a shell, disappeared with more of our money, and it was like, This place is cursed, let's just sell it.
But we didn't, because by then MTV was involved, so at least we could put their needs into the rebuild. There had to be a control room, permanent security. It had to be wired up for twenty-four fixed cameras in all the rooms except toilets and bathrooms. A long, long procedure, which took most of the summer, while Ozzy and I were on the road with Ozzfest. Shooting began in October 2001 and the first shows have us moving in, unpacking, getting our lives settled--and still decorating. The children were back in school, Ozzy was writing, I was going into the office, Melinda was there, the house staff were there, and it just had us living a life.
So after the third week, MTV said, "You know what? We're getting such classic stuff we're going to stay another couple of weeks. Let's make it six weeks." So they stayed six weeks. At that stage it was nothing more than a gut reaction; they hadn't even put together the first show.
And so life in the Osbourne household continued as usual. There's always a lot going on and it didn't really affect our day-to-day lives at all. You got used to the crew being there. It was a bit like being at school: there are all these other people around, but you're not really aware of them, you just get on with your work. Then the six weeks turned into six months.
The real work was being done by the editors, who had to look through hours and hours of footage every week and try and make some sense of it. It took six weeks to turn one show around. The first series was ten weeks, and that took a long, long time, and so it was six months before the first show was aired on March 5, 2002.
The following weekend, I took the kids to Venice Beach. It was just something we did as a family every so often--a day at the seaside, and this was a nice spring day in California. But this time Ozzy wasn't with us; he was away in Canada on his first solo tour since Ozzfest had taken over our lives. And on Sunday there are lots of little cafes, and everybody takes their dogs, and it's a bit like Covent Garden in London, with mime artists and people singing and Rollerblading and little stalls that sell hand-made things, clothes, jewelry, artisan stuff.
So we're on the beach, wandering along with Minnie and Maggie, our Japanese Chin dog, and all these people kept stopping to talk to us, and I'm like, Jeez, this is really weird. I mean, the show has only aired once. It was six months since the cameras had first started rolling, but that was the first inkling we had that things were never going to be the same again.
April 21, 2005, 3.00 p.m.
Doheny Road, Beverly Hills
My parents used to say we were "cosmopolitan." Our staff in Doheny is about as cosmopolitan as you can get. Saba is from Sudan, Dari who helps with the ironing is Russian, David the chef is from Essex, Tony is from Northumberland, Melinda is from Australia and Howard is from New Zealand. Howard is like our estate manager: he looks after the houses and the staff. And when our Labrador, Beau, was here he would take him to his home in Pacific Palisades every night and have him sleep there, then take him for a run every morning on the beach. Howard is young, athletic and reliable. Not qualities that Ozzy or I can lay claim to anymore.
"Howard, do you have Jack's number in Thailand?"
"Sure. Want me to give it to you?"
"Do you know what time it is there?"
"I can soon find out."
"Would you do that for me?"
"Sure."
Jack has been sober now for exactly two years. The fact that Jack, a kid then aged eighteen, could give it all up and stay clean for one whole year was what shamed Ozzy into trying just one more time. So I just want to tell him that I have remembered that it's his anniversary too. And to tell him that I love him. I miss him, but it's only a few days now before we see him in Thailand for his kick-boxing match.
18
Making It
We had barely gotten over the shock of the success of The Osbournes when two totally unexpected honors came Ozzy's way. The first was an invitation to the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on May 5, 2002. This event happens every year, and this was the eighty-eighth since it began. The President is the guest of honor, and the tables are all bought by newspapers and magazines that have White House correspondents, and each table invites a celebrity. Ozzy and I were invited by Greta Van Susteren. She is a lawyer-turned-commentator, and she covered the O. J. Simpson trial for CNN and did such an amazing job she joined them as their legal analyst. She then went to Fox news and is credited with turning the channel around. Her husband, John, is a lawyer in
Washington. We met when she came to the house to interview us on the surprise success of The Osbournes, and we just got along--she adored my ragdoll cats, so I sent a kitten as a gift--and basically she and her husband are an amazing couple who, luckily for Ozzy and me, have become friends.
Neither Ozzy nor I had ever been to the White House before, so this was a big deal for us. And for me it was another milestone: the first time in my life that I didn't dread thinking about what to wear; that I could go to an event this special dressed in something that wasn't an exercise in camouflage. I had a fabulously elegant dress made in navy blue silk with matching coat. It was very tight-waisted with a corset back and I wore diamonds borrowed from Van Cleef.
Although it was only two months since The Osbournes had first aired, when we walked down the red carpet the place erupted, the press surged forward and broke down the barriers, and we didn't understand what was going on. We knew from the ratings that the show was a hit, and not just in America, but it was aimed at young people and these people were even older than we were! The four of us were quickly removed by White House security, as we were causing a disturbance, and taken straight into the dining room, ahead of the President and bypassing metal detectors, and all the time we kept looking at each other with expressions that said, What The Fuck Is This?
So the evening began and President Bush came out and did his speech, thanking everyone present for turning up--"members of the press, movie stars, TV stars and Ozzy Osbourne." Ozzy was the only person he singled out. And then he started into how his mum loved Ozzy's music, and even named a few of the songs. At which point Ozzy stood up on his chair, and the President goes, "Get down, Ozzy. Ozzy, get down!"
All these people that run our lives and tell us what's going on in the world started coming up to us. Four-star generals, senators, editors of every influential newspaper in America were asking to have their pictures taken with Ozzy, saying, "Oh my son's a fan, or my whatever's a fan." People were even standing in line to get an autograph. We were just blown away. The whole evening was one of those magical once-in-a-lifetime moments.
After the dinner we went on to the party, and Glenn Close was there, and her arm was in a plaster cast. And after the hello, how-are-yous, what does Ozzy say?
"You must be on painkillers. Can I buy some off you? I don't mind paying."
Glenn, Greta, John and me, we all just cracked up, clutching each other in hysterics. He was trying to score drugs in the White House!
Ozzy had been in and out of rehabs and detox clinics over a dozen times since that first experience in Palm Springs, the year Kelly was born, and eighteen years later he was no better. If anything he was worse.
The previous year, we were in Dallas with Ozzfest. I was at the venue, doing my stuff, when I got a call from Tony back at the hotel to say Ozzy was in a bad way. Apparently he had called a doctor, spun him some bullshit, claiming he had a bad back, and this idiot had prescribed over the phone.
Tony always has the room next to Ozzy, and the first he knew about this was a knock on Ozzy's door. So he went into the corridor to find out what was happening, and was just in time to see the bellman handing Ozzy a paper bag, clearly from a pharmacy. The moment Ozzy saw Tony, he undid the top and threw the whole bottleful down his throat. Twenty-five Vicodin all in one go. "Give him coffee," I told Tony. "Do whatever it takes to keep him awake. Do not let him sleep. Whatever you do, do not let him sleep." I called his doctors in LA immediately.
"Did you see him do it?"
"No, but --"
"There's no way it could be twenty-five Vicodin. There's no way he could still be alive. You must have gotten it wrong."
But I hadn't gotten it wrong. I knew Ozzy, and I knew Tony. And Tony would call me every half an hour with another update. So I called another doctor who told me he was going to need one of those injections in his heart. "If not," he said, "you're going to lose him."
By this time Ozzy was talking to Tony. "He's very disoriented and drowsy, but he's still awake," Tony told me. I told Tony to get him down to the show. By then it was between six and seven o'clock, and Ozzy would go on at quarter to nine.
And it was like, was I his manager or was I his wife? Ozzy had a crowd of 20,000 young kids waiting to see him and Sabbath, who always closed the show. They'd been out there in the Dallas heat all day, standing and drinking and waiting for Ozzy.
I didn't know what to do, and I tried desperately to think it through. If I cancel, if we don't go on, there will be a riot. The last time Ozzy had been sick and couldn't make a show, I'd taken the decision to say nothing until the last minute, until just before he was due to go on, and the kids just wrecked everything. They destroyed the box office, they ripped up the seats, turned over cars--they utterly destroyed the place. It hadn't happened that many times with us but historically it had happened over and over again with other artists. You cannot keep a crowd in a facility for hours on end and then tell them they have to go home before the main attraction, because you know what's going to happen.
And Dallas in the summer is boiling hot, and Ozzy's crowd drinks a lot, and we're not talking Pepsi here. I knew they weren't going to take kindly to being told to go home now, because Ozzy's not going to come.
Where do you draw the line between being a wife and a manager? I was scared people were going to get hurt. What about kids who might be killed in a riot? Could I have that on my conscience? So do I let the show go on? Yet how could I let anyone see Ozzy like that?
When Tony and Ozzy arrived and I saw the state my husband was in, I was heartbroken. I was just like, What are you doing? This was insane behavior. I threw him into the shower in the trailer, got buckets of ice and poured them over him and let the cold shower run on him. He was curled up in the corner with his head in his hands, his hair plastered to his head. I was so angry, and panicked, and terrified. What do I do? Whichever thing I did, I couldn't win. If he didn't go on there would be a riot. And if he did go on he would be terrible.
And the children were there; they saw it all. Kelly and Aimee were crying and weeping and pleading with him, saying things like, "Please, Dad, please don't die." Because they're not stupid. By now they knew what he had done. And I was screaming and yelling at him. "You have to go onstage, you have a responsibility to the audience, to the band, to everybody."
By quarter to nine, he was standing and talking. And as the audience began clapping and chanting his name, he made his way from the trailer up the ramp to join Sabbath onstage, Tony by his side, and our production manager, and me. No one else in sight. And the crowd was on its feet cheering and chanting, but the moment they saw him there was a hush. It was like they had seen a ghost, a phantom walk up there on the stage, and they were in shock.
How many hundreds of times had I stood there at the side of the stage and felt my heart surge with pride and happiness? How many times? Watching this wonderful performer, who gave everything he had, who the moment he stepped out on the stage was on fire. How many times in the thirty years I had known him? I couldn't watch. It was pitiful. I just went back to the production suite to sit down. And I was numb. Exhausted, from the emotional turmoil, wrung out, finished. By the time I got there, the monitors showed the awful truth. Nobody was standing, the entire place was seated, which they never do when Ozzy is onstage. They were simply stunned. And then I saw what they were seeing. Ozzy's face, as high as a house on the big screens, was like a ghoul's, and the adrenaline pumped in again.
"Get the cameras off Ozzy," I yelled. "Just focus on everybody else. Don't put Ozzy on the big screens, don't put Ozzy on the screens." I didn't want the kids to see him fifty-foot-high in that state.
He could barely sing; the best you could say was he mumbled. He couldn't clap his hands--or rather he went to clap them, but they missed. He had to hold on to the microphone stand simply to keep upright.
It was a disaster. I think they managed forty-five minutes and then Tony Iommi walked off. And I don't blame him. I thought it was pretty amazing t
hat he stayed that long. And Ozzy staggered off, and he said, "I'll never do that again." And he never has. But I still don't know whether I did the right thing in letting him go on, and it continues to haunt me.
With drugs as powerful as that, and with that dose, any normal person would have been dead: their organs would have packed up. It was only that he had built up such a high level of resistance over the years to massive amounts of drugs and alcohol that he survived.
The next extraordinary thing that happened in 2002 was being asked to perform at the Queen's Golden Jubilee. It was such an honor to be a part of history, because it won't be forgotten, and each generation of kids at school will learn what happened when Elizabeth II reached the fiftieth year of her reign. Being part of the history of your country was so moving for both of us.
What was even more extraordinary for me was that I would be there in my own right. I had been asked by VH1, MTV's grown-up sister channel, to host their coverage of the jubilee concert. It would be the first time I had ever done anything on camera, but nothing fazed me because I had seen it so many times from the other side. Casey Paterson, the producer of the show, was so supportive and nurturing, and she said I was a natural and couldn't wait to work with me again.
Because of The Osbournes, everything was so easy. When you're the new biggest thing, everyone wants to be a part of you, and also I was on home territory. Being instantly recognizable gave me access to people I didn't know, like Bryan Adams, Baby Spice, Shirley Bassey, French and Saunders, Lenny Henry and Ruby Wax, and there were old friends as well, Brian May, Paul McCartney, and Richard Branson, who saved our bacon in 1982.
Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography Page 28