What was fabulous about working with a live audience was that we built up a library of inside jokes. On one of the first shows there was a woman who was very large, and I could empathize with her, having been like that myself, so I asked about sex and how she coped with that.
"Gurrrl," she said in a rolling Southern drawl. "I jus' take it from the side." And I cracked up, and the audience cracked up, and from then on, whenever I got bored with these celebrities--and I often got bored--I would say, "I jus' take it from the side." And, of course, the audience would be killing themselves with laughter while the poor celebrity wouldn't have a clue.
The best people were the ones who were prepared not to take themselves seriously. I had an in-bed-with-Sharon slot that I stole from The Big Breakfast on Channel 4, and Dame Edna Everage joined me in it in her ballgown. She was fabulous. And how bad a job could it be to lie in bed and cuddle Alec Baldwin in his pajamas?
But it meant I hardly spent any time with my family. Every morning I was leaving my house overrun with TV people to go to another version of my house overrun with TV people, and the few times I was at home, they were always on the phone saying, "Call all your friends, get all your friends in." And I said no.
But doing a five-day-a-week show is a slog for everybody involved. There is only a finite number of celebrities available, and that's why these shows bump things up with cooking sections and nonsense, because they need fillers. You want to ask me what to do for a fucking Superbowl party? Get a caterer. They made me interview this taxi driver dressed as Elvis. It would have been all right for two minutes, but no, they wanted to give him a whole fucking segment. So then he was dancing like Elvis and they wanted me to do an Elvis impersonation. I don't do Elvis impersonations. It was all so childish and such fluff, and there'd be this voice inside me saying: Why is a fifty-year-old woman doing this shit?
I wanted to do stuff on kids who get pregnant and then dump their babies, social issues that at the beginning they had told me I could do. Nobody cares that there are all these kids abandoning their newborn babies in dumpsters, and it goes on all the time. In America there's a format that works in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. And they follow it. If it's experimental TV you want, that's in Europe. Their answer was always the same: "The advertisers don't like it."
There were over a hundred different affiliates buying this show. And the comments would come back: we need this, we need that, and every one would be different. So you get an affiliate in Greensboro, North Carolina, saying they want more jokes, but New York wants more serious stuff, San Francisco wants more music, and Cincinnati wants more sports. Every station wants the show molded to it, but you cannot be all to everyone. You have to stick to your guns: "This is what I'm about and take it or leave it."
And I'm not going to spin plates, and I'm not going to do belly dancing, and I'm not going to do fake horse-riding. I have my own form of humor, which you would think was why they wanted me in the first place.
And as for the swearing and censoring, I had to watch it all the time because they don't like to bleep on daytime TV. So I would be introducing someone and I'd get the name wrong, so I'd go, "Fuck, cunt, shit, bollocks," which, of course, was why they would never let me go out live.
On the morning of December 8, 2003, I was dozing in my bed at Doheny. Aimee and I were doing a photo shoot for Vogue at midday, and any minute the florists would be arriving to make the house look delightful, so this was a brief moment of peace before the engine cranked into life, because the volume of people who come through the house on any given day is unbelievable. So I was lying there, thinking about Christmas at Welders, and about going to Ireland for my stepson Louis's wedding early in the New Year and what I was going to wear. We had banked up a few shows, and I would have two whole weeks off. Ozzy was already over in England with a small MTV crew doing promo with Kelly for "Changes," a duet they had done, a cover of one of Sabbath's early hits.
At seven o'clock, the phone rang. It was Tony. Ozzy had had an accident on the ATV, he said, and they were on their way to Wexham Park hospital now.
"I think he might have broken some ribs."
Ozzy has a selection of bikes at Welders, dirt bikes and four-wheelers, and he was forever falling off. It had happened at least three times before, so I wasn't particularly concerned. I said for Tony to call me as soon as they got to the hospital and we could get a doctor on the phone.
An hour later the phone rang and Tony put the doctor on. I was with Jack; we'd just been laughing about how Ozzy was always crashing around, and we were like, Whatever will your father do next!
They were preparing Ozzy for surgery, the doctor said. And I'm like, Surgery? For what?
And then he ran down the list of injuries: cracked vertebrae in his neck; eight broken ribs, all at the back; collarbone totally shattered; and he had punctured a main artery which was stopping the blood supply to his left arm; a bruised heart; blood on his lung; and he was in a coma. The most serious injury was his arm, the doctor explained. They had seventy-two hours to get the blood back, otherwise they would have to amputate.
I canceled everything. There was one seat left on the next flight to London. I didn't tell Jack or Aimee the full extent of their father's injuries. I didn't want to frighten them, and they had their own commitments. The entire time I was in the air I knew Ozzy was in the operating room. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. I just stared out of the window into that deep, unending blue that, in the past, I had always found so full of hope.
The first thing that happened was that two policemen boarded the plane at Heathrow and walked me off. And then we emerged into this sea of film crews and photographers. Roger Moore and his wife were on the flight, so I assumed they were for them. So did they, until they were mowed down in the rush and the cries of "Sharon! This way! How is he?"
I knew less than they did. I'd heard nothing since I had boarded the plane. The headlines in the papers were enough: Ozzy Osbourne In Coma. I felt like I was sleepwalking. The police took me through immigration, through the airport to a car where Kelly was already waiting. They had pulled her out of the recording studio. She was like a little lost girl, vulnerable and frightened, all wrapped up in scarf and gloves and little hat, because it was freezing cold. We didn't talk much, we just hugged.
It took us half an hour to get to Wexham Park Hospital outside Slough. The police gave us an escort all the way there, and they couldn't have done more--it was as if they were genuinely concerned for my husband. There were police everywhere because photographers had tried to get into the intensive care unit. They took me in the back way.
Tony and Bill Greer, Ozzy's tour manager, were waiting. Somehow with the shock and the panic, I had imagined that Bobby would be waiting for me. My darling Bobby. He had been with us through every emergency, from Randy and Rachel to my cancer. It seemed impossible that he wasn't there. But he wasn't. Dear Bobby had finally lost his battle with cancer. He died on the road, as he wanted to. We'd said, Why don't you take a job in the office? but he just wouldn't hear of it.
"Now, please, Sharon," Tony said, "don't panic when you see him, because it looks worse than it is." Tony stayed with Kelly in one of the doctors' rooms the hospital had given us to sit in, while I went in on my own.
There were about thirteen people in the trauma unit. They were all on respirators or had tracheotomies, and they were all out. Nobody was moving. Just bodies attached to wires, and machines bleeping and buzzing. One of these was my husband.
They gave me a chair next to Ozzy, and I looked at him. He was on a respirator, unable to breathe on his own. There were tubes everywhere, coming out of him, going into him. The doctor explained how they had taken a vein from his right arm and put it into the left arm to replace the damaged artery. All they could do now was wait and hope that it would "take." His lungs were being drained. As for his heart, that would just take time; the same with his ribs. They could only determine what damage had been done to his neck, they said,
"when he was up and walking." When. If.
His left eye and that whole side of his face were black. There was still dried blood and dirt in his hair where he had fallen, big lumps of dirt, and the pillow was all covered with dirt and dried blood, and there was congealed blood at the corner of his mouth, and his nose was all swollen down one side. As for his arm, there was no pulse. It was like a dead thing. When I took his hand it was completely cold.
I couldn't cry. I just took my coat off and curled up on the chair. And from time to time I would try to clean him up, pick out the dirt from his hair. I felt utterly empty. I'd fall asleep, then wake up to the same rhythms, the silent flashing lights, the beeps, the hum. They offered me a bed, offered me food, but I said no to everything. I still didn't cry. I stayed there all that day and the following night and went back to Welders at about six the next morning. I didn't go beyond the kitchen. It was days before I went upstairs and unpacked. I just stayed in the corner of the sofa in the kitchen by the phone, and would sleep, wake up, sleep, wake up and call Ozzy's security for any updates. There were no updates. All I kept thinking about was the seventy-two hours for Ozzy's arm. Every so often Tony would drive me to the hospital--it was barely twenty minutes from the house--and there were always photographers everywhere. The response of the public was extraordinary. There were crates of letters and cards and gifts sent to the hospital, chocolates and rosaries and prayers on little cards and get-well flowers. And Ozzy and Kelly's record went to No. 1.
As for the staff, I have never seen such dedication. Not just to Ozzy, but to everyone in the trauma unit. It was so humbling seeing everybody else's journeys as well as my husband's. A lady next to Ozzy died. She had only gone in with flu, but it had turned to pneumonia, and every day you would see the same family members come in and there would be little exchanges. How's it going? How are you coping? And then you'd see them sob, and it would get worse and worse and there would be more family members, and then the next time you got back the priest would be there. It was heartbreaking to watch.
Ozzy's arm took, thank goodness. The operation had been a success, though they still didn't know about his neck because he was unconscious. The next worry was the respirator. It was connected to his lungs by a tube down his throat and, because of the danger of infection, could only stay in for a maximum of ten days. After that they would have to do a tracheotomy. After eight days they would try to see if he could breathe on his own. And I was desperate for him not to have the tracheotomy because of the damage it would do to his vocal cords. I wanted my husband to live, but I wanted him to be Ozzy.
April 21, 2005, 5:00 p.m.
Doheny Road: my bedroom
I'm packing for Thailand. Out goes anything manmade, in comes cotton in light colors. Will it be cool in the evening?
A knock on the door. "Who is it?"
"Robert."
"Come in, Rob, don't just stand there!" Robert Marcato is a handsome young man of nearly twenty-one. "Everything all right with the apartment?"
He nods.
"And still all right with school?"
"Yeah."
"What's the project?"
"Just editing a film I'm doing."
Robert is an old school-friend of the kids. When I got cancer we heard that Robert's mother had been battling with colon cancer for three years. She had been in the last stages when she found out, but she didn't have the money and she didn't have the insurance, and she was dying. Ozzy and I would go over and visit her, and Ozzy held her in his arms and he swore that we would always take care of Robert, and that she didn't have to worry about her boy.
So after his mum passed away, Robert moved in here for a while. He's a normal teenager, not an addict or an alcoholic, so he would drink and want to party, and it was just when Jack had come out of rehab and we couldn't have that going on. We asked Rob to stop drinking and doing his dope, but he wanted his friends, he wanted a normal teenage life. So we found him an apartment, which we pay for, and we pay for him to go to school, and he's two years into a four-year course. He's doing well, and hopefully he will come out and pursue his dreams and be fine.
This year colon cancer has overtaken breast cancer as the biggest cancer killer in America. But still nobody talks about it because it's not romantic, and people don't like to go on TV and say, well, actually yes, I had a huge tumor up my arse. Yet it's something that affects men and women and all ethnic groups, and it is one of the cancers that, if it's found in time, you can survive. But it is a killer.
When I was being treated in the hospital I had a huge support group. For every visit I would have Bobby and Melinda at my side. But when I would leave in my chauffeur-driven car, I would see these other ladies sitting on a bench, waiting for a bus. And you knew that when they went home there would be no one there to help them. And I'm thinking, How do these people cope at home when they're feeling so bad? Because the chemo really knocks you on your arse. And if you've got a baby, how can you possibly take care of your baby? How can you work? If you don't work you can't pay your rent, so you get thrown out. That was basically what had happened to Robert's mum. She couldn't pay her rent, she wasn't working, she didn't have insurance, so there she was getting thrown out of her apartment, and then she died, aged thirty-four. And so I set up my charity. Every year Elton and I do a joint party, and we split the proceeds, with half going to his AIDS charity, and half to mine. And at each of Ozzy's shows, 50 cents of every ticket sold goes to the hospital. I can't help every person out there, or every Robert, much as I would like to. But I now raise enough money each year for a program in Los Angeles where there's a car to pick up people who don't have transportation to and from treatment, or if they need somebody to do their shopping, or if they need somebody to babysit, or if they need somebody to give them hydration at home. Because you get very dehydrated, and if you have to come back to the hospital to get rehydrated it wipes you out. So now there are a few people who can have the luxury of that at home, instead of getting on a bus. It's not offering a cure or anything. It's a program to do little things that help make life more bearable.
20
The Knock on the Door
Only gradually did I piece together what had happened that morning. Ozzy had gone out with MTV on his four-wheeler to show them some of our land, and he'd been riding over some rough grass when he just went over. There was a dip in the field but it was covered in leaves. The crew had been filming at the time, but as soon as it happened, the guys threw their cameras on the ground and ran to help. He fell off the bike, he landed on his face, and then the bike bounced off his back. It weighed 650 pounds. Ozzy was in such a state of shock that he got up and was staggering around the field. They tried to stop him, but he wouldn't, and kept saying, "Take me home, take me home." So the security guard heaved him up on his shoulders, then drove with him back to the house on another bike. He'd had to revive Ozzy twice; he was in a terrible state. But as much as he saved Ozzy's life, moving somebody after an injury like that is the worst thing you could do, and he could have broken his spine. It was adrenaline that was making Ozzy stand up, brought on by the shock.
The children were now all at Welders; with the scare stuff in the press, Jack and Aimee couldn't cope in LA on their own, so their projects were put on hold. Ozzy's family came down to visit from Birmingham, and Louis came over from Ireland. The Newmans came, and Maryshe and her husband came straight from Yugoslavia after cutting short their vacation. Zakk flew in from California, so did Mark Hudson, Ozzy's writing partner, and our old friends Marsha and Peter Velasek came in from New York. And of course Tony would sit and talk to him for hours, like we all did, about the past, reminding him of things, trying to bring him back to consciousness. The staff shaved and washed him every day, but they couldn't wash his hair because of the neck, and so I continued to pick bits of blood and dirt out, and I would take a warm cloth and try to tidy him up with the end of it while I was stroking him and talking to him. Sometimes his eyes would open, and then they would put drop
s in and tape them over to close them again, to stop them from drying up because he wasn't blinking.
Although there were always people around to call on, I was overwhelmed with a terrible feeling of emptiness. I have never felt so alone in my entire life. It was like, If my husband doesn't make it, this is my life without him.
On the eighth day they took him off the ventilator, but his breathing was very shallow. He wasn't getting enough oxygen in his blood, they said. So I sat there beside him, telling him, "You've got to breathe, Ozzy." Sometimes I must have sounded like a fucking midwife. "Nice deep breaths, Ozzy. Breathe, just breathe." While all the time he kept trying to pull the tubes out with his right arm, and the alarm was going off every time he pulled one free.
I was desperate that they shouldn't cut into his throat. Because Bobby had had a tracheotomy, and I saw what he went through. But thank God he managed to get enough oxygen into his blood so it wasn't necessary.
Gradually things seemed to improve: the tape was now off his eyes and they had removed some of the tubes. Everything was going fine, they said. But when you're in a trauma unit, it can all turn within a second. He was groaning a lot, trying to pull out the tubes in his nose, which is how you're fed.
By the tenth day he was beginning to come around and saying the odd word--but you could see he had no idea where he was, and he was moaning because, for the first time, he was conscious of the pain.
On the eleventh day when I arrived I was greeted by a beaming nurse.
"We've got a surprise for you, Mrs. Osbourne," she said.
He was sitting up and the number of tubes going in and out of him had been halved. And I went over to kiss him. I had kissed him so often when he was lying unconscious, and I ached to see that lovely smile and his eyes light up.
He turned away. It wasn't that he didn't recognize me. He obviously recognized me, but he seemed to be angry with me, just from the look in his eyes. It was the weirdest thing and, in spite of myself, I felt very hurt.
Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography Page 31