Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne; Penelope Dening

  So when early in 2005 a production company in London approached me, it was as if fate was giving me a second chance. I had survived Simon Cowell and was ready for another challenge. Another experience. Why stand still? And when Aimee agreed to do it with me, mother and daughter onstage together, it seemed like destiny.

  Since the moment she decided not to be involved with The Osbournes--perfectly understandable when you're eighteen and would be embarrassed by your family even if they were entirely normal--there's been an inevitable separation. Not an estrangement, but on a practical level our lives were just so different. I mean, by the time we were six months into the show she wasn't even living at home. So the fact that she and I would be spending six weeks working together was something very precious indeed.

  However, two months ago, in February, Aimee discovered two lumps in her breast. When I heard the news I literally could not speak. It was as if every cell in my body were closing down. She's twenty-one. I wanted to scream, to wail, to howl. To tear up every plant in the garden that dared go on living. But how could I do that to Ozzy after all he had been through with me? In fact, I had to do all I could to calm him down. Aimee, of course, was as dignified as she always is.

  Lumps at her age, I told him, are usually benign, and the chances of them being cancerous were very remote. But it was as if I had been taken over by somebody else's voice. Inside I was fucking terrified. The idea that cancer only hits people of forty-plus is a crock of shit. It's like an epidemic out there. And more and more young people are coming down with it. While I accept that I'm only a layman, because of the work I do with the hospital now, I'm talking to patients all the time. One that I see regularly is a young woman whose lump in her breast turned out to be malignant. It was removed. Then she developed a lump in the back of her neck, and then her spine. And then she called me the other day to tell me it's now in her bones. She's twenty-four.

  In Aimee's case an ultrasound was done immediately, but apparently it's difficult to make a firm diagnosis at her young age, so they decided to remove her lumps anyway. Thank God they turned out to be benign. We didn't celebrate. How can you celebrate something like that? It would be like tempting fate. The best thing, the only thing, was to try and forget it, like a bad dream, and get on with our lives.

  This wasn't as difficult as it sounds, because the next week or so was insane. The Oscars were in town and I'd been asked to front them for Sky Television, the UK satellite channel. Then, only four days later, there were the Australian MTV Awards in Sydney that we were hosting as a family. Kelly was going to be performing there with her band, so there were rehearsals, accommodations and the rest of it to arrange. At the same time she was busy doing the video for her first single from her new album. It's unbelievable that you have three and a half or four minutes of a song and it takes two days of constant filming and it's like they're shooting War and Peace. And if that wasn't enough, the very last episode of The Osbournes would soon be screening and a final "special" had been planned with Dr. Phil, the family counseling guru discovered by Oprah. Then there was the tenth Ozzfest to organize; this year will be the twelfth consecutive summer we have been on the road. Merchandising to agree on, other bands to firm up (we only have twenty-one . . . ), schedules to organize, stage design to finalize. Of course, I've got a whole team of people doing the day-to-day, but ultimately all decisions are made by me and it's been that way for the last thirty years.

  About a week into the mayhem came the call from the clinic. Although, as we already knew, Aimee's tumors were clear of cancer, the cells around them were "a little unusual," they said. She would need radiation, but first she needed to build up her strength, as her blood count was too low to start treatment immediately. Naturally I panicked. To me radiation is as terrifying as chemo. But it was just a precaution, they repeated. Like removing the lumps. Just a precaution.

  We talked about canceling The Vagina Monologues. But Aimee saw the show for what it was. A real opportunity. A showcase for her. It might be years before a chance to work on something serious came along again. This was already my second chance. And she felt fine, she said. She'd been overworking, writing and recording her own album, staying up late and all the rest of the shit, but now she was clear and planning to spend a month in Australia after the MTV Awards, which would give her a real rest.

  Then, last night, just as Ozzy and I were about to leave to record an appearance on Michael Parkinson's talk show--to promote Ozzy's new boxed set and The Vagina Monologues--there was a call from Irina. Aimee needed to get herself to a doctor, she said. "This child is so tired that I cannot work with her, and if nothing is done, she's never going to make the show."

  I know Aimee's tired, but I still think it's just the combination of jet lag--flying from Australia to England really takes it out of you--and first-night nerves. Aimee's like Ozzy: a fucking nightmare for anyone around him before he goes onstage, but once he smells the audience, he's on fire.

  I called our doctor in Harley Street and got Aimee an immediate appointment. When she got out and called us, we were already on the set with Michael, but we spoke as soon as I got back to the dressing room. The doctor had taken some blood tests, she said. He'd get the results to her as soon as possible. She didn't seem that worried, and we talked about Stephen Fry, who'd been on with us.

  I went to look in on her just now on my way downstairs. Back in her old bedroom in the attic under the sloping roof. Fast asleep.

  It was Ozzy who found the fax, on his way down to find me. Wandering around.

  Aimee is seriously ill. Her doctor says it's amazing that she'd been able to do anything at all. As for the radiation related to the breast tissue, there is no way anyone will touch her in the state she's in. We should contact her oncologist immediately and also begin the process of building up her immune system. She just needs complete bed rest of at least six weeks combined with high doses of selected vitamins via a drip.

  We were in the kitchen. Aimee was crying and finding it hard to breathe, her breath coming in gasps, her inhaler in her hand. Ozzy was sitting on the sofa beside her, holding his head in his hands. The fire was roaring, spitting and hissing. I couldn't believe that I hadn't seen it coming. And suddenly I couldn't cope with it anymore.

  "Don't worry, baby," I said, cradling her head on my shoulder. "We'll get you back to California to the doctors who know you."

  I didn't think about the consequences. All I knew was that this was the right thing to do. Nothing else mattered. With Kelly and Jack, I had all too often put work first. Not that I realized it at the time. My problem, they now say, is that I didn't know how to say no. It all came out when Ozzy and I went to the family sessions at rehab. I had been there so many times before with Ozzy. But seeing your own children like that, so distressed, so humiliated, so desperate, is beyond any pain I have ever known.

  I knew that, whatever they said, it would be hard to hear, and I prepared myself for the worst. And, to give them their due, they didn't milk the situation. They just told it like it was: their father was a drunk and their mother wasn't there for them.

  It was unbearable. I didn't cry. They would only have been tears for me. Selfish tears asking what had I done to deserve this when I needed all my strength for them. And I swore then I would never let that happen again. Never. This time I was saying no.

  I put Aimee to bed and she fell asleep almost instantly although it was barely nine. We decided that Saba, our housekeeper from LA who had come over to England to be our dresser on the show, would take her back to California. Ozzy and I would fly back as soon as I'd sorted everything out on this end. As for The Vagina Monologues, we had had only three days' rehearsal and we hadn't even met the other members of the cast. There were plenty of proper actresses out there who had done it before, professional enough to step in on short notice. I was sure everybody would understand.

  But I was wrong. No sooner was it on the news that Sharon Osbourne and her daughter had pulled out than rumors started circula
ting on the Internet. Another Osbourne kid who'd fallen victim to drugs. So that was why we made the decision to go public. Originally, we had just said "medical reasons," as I hadn't wanted to make the details of Aimee's health general knowledge--it was nobody's fucking business, and I didn't have the right. But in the end Aimee made the decision for me.

  In later days people would ask me why I needed to go back with her. Why couldn't I have stayed in London and fulfilled my commitment? I have only one commitment, I told them, and that's to my children.

  In March 2005 we were hosting the Australian MTV Awards in Sydney, and a TV executive had invited us to his home to have dinner one evening.

  So we get there and the house is lovely, and it's a lovely spread and lovely people, and I'm beside the hostess, and she's laid out this beautiful supper for us. And then she turns to me and says, "You're a Jew, aren't you?"

  I was completely dumbstruck. To me, it was like saying, "So you like a bit of dick up the arse, don't you?" It's that extreme. It's like saying, "Do you like to give head, then?" You would never, ever ask anybody that question. And I'd just met this woman and I'd just been saying to her, "Nice shrimp," and then she goes, "You're a Jew, aren't you?"

  And I said, "Yes, I am."

  And when I went away I thought, Why did I say "Yes, I am" when I'm not? Technically in Judaism to be a Jew you have to be born of a Jewish mother. My mother was an Irish Catholic. But I was so taken aback by what she said, and I found it so offensive, it was like, "Yes, I fucking am, and what are you going to do about it?" If she had said, "So you're black?" I'd have said, "Yes, I fucking am, and proud of it."

  1

  Brixton

  Memory is a strange thing, and since starting this book I have discovered that people's memories of the same event can be very, very different. What follows, therefore, is only my memory of what happened in my life. I cannot say this is how it happened. I can only say this is how it seemed to me at the time.

  My earliest memory is of sitting on a wooden chair, watching some girls going through their dance routines in fishnet tights and silver shoes. I can't have been much more than two, but far from this being unusual, it was everyday life for me.

  The church hall where my father would always do these rehearsals is no longer there, though the church still is, and the house where we lived--68 Angell Road--has become one of a row of townhouse-style public-housing apartments.

  The area has changed too. There's an edge of danger to it now, which wasn't the case back then. In the fifties and early sixties, Brixton, south of the Thames, was where all the vaudeville artists lived, comedians, singers, ventriloquists, acrobats. Entertainers. Pre-TV, vaudeville was the only entertainment there was for ordinary people, and with the Brixton Empress and the Camberwell Palace being less than a mile away, Brixton was the hub. Across the street from us were the fire-eater and a juggler. A dog act, a man called Reg, lived in a trailer in a bombsite behind our road and I used to play with his little girl.

  Our house was large and old, with six steps leading up from the pavement and pillars on either side. At one time it must have been quite grand, but by the fifties the plaster was peeling off, and once you got inside everywhere was dingy and drafty and damp.

  Before I was born, in 1952, my mother ran it as a theatrical digs, a boardinghouse for artists who needed a place to stay when they were working in town. And that was how she met my father. He took a room for the week in 1950, and six weeks later they were married.

  Looking back, it's hard to see what they saw in each other--she didn't own the house, it was rented, and belonged to a chart-topping honky-tonk piano player named Winifred Atwell. And although my mother was obviously nice to look at--at least my father must have thought so--she was ten years older than him and divorced with two children. Her name was Hope Shaw (Mr. Shaw had been a bandleader and had fucked off to Canada with somebody else) but she was always called Paddy because of her Irish background, though my father would often call her Paddler because he thought it sounded more Jewish.

  Maybe my father saw her as being a bit bohemian, because he himself had come from this very strict Jewish background, very frum as they say in Yiddish, while my mother was the polar opposite: an Irish Catholic and a former dancer.

  My father's family were Russian Jews who had arrived in Manchester (in the north of England) around the time of the First World War. He was born Harry Levy, but changed it to Don Arden when he decided to make a career in show business. With such an obviously Jewish name he'd get nowhere, he said, and he'd had his fill of anti-Semitism in the army during the war. I don't know where he got it from--perhaps from Elizabeth Arden, the makeup line--but it did what he wanted. It's a name that says nothing about who you are or where you come from. A blank canvas.

  My father was a singer, and although popular with audiences he was always in trouble with management. Things came to a head one night when he had a fight with a stage manager who had called him a Jewboy. It ended with them both rolling around the stage kicking the shit out of each other and the other guy falling into the orchestra pit. Not only was he told to pack his things and get out, Don Arden was banned from performing in any venue owned by Moss Empires for two years, and as these people had a virtual monopoly in vaudeville theaters, this was like a death sentence for his career. (They owned fifty of them, so artists would be under permanent contract, moving around the country playing one town a week.)

  In order to make enough money to survive, he began packaging whole shows, which he'd then tour around independent theaters where his name still held good. He continued to perform, topping the bill with his own act--not only singing but doing impressions of American stars like Bing Crosby and Al Jolson that people knew from films--but also emceeing the rest of the show: a comic, puppet act, dancers, whatever. He was like a one-man band. He did so well that when the ban was lifted he never went back to simply performing.

  My father didn't dare tell his family he was married until 1951, when my brother David was born. Even then, as he expected, his mother went insane and only finally agreed to meet my mother when I came along. Sally, as everybody called my grandmother, was herself divorced from my grandfather, so maybe he thought she'd be sympathetic--in fact I later found out that she'd been dumped in very similar circumstances to my mother--but she never really accepted having a shiksaas a daughter-in-law, and that went for my father's sister, my auntie Eileen, as well.

  I can't remember a time when there wasn't turmoil within the family: fights between his mother and my mother, between his sister and my mother. And then, back in Brixton, there was my half sister, Dixie: always some drama with her. And different sorts of problems with my half brother, Richard. In fact, my father detested both his stepchildren, who by the time I was born were fifteen and ten respectively. According to him, Richard was always a dimp and a schmuck and Dixie was always a tart. But I was very close to them when I was growing up. With both my parents involved in the business, they relied on Richard to babysit and Dixie to cook and make my clothes.

  The house on Angell Road was always overflowing with people. Not just us: my parents and me, David and Richard (Dixie had been sent away to school--my father got rid of her as soon as he could), but, to bring in extra money when it was needed, they continued to rent out rooms, mainly to other artists. In the basement next to the kitchen there was a permanent lodger, a young man named Nigel Heathhorn, who lived there until we moved. He had been orphaned during the war and put in the care of my mother by the bank that acted as his legal guardian. I never really knew what he did, but he used to spend money like water. My father had a record player he'd bought at Boots, and Nigel would buy all these classical records and stand there conducting them with a baton while admiring his reflection in the window. He even got hold of a proper film projector, 35mm, and would rent out movies from Wallace Heaton in Victoria and show them on the back wall of the yard, with a sheet pinned up for a screen, and everyone on the street would be hanging out of their wind
ows watching.

  Apart from Nigel, the only people who ever came into our house were artists or people connected with that world. The first room on the right when you came in was used as the office, and behind that was the sitting room, which opened onto the conservatory, and this was where friends and business associates were entertained. My mother's pride and glory was a bar that she bought at the Ideal Home Exhibition in Earl's Court, made out of wine barrels cut in half, which was stuck in the corner of every home they ever owned. There was a part you lifted up to go behind, and there was a corner shelf for the miniatures. And I can picture my mother there now, leaning on that bar, a gin in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  School was about half an hour's walk up Brixton Hill, but we usually took the bus from the end of our street. It was a preparatory school called Clermont, and the owner and only teacher was Miss Mayhew, a survivor of the Titanic. It was tiny, never more than thirty children, and we did our work in two rooms at the front. Our playground was the yard.

  I was five when I started. David, being eighteen months older than me, had gone the previous year. My mother took us for the first week, to show me how to take the bus, but then we were on our own, rain or shine, sometimes with a packed lunch, usually not. My mother was never an early morning person. I'd go to my parents' bedroom to ask for a shilling for my lunch and she and my father would both be still sleeping and it was like: "For fuck's sake, Sharon, can't you see your mum's sleeping?"