Just like before, there were two weeks when he wasn't allowed to phone, though I did get occasional calls from his counselor, just checking in. They needed time to assess his progress to see what the next step of his treatment would be, they said, before we could start talking dates for the family therapy week. So I asked if I could just come visit. And they agreed.
I got a car to pick me up from the Minneapolis airport as I could never have found my way otherwise. It was snow everywhere. When I arrived at the facility I was told that I was fifteen minutes early, and that I would have to wait. When finally I got to see Ozzy, he looked desperate. Like a prisoner. And the moment we were alone he just clung to me. "You've got to get me out of here. Please don't make me stay." The counselor had a very different take. Ozzy needed long-term treatment, he said. A minimum of six months. Six months? Although I knew he was probably right, I felt my mouth go dry and panic begin to rise. I mean, six months without my crazy husband? On any level, I just didn't think I could do it. So I said that my husband and I needed to talk before we could make a decision.
Then Ozzy and I had a talk. It wasn't the six-to-a-room he couldn't take, it was the prospect of facing the "hot seat" in ten days' time, where you sit in front of your peer group and they tell you what they think of you. And he was fucking terrified. His people-pleasing technique hadn't worked here. I went back to the counselor and said we would have to think about it, but that I had to go home. I was getting the next plane back.
The next time we were allowed to talk--a week later--he was begging me: "I have to leave. I can't do the long term. I can't, I can't."
"Ozzy, it's your decision. If you stay clean, it won't be a problem." But in my inner heart I knew that he wouldn't. Pete Mertons went to get him, and he was sober for a while. Perhaps six weeks.
That summer of 1986 was the first time we rented a house at Malibu, and we did that for the next few years. We anchored ourselves on the coast of California for the summer months. It was good for Ozzy--he could come back and spend time with the children--it was good for them, because they got to see their daddy and yet had weeks and weeks at the seaside. In previous years we had taken them on the road in a specially converted tour bus. Ozzy loved it: he would take them onstage with him at every opportunity, but it was far from ideal. They would have to spend most of the day in his dressing-room trailer as backstage is a minefield for little people, cables everywhere, heavy equipment being lugged around, and noise. They never complained. Like circus children, they had grown up with it; it was all they knew.
Subpoenas were a continuing feature of our daily lives. One time Ozzy was performing at Irvine Meadow, between LA and San Diego, and a man tried to serve papers on me backstage. Not my father this time, but a sound and light company that said we owed them money from the tour and I said we didn't. So Ozzy is onstage doing his encore, "Paranoid." Slash from Guns N' Roses joins him and I see this guy, but he's got all the laminated VIP backstage passes and so I think he must be with one of the other musicians from the band, because he was built like a bodyguard. And I am more onstage than off, listening to Ozzy, when this guy comes up and he taps me with a rolled-up bunch of papers on my upper breast and says, "You've just been served'--because as soon as the subpoena touches your body, technically you've been served. So I just yelled for our tour manager, Bobby Thomson.
"Bobby! Bobby! Stop that man," and Bobby grabbed him and held him, and I took off one of my beautiful Maud Frizon shoes, and holding the foot part, hammered him on the head with the heel. "How dare you, you bastard, you motherfucking piece of shit!" I screamed, jumping up and down to reach him. "How fucking dare you. Never, ever do that again." Because the way I look at it, it's my home. If anyone comes on your tour bus, in your dressing room, in your venue, in your house, it's an invasion. If you're in a restaurant, that's not. And the way he touched me was unforgivable. So the next day the police called and said that this man had made a charge of assault and battery. So I told them what had happened and how he had touched me inappropriately, and how my friend Gloria had witnessed it all, which she had.
But the guy didn't give up. A day or so later, I was sitting on the deck, looking out from the beach house onto the ocean, and I see this man, and he's on a pristine beach with private access, dressed in a supboena-server's outfit, and I recognized him immediately.
Autumn 1986 was the last time Ozzy was unfaithful to me. I had flown across to spend three days with him at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood to check on how the recording was going. I was commuting to LA nearly every week. So I was packing to leave again, to go to the airport, when I did my usual check around the bedroom, and there was something under the bed. A stocking. One black stocking. So I asked him how he thought it came to be there.
"It's probably been there for fucking ages."
"No, it hasn't," I said, "because I was here last week. And I checked and there was nothing."
"Well, it's nothing to do with me."
"So the maid was just cleaning the room and decided to remove one of her stockings and throw it under the bed, is that it?"
"I don't know."
Finally he admitted he'd gone with some old tart he'd picked up at the bar.
"Well, I think you better have an AIDS test, don't you?"
AIDS had just begun to impinge on the world in a big way but I didn't really expect it would come up positive because it was still very much associated with the gay community, and one thing Ozzy has never been is gay. But I wanted to give him a shock. And my God, it certainly did that: Ozzy was terrified of AIDS. Nor was the test something you got done while-you-wait. It required a blood sample, and so we went to a doctor who said we would get the result in a week. There was a lot of slapping and hair-pulling going on that week. And then came the results. We went to get them together. Positive. So now I would have to be tested too. Ozzy was mortified, and he completely broke down.
"Right," I said to the doctor. "Take some blood from me, but also take three more vials from Ozzy, and I want you to send them off to three different labs and under three different names." Because I knew from my gay friends that in those days the test was so unsophisticated and delicate that the vial only had to be shaken and you could get the wrong result. So that was another week we had to wait. All the results came back negative. But every month after that for two years Ozzy had the test done again because he was so terrified. And that was the last time he was unfaithful, ever. It put the fear of God into him and he never wants to relive it.
I never found out who it was. And, anyway, it wouldn't have meant one thing or another. It wasn't anyone of any consequence. I mean, it wasn't Princess Diana or Princess Caroline of Monaco, and it wasn't Madonna or Blondie.
Just like Kelly says, I am always looking at houses, even if I'm perfectly happy where I am. But I had nothing to do with our next upheaval, the following year. I was in LA on business and Ozzy was in London. A brochure for a house had come in the mail and he'd opened it, he told me when he called for our nightly chat. "It's in the country and it's the most gorgeous house I have ever seen," he said. "I'm going to see it tomorrow."
The next day he called again. He'd seen it. He wanted it. Beel House had an unbelievable history. It had been owned by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and Dirk Bogarde. He sounded so happy and excited that I thought, why not?
"Go for it, Dadda. Do it!"
I had no idea what it looked like, but two weeks later it was his. There were deer in the yard, and it was a fabulous Georgian house in a quiet and incredibly beautiful corner of the Chilterns in Buckinghamshire, within easy reach of Heathrow and the M25 London beltway. And that was it. We sold Hampstead immediately, which in retrospect was a big mistake, especially since financially things were going so well for Ozzy that we didn't need the money. Only once we'd moved in did I realize there was a pub at the end of the fucking drive.
But in terms of the children, the move to Little Chalfont was the best thing we ever did. We found a lovely M
ontessori nursery school for Aimee and Kelly, and later they went to Gateway School in Great Missenden. And the friends they made back then are still their friends today.
As Ozzy's star rose, Don Arden's reached its nadir. Several years before, when he still had the Howard Hughes house, my father suspected that the LA accountant, Batyu Patel, had been stealing money from the company. Instead of investigating whether this was true, as usual he decided to sort it out himself. So he paid a visit to the house where Batyu was living, one of the two I'd had refurbished. And he attacked him, tied him up and punched him, and did God knows what else. I wasn't there. At the time I hadn't talked to my father or my brother for over three years, so didn't even get a reported version. My brother now says he had taken two heavies with him, but it was Don himself who did the dirty work. But when I remember how he dealt with Paulita, the thick gold necklace wound around his hand before punching her in the face, I can imagine he didn't go any easier on a man he decided had betrayed him on such a massive scale as he believed Batyu had.
So then he tells Batyu that he has twenty-four hours to find the money, leaves the phone lines open, but locks him in the house. Batyu isn't stupid, so he just breaks a window, climbs out and takes the first plane back to England. My father follows him to the house in Harrow where he lives with his parents. So Mr. and Mrs. Patel are sitting quietly in their kitchen, enjoying a chicken tikka with their son, when the door bursts open and two Italian-American hoods and a Russian-Manchester Jew walk in and start beating the shit out of their son. And they kidnapped him and took him to the house in Wimbledon and kept him there all night until the banks opened, when he was persuaded to make a large withdrawal, about PS50,000. So that was all right then.
Not satisfied with that, my father arranged for a random check of the accounts and claimed to have found a deficit of $600,000 and so--three months later--went back to the house in Harrow. This time Mr. or Mrs. Patel called the police. The charge was kidnapping and extortion and assault. My brother was arrested, sent to trial, found guilty and given a two-year prison sentence, though he didn't serve the full term. My father, in the meantime, had fucked off to California and went into hiding. He didn't give evidence at his son's trial; he didn't come over when his mother died. He sat shivahfor her over the phone. Two years later he was extradited, stood trial and, amazingly, got off.
In 1987 it was album time again--Ozzy was about to record No Rest for the Wicked--and the worst time in the world for his and my relationship. We would argue over producers, we would argue over studios, we would argue over everything. Ozzy is the sort of guy who believes in luck. If he's done an album in such-and-such a studio and it's been a success, then that's a lucky studio, or a lucky producer or a lucky engineer. His tendency has always been to stay safe, whereas I want to progress. We'd been doing a gig in Connecticut but had come into Manhattan to stay the night at the Parker Meridien. So it's late and so we decide to go to the Hard Rock on Fifty-seventh Street, and they show us to a table in the VIP section, which is on a mezzanine slightly away from the general public. And we sit down--six of us--me, Ozzy, Jakey Lee, Lynn, Tony and Larry, an ex-Vietnam security guy, and the food had just arrived. As usual I had a Coke. Ozzy, of course, had a Hard Rock Hurricane, having already been drinking all day.
I was talking about the need to bring in a new producer. And Ozzy wanted the same producer he'd had before. He wanted to play safe, and he thought this producer was lucky. And I get that, I honestly do get that. But Ozzy's way of dealing with it was not to sit down and have a debate or agree to disagree. It was, literally, let's have a fight. So suddenly Ozzy lunges at me across the table like a madman, grabs me around the neck and starts to strangle me. And it's such a shock that my chair tips back and I'm basically still sitting in the chair on the floor and Ozzy is now stretched flat across the table and his hands are around my neck. Then we're both down on the ground and other people are trying to get him off, but he's like a man possessed and it isn't until Larry drags him off that I can breathe again.
As we were away from the main restaurant, the in-house security didn't see what was happening. But Brian Johnson from AC/DC did, and he came over to check if I was OK. And it was the Rio plane thing all over again but with an extra lick of violence. Somehow when nobody else saw the violence I could cope, but in public it was humiliating and acutely embarrassing. Ozzy once wrote a song about Jekyll and Hyde--"Mr Jekyll Doesn't Hide"--and that was him. He would have these mad rages, and just minutes later he'd be wondering what he'd done. Tony took Ozzy back to the hotel, and I decided I would stay in Lynn's room that night. We must have been back an hour when there was this terrible hammering on her door, and I could hear Ozzy outside screaming to be let in.
Violence has always been a part of my life, and the idea that I might get hit didn't scare me. So I was like, "OK. Fine. Bring it on." And I opened the door. And he was still yelling and screaming, and Tony and Larry were both trying to stop him.
"What the fuck do you want me to do, Ozzy? What the --" I never got to finish my sentence before Ozzy threw a punch and we started to fistfight, then he got me by the arm and flung me against the door, and my head ricocheted off the wall and I slumped to the ground. This seemed to satisfy him and he left.
Lynn and I got a cab to the nearest hospital. This was New York on Saturday night, and compared with what else was coming in through the door, my dislocated jaw wasn't that important. It was horrendous. There were stretcher cases, and blood, and sirens, and people crying and drunkenness. And I'm like, for fuck's sake, this is not what I signed up for. And it really wasn't.
Ozzy was now doing combinations of prescription drugs and drink, big-time. All he had to do was complain of back pain and he could get any fucking thing he wanted. As for drinking, he would not stop from the minute he got up to the minute he collapsed. He had it hidden everywhere. In the cellar, in the back of the coal cupboard in the hall, in the oven--it was safe because I never cooked. Bottles of vodka, scotch, Jack Daniel's, Hennessy, whatever; he had no particular choice. It wasn't as if he was a gin drinker: he was an anything drinker.
And I would do anything to stop him.
When I found the booze I'd throw it away, or I'd piss in it, or I'd stick the neck up my arse, just as a kind of Fuck You, because I knew he would drink straight from the bottle. I wanted him to suffer. And even when I told him what I'd done, he'd still fucking drink it. And it didn't matter if I poured a case of whisky down the drain, all he had to do was find someone to take him to Beaconsfield, the nearest small town, and he could get anything. He was always drunk. And he'd say, "Take me to the pub," because he was prohibited from driving.
"Why, Ozzy? The pub doesn't even open for an hour."
"Because I want to."
"So you'll be sitting an hour by yourself waiting for this pub to open. Why?"
"Because I want to."
"Ozzy, I love you, but actually I can't stand this, because I am not prepared to be picking up the pieces every single fucking day."
And of course there had been times when I'd said, "That's it, I'm out, fuck you, I'm gone." But where does a woman with three children, who has no bank account and no money, go? Because I was in so much trouble through my father, and so many people wanted me for his debts, I still didn't dare have a bank account, didn't dare have a credit card, so I couldn't even check into a hotel. And then Ozzy would call up the accountant and say, "If she calls, give her nothing." I had no family, so where do you go?
A couple of times I had gone to my niece Gina, who by that time was married, and she always said I could sleep on her sofa. But I had three babies. And I was like, What the fuck is going to happen to me? So I would ignore it, everything I would ignore. I ignored everything about my father; the position I now found myself in was a direct result of my father. I was living with an alcoholic who had gone from being like Arthur, the funny cuddly drunk, to the fucking Hulk. Because alcoholism is a progressive disease. It changes in how it manifests.
&n
bsp; There were times, especially when we were living at Beel House, when I was terrified. He would come into the bedroom after getting back from the pub and my stomach would knot. I would pretend to be asleep. Please God, I beg of you, do not let him wake me up, let him think I am asleep. A few times I would put the children in the car and run away in the middle of the night; I would pile them in the car and just go. I was never frightened that he would do anything to them, but I didn't want them to see or feel the atmosphere in the house.
His addiction with drink had moved into a sexual addiction as well. He wanted sex all the time, all the time. And I'd be pleading with him, "Please let me sleep, let me sleep." But I would never say no. I just wanted to keep the peace. It was easier to say yes.
Because I was genuinely so tired. I'd had six pregnancies in six years. Yes, I had nannies, but whenever I was home I spent all my time with the children, and I had three children under five, and so by the time they go to bed you are drained. And so you too go to bed. And then your husband comes back from a night at the pub, and he's there in the bedroom, smoking a cigar and wanting sex. Nothing to do with love. No kissing involved. Not that I could have kissed him anyway. You can't kiss and hold lovingly someone you're angry with. So I would just turn my head. I would shut my eyes tight. Mouth and eyes both closed. And I would lie there and I would cry. Not sob. I would quietly cry and I would turn my back on him. Oh God, please let him sleep.
One time things got so bad that I gave Ozzy an ultimatum. I was off to LA, working on his behalf. "If you're drunk when I come back," I said, "that's it. I'm divorcing you." And when I did get back, he'd done it. Full of remorse, he'd laid off the booze for two days. He had gone cold turkey just like that.
Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography Page 22
