"If you wouldn't mind waiting while I go to the bathroom," I said, "we'll finish this conversation when I get back." But I never did go back. I just got in my car and left. Never saw her again. She owed me God knows how much in commissions, but I didn't give a fuck. I had never liked her, and I didn't respect her, so it was like, All right, luv, forget the fucking money. See ya. I was relieved to get shut of her. After all, I'd only done it for a bet, and I was exhausted. It was one less person to worry about.
Yet I couldn't stop that thought at the back of my mind: what if something else happened? I have to take care of my children, I have to work . . . But in the end Ozzy was right in what he'd always said: that I was spreading myself too thin. Even though I was now down to only two bands, what with him and three young children it was ridiculous. So I told both Bonham and the Quireboys that I was retiring from management. "God bless, good luck, just go." They both got other managers, but neither of them did much after that. And neither did Lita, the old cunt. I can't say it was because I wasn't there; it was just the way it panned out.
Half the problem, I realized, was my insistence that we live in England although Ozzy earned his living in North America and Japan. I had tried as long as I could to keep the kids grounded at the same schools and with nice friends but it was making us live apart, and as much as I wanted my children to be brought up in England, I wanted to keep us together as a family. I felt so guilty it was destroying me. If I didn't spend time with Ozzy then I wouldn't have a husband, because you can't keep a husband like that. So I would go to Ozzy, and then come home to the children, and then out to Ozzy and back again. It was just insane. As much as Ozzy was traveling, I was having to do three or four times more.
So we decided to move to Los Angeles, and we found a rental in Pacific Palisades, just down the coast from Malibu, because the children so loved the beach and it's a well-heeled suburb, very family-oriented, and they went to a Calvin Christian school with a strict uniform, and we were very happy there.
April 21, 2005, 11:00 a.m.
Doheny Road, Beverly Hills
Ozzy was very sweet when he found his roses this morning. He brought one up to me and laid it on the pillow, and I found it when I woke up. I still haven't told him about the party, and just hope Howard and Dave can disguise the preparations.
I pull up outside the Beverly Hills Hotel. The door of the Bentley is opened for me.
"Hi, Chris!"
"Hi, Sharon, howya doin'?"
I have known Chris for over thirty-five years. When I first stayed here in 1968 he was a parking valet. Now he owns the parking lot. In all that time, barely a month has ever gone by when I haven't been here. When we lived across the street, it was like our neighborhood diner. We'd come here for all our meals, including breakfast. They even did packed lunches for the kids to take to school.
It's also my local beauty salon and I've been coming here for years. Kay, who runs it, is Korean and a true character. She will hug you half to death. Sometimes she'll come to Doheny, washing my hair at the kitchen sink because we've got this amazing spray attachment there; then while Kay does her magic with the hair dryer, Fariba, a lovely lady from Iran, will do my nails or wax my legs. But I prefer coming here. There's always some drama going on in the salon, and everybody knows me and Ozzy, and Kay will tell me all the gossip, who's been in, who's had a terrible face-lift.
16
Pacific Palisades
In many ways, although we had changed continents, life continued much as before. I was that mum who got the kids up and took them to school, I was that mum who made sure they had their lunches and picked them up from school and sat with them and tried to make them do their homework, and gave them parties and made sure that Christmas was always great and that they had a stable lifestyle.
I tried to shield them from the worst of Ozzy's drunken or stoned excesses, and Kelly and Jack were really too young to understand. But Aimee did. All I was able to do to balance it was to give them as normal an upbringing as I could while Ozzy would disappear from time to time, on the road, or into rehab.
One time I was visiting Ozzy in the latest rehab and Aimee was with me. I was just looking for my car keys when this man came up.
"Mrs. Osbourne?"
I smiled.
"I think you should know that your husband has Parkinson's disease."
"Excuse me? You're a doctor and you're telling me this in a parking lot in the facility, with my daughter standing here? And, for the record, he does not have Parkinson's."
"I'm telling you. I'm a fully trained doctor."
"And I'm telling you, you're a twat and fuck off."
I was furious. Here I was on the fucking gravel in a crappy parking lot, and he's saying, "Oh, I think you should know that your husband has Parkinson's." How fucking dare he.
I'd had this at two other detoxes. When you're an alcoholic you sweat and you shake until you get your next drink. So he would go into rehab. And that's how they would see him. So that's what they thought it was.
Ozzy had always had a weird body language, and over the years I'd gotten used to it. But one day he woke up and his foot was like a dead foot, it just flapped, and there was no muscle tone in his calf. So we went to a sports injury place, and they couldn't fix it. "Neurological." So then we went from one neurologist to another and nobody knew what it was. We had every test in the world, brain scans, CAT scans, dog scans. Finally we went to one guy who did a spinal tap, and he said, "He's got MS." I didn't know what MS was so I looked it up. Multiple sclerosis. I freaked.
I didn't dare tell Ozzy. For six months I went to an MS support group at UCLA, just twenty minutes back down Sunset in Westwood, trying to understand the disease, trying to work out what to do for the best. The dead foot thing never happened again, but the long-term prognosis was very scary. Ozzy was forty-four. I would take long walks around the Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, ten acres of lake and park in celebration of spiritual enlightenment, beautiful gardens filled with religious symbols and quotations from the Bible and the Koran. And it was there, on my own, that I made up my mind.
Ozzy's latest album, No More Tears, was the biggest he had ever had, and the huge follow-up tour was happening and it was sold out everywhere. So we talked and I said I thought it was time to call it a day. The constant touring and the constant abuse of his body with drink and drugs had finally taken its toll, I told him. But he would be going out on a high. And so he agreed. And we turned his No More Tears tour into the No More Tours tour. And I was just talking to Gloria about it--the only person in the world I could trust with the MS diagnosis was my girlfriend--and we thought, wouldn't it be nice to end where Ozzy began, which was with Sabbath.
We put it to them and everyone agreed except Ronnie Dio, who'd gone back to singing with them. So the other guys in the band said, OK, we'll find another singer. Rob Halford was from Birmingham, just like they all were, and he had no ego problem. He was in a band called Judas Priest, a very big band at the time, and he was overjoyed to step in and to be there with everyone on this special occasion. So Sabbath performed a set with Rob singing, then Ozzy took the stage with his band and did his set, then Ozzy came back on with the three original guys from Sabbath for four songs, and it was great, and very emotional.
Just before these last few gigs, the head of Ozzy's record company said he wanted to talk to me alone. CBS had by then become Sony, and it was run by Tommy Mottola, a great music man who managed Hall and Oates. No More Tears, the album, had done such great business that he couldn't understand what all the talk of retirement was about. So I had no option but to tell him about the MS.
"Are you sure about this, Sharon?"
"Sure I'm sure. I had it from his neurologist."
"Have you had a second opinion?"
"No."
"For this you need a second opinion. I'm going to find you the best neurologist in America and you're going to go see him." And he found a man in Boston at a place called the Caritas St. Elizabe
th's Medical Center, where they do a lot of research on neurological disease, and Tommy organized a plane from Detroit where Ozzy was playing. And this MS specialist looked at Ozzy, looked at his brain scans and basically said, "Fuck off. You're wasting my time. He hasn't got MS." Ozzy had no idea what he was talking about. He was dumbstruck when I told him the situation. He wasn't angry I'd kept him in the dark, he was thankful. He said that if he had known, he would probably have killed himself.
St. Elizabeth's was involved in joint research with the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, and this guy suggested we see a colleague there for a third opinion. And so when the last two gigs with Sabbath were done, we went back to England and saw this man: "Nothing, go away."
But Ozzy's symptoms were still there, and as years went by his body language got more and more bizarre, especially when he was drunk. Alcohol seemed to enhance it: some nights his body would be totally arched over and his hands would come up, like he was begging like a dog, and I thought it was the drink. It wasn't until ten years later, in the summer of 2003, that we came any closer to discovering what was wrong. By this time, Ozzy's body language was fucking ridiculous, but then so was his drinking. However, alcoholics shake when they don't have drink, not when they do. I had come to realize that it wasn't just the drinking, that there must be something neurologically wrong.
Michael J. Fox had just been diagnosed with Parkinson's, and I read an article in People magazine about the neurologist he'd gone to see, and how great this Dr. Roper was and how he'd put him on a certain medication which hadn't stopped the Parkinson's--you can never make it go away--but had stabilized it, and minimized the symptoms, which meant he was now living a really active life. I called up Dr. Roper and asked if he'd see Ozzy, not because I thought it was Parkinson's, but simply because he was a good neurologist. So Ozzy went and was put through a whole series of tests. They sent his DNA away and then sent him to someone else and somebody else. And finally Ozzy was diagnosed.
Although it's quite normal for people to have one chromosome that's damaged in some way, the chances of two people meeting, falling in love and marrying who both have the same damaged chromosome are about one in a billion. But that's what happened with Ozzy's mother and father. But then, nothing with Ozzy is straightforward--that's what makes him so special. Right now, there are only three people in the world who have what he has. There's no name for it. Whenever you have something with your body that is shaky and is neurological in origin, they call it Parkinsonian syndrome. But it doesn't progress like normal Parkinson's and you don't have all the things that you get with Parkinson's disease. They're now writing medical papers on him. Yes, one day Ozzy Osbourne is going to be famous in the medical world.
But back in 1992, I was faced with another problem: Ozzy's career. He couldn't just say, "Oh, I thought I had MS, but it turns out to be some other weird shit." Because you can be a drug addict in this business, you can be a murderer, but if you're sick, forget it, you're written off.
So we decided that Ozzy should have a year off. At least he came off a huge record. There were rumors in the industry--there always are, people talk. Is he well? Is he not well?
After Ozzy was misdiagnosed with MS, it put me off everything in America. All that certainty everywhere you looked: Don't Walk, Dead End, Wrong Way. It was a quality I had always admired, but now I was not so sure. And I decided I wanted to go back to England. By this time we had already sold Beel House. I had enough bad memories not to be too sorry to see it go. Also it had reached what the builder called the domino point: mending one thing only triggered something else that needed to be done.
So it was back to house-hunting again. My requirements were specific: it had to be in the Chalfonts, to be near the children's friends and schools; it had to be off the road; it had to have a lot of land. Suitable properties were few and far between.
The first thing I liked about Welders was the address: Welders House, Welders Lane, Jordans, Bucks, and--in what I took as a very positive sign--Jordans is a Quaker village, that is, not a pub in sight, so I flew over immediately to have a look. It was November 1992 and Lynn came with me. The approach was very romantic--an ancient road no wider than a cart track that in summer is so closed in by trees it's like driving through a green tunnel. When you come to a gap you know you've arrived. Leaving the car, we walked the rest of the way on foot, through the five-bar gate then down the drive, and there was Welders. It wasn't particularly pretty from the outside--it didn't have the elegance of Beel House--but this was a strong, handsome Victorian mansion.
Inside, however, it began to improve, and felt very warm and welcoming. The lady of the house showed us around. She told us how it had been built by Disraeli as a wedding gift for his daughter. This lady's husband built special effects for George Lucas. He had recently gone over to California and so they had decided to move there permanently. The dining room was full of the awards he'd gotten for the Star Wars series, including a Golden Globe.
Once you moved through the house to the other side, everything changed. The surprise was nearly as great as at the Howard Hughes house. The terraced garden sloped down to a huge area of open grassland, and beyond it were trees stretching away as far as you could see. So Lynn and I walked right down to the edge of the forest and then looked back at the house, set up on its hill, looking stately rather than elegant.
"This is just too good not to take," I said. "With this land, and this situation, it's just too good."
On the way back into London, all I was thinking was, How can I make this house work? Because inside it was all over the place. What I'd really wanted was somewhere we could move into right away, but realistically I knew that was not possible. So I called Ozzy.
"Get Colin over, and see what he thinks."
So Colin came over. Stood, looked and said, "If you don't buy it, I will."
Within three weeks it was ours, though Ozzy hadn't seen it because he was still in California with the babies.
I was a bit worried that he'd freak when he saw it because of the state it was in inside. By the time he got back, the builders were already working on the roof, then the whole house needed rewiring and replumbing. The kitchen area was a jumble of small rooms: butler's pantry, pantry, flower room and so on, so I knocked everything out and made one big L-shaped room, because we had to keep to the footprint of the original building. Several rooms couldn't be touched at all as they were on the historical register, including the downstairs cloakroom, which is covered with fabulous hand-painted antique Delft tiles and has a bathroom that is antique in itself. Upstairs I changed the configuration entirely. The top floor had been used as model-making studio. Great light, but no water and no heat. I turned this into the children's floor, with three bedrooms and a bathroom, and painted the whole landing area like a sky with fluffy white clouds. The children were still children then: nine, ten and eleven.
We put in a gym for Ozzy next to the kitchen, copying the original roof design of the house, and doing the facade in old bricks; now it looks as if it has always been there. Tucked in behind it we added a little courtyard with a fountain. In the meantime we rented a house in Gerrards Cross, a couple of miles away from Welders, so that the kids could be near their school and their friends, in an area they were familiar with. And it all worked out great. They settled straight back into the same schools they had left two years before, back to their old friends, their old life, as if they'd never gone.
The year 1993 was one of the best of our lives. Neither of us was working; we were together with our children in one of the most beautiful parts of England, with a yard that seemed to stretch on forever, where we could do what we liked when we liked. Even before the house was finished, we'd come over on weekends and go off on our ATVs to explore the grounds, and I'd put together a picnic: French bread and salami, apples and bananas and fruit juice in cartons, and individual cheeses that the children loved to unwrap.
And we'd go down into the forest, find a grassy spot in the sunshine a
nd lay out the rug, the kids would pick flowers, and Ozzy would help them climb trees or make little dams, and it was just idyllic. There was one long hot day in summer, I remember, where we stayed out till late. The ferns were as tall as Aimee and they played hide-and-seek, and everywhere were spires of purple foxgloves in patches of forest sunlight, and they would put them on their fingers and dance up to show us. And there wasn't a sound, except their voices ringing out and the birds singing and cawing, and butterflies dancing along the paths and the sun streaming golden through the beech trees, and we watched the sunset. Ozzy said it was one of those days he would never forget.
And sometimes, during those first few months before Welders was ready, we'd load our bicycles in the Range Rover then drive to the heart of the Chiltern hills, and go miles and miles along cycle paths, coming home with our picnic basket filled with bluebells. In the early summer we went up to Scotland to Inverness to look for the Loch Ness monster. We had the best time ever. Jack and Ozzy would take a flashlight out at night and go sit by the loch. We stayed in a little local hotel, and although the whole of Scotland seemed to be filled with American and Japanese tourists we never got bothered. We were allowed to be totally anonymous, just visiting old castles, having picnics by fast-flowing creeks and being a family.
By the time Welders was ready to move into, our dogs were ready to come out of quarantine. There was Sugar, the boxer we'd bought at the pet shop in Malibu; Baldrick, a bulldog Ozzy absolutely adored who'd been given to him by Zakk Wylde, his guitar player; and a Cairn terrier named Toto. In the meantime we had bought Sunny, a German shepherd, for Aimee. It was her choice, so we asked for the most docile in the litter.
In our naivete we had both imagined that the quarantine kennels would be like a farm where the dogs could roam around. How wrong can you be? It was like a concentration camp. It was a concrete prison. They were never allowed out onto green grass, never allowed out of their cells.
Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography Page 25
