Wrinkles and sagging are part of life, I realise that now; they’re part of you. And every time you go under the knife for vanity, you are slicing off yet more of your self-worth, too. Far better to find other ways of trying to feel comfortable with who you are. Jack’s diagnosis and my mastectomy were both lines in the sand for me, but turning sixty may be part of it, as well as becoming a grandmother and finally realising that there is so much more to life than fretting about your droopy bits.
In between my many cosmetic surgery operations, I would also embark on some of the most ludicrous diets known to woman. There was the gastric band, of course, but I have also done powders, pills, the cactus diet, the cabbage soup diet, the purée diet, the fasting-every-other-day diet, the South Beach diet. You name it, I have been on it.
The lightest I have ever been is 107 pounds (seven stone, nine pounds), but even then I would never be the girl to wear the shortest skirt, or even a bikini on the beach. I have never strutted around naked in front of my husband – I’m always swathed in something because I don’t like my body. The perfect era for me would have been Victorian times when they took ladies to the water’s edge in a carriage and you dropped into the sea unseen.
Now I’m on the Atkins diet and it seems to be working for me. My weight has started to drop steadily rather than rapidly, which is an encouraging sign. My experience has always been that losing the pounds isn’t that hard, it’s maintaining the weight loss that’s the tricky bit. And you have more chance of success if you have lost the weight slowly and sensibly. This is the first diet I have done where I can actually go to a restaurant and order something from the menu, like steak and vegetables, or fish.
Ozzy tried it too, and he lost a lot of weight initially, though he goes back and forth on it – much like I do. Ozzy cares very much about his weight, with good reason. Performing at the level he does, doing two-hour shows a night, he needs to be a comfortable weight. And to achieve that, Ozzy works out every single day, obsessively.
I, however, will have a little voice in my head that says, Go to the gym, go to the gym, and I will think, In a minute, in a minute. I need someone to be standing next to me, constantly prodding me in the back until I do it. For the last year I have worked with a personal trainer. Her name is Michelle Woolf, known to her clients as Woolfie, and we’ve become great mates. Even when I moan and say I can’t do it, she will come and grab me and push me into the gym and if I moan too much, she’ll make me do double.
Over the first three months I steadily lost twenty-five pounds – almost two stone – and had just eight more pounds to lose to reach my ideal weight. Then it was down to four. Nearly there! It was all looking so promising and then I sabotaged myself by starting to eat junk food again. Some people starve themselves when they’re unhappy or feeling a bit low, but I comfort-eat. I know when I’m doing it that I really shouldn’t, that I will put on weight that I have worked so hard to lose, but I still do it because it feels soooo good at the time. And then I disappoint myself.
I went for therapy a few times to try and get to the bottom of it but frankly, I got bored of talking about myself. I just wanted to scream, ‘Can we talk about something else now?’ Or I’d find myself saying things I didn’t really feel, just for the sake of it, to fill the silence in the room. So I stopped going.
By the time you get to my age, you can pretty much analyse yourself anyway. The plain facts are that it’s not just about dieting. It’s about a lifestyle change, which means mind, body and soul. Yes, you can lose weight – anyone can lose weight – but you cannot maintain it without life changes, which means exercise. You must take care of your body. It’s only taken me sixty years to accept this and to stop the voices inside my head saying, ‘Eat that cake! You can start the diet on Monday.’
However much I crave carbs and sabotage my diet occasionally, I always have a cut-off point in my head now. After all my medical problems, I know that I can’t go back to being 230 pounds (sixteen and a half stone) again, it’s too unhealthy. I just can’t allow myself to become that person again. In many ways, I’m fighting pretty lousy odds, anyway. My mother and father were both prone to weight problems and had short, stumpy legs. Some people inherit a lump sum from their parents; I just got a lumpy body.
So I’m short and I’m small-boned, and when I’m in one of my ‘big’ phases, it’s all fat that you can see. Never mind the aesthetics; that’s so unhealthy for someone of my age. When you’re too heavy, your knees go, your back goes, your feet swell. And I don’t want to find myself struggling to stand up, so that’s why I always go back on the diet after a self-inflicted sabotage. Besides, I hate waking up one morning to find that the blouse I really like suddenly won’t do up any more, or my trousers are too tight, or my favourite ring won’t slip on to my big, fat, puffy finger.
When I’m being a good girl, I have egg and bacon for breakfast, then when I’m at The Talk I invariably have a salad of avocado, beansprouts, tomatoes, maybe some carrots. It really does fill me up, and it works. If I stick to it.
If I’m being a bad girl, I will stuff my face with pasta, chips or – my absolute downfall every time – strawberry cream cake. God, I love it. If it’s there in the fridge, I just can’t not eat it and, if I’m feeling a bit down on myself, I will ask my housekeeper Saba to buy one so that it’s there when I get home.
There is one habit I have managed to kick. Every single morning, without fail, I would drink a huge glass of Coca-Cola to get me going. The full-on sugared stuff, not the diet version. Whenever I felt tired I would drink it, get the sugar rush, then get the slump. So then I would drink it again to bring me out of the slump. But since I have been doing Atkins, I haven’t touched it. In fact, I don’t have fizzy drinks at all, which is a massive bonus to my diet because, sugar-wise, they are dreadful. I have also trained myself to eat fruit, which I never used to do, and I’m getting better at eating vegetables, although I accept that I will never be the kind of person who chews on a stick of celery because I actually enjoy it.
I’m not a beauty or fashion icon, I’m just a normal person who got lucky. I can scrub up pretty well for my age, with the help of a good make-up artist and some flattering lighting, but the rest of the time I honestly couldn’t give a toss what I look like. I often go out without make-up on looking a right old sight.
When Jack and Lisa were moving into their new house, I was helping to shift boxes and clean floors, like all mothers do for their kids. After a while, we were all starving, so we went to Madeo’s Restaurant in West Hollywood, and when we came out the paparazzi were outside. I was wearing a pair of baggy old jeans and a T-shirt, and had a scarf on my head because my hair was all over the place. The next thing I know, I’ve got Louis Walsh on the phone taking the piss and calling me a scruffy old cow. How dare he!
12
Here We Go Again
Ozzy and I renewing our vows in 2002, twenty years after our first wedding. I would never have imagined then that our thirtieth wedding anniversary would be the beginning of one of the worst periods in our turbulent marriage.
On 4 July 2012, my husband and I celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary.
I would like to be able to tell you that he organised the delivery of a vast bouquet of flowers before taking me for a candlelit supper for two.
But I’m married to Ozzy Osbourne, whose capacity for fucking up is legendary. So, suffice to say that it was one of the most anticlimactic, frustrating, distressing days of my life. And given what I have already been through, that’s saying something.
I was working in New York on America’s Got Talent, and Ozzy had just finished the summer festival dates, which were meant to be Black Sabbath, but due to Tony’s illness became Ozzy and Friends. The 4th of July is of course a national holiday in America for Independence Day, a fitting occasion for celebration.
The plan was that Ozzy would fly out from London the night before and we’d spend the day just hanging out together in my suite at the Greenwich Hote
l in Tribeca. I was looking forward to doing nothing, but was apprehensive about the imminent arrival of my husband, who had been particularly stroppy with me of late. Nothing I ever did seemed to be right and, on the rare occasions he was home, I kept out of his way. It was safer for both of us.
The day before he was due to arrive, I got a call from Pete Mertens, a dear friend of both of ours. He’d gone to school with Ozzy and Tony Iommi and, in one of those small-world coincidences, I had met him independently when I worked for ELO and he was one of their roadies. So we all go back a long way.
Now retired and living in Laguna, California, he’s one of the biggest jokers there is, so when I hear his voice it always makes me smile.
‘Pete! How you doing?’
We got the usual social niceties out of the way and then he cleared his throat, sounding slightly awkward.
‘Sharon, Ozzy keeps texting me to ask if I can get him any drugs. Is everything OK?’
I half laughed, waiting for the confirmation that this was Pete’s idea of a wind-up. But none came. No laughing matter, it turned out to be the tip-off that set in motion the next gut-churning episode in my box-of-chocolates marriage. You never know what you’re going to get next.
I had told Ozzy weeks before that when he landed in New York on the night of 3 July, I would most likely still be on the set of America’s Got Talent, but that I’d only be about an hour behind him.
‘Just get unpacked, have a bath, get into bed and I’ll be there,’ I’d said.
So come the night, I was on set and we had just gone to a commercial break when my assistant Julie brings me my phone. It’s Ozzy, calling from the hotel.
‘You arsehole. I’ve flown halfway round the fucking world and you’re not fucking here.’
I had a microphone on and either side of me were the other two judges, Howard Stern and Howie Mandel. As I had done so many times in the past, I smiled sweetly and pretended that everything was just hunky-dory in my world.
‘Oh, hi darling! I can’t waaaaaait to see yoooooooooooooou. Lovely… lovely. OK, I’ll be there in an hour. Mwah.’
Click. Oh fuck, I thought, it’s going to be a rough night.
The first thing that happens to me when I’m emotional is that my stomach starts to knot.
Luckily, America’s Got Talent was not due back on air for another two minutes, so I rushed off to the loo, praying that I would get to the end of that night’s show without betraying how upset I was. By some miracle, I managed it.
By the time I arrived back at the hotel, Ozzy was in bed, watching TV. He started on me straight away.
‘Well, if this is the way it’s going to be, then our fucking anniversary is just a fucking joke. You’ve got to fucking rethink our life,’ he ranted.
Everything was my fault. Me, me, me, me, always fucking me. I already had a plan of action in my head, and knew what I wanted to do. So I didn’t retaliate, I simply took it all, removed my make-up and got in beside him, waiting for him to pop a sleeping pill that would release me from this verbal onslaught. As soon as he was out cold, I picked up his phone and started scrolling through the texts, looking for evidence of what Pete had told me.
Normally, I would never do something like that. Ozzy has kept journals from the day we met; he has bookcases full of them. But I would no more rifle through them than fly to the moon. It’s something I have always taught my kids: never snoop at someone’s computer, mobile phone or diaries because you will only find something that might hurt you. And besides, it’s an invasion of their privacy.
Ozzy knew I felt that way, which is probably why he didn’t see the need to delete anything. But right then, in New York and about to celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary, I was a desperate woman.
It didn’t take long and boy, did I find a load of ugly shit. There were texts going back months, asking people to get him drugs and saying, ‘Don’t tell the old girl.’ It was all there in black and white, everything I knew I would find but had desperately hoped I wouldn’t. Without evidence, I could bury my head in the sand and pretend it wasn’t happening, just as I had done about so many uncomfortable truths in my life. But there it was, incontrovertible. After doing so well with sobriety, and despite everything he had promised both to me and the kids, my husband was abusing again.
Looking back, I think I was in shock, because I still didn’t say anything to him. All I kept thinking was, Let’s get through our anniversary day tomorrow and I’ll worry about this afterwards. Also, I was wary about confronting him in a public place because I had no idea how he would react.
The next morning, I woke first and lay stock still for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling and trying to get my head straight. If we manage to have a nice day together, I thought, then perhaps this can all be sorted out. But no.
Our precious day together – the celebration of three decades, three gorgeous children and everything else we had achieved – was just a blank.
He lay on the sofa for most of the day, watching TV. He hated the ‘fucking hotel’, hated the ‘fucking food’, hated being in New York. He was tired, he’d just finished his tour, he wanted to go to LA, why had I made him come to New York… The list of complaints was endless, the vitriol unrelenting. And that’s what I endured all day for our thirtieth anniversary.
Meanwhile, our family and friends were calling to congratulate us on making it to three decades. With a Herculean effort, I managed to sound like we were having a great time, just holed up in our hotel room like two lovebirds with no desire to see the outside world, though given Ozzy’s moods of late, the kids would have known that, at best, we were perhaps managing to get through the day without bickering.
I had had a belt buckle made for him, mounted with a gold cross and inscribed on the back, Happy 30th anniversary. Here’s to the next 30. But I didn’t give it to him. I still haven’t, to this day. I never will. It now lives in the safe. If we make it to forty, maybe. Not only had he not bought me anything, he never even acknowledged what day it was. He acted as if, to him, it was just another shit day in another shit hotel. Except that I knew there was nothing wrong with the hotel, or with me. It was his craving for drugs talking, just as, I now realised, it had been causing his recent mood swings. As it happened, Michele Anthony and her mum Harriet had sent Ozzy and me a chocolate cake for our anniversary. So I ate it. All of it, and loved every bite. I didn’t let him near it. As for my husband, he just wanted any excuse to get the fuck out.
The next day we had a scheduled appointment to see an MS specialist in Boston. Jack met us there that morning. We stayed for three days. The specialist confirmed Jack’s diagnosis – which we all knew anyway, but there is always that seed of hope. But for me, all I felt was relief – relief to be with Jack. Ozzy came with us, but he was closed off emotionally. He was there in body, but not in mind. After we got the diagnosis we flew right back to LA, all three of us. Ozzy and I returned to Hidden Hills, and Jack to Lisa and Pearl.
If I had expected him to be contrite after his behaviour in New York, I was sorely mistaken. He was as foul to me as ever, making no attempt to hide his irritation at my mere presence, calling me a fucking this and a fucking that. Again, I soaked it all up, watching and waiting.
By late afternoon, he was absorbed in something on television, so I wandered into the room we referred to as his bunker, where he would spend hours doing his art or poring over books and rock magazines. He kept his journals in there, so I found the ones covering the time from when he was writing in England to being away on tour, and I flicked through them. His scrawl was virtually illegible, but I could make out several references to drinking and drugs.
Then I headed for our bathroom and went through his medicine bag. It was full of pills, prescribed by every fucking doctor in Denmark, Norway, France, Italy, Germany… bags and bags and bags of them. All perfectly legal, but none of them necessary.
It was mostly Ritalin, the drug for ADHD, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Surprise surprise,
according to experts it possesses some pharmacological similarities to cocaine. There were sleeping pills, Valium and pills that I later discovered were speed. This was on top of the medication I did know about for high blood pressure, and the steroids he was taking because he’d been having problems with his voice.
I sat there for several seconds, staring at this pharmaceutical pyramid piled in front of me, trying to get to grips with the enormity of what I was about to deal with. Then I packed it all away again and planned my next move.
That night, once he had taken his sleeping tablet, I knew there was a sedated window of opportunity before he zonked out completely.
‘So what have you been drinking?’ I asked. And he told me. Everything: beer, vodka, wine – whatever he could get his hands on. Then I progressed to the chemist’s shop that was in his bag.
‘And why are you taking all these pills?’
‘To get fucked up.’
Perhaps the sleeping pill had dulled his will to fight.
I sat there for quite some time, studying the sleeping face of the man I had been through so much with, yet right at this moment felt I barely knew. I didn’t feel anger, just an overwhelming sense of weariness. Wasn’t life supposed to be easier as we got older? Weren’t we all supposed to mellow and look back on our wild days with a sense of fondness, but grateful that they were behind us? Yet here was my husband, sixty-bloody-four and still behaving like a teenage rock star.
Before I knew it, it was 4 a.m. Too exhausted for rational thought, I felt only an overwhelming desire to get the hell out, away from the source of my pain. I packed a suitcase, scooped up the dogs – making sure I took his special dog Rocky, to hurt him – and loaded them into the car. In just a couple of hours I was due at The Talk studios for that day’s show. What the fuck was I going to do?
Taking a deep breath, I stopped at the side of the road and called Angelica, the CBS Head of Daytime, my boss and a very bright young woman. I told her everything that was going on and said that I just couldn’t muster the strength to do the show.
Unbreakable: My New Autobiography Page 13
