He and Lisa are so mature, measured and sensible that I am in complete awe of them. Their obvious compatibility and happiness makes me emotional every time I think about it.
At the start of the ceremony, Jack faced Lisa and read out a speech.
‘I promise to always take care of you the way you take care of me. I will always do my best to be a good husband and father, no matter what. You are my best friend, the mother of my child, and I’m very excited that, in a few minutes, you’re going to be my wife.’
For the umpteenth time since we’d flown in from LA, I glanced sideways at my husband and wondered what he was thinking, whether the solid message – that love is a decision, not just a feeling – had sunk in. But he was just staring straight ahead at the happy couple, his face betraying nothing.
Night descends swiftly in Hawaii, and before we knew it, it was dark and time for a celebratory supper illuminated by table candles and those tall tiki torches. We ate traditional Hawaiian fare: grilled local fish, Lilikoi ribs, teriyaki-glazed steaks and tropical fruit. Jamie made a speech that he said had been tricky to write because, as Jack had been sober for so long, ‘he has more stories to tell about me than I do about him’.
Then it was Kelly’s turn. We all expected something quirky and outlandish, but she kept it simple and heartfelt.
‘Jack, I am so unbelievably proud of you, of the man you have become… even though I am your older sister, I am pretty much the younger sister because you are a lot cleverer than me, a lot smarter and a lot more put-together than I am. I love you and Lisa so much.’
My speech was a short one, but said it all. I told Jack that I couldn’t have asked for a better son and that I had learnt so much from him.
Ozzy did not want to be involved and, once the dancing started, he left. He didn’t dance with the new bride, the bride’s mother, or his wife of thirty years. He just buggered off, the first one to leave. The evening ended with the young people back on the beach, laughing and chatting. For a while I joined them, but then thought, No. This is the time for Jack to be with his friends, so I left and went to bed.
The next morning we had a buffet-style brunch. Everyone was relaxed, talking about the previous day’s festivities. Nobody had to struggle for conversation. It was just so lovely and natural, with Pearl being carried from table to table. It had been a long way from Louisiana, but Lisa’s family had fallen in love with Hawaii. They left determined to come back. In fact, Lisa’s sister Betsey and brother-in-law Ryan – the preacher who married them – are now thinking of moving there.
While the wedding was over, the festivities were not. The next day was my sixtieth birthday and I had asked all the close friends and family who’d come for the ceremony to stay. Gloria was there with Geezer, and Colin Newman and his wife Mette. Gina had to get special permission to take Olly and Amelia out of school. And Melinda, the nanny when we were filming The Osbournes, came with her children from Australia. And of course there were Aimee, Kelly, Jack, Lisa and Pearl. I thought it was time we got out on to that sparkling sea. So I’d chartered a boat to take us around the coast to where there’s a monument to the great navigator, Captain Cook, who mapped the South Pacific and discovered Australia and who was murdered when he came back unexpectedly to Hawaii. Once we got there, we all went snorkelling, even Ozzy.
The one person who hadn’t been looking forward to this sea excursion was Colin, who always gets seasick. But as a gesture of friendship and of the occasion, he agreed to come. Big mistake. There’s always a bit of a roll on the Pacific. He was standing next to Gloria, Geezer and me at the rail, just chatting, when suddenly his head slumped on to Geezer’s shoulder, his eyes rolled into his head and his stomach began visibly to undulate, like a belly dancer’s, or as if an alien was about to pop out. My first thought was that he had had a stroke. Ozzy thought it was epilepsy and started slapping his face, then Jack started screaming at his father because he was hitting Colin, and I was screaming because that’s what I do when I panic. It was like something out of a comedy skit.
We immediately turned the boat round and headed back. Three other sailors offered to bail with Colin and took him back to the hotel to sleep it off. Mette had seen it all before and knew it wasn’t serious, so she stayed with us. ‘I’m not wasting a great day like this in a darkened hotel room,’ she said. As she predicted, Colin was fine. It was just a violent attack of seasickness. And it was a great day, perhaps the best birthday I think I’ve ever had. What could have been nicer than to spend the day with friends and family? We had sailed on an azure sea, had a picnic lunch on a South Sea island beach and had the fun of snorkelling among tropical fish. We’d even had comedy and drama.
And for once, Ozzy was even pleasant, though – as usual – he failed to give me a present. I told people he’d bought me a Richard Avedon photograph, but the truth was that I’d bought it for myself.
14
Hell with Chandeliers
It was getting harder to hide the fact that my marriage was now in serious trouble.
Back in LA, life’s rhythm returned to something like normal. Ozzy was now in Malibu, recording with the band. I was back at The Talk. Jack was getting on with his life, as were Kelly and Aimee. They were all living in their own places, doing their own thing. They were always trying to involve me, but I often felt like an encumbrance. I wanted to be a parent they came to see when they wanted to, not one they fretted about.
As usual, we tried to have Sunday lunch together whenever we could, but I knew the hurdle of Christmas was looming. Although I love the run-up and all the preparations, Christmas is always a hard time in our house, and always has been, largely because of alcohol.
More than any other season, it’s the time of year which revolves around drink, from chocolate liqueurs to rum punch to Santa’s sherry and brandy butter – the entire period is soaked in booze. Recovering alcoholics are always reminding each other that Christmas Day is 25 December and that’s all. But AA are the first to recognise that Christmas is a particularly vulnerable time – and in large cities there are marathons, meetings that run from lunchtime on Christmas Eve right through to Boxing Day, where you can have a cup of tea or just be with people who know you’re not feeling great. Alcoholics are often estranged from their families. The rest of the year they learn to cope, helped by regular meetings and by their sponsors and sober coaches, but at Christmas there’s often no escape. Finding yourself alone – knowing your children are opening their presents without you – is very hard. But if you’re allowed back, then alcohol will always be around and often in liberal quantities, festive packs of beer stacked up in the fridge being the least of it. In every house you go to there’ll be bottles of bubbly on the go, half-glasses of this and that will be littering the place, abandoned on the hall table, on mantelpieces, on the cistern when you go for a piss. This is temptation at its most biblical.
Given Ozzy’s recent volatile moods, I was feeling particularly apprehensive. Once children leave home, you can’t count on them to be around for Christmas. Kelly had already told me she was going to be spending the holiday with her boyfriend Matt’s family in Detroit. So that was going to feel weird anyway. And Lisa’s parents were coming up from Louisiana to spend Christmas with the new little family. We would see Jack, of course, but it would be different. The plan was that Ozzy and I would spend Christmas morning at their house for a late brunch, so that both sets of grandparents could enjoy Pearl opening up her first Christmas gifts.
And that’s what happened. When we got there, it was a hive of activity: kids running around, food being prepared, family everywhere. It was exactly as a happy house should be at Christmas: warm, inviting, festooned with decorations. At the heart of it all was our gorgeous little granddaughter, who was inevitably the centre of attention. Ozzy tried as best he could to socialise, but I could see it was a struggle. He was completely detached from the rest of us, smiling when required but seemingly not spontaneously or genuinely. He was very, very quiet.
The evening was fine. Very low-key, which was exactly what I needed. We had our English Christmas dinner with turkey, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, bread sauce, the lot. Even plum pudding. But when everyone had gone, and I’d finished pottering around in the kitchen, Ozzy disappeared again, cutting himself off from me. In the old days we’d have had a chat, talked about what was said, all the usual things couples do when they’ve had friends in. I found him in the living room with the curtains pulled tight, the television blaring, just like he was most days, even when it was bright sunshine outside.
He had been fine about going to Jack and Lisa’s, but other than that, he didn’t want to go anywhere. He would complain bitterly if I even mentioned going out, acting short-tempered and nasty, trying to belittle me by saying that I would go to the opening of an envelope when all I was actually suggesting was a supper with some friends. I now knew what people meant when they referred to their marriage feeling like two strangers living under the same roof. The situation was becoming impossible.
Despite his animosity towards me, we were still sleeping in the same bed. If I haven’t flounced off to a hotel and we are actually under the same roof, I have always stayed in the marital bed come hell or high water. I have always felt that if we started to occupy separate bedrooms, it would stay that way permanently and there would be no going back.
A couple of weeks after the tricky Christmas, we were fast asleep, having both taken a sleeping pill. I take them sporadically, usually when I have a lot on my mind, but Ozzy has to take one every night or he’d be pacing the floor like a wide-eyed lunatic. Presumably, because his body is so used to them, the tablets don’t put him into such a deep sleep as they do me, though he claims I could be in an actual coma and still take a phone call. But this particular night I heard the sound of something like glass breaking, and it had stirred me. I ignored it and tried to go back to sleep. It was he who woke up at 3.30 a.m. to find the bedroom filled with smoke.
‘Shaaaaaaaron! The fucking house is on fire!’
That woke me up. I leapt out of bed, ran for where I thought the door was and crashed straight into Ozzy, who was panicking like a headless chicken because he couldn’t see anything.
To add to the comedic element, he had just had a small operation to try and alleviate a spot of arthritis in his right hand and, although we thought it was only a minor procedure, it actually took two hours and he had come home with his arm fully plastered at right angles to his body, his forearm raised and a splint structure connecting it to his neck. He looked like a fucking deranged air-traffic controller.
As I went around opening doors and windows, which Ozzy later claimed only exacerbated the fire, he headed off to the living room to find the wooden coffee table ablaze.
Ask Ozzy about ‘the candle fire’ and he’ll reply, ‘Which fucking candle fire? We’ve had loads.’
In reality, we have only had a couple, both at Welders in England, and this one in LA was, ahem, only the third. My problem is that I love candles. Every house I have ever lived in has looked like a church on All Saints Day. They’re everywhere – on every table, shelf, mantelpiece and in the downstairs loo. But occasionally, I forget to blow one of them out.
The guilty candle on this occasion was a Christmas present from my former America’s Got Talent co-host Howard Stern. It had burned so low that the glass had shattered and the naked flame had caught the coffee table, which now resembled a bonfire in the middle of the room.
We rang the fire brigade but, in the meantime, tried to put the fire out ourselves. Ozzy went to fetch a wet towel to throw over it, and I returned from the kitchen bearing a saucepan of water. But as I threw it, it seemed to push the flames towards Ozzy and suddenly his arm was on fire. Thankfully he managed to pat it out straight away, but his plaster was left slightly charred.
As the house was still full of smoke, we went out into the front garden to wait for the firemen. So there we were, surrounded by a menagerie of dogs, when the fire engine arrived.
‘Has someone here reported a fire?’ the first one asked.
‘No, I always sit in the garden fucking smouldering,’ said Ozzy.
Dramas over, I returned to The Talk and carried on with my other job of managing Ozzy’s career. For three years we’d been working on making a movie out of Ozzy’s autobiography and, as ever with the film industry, it was taking an age to find the financing, the right writer, and so on. Then, one of the people we were working with on developing it said they had found the perfect writer and could Ozzy and I fly to England in February to meet him? ‘Consider it done,’ I said, ‘we’re there.’
The timing was perfect, as Ozzy and I had been asked to present at the Brits. Also, I’d been asked by Richard Curtis, the founder of Comic Relief, if I’d be interested in doing a sketch. I have loved David Walliams ever since seeing Little Britain all those years ago. So this sounded like just what the doctor ordered. I said yes straight away. I took a week off from The Talk and we flew to England.
While I was busy filming in a church in Hampshire, Ozzy met up with the writer and they bonded. It finally started to look like the movie was becoming a reality, and his mood was upbeat.
Unfortunately the tight schedule meant that I had to abandon him at Heathrow the moment we landed at around 11 a.m. And that’s all part of the problem: Ozzy and I are always fighting time. So that didn’t go down too well.
Two days later we were due to present the award for International Best Female Solo Artist at the Brits, but on the morning of the show he said, ‘I’m not fucking doing it.’ So, fine. So much for raising his profile a few weeks before the release of 13. It didn’t matter; I ended up presenting it with X Factor host Dermot O’Leary. I simply left my miserable husband at home, muttering to himself about ‘Mrs Fucking TV’, which was his new term of abuse.
When we’re over in England we always stay at Welders, if humanly possible. It’s the loveliest house, set in acres of beautiful rolling hills. Incredibly, it’s not even an hour’s drive from the centre of London. It’s our home. The plan had always been that we would stay for eight days and then fly back to LA. The main reason was The Talk. I’d been given a week off, but that was it. Afterwards, I had to go back to work.
Two days before we were due to leave, Ozzy blows a gasket.
‘I’m not coming.’
‘What do you mean, you’re not coming?’
‘I’m not fucking coming.’
He then comes out with the usual spiel: ‘I’m fed up of travelling. I never spend enough time at Welders.’ All of which was true.
As he was scheduled to be back in England three weeks later to do a lot of press for the Sabbath album – interviews for magazines which have long lead times – he didn’t see the point of coming back with me now just to turn round again in three weeks. All the reasons he gave for not going back were perfectly reasonable. But he didn’t argue reasonably or coherently. He just went on and on about it. Finally I told him, ‘You do what you want. I have commitments in LA, I have to return.’
And then it really kicked off.
‘I fucking hate you.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, I fucking hate you.’
Right. Here we go again, I thought. Back on the bloody roller-coaster.
I knew he had just employed the oldest trick in the book: start an argument so you can flounce off and do what you want. But I was too tired to fight it. Besides, I had co
mmitments and contracts to uphold, so I had to go back.
So he stayed behind, poncing about in his Audi R8 convertible that he kept at Welders, and I left for the States wondering what the hell was going to happen next. It didn’t take long for me to find out. A lovely couple called Dave and Sharon run the house for us in the UK. They’ve been working for us for at least ten years and they know Ozzy of old. After a couple of days, Dave rang and told me that Ozzy was behaving so unpredictably that it was like ‘having the Exorcist in the house’. Not a lot I could do.
Then, one week in, I got an email from Ozzy to say that he was going away for a couple of days to try and ‘find’ himself. I resisted the temptation to reply that he should start by looking up his own arse.
People have the impression, I’m told, that Ozzy is a technophobe. Nonsense. Ozzy can email, Skype, text, you name it. He’s perfectly competent at new technology if he wants to be. I called the house and, by some miracle, he answered. He said, ‘Hello,’ but anything beyond that was like getting blood from a stone. He was sullen and wholly uncommunicative, but even I couldn’t have predicted what came next.
‘I think I need to be a bachelor.’
‘Whaaaat? A bachelor? Have you heard yourself? You’re a fucking pensioner. You need a bus pass, that’s what you need.’
I slammed the phone down and stared into space for a while, wondering what on earth was going on inside my husband’s head. Was this just a classic mid-life crisis? He’d always had long hair and a penchant for rock music, so they couldn’t be classed as defining features, but the sports cars were a new development – the Audi R8 and two fucking Ferraris lying idle in LA – and so too was this recent Greta Garbo ‘I vont to be alone’ bollocks.
Later in the day, I called the house again and this time, Dave answered. He said that Ozzy had gone out hours earlier and had not yet returned home. Worse, he’d taken the car.
Unbreakable: My New Autobiography Page 15
