Unbreakable: My New Autobiography
Page 16
That frightened me, the thought of him driving back drunk. I wasn’t worried for him, but for everybody else; because invariably the fuckers who drive drunk don’t get hurt themselves, they just hurt other people. I was fuming. Fuming. I felt impotent, stuck in LA, but sent Dave and his wife Sharon driving round Buckinghamshire to look for him. Eventually, they saw the car parked outside a pub, and tucked under the windscreen wiper was a note from a dealer offering to get him drugs! Beyond pathetic.
So Dave went inside the pub and Ozzy was just sitting there, drinking God knows what, and he refused to come home. Dave made an effort to persuade him, but Ozzy tried to start a fight so he backed off and left him. And all this time I was at my wit’s end in Beverly Hills, getting updates on my husband’s drunken idiocy and feeling completely helpless to do anything about it.
He must have slept in the car, because he arrived back at the house the next day carrying a bottle of vodka and a crate of beer. By now it had been established that he’d drunk our garage dry. There was no alcohol in the main house, but in the garage there were a few bits and pieces like old Christmas hampers people had sent us. God knows how long they’d been there, but he’d worked his way through every drop of alcohol he could find.
Everything fell into place. The arsehole behaviour at Jack and Lisa’s wedding; the same crap over most of Christmas. Just as, earlier, I had thought it might be, I now knew for sure. He was begrudging every drink that anyone took and every laugh that anyone had because he was craving alcohol and was unhappy with himself. The hostility finally made sense: it was his guilt, his anger at himself for being so weak.
I called Dave again.
‘Get his car removed from the house. In fact, take every car away. I’m going to sell every last fucking one of them.’
Within twenty-four hours, I had sold the Audi R8 in England and one of the Ferraris he kept in America. The other one went to Jack. All gone. There was no way I was going to risk him getting in one of them while he was drunk and hurting someone.
Ozzy says now that it proved to be the most expensive drink he’s ever had, but at the time he was none the wiser because I had stopped talking to him. The way I felt, he could have stayed in England for good and drunk himself to death.
Then the text came.
‘I need help. I’m hurting. I’ve been using for a year and a half.’
And that was it. I knew he had reached probably one of the lowest points that addicts have to hit before they finally accept that they need help. I also know, from my years of experience with it, that until that acceptance hits them, there’s not a damn thing anyone else can do to make them get sober.
A friend of ours, Billy Morrison, who has been in the programme for years, flew to England to collect him. But Ozzy was in no fit state to fly. He was screaming for help. Quite apart from having the shakes, he had a terrible stabbing pain in his chest and didn’t know why. He just woke up with it one morning after blanking out on booze, just like the bad old days.
Billy took him to the doctor’s. His blood pressure was totally through the roof and an X-ray showed that he’d broken his sternum, but to this day he doesn’t know how he did it. Add to this the fact that he was detoxing, and you get the picture. It was eight days before he was considered well enough to board a plane back to LA.
As luck would have it, I had just sold our house in Hidden Hills to singer and actress Jessica Simpson. The downside was that I had to pack up 13,500 square foot of house in a matter of weeks. Jessica wanted to move in within the month. I was in the middle of packing when Ozzy returned with Billy. Talk about stressful. I had moved out of the rented house on Walden Drive and taken my stuff to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Every afternoon, once The Talk was over, it was back to Hidden Hills with the packers, trying to get out in time. I’d made up my mind. There was no way I was going to be in the same house as Ozzy this time, playing happy families. I was furious with him for taking the second chance I had given him and throwing it back in my face. He had betrayed my trust, but worse, he was failing as a father and now a grandfather. It was time, I felt, for him to grow up.
I knew he would be staying at Walden Drive, which I was constantly referring to as the Dark House. I had come to loathe it there. Its gloominess made me feel stifled, as if my throat was constricted. Every time I pulled on to the driveway and then on through the small tunnel that led to the front of the house, I felt a sense of impending doom. The dark wooden floors and panelling that I had always been fond of now felt crushing and life-sapping to me. I needed somewhere light and spacious to live. No more dungeons.
I thought back to the previous July, how Ozzy had promised he was going to work a rigid programme of sobriety, how sorry he was, asking for forgiveness. To think I’d actually believed him! It was nothing more than the usual bullshit. I couldn’t bear to think that he was back to square one; same old shit, just a different day.
At Walden Drive, Billy Morrison was trying to work out a rigid programme for Ozzy. This would involve attending at least one AA meeting a day, maybe two. Sometime earlier, we had arranged for Jack to go to Germany for treatment for his MS. Originally, Ozzy was supposed to be coming, but the last thing Jack needed was his father ricocheting around the clinic going cold turkey from drugs and alcohol, so we left him behind at the Dark House where, as far as I was concerned, he could stew in his own juice. Having Ozzy along was never an option at this point.
In retrospect, perhaps Jack’s having MS, and his courage in fighting it, strengthened my resolve in staying away from Ozzy for far longer than I might normally have done. When one of your children is sick or given a potentially life-threatening diagnosis, everything else diminishes in importance. I loved Ozzy as much as I had always done, but this time, his illness seemed somehow pathetic compared to our son’s. It was something I just didn’t have the inclination or the time to focus on. There were bigger issues at play.
In February 2013, right after Ozzy had been rescued from himself at Welders and brought back to LA a jabbering wreck by Billy, Jack, Lisa and I headed off to the Infusio Center for New Medicine in Frankfurt, Germany.
We had been told about a revolutionary stem-cell treatment that isn’t allowed in the States because it hasn’t been trialled for long enough, and its efficacy has not yet been fully evaluated. But as far as we could tell, the worst thing that could happen would be nothing.
Jack said that his philosophy was to take a 360-degree approach to his MS to maximise his chances of thwarting its symptoms. A balanced diet, keep fit, sleep well, positive thinking, that kind of thing. And the stem-cell treatment was part of that overview. We knew that the treatment wouldn’t cure Jack’s MS, but the best-case scenario was that it would possibly help his body to repair some of the existing damage and build up his immune system to make him as healthy as he could be to fight the onset of the disease.
The clinic describes stem cells as life’s ‘library’ and ‘construction workers’, responsible for the renewal and healing of the entire body. They harvest them from bone marrow or, in my and Jack’s case, from about 300 cc of circulating blood that was taken once we had arrived at the clinic. They sorted the cells and checked them for quality, then incubated them with cytokines (cell-signalling molecules) to stimulate replication. About a week later, they had enough stem cells for implantation and injected them into our lymphatic system. The idea was that those new cells would then utilise the rest to rejuvenate necrotic and damaged tissue and, in an ideal world, bring the body’s healing elements into play to fix what was wrong. Depending on your age and fitness, they can get something like 800,000 to nearly two million stem cells that way.
When Jack’s results came back, they were excellent. He was in the top group of yield because of his youth and fitness. My yield was pretty lousy because of our age difference and, presumably, the damage done not only by my ill health but also from all the unnecessary procedures I had put my body through. But we were really happy about Jack’s results.
&nbs
p; I texted Ozzy to let him know, but we didn’t actually speak. This was all about Jack, and I had no appetite for dealing with anyone else’s problems.
Did the stem-cell therapy work? I really don’t know, but it certainly doesn’t do any harm and Jack has now dropped a load of weight and is feeling pretty good, so fingers crossed. You have to have it done every two years. It’s not a cure, they’re not saying that. But if it gets his immune system in top order, then it might stall an outbreak or even stop it from happening.
For now, that’s all we can hope for.
It was about five weeks since I had last seen Ozzy, just before I left him in England. I was now back in LA, so I texted him to say I wanted to meet up. Obviously I was interested in the state of mind he was in. I wanted to have a plan of where we were going from here.
It was a Sunday morning, and he came from Walden Drive to my hotel room. He was all dressed up in a suit and the usual array of gothic jewellery, so I took this as a good sign, that perhaps he had made a special effort because he wanted to look nice for me. But as soon as he opened his mouth, he was cocky, his tone arrogant. There didn’t seem to be one shred of remorse at his behaviour; there was no apology forthcoming. His tone was cold, his attitude along the lines of, so, what do you want to do then?
Something snapped. I thought, I can’t carry his shit any more. It’s what I have always done, and I’m tired.
‘I want a divorce.’
‘You’re not serious.’
He didn’t look shocked. I don’t think he believed me but, at the time, I meant it wholeheartedly.
I was expecting him to be mortified and remorseful, begging me to take him back, but his reply was said with something like a sneer.
‘I am. I want half of everything, that’s my right. And I also want a hundred grand a month.’
I knew that money was Ozzy’s Achilles heel, and that the thought of losing it might have more impact than the thought of losing me.
‘No fucking way. Over my dead body.’
My Achilles heel is respect, namely the lack of it in other people, and I felt he was being dismissive, so that was it. Snap. I was drinking a cappuccino at the time and the whole lot went on his head. The coffee, the cup and the bloody saucer. Then I grabbed him and pulled at his precious hair with one hand, while trying to yank off his jewellery with the other.
He went for me, trying to grab me in a headlock. We must have made quite a noise because Ozzy’s assistant, Big Dave, came rushing in and placed himself between us, holding me back and pushing Ozzy away.
After Dave took Ozzy out of the room, I was physically and mentally exhausted.
There were a couple of very formal texts that went back and forth, mostly to do with work or the kids because he was still in regular contact with them. Whatever was going on with Ozzy and me at the time, it never affected the kids’ attitudes towards their dad.
But other than that, there was no communication between us. The man I had been with, or had spoken to pretty much every day for the past three decades, suddenly felt like a stranger to me. Was this how it was going to end after we’d been through so much together?
The kids kept asking me what was going on. They had grown used to our arguments over the years, but us living apart from each other was something new that they couldn’t quite comprehend.
It was all, ‘But, Mum, it’s not really serious, is it? You’ll sort it out soon, won’t you?’ They understood why I needed to be away from their father, but at the same time our marriage, however turbulent it had always been, was their normality. It was all they had ever known, so for us to be living apart was very disturbing for them, even though they were now adults themselves.
I didn’t tell them too much about what was swirling around inside my head, or relay the level of my anger at Ozzy. I wanted to keep them out of it as best I could. For me, there were no sides; it wasn’t the school playground. Sometimes, Ozzy would leave a message with one of them for me, and I would tell them, ‘Say hi to Dad, I hope he’s doing good.’
Hidden Hills was now gone: sold and emptied, gone. Ozzy was living in the Dark House in Walden Drive. I was in a bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Not having a place you can truly call your own is very unsettling, even if everything else is fine. Then a house came on the market that I happened to know very well, of which I had very happy memories, something that I could have done with now.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1976, I had made friends with an elderly couple called Gert and Sonny Silverstein. Gert was an interior designer and antiques dealer, and she had worked on the house I moved into. We had hit it off from the start, and I used to spend day after day at their house on North Crescent Drive, a few doors down from the Beverly Hills Hotel where I was staying until my place was ready. Their house felt like a second home to me. I absolutely adored them, and they adored me.
Gert and Sonny are both dead now, God rest their souls. After they passed – about twelve years ago – their house was sold. But now I saw that it was back on the market. The asking price was way too high, but I kept my eye on it. And when it didn’t sell, I enquired about renting and secured a two-year deal from March 2013. It was years since I’d seen it, and as I wandered round I realised that there was quite a lot to be done to make it feel like home. An Osbourne house needs lots of televisions and gadgets, acres of hanging and shelf space for clothes and plenty of chandeliers, the more the merrier.
If I’d owned it, I would have gutted most of the rooms and started again, but as I was only renting, that wasn’t an option. It would be a case of tweaking around the edges. In the meantime, I would continue to live at the hotel. So now I was responsible for two houses, North Crescent Drive and Walden Drive. All the while I was living out of a couple of suitcases. I remember sitting in the Beverly Hills Hotel one night, on my own, and thinking, Oh, for fuck’s sake, my entire life is in a bloody box and I don’t know where anything is. It was not a happy time.
I’d get up each morning, go to work at The Talk, then come back to the hotel and just take to my bed. I’d make a few imperative phone calls, often to do with Black Sabbath business, then pull the duvet over my head and sleep for the rest of the day. Sleep, sleep, sleep. It felt like I was shutting down.
I was in a pretty bad way, to be honest, in a state of permanent exhaustion. I only needed a couple of glasses of wine and then I’d be fast asleep. But then the sober light of day would come round again, and I would feel physically sick. I felt constantly as if I wanted to throw up, that doing so might get rid of the tight knot in my stomach, but I never could. That feeling never went away; it just got bigger and bigger. It was a physical pain from feeling so hurt.
I thought I knew Ozzy so well that I could virtually predict what his next thought or move would be, and then there I was, thinking, Oh my God, I don’t know this man, I don’t know anything about him. It was just a huge shock, that he’d given me a load of bullshit and I’d been pulled in. Now I couldn’t find two shoes that fucking matched, the dogs were all over the place and God knew what was going on inside my husband’s head. Our life had been shattered to pieces by his behaviour, and I couldn’t believe that it had come to this. I had invested thirty-three years of my life in him, our family, what we stood for… and where had it left me? Alone in a hotel room in my pyjamas at three in the afternoon.
Ozzy and I had communicated occasionally via text and, although I was keeping busy, I was still going over and over everything constantly in my mind. I’d wake up each morning, spend a few seconds staring into the darkness as I tried to work out where the hell I was and then, after that microscopic spell of blissful ignorance, my brain would fill up with all the crap going on with Ozzy.
Even though he was at Walden Drive, just a few blocks away, I kept my distance. I never went there unless I was sure he was somewhere else. After the showdown the previous July, when he’d promised to stay sober, I didn’t trust him not to betray me again. But there was no game plan in my head about what to do
. The state I was in, I was lucky to be functioning at all.
For the first time ever, I removed my wedding ring. For me, this was a massively significant thing to do, but I just didn’t feel connected to him so I didn’t want to wear it. On 14 April, I was photographed without it while helping to unload a removal van delivering my belongings to the North Crescent Drive house, so of course that sparked even more fevered speculation in the press about the state of our marriage.
Inevitably, it started to leak out that we were possibly living apart, particularly as an agency reporter had been tailing us. You didn’t have to be Sherlock bloody Holmes to suss out quite quickly that we weren’t being seen together and were travelling to separate houses.
Once the rumours started appearing in newspapers and on websites, friends began calling to ask if everything was all right, and I was having questions fired at me by reporters wherever I went. We live in this instant world now, where everything you wear, say or do can be on the internet within seconds, and it’s really disconcerting. It’s constant, constant, constant, and everybody is out to make a buck by selling a picture of you, however shit it is.
I was still Ozzy’s manager and having to work on the tour and the album. We never met face to face, but every day there was another conference call or another meeting, so suddenly he would be there, in front of me, while I was trying desperately hard just to keep it professional and not burst into tears.
Usually I’m quite good at keeping emotional matters separate from business, but this time I struggled. I did the vital stuff, dealing with other people and overseeing contractual issues, but when it came to being somewhere just as background support, I began to bow out. As work started to crank up around the album, I didn’t even go to the listening party for the press because I just didn’t think it was fair to bring the bad atmosphere between me and Ozzy to the other guys in the band. I wouldn’t have been able to hide it, so I thought it best to stay away. It was their time, not mine, and needless to say, Ozzy didn’t ring to find out why I wasn’t there.