Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (18 page)

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 Hotel 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.

‘Listen, Sharon, do what you’ve got to do, sort out whatever’s going on in your life and then come back to work.’ She was heavenly to me.

Now the only immediate problem to solve was, where did I go?

We loved the house in Hidden Hills, but just as the kids had warned us, it was too cut off out there. If you’re taking life easy, it’s perfect. But Ozzy was either writing the album or on tour, and I was doing a daily show in central LA, and the location of the house was adding around ninety minutes to my journey time. Invariably we’d end up staying in our small, one-bedroom apartment in Sierra Towers. It was a fun and interesting place to be – Elton had a place there, as well as Courteney Cox, and Cher – but it was tiny, and when me and Ozzy were there, plus our housekeeper Saba and probably one or two of the kids at any given time, it was ridiculously cramped. So a couple of months earlier I had put Hidden Hills on the market and found a readily available house to rent in Walden Drive, Beverly Hills.

It was a Spanish-style, two-storey house, set back from the road behind a cluster of small trees and bushes. Consequently it was pretty gloomy inside, which proved rather fitting considering the state of our marriage. This meant that, having left my husband sleeping at Hidden Hills, I still had two other properties to choose from, but instead I checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel. I’d been staying there since I was a teenager and it had always been my home from home in LA. I felt comfortable there.

What was I to do? Was I to tell the kids? Was I to tell Tony and Geezer? Was I to tell our friends? I was numb. Ozzy had been clean for seven years. It had taken so long to get there. So much heartache and pain for us. So much effort from him to get himself sober. Every day it’s hard work to battle those demons, and he’d done it. I had just presumed that he was sailing. That he was on the right road. That he was on skis going down the perfect slope. He’d got his dignity back, he’d regained his respect. He was a stronger man, mentally and physically. Now he’d thrown all that away. And at this point in his life, he was a man with great principles. He was a force to be reckoned with. He wasn’t playing the victim or a clown any more, he was his own man. And he was a beacon of hope for so many people in positions similar to his; living proof that you never give up.

Through all of these dark thoughts I remembered everything I’d learnt going to family week at rehab. That this is a disease. A devastating, painful disease. I just wanted to take him in my arms and cuddle him and tell him, ‘It’s going to be all right.’ The saddest thing was having to tell the kids and our friends. I knew I had to. To keep it secret would have been the worst thing to do because you’re protecting that person. And everybody was so disappointed and sad for him.

Over the next couple of days, Ozzy left Hidden Hills and went to the house in Walden Drive. And so I met up with him. His attitude at that time was, ‘What the fuck? I had a slip. Forget it. I’m never doing it again.’ But his ‘slip’, I calculated, had lasted seven months. From his journals I’d found out that he’d started drinking the previous January. Seven months of abusing himself and living a lie and fucking with my head out of guilt. Because every time he saw me he was cold and confrontational, looking for an argument, looking to fight. I’d been thirty-two years with this man. He’d always said we were like bread and butter. We were a team. Again, I wasn’t going to walk away because my heart went out to him. And besides, we had a wedding to look forward to. Jack was getting married on 7 October.