I Am Ozzy (36 page)

*

When we started to film
The Osbournes
, Sharon hadn't spoken to her father for almost twenty years. It was terribly sad, because I knew that deep down, somewhere, she loved the guy. But after everything he'd done, she'd pretty much given up on him. She'd even told the kids that their grand-father had died during the war - although it didn't take long for them to find out the real story. I remember the day it happened, in fact: we were all in the car together, driving through Beverly Hills, when Sharon suddenly hit the brakes, made an illegal U-turn, and pulled up outside Nate 'n Al's delicatessen.

Before anyone could ask her what the fuck she was doing, she was leaning out of the window and screaming, 'You fucking arsehole! YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE!'
Then I saw Don standing there on the street. He immediately started to shout back. The last thing I remember is him coming right up to the car window, until he was only inches from Sharon's face, and calling her a 'fucking whore'. Then Sharon put her foot down and sped off, leaving him coughing and spluttering in a cloud of black smoke from the tires.
Meanwhile, inside the car, there was just this stunned silence. I had no fucking idea how to explain what had just happened to the kids. Then Aimee's little voice piped up from the back seat.
'Mum, why did Tony Curtis call you a whore?'
'BECAUSE TONY CURTIS IS A FUCKING ARSE-HOLE,' came the reply.
To this day, I have no idea why Aimee thought Don was Tony Curtis. Maybe that's what Sharon had told her, or maybe she'd seen Tony Curtis on telly - at the time he was a dead-ringer for Don. But it didn't matter, 'cos that's when Sharon told the kids everything.
It wasn't the only time we bumped into Don in LA. On another occasion we'd been to see a movie at the Century City shopping mall, and we were waiting for our car at the valet stand. All of a sudden, I spotted Don behind Sharon.
'Promise me you won't go nuts,' I said.
'
Why?
'Just promise me.'
'OK, I promise.'
'Your father's standing right behind you.'
The moment I said it, one of the valet guys turned up with our car. Thank God for that, I thought.
'Get in the car,' barked Sharon.
'You're not gonna do anything crazy, are you?' I said to her.
'No.'
'You're sure about that?'
'GET IN THE FUCKING CAR.'
I got in the passenger side and closed the door. Sharon climbed into the driver's seat. Then she turned into this Satan woman. She floored the accelerator, mounted the kerb, and drove straight at her father. He had to dive into a hedge to get out of the way. She almost killed him - with about fifty people standing around as witnesses. It was terrifying.
After that we didn't see or hear from Don for years. Then, at the end of the nineties, Sharon's mother died. I don't know all the ins-and-outs of it, but Sharon's mum had taken a few funny turns over the years, and the upshot was that the two of them had stopped talking, too. They're a very intense family, the Ardens. They've always gone in for a lot of verbal abuse - which sometimes I think can be even worse than physical abuse. Anyway, a year or so after her mother died, we heard from the family in England that Don was sick and had fallen on hard times. Even though they still weren't talking, Sharon sorted him out with a place to live. Then I got a call from Sharon's brother, David. 'I've got some bad news,' he said. 'Don's got Alzheimer's.'
There was
no way
I could keep that from Sharon.
At first she brushed it off, and said she was supporting him financially anyway. But I said to her, 'Look, I don't know what your real feelings are towards your father, but I strongly advise you, if you've got anything to say to him, even if it's just to call him an arsehole again, do it now. Because with every day that goes by, he's gonna be like a dying flame.'
The thing is, I've never believed in feuds. Don't get me wrong: I've been angry with people.
Very
angry - with people like Patrick Meehan, or that lawyer who tried to bill me for a drink, or Bob Daisley. But I don't hate them. And I don't wish them any harm. I reckon hating someone is just a total fucking waste of time and effort. What do you get out of it in the end? Nothing. I'm not trying to come over like the Archangel Gabriel here. I just think that if you're pissed off with someone, call them an arsehole, get it out of your system, and move on. It's not like we're on this earth very long.
Anyway, Sharon finally decided she wanted to see him again, so he came back into our lives. He even ended up in a couple of episodes of
The Osbournes
. And I was happy about it, y'know - even though he'd called me Vegetable for most of the time I knew him. Then, when Sharon decided she wanted to renew our wedding vows - she was still going through chemo at the time - we made Don part of the ceremony, which we held on New Year's Eve at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We did it Jewish-style - with the little canopy, the broken glass, everything.
A lot of people came up to me that night and asked, 'How come you and Sharon have stayed together all this time?' My answer was the same then as it is now: I've never stopped telling my wife that I love her; I've never stopped taking her out for dinner; I've never stopped surprising her with little gifts. Unfortunately, back then, I'd never stopped drinking and taking drugs, either, so the ceremony ended much the same as our original wedding had: with me slumped in a corridor, pissed out of my brains.
The Don Arden I'd known since the early seventies just disappeared after that. The light was on but no one was home. It was a terrible way to die. I'm telling you, having seen what happened to my father-inlaw, I wouldn't wish Alzheimer's on my worst fucking enemy. Even after everything that had gone down between us over the years - even though he'd played a part in Bob Daisley's lawsuit - I felt truly sorry for him during his final years.
In the end, we put him in a care home.
I remember he had this wax build-up in his ears, and whenever we went to see him, I used to put these drops in for him. I don't know why I thought it was my job, I just did it. I suppose it probably had something to do with the immense pity I felt for him. This vicious, powerful, frightening man had become a child.

'Dad,' said Jack one day. 'When you're on the telly, d'you think people are laughing
with
you or
at
you?' The question had obviously been bothering him for a while.
'Y'know what,' I said to him, 'as long as they're laughing, I don't care.'
'But why, Dad? Why would you want to be a clown?'
'Because I've always been able to laugh at myself, Jack. Humour has kept me alive over all these

years.'

And it's true, y'know. I mean, it doesn't take much to rattle my cage, either - although, as I'm getting older, I increasingly think, Fuck it, what's the point, it'll all work out one way or another - but humour has saved my life too many times to count. And it didn't start with
The Osbournes
. Even in Black Sabbath, I was the clown. I was always the one making the others crack up.

But I felt bad for Jack.

It couldn't have been easy for him, especially during those first two years of the show, when I was this shaking, mumbling, fucked-up wreck. I can't even imagine it, to be honest with you. Same goes for Kelly. When we all became these mega-celebrities, it was the first time I really understood why all these young Hollywood starlets get doped up and go into rehab every other day of the week. It's the pressure - it's fucking ridiculous. Non-stop. Day-in, day-out. I mean, the first year we went on air, Kelly sang 'Papa Don't Preach' at the MTV Movie Awards. She had to come down this big flight of stairs with every star in the business sitting there, watching her. But she just took it by the horns. And of course she ended up loving every minute of it, as did the audience.

But she had her problems, like we all do. And it broke my heart when Jack started to get fucked up too. He took Sharon's cancer as hard as I did, to the point where he ended up on OxyContin, which they call 'hillbilly heroin' in LA. I remember we had this huge blow up about it, and I said, 'What the fuck, Jack? Why are you going around getting pissed all the time? You've never wanted for a thing!
What have you ever wanted for?

He just looked at me and said, 'A father.'
I won't forget that moment in a hurry.
It was the first time I'd really had to face the cost of how I'd been living all those years - the cost to

my son, who I loved so much, who I was so proud of, but who I'd never been there for. It was a terrible feeling.
All I could say was: 'Jack, I'm so sorry.'
Jack got sober after that. But I didn't.

By August 2003, I was shaking so much that I couldn't walk, I couldn't hold anything, I couldn't communicate. It got to the point where Sharon started to get pissed off with my doctors. The stuff they were giving me seemed to be making me
worse
, not better.

So then I got a new doctor, Allan Ropper, who was based in the same teaching hospital in Boston where I'd been told I didn't have MS in the early nineties. He was treating Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease at the time - Sharon had read an article about him in
People
magazine. The first thing Dr Ropper did when we flew out to see him was throw away all the pills I was on. Then he checked me into hospital for five days and ran every test ever invented on me. After that, I had to wait another week for the results,

Finally, me and Sharon went back to his office to find out what the fuck was wrong with me, once and for all.
'I've think I've got to the bottom of this,' he said. 'Basically, Mr Osbourne, you have a very, very rare condition, which is caused by your mother and your father both having the same damaged chromosome in their DNA. And when I say it's very rare, think one-in-a-billion rare. The good news is that it's not MS or Parkinson's disease. The bad news is that we don't really have a name for it. The best description is probably Parkinson -ian syndrome.'
'Is that what's been giving me the tremor?'
'Absolutely.'
'And it's hereditary? It has nothing to do with the booze or the drugs?'
'The alcohol and some of the drugs you were taking were definitely making it worse. But they weren't the primary cause.'
'Can you treat it?'
'Yes. But first I have to tell you something, Mr Osbourne. If you keep drinking, and if you keep abusing drugs, you'll have to find another doctor, because I won't have you as a patient. I'm a busy man, I have a
very
long waiting list, and I can't afford to have my time wasted.'
I'd never been spoken to like that by a doctor before. And the way he looked at me, I knew he was serious.
'OK, doc,' I said. 'I'll try my hardest.'
'Good. I'm going to put you on two pills a day. You should see a vast improvement in your health.'
That was the understatement of the century, that was.
My tremors calmed down almost overnight. I could walk again. My stammer improved. I even managed to get back into the studio and record a new version of 'Changes' with Kelly.
I'd been promising to do a song for Kelly ever since I named one of the tracks on
Ozzmosis
after Aimee. She was always saying, 'How come Aimee got a song and I didn't?' In fact, I'd done a song for Jack, too - 'My Little Man' - which is also on
Ozzmosis
. So I owed Kelly - and I wanted to help her out, anyway, 'cos she's my special girl, y'know? I mean, I love all my children the same, but Kelly always seems to end up in the firing line, for some reason.
So we did 'Changes', one of my favourite songs of all time, with the lyrics changed slightly for a father and daughter. It was so good, I thought we might have a Christmas number one on our hands. Then we flew back to England in December to promote it. By then, I was off the booze - on Dr Ropper's orders - but I was still fucking around with all kinds of pills. You don't just stop being a drug addict overnight. I was Russian Rouletting it every day. At the time, I was into chloral hydrate, which is the world's oldest sleeping medication or something. But it was still a big improvement on the ridiculous amount of narcotics I'd been taking only a few months earlier, and I got through an appearance with Kelly on
Top of the Pops
with no problems. Then I drove up to Welders House with my assistant Tony for the weekend.
MTV already had a camera crew up there, because by then a lot of our family routines had become old hat, and they were desperate for some new material. But there wasn't much to shoot. I had this Yamaha Banshee 350cc quad bike - like a bullet on wheels - and I'd gun it around the fields for hours on end. So I spent most of the weekend doing just that. And on Monday morning, December 8 - the day 'Changes' went on sale - I took the bike out again.
By this point, the crew were a bit cheesed off, I think. They didn't even have the cameras rolling. I remember getting off the bike to open a gate, closing it after everyone had gone through, getting back on the bike, racing ahead along this dirt trail, then slamming on the brakes as I went down a steep embankment. But the trouble with that quad bike was that it didn't have one of those twisty throttles like you get on a motorbike. It just had a little lever that you pushed to go faster. And it was very easy to knock the lever by accident, while you were trying to control the bike, especially when it became unstable. That's exactly what happened when I got to the bottom of the embankment: the front wheels hit a pothole, my right hand slipped off the handlebar and slammed into the lever, the engine went fucking crazy, and the whole thing shot out from under me and did a backflip in the air, throwing me on to the grass. For about a millionth of a second, I thought, Oh well, that wasn't so bad.
Then the bike landed on top of me.
Crack
When I opened my eyes, my lungs were full of blood and my neck was broken - or so my doctors told me later.
OK,
now
I'm dying, I thought.

It was the Nazis' fault, believe it or not. The pothole was a little crater, made by a German bomb that had been dropped during the war. I didn't know it at the time, but the land around Welders is full of them. The German pilots would bottle out before they reached the big cities - where they might get shot down - so they'd dump their bombs over Buckinghamshire, claim they'd carried out their mission, then fuck off home.