Fierce (24 page)

W
HEN
the cameras came back to film us for the second series it struck me that all the fun of being in
The Osbournes
had gone for me. It was a combination of things that made me start to hate being on the show. On a superficial level, the novelty of suddenly being able to walk into my favourite nightclubs after years of queuing down Sunset Boulevard wore off almost as soon as it had begun. So did the endless supply of freebies we were sent from various companies such as computer-game manufacturers because they wanted free publicity. It was crazy the amount of stuff we were given. I actually really struggled with the whole freebie thing because when I sat back and thought about it, I couldn’t understand what we’d done to deserve a new games console or whatever else they were sending. As a family we were just living our lives, so why were we being sent free shit? It started to trouble me.

No one ever sent me clothes back then because everyone thought I was too fat. I was a UK size ten. A size ten. How is that too fat?
Someone was actually sitting in a fancy design studio somewhere saying, ‘Don’t send Kelly Osbourne anything. She’s a size ten and far too fat for our clothes.’ I couldn’t have given a shit about whether I got free clothes or not, I was more than happy to spend my own money on my own clothes. But I did start to become really self-conscious about my size.

Living in Los Angeles had always been a something I found difficult because I wasn’t one of those girls with a fake tan and blonde hair (although I am naturally blonde, which is more than can be said for most LA girls). I don’t have massive tits and super-long legs. From the moment we moved to LA when I was thirteen, I stood out because I wouldn’t conform to what the majority of people living there perceive as beautiful: I’m short, I have milky white skin and I wear big knickers! People thought I was ugly because in America they’re obsessed with physical perfection.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully aware that the day I decided to do
The Osbournes
was the day I sold my soul to the devil, but recognising it didn’t stop the pain. I found myself looking for something to numb my anxiety.

W
HILE
we filmed the second series of the show in the summer of 2002, my mum was in and out of hospital being treated for colon cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy the whole time. If I’d not slept with her at the hospital, I’d be at home. That’s when my problems with Vicodin would be worse. I’d get up in the morning, open the white blinds and see a queue of photographers lining the
street in the LA sunshine outside Doheny. I’d hear the camera crew wandering around the house and my heart would sink and I’d feel like total shit. I’d quit my job at the music management company, which meant I could go out every night if I wanted and, because the camera crew were simply recording our lives as they were, I could behave however I wanted. There were no rules.

By this point, I was taking Vicodin every time I went out – which was most nights – and then one morning, while we were filming the second series of the show in the summer, I woke up and took a Vicodin for breakfast. I don’t know why I did it.

My bed – a silver four-poster – was in the middle of the room and I leaned out that morning and grabbed the small bottle of painkillers sitting on top of the table next to it. It wasn’t that I wanted to get high. No – it was not ever, ever, ever about getting high. Vicodin made me feel like a different person because it blocked out the pain. And for the first time since I’d moved to America, I was starting to feel like I belonged and that I could cope with the show.

Eventually, swallowing one Vicodin when I woke up wasn’t doing the trick any more so I quickly moved on to taking two and then three. Soon I was waking up, leaning out of my bed and emptying six into my hand and knocking them back. Then I’d have another six for lunch and another six for dinner. My friends started calling me Noddy because every time we went out, I would fall asleep due to the effects of the painkillers. While at the beginning they gave me a sort of buzz, they were now making me fall asleep; it didn’t matter where I was.

I’d usually get home from a night out at 3 a.m. and go straight to bed and sleep until 4 p.m. When I woke up I’d grab a handful of pills, shove them in my mouth and swallow them before I’d even had chance to open my eyes properly. I didn’t bother hiding my bottle of pills, instead I kept them on my bedside table. You want to hide something? Put it in the most obvious place and I guarantee no one will see it.

There would be the usual chaos going on outside my bedroom with the dogs barking, my mum chatting, my dad wandering around, and this was all being captured by the MTV camera crew. Truthfully, the film crew didn’t want to work with me – they didn’t like me. No one liked me, including my own family. My addiction to Vicodin was beginning to make me moody, difficult and hateful. Who wants to be around someone like that? I was constantly fighting with Jack – massive fights which usually ended in my smacking or punching him. No matter how angry he got though, he’d never hit me back, but he’d shout and I’d scream. It must have been horrendous for the film crew at times.

Behind my closed bedroom door, I’d pull myself out of my bed in the late afternoon, pad across the thick cream carpet to my en-suite bathroom where I’d run a bath and look for my phone to call my friends and find out where they were going out that night. Sometimes they would come over and we’d get ready at our house or I’d meet them somewhere on Sunset like The Roxy. By the time I left the house at 10 p.m., I’d usually taken about thirty tablets. Someone who’d never taken Vicodin before would almost certainly overdose after ten pills, let alone thirty.

I had built up a resistance over the months I’d started to take them and I was feeling no side-effects apart from constantly falling asleep. I was taking so many pills that during dinner or even in the noisiest clubs I would just doze off and my head would hit the table with a bang – I would literally nod off, hence my nickname Noddy. The music would be thumping around me and I’d be fast asleep in some corner somewhere.

On 14 September 2002,
The Osbournes
won an Emmy in the Outstanding Non-fiction Program (Reality) category, which was the first Emmy MTV had won in its twenty-one-year history. I went with my mum, who was very weak and still undergoing chemotherapy, to collect the award. I barely remember it. I was so high.

Some of my friends knew what I was taking and some didn’t. By now, you might be wondering whether or not my mum and dad knew? They had their suspicions, but I denied it when they asked me and I was very good at lying about it. My mum would come into my bedroom and perch on the end of the bed and say, ‘Kelly, my darling, are you taking something? What is it that you’re doing? Please tell me. Please tell your mummy.’

I would just deny it. What could she do? I was seventeen and she had no proof.

Melinda and Big Dave had their suspicions too. But there was nothing they could do either because I just kept saying that everything was OK.

One night I sat in the middle of my bed with my back against the wall, looking at the Andy Warhol print of Marilyn Monroe I had hanging up, and thought, ‘Kelly, you’ve got a problem.’ That was probably the first time I’d addressed it in my own head. But by then it was too late and I was addicted. I was taking Vicodin because I had to: my body needed it and I was thinking I would die if I didn’t take it. Those pills were consuming my whole life.

T
HERE
was another problem too. The music career I’d launched in 2002 was starting to make me miserable. By now I was at the
height of my addiction, taking up to fifty painkillers a day. At fifty a day I could have overdosed of course, but I didn’t want to. There were times it would have helped me escape the misery of my addiction, which was now making me more unhappy than before I’d started to take pills.

In the autumn of 2003, we were filming the third series of
The Osbournes
and I’d signed to the record label Sanctuary. The only real positive at that time was being asked to do a duet with my father on a cover of the Black Sabbath hit ‘Changes’. It was a song I’d always loved and being able to do it with my father was just an honour. I am his biggest fan. It was released at the beginning of December and Dad and I were going to the UK to promote it.

A couple of nights before we were due to fly out I’d gone out with my friends to a club. I was permanently out of it from Vicodin at this point and I’d come home and passed out across my bed, fully clothed with my bedroom light still on.

As I lay in bed, completely out of it, my mum, worried, had tip-toed into my bedroom. I don’t know why she’d bothered to be quiet because I was too gone to notice. I woke up to my mum, in her silk pyjamas, sitting on my bottom with her legs at either side of my waist pounding my back and screaming, ‘Kelly. Wake up, Kelly.’ I was literally soaking wet from my own piss. I was covered in it and my mum was beating my back because she thought I’d stopped breathing. As I lay there my mum kept repeating, ‘Kelly, what are you doing to yourself? What have you taken? Tell me!’ It shocked the hell out of me and it shocked the hell out of my mother. Of course she had her fears, but there was nothing she could do because the next morning, when she asked me again what I’d taken, I denied it and told her I was just drunk. Two days later, Dad and I flew out to the UK and we stayed at Welders while we promoted the single.

On the 8 December 2003, I was booked on the Channel Four chat show
Richard & Judy
to talk about the single. I’d left Dad at home with the MTV crew who’d come over with us and Uncle Tony. I used to watch Richard and Judy when they hosted
This Morning
on ITV when I was off sick from school. So not only was I so excited to be back in the UK, I was even more excited that I was going to be a guest on their show.

The show was filmed in Kennington, south London, and Big Dave had come with me. It was live from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m., so I was sitting in my dressing room at about 4 p.m. when I got a call from Mum. She asked me if I was sitting down, which instantly made my heart start thumping. She said, ‘Kelly, your father has had an accident and we need
to get you to the hospital.’ I just burst into tears. Me and Big Dave ran out of the studio and jumped into the car that had been waiting to take us back to Welders after the show. While we were in the car, Uncle Tony called and said Dad had been riding one of his quad bikes in the grounds, crashed and fallen off. My dad had a collection of quad bikes and we always used to ride them in the garden and we often used to crash. But this time it was serious and he’d been rushed into hospital.

The driver took us to Paddington Station where we sat on a train for forty minutes before getting back into a car again to Wexham Park Hospital, just outside Slough. The whole time I was worried about what state Dad would be in when we got there. I ran into the hospital nearly an hour and a half after my mum had first called and found my dad in the intensive care unit alongside about twelve or thirteen other patients all wired up to God knows how many machines.

As I stood there, staring at him helplessly, I could feel my legs shaking and I was shivering. It was awful. Really fucking awful. I thought, ‘Is my dad going to die?’ A doctor came over and introduced himself before guiding me by the arm into a private room where he asked my permission to operate as I was the next of kin. He told me that Dad had cracked vertebrae in his neck, broken eight ribs, shattered his collarbone and was suffering from blood on his lungs.