Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (22 page)

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.

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.

I was just trying to find the strength to keep walking.

The moment the Black Sabbath album went to number one in America should have been a defining moment for me as well as for Ozzy, a time of supreme celebration. I had worked my butt off to help get it there, for years and years. But I was numb. Just numb.

The new house was sitting there, ready for me to move into, but I felt so overwhelmed by it. My entire life was there, all sixty years of it, in boxes, everything I had. But every time I went there, I couldn’t cope. I would walk in the front door, take a look round, then run off back to the hotel and hide. I would literally pull the sheets over my head thinking, I can’t do this. And so it went on, week after week. I just couldn’t get myself together. I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t
want
to begin.

Meanwhile, Sabbath were off touring Australia and New Zealand, and I decided to take a long weekend away and flew to Mexico with Aimee and her boyfriend Michael. I just needed to get away, and thought that a change of scene might make me feel better about my life. How wrong I was.

It was just my luck that someone recognised me at once. The very next morning after I got there the place was surrounded by paparazzi. Someone had sold the story to a Belfast newspaper, and once it was out that I was staying there, photographers pursued us everywhere we went, even during a day trip on a boat. There are pictures of me looking suicidal, as if I’m about to chuck myself over the side and be done with it. But actually I was deep in thought, mulling over my problems and wondering what to do next. I didn’t feel settled anywhere, I just felt lost. I might as well have stayed at the bloody hotel in LA.

Straight after the second relapse, I had said to Ozzy that it was going to take at least a year of sobriety on his part to get us back together. I told him it had to be an AA meeting a day, working the steps religiously and a full commitment to staying clean and sober. You can’t just say, OK, I’m fine now; you have to work at it over a long period of time.

But I missed my old life, I missed
him
. I wanted him back. So it became my mission to make him see what he had in life and, more importantly, what he could lose. I wanted him to look at everything he had worked for, and what he was throwing away because of the fucking drink and drugs. I wanted to scream at him, ‘Are you fucking
mad
? Are you so juvenile that you can’t get a handle on your behaviour?’

The pictures of me staring out to sea in Mexico went global. Ozzy was in Australia when he saw them, and the very next day he put a letter on his Facebook page, an open letter which read:

For the last year and a half I have been drinking and taking drugs. I was in a very dark place and was an asshole to the people I love most, my family. However, I am happy to say that I am now 44 days sober. Just to set the record straight, Sharon and I are not divorcing. I’m just trying to be a better person. I would like to apologise to Sharon, my family, my friends and my bandmates for my insane behaviour during this period… and my fans. God bless, Ozzy

The next morning I woke up to Ozzy’s statement. I was stunned. After reading it, I realised he had come a very long way in the forty-four days he’d been sober. I admired his honesty, and truly felt that he wanted his family back. And where he said he was trying to be a better person, I was a hundred per cent sure that he was trying. So I texted him and told him how proud I was of him, and how brave I thought he’d been.