Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (8 page)

5

In My Opinion

Sharing a joke with young Mr Bieber.

I
count Louis Walsh as a
proper
friend, not one of those ‘showbiz’ ones that air-kiss you at parties while looking over your shoulder for someone more interesting.

After I quit
The X Factor
, we stayed in regular touch, talking on the phone at least once a week from wherever we were in the world. We still do. It’s been a long friendship, and Ozzy loves him too. We know each other so well. We can be at dinner with other people, and if one of them says something that’s a bit up their own arse, or whatever, we sort of glance at each other and know we’re thinking
exactly
the same thing. If he comes to LA, we hang out, and likewise if we’re both in London at the same time.

One day, in early 2010, he called me.

‘Sharon, how do you fancy coming over to Ireland to do judges’ house with me this summer?’

It wasn’t his ‘house’ at all, it was some Irish castle hotel. But it looked like a really lovely place when I checked it out online, and I adore hanging out with Louis, so how hard could it be? I was over the moon that he’d asked and said yes immediately. I would have walked on water to get there because I knew we’d have such a great time. And we did. It was just him and me, sifting through the over-twenty-fives group, and it was two days of non-stop laughter. I barely slept because, once filming had finished, we were up most of the night chatting and putting the world to rights, and then of course it was a painfully early start again the next day.

A couple of people asked me at the time if it bothered me that I wasn’t one of the main judges, but I can honestly say, hand on heart, that it didn’t. That type of thing never bothers me. Who cares if you’re having fun? It was largely the same crew and producers, so it was like going back to a family but with none of the responsibility. I just went in, got a taste of it again and left. It was fantastic. Obviously, Louis had to get clearance from Simon and all the senior production people to ask me, and they all agreed to it. But he wanted to ask me again the following year, and Simon said no! I never found out why, but Louis ended up with Sinitta.

A couple of days having a laugh in Ireland was just what I needed. I was still recovering from a very different TV experience. In March 2010 I’d headed to New York to take part in
Celebrity Apprentice
on behalf of my colon cancer programme.

In the American version, the Alan Sugar role is taken by property magnate Donald Trump, who probably owns half of New York City. He’s a fabulously eccentric character; I have only ever met him socially, but he has always been great to me and my family. I had been approached by NBC, the network that airs
America’s Got Talent
, asking if I would like to take part. Just as with the British version, the show entices celebrities with the promise of large amounts of money that they can earn for their nominated charity. So I think to myself, what a great way to raise awareness and money for the colon cancer programme that I run at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles.

My colon cancer programme enables people to get free testing. We don’t do research; it’s more like a helping hand, enabling patients to get to and from treatment as well as providing other kinds of practical help, using volunteers.

The show involves a solid month of filming, six days a week, so it’s a big commitment. But I thought it would be good to do. If you get through to the final, you can raise nearly a million dollars, so that’s all I thought about when it came to saying yes or no. I had never watched the show, not a single episode. I’d seen the ads, but of course that’s just a montage of rapid-fire clips. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into. Silly, silly me.

It’s a game, of course it is, but this was gladiatorial combat. I didn’t know that I was to be pitched against the other contestants and goaded into believing that everyone is out to get you. As it was for charity, I imagined it would be more supportive and laid-back, so I went into it in total innocence and with a warm, fuzzy feeling of loveliness towards everyone… that lasted for about five fucking minutes. It was a vipers’ nest.

There were seven men and seven women. On the women’s team, there was Holly Robinson Peete, an American actress and singer; former wrestler Maria Kanellis; Olympic gold-medal swimmer Summer Sanders; Victoria’s Secret model Selita Ebanks; comedienne Carol Leifer and singer Cyndi Lauper, who turned out to be the one saving grace. I absolutely loved her. I had met Cyndi, but this experience brought us much closer together. I had also met Holly, though I didn’t know her well. The rest of the team were total strangers.

It was horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. One minute you’re there thinking it’s going to be a bit of fun, the next you’re running across the city in a muck sweat thinking, Fucking hell, what have I got myself into?

And the producers wanted you to start bickering with each other, as it makes better telly. They would get you on your own and tell you that one of your team-mates had just said something derogatory and inevitably you would become paranoid, thinking, Bloody hell, did they
really
say that? It did my head in – I just hated it.

From day one, everyone started to make allies, plotting in corners about how they were going to bring you down. At one point, some of the other women had a go at Cyndi, who was very passionate, very animated and, shock horror, had an opinion. She was doing the show to support a gay charity and was very determined about doing well to raise funds for it, and for some reason the others started giving her a hard time and taking the piss.

So I said, ‘Listen, this is Cyndi Lauper you’re talking about, who the
fuck
are you? Don’t be so disrespectful to this woman.’ I became her protector, in a way, because she’s a lovely person with a huge heart and there she was being ridiculed for effect on a bloody TV show. I wasn’t having it. I made it very clear that despite their nefarious efforts to get more airtime and to gain notoriety by being bitchy, it was all going to end up on the cutting-room floor because they were fucking nobodies compared to Cyndi. I think it’s fair to say that we weren’t getting on as a team.

We were miked up the entire time, and so the whole world got to hear us constantly sniping at each other. I don’t get it. When men compete, they are very straightforward about it; it’s rarely personal. But women so often seem to get behind-the-back mean. It’s a fatal flaw of our gender. Cyndi kept saying to all of us, ‘It’s just a TV show, don’t take this personally,’ but we didn’t listen, we all took the bait. More fool us.

I came within seconds of walking out several times a day, but there were the potential winnings to consider. How could I give up that chance? I’d have been called a quitter, and rightly so. But God, it was a tough show to do. It was a total guilt trip because they knew that you wouldn’t walk out on the opportunity to help others – it totally messed with our heads.

We were staying at the Trump International Hotel and had to be in front of Donald by bloody 7 a.m. each day. There was no time to wake up properly or even have a proper breakfast: a takeaway coffee and muffin in a bag were thrust into our hands to eat on the way.

Sometimes we were working through until 1 a.m. then getting up again a few hours later, so it was punishing stuff. It seemed to me that they were deliberately wearing us down to make us vulnerable and tearful. I hated it, and throughout every last, soul-destroying second of doing it, I just thought of the money I would raise for my charity. Otherwise, it would have been
hasta la
bye-bye.

Tasks included writing a radio commercial for a plumbing firm and designing the interior of an apartment. (I was thrilled to win that one!) I reached the final three out of fourteen, at which point we had to become a personal trainer for a day, getting people in and motivating them to do a workout. We literally had to pull members of the public off the street and persuade them to come and be filmed doing exercises, then call all the famous people we knew and get them to sponsor us. You had to raise money for every task, so it was hideously embarrassing having to ring your friends and put them on the spot by asking for donations. I hate asking people for money, even for charity. Hate it.

For the first task we had to run a restaurant, and I got everyone I knew in New York to come along. God, it was hell. By the end of the series, I should think every time one of my friends saw my name flash up on their phone, they just switched the bloody thing off. Those who accidentally answered probably wanted to say ‘Fuck off’.

I raised about $165,000 for the workout assignment, but Holly beat me by $50,000 because she found one big sponsor who came in at the last minute. Until that point, we were running neck and neck.

When Donald fired me, he said it was because he didn’t feel I was strong enough for the next assignment, which was designing a new flavour for a Snapple drink, for fuck’s sake! But as I left that famous boardroom for the last time, all I could think was, Thank fuck for that, now I can go home.

Even though I wanted to win it for my charity, it was tough because I didn’t want that to mean that Holly would lose out on raising money for hers. It was a truly invidious situation. Her father has Parkinson’s disease and her teenage son has autism, so she set up the HollyRod Foundation to offer help to families living with those conditions. The two finalists were Holly and Bret Michaels of the band Poison. Bret is lovely, and I adore him, but he got very sick after we had filmed all the challenges and returned home complaining of a severe headache. He suffered a brain haemorrhage, and was in hospital for several days before returning to New York to film the finale, when he won a huge amount of money for his chosen charity, the American Diabetes Association.

On camera during the finale Donald said that he had spoken to Bret’s doctors. ‘They didn’t want you to be here tonight. At all. Believe me, not at all. Are you risking your life being here? This is a lot of pressure.’ Quick as a shot Bret came back, ‘Lately it seems like me just standing up is risking my life.’

I knew just how he felt. Once again, I had said yes to something because I thought people might think badly of me if I didn’t do it, and once again I regretted it. Still, at least this time I could console myself that it was for charity and that I would surely go to heaven.

If I can only stop fucking swearing.

If reality shows are the most life-sapping way to earn a crust in show business, then filming adverts must surely rank as the easiest. It’s big money, they usually take only one or two days to film and, if the premise and script are good, they don’t damage your reputation. They might even enhance it.

The Super Bowl is the annual championship of the NFL, the American football league. It’s their equivalent of the Cup Final, and a huge event in the US sporting calendar. But it also attracts millions of TV viewers who have no interest in sport because of the big half-time show and the hilarious, budget-busting ads that run in the breaks. It’s part of the tradition that all the major companies pay a fortune to do a special advert that’s really over the top and funny.

Ozzy had done one years before, for Pepsi Twist, which showed Kelly and Jack holding the can before turning into Donny and Marie Osmond before Ozzy’s horrified eyes, and it had gone down really well. Then, in 2011, a marketing company approached us about Ozzy doing an ad for a big US electronics firm called Best Buy. It was a really funny idea, and we jumped at it.

The premise was that new technology moves so fast, it’s hard for old rockers like Ozzy to keep up. The set was like a space station, and they had Ozzy in an intergalactic suit like something out of
Star Wars
.

In the ad, he faces the camera, holds up a mobile phone and says, ‘Welcome to 4G!’ before someone shouts, ‘Cut!’ and an assistant wanders into shot to tell him that it’s now been updated to 5G. Of course, Ozzy being Ozzy, he can’t grasp this and he keeps getting it wrong before muttering, ‘How many bloody Gs are there?’

Enter stage left Justin Bieber, also in an intergalactic suit, who comes up to Ozzy and says, ‘I’ll take it from here,’ before doing a little dance and declaring, ‘It’s Bieber, 6G fever,’ the message being that technology moves fast, so don’t get left behind. The ad ends with me and Ozzy standing on the sidelines watching Justin, and me saying, ‘What’s a Six G?’ and Ozzy replying, ‘What the fuck’s a Bieber?’

Funny, right? Except that the last bit wasn’t a spoof, because Ozzy genuinely had absolutely no idea who Justin Bieber was.

Justin was sixteen at the time and still looked really young with a cute teen haircut. He was so sweet and polite to everyone, and he turned up on time and was generally very eager to please. I met his mum, who seemed to be a lovely woman, and his manager was there too, overseeing things.

Many times you see kids that get an astonishing level of fame quite quickly, and they don’t always handle it well. They crash and burn. But at the time, I remember thinking that Justin was surrounded by good people and seemed very grounded.