eight-ball—an eighth of an ounce of coke—from my dealer.
‘This stuff’s gonna knock your head off,’ the bloke had told me.
As soon as I got back to the bungalow I went over to the bookshelves and hid the plastic bag inside this hardback novel. ‘Third shelf up, six books to the left,’ I kept repeating, so I’d remember. I was planning to save it for a special occasion, but that night I was having a bit of a bad comedown, so I decided to have a little toot. I made sure that Sharon was asleep, tiptoed out of the bedroom, went over to the bookshelves, counted three up and six across, then opened up the novel. No coke. Fuck.
Maybe it was six shelves up and three books from the left?
Still no coke.
So I sneaked out of the bungalow and knocked on the window of the room where Tommy was staying. ‘Pssst!’ I whispered. ‘Hey, Tommy! Are you awake, man? I can’t find the fucking coke.’
The second I said that, there was this clattering noise behind me.
Sharon had flung open the window of our bungalow.
‘IS THIS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR, YOU FUCKING DRUG ADDICT?’ she shouted, emptying the bag of coke on to a sheet of paper.
‘Sharon,’ I said. ‘Be cool. Don’t do anything cra—’
But then she goes puff, and blows all the coke into the garden.
Before I even have time to react, Sharon’s Great Dane comes lolloping out from his kennel, and starts licking up the coke from the grass like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted in his life. I’m thinking, This ain’t gonna be good news. Then the dog’s tail goes straight out—BOING!—and he takes this enormous shit. I’ve never seen such a big shit in my life, and it goes all over the water fountain in the courtyard. Then the dog takes off. He’s a fucking huge dog, this Great Dane, so when he runs he does some damage, knocking over plant pots, denting cars, trampling over flower beds, but he keeps it up for three days and three nights straight, his tongue hanging out, his tail still standing on end.
By the time the coke wore off, I swear the dog had lost four pounds. He’d developed a bit of a taste for the old waffle dust, too.
He was always trying to sniff it out after that.
We got married in Hawaii on the way to a gig in Japan. It was a small ceremony on the island of Maui. Don Arden showed up, but only because he wanted Sharon to sign some paper-work. My mum and my sister Jean came, too. Tommy was my best man. The funny thing about getting married in America was that we needed to get a blood test before they’d give us a licence. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bloke from the lab had called back and said,
‘Mr Osbourne, we appear to have found some blood in your alcohol.’
There was a lot of drinking at that wedding, not to mention seven bottles of Hennessy in the wedding cake. If you’d been breathalysed after eating a slice of that stuff, you’d have gone to jail. And I was smoking some killer weed, too.
‘Maui-wowy’, the local dealer called it.
The stag night was a joke. I got so fucked up in the hotel, I missed it. There’s a photograph of me crashed out in the room as everyone’s getting ready to leave. Fucking classic.
The wedding night was even worse. I didn’t even make it back to the room to spend the night with my new wife. At five in the morning, the hotel manager had to call her room and say, ‘Will you please come and get your husband. He’s asleep in the corridor and blocking the maids.’
It wasn’t long after I almost pissed in my new father-in-law’s face that he stopped calling me Ozzy. He took to calling me ‘Vegetable’ instead. As in, ‘Fuck off, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Die, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Get out of my fucking house, right now, Vegetable.’ I could understand why the bloke was upset—no one likes to get piss splashed in their direction—but I thought that was a bit much.
Mind you, it was nothing compared with how he’d talk to Sharon. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have your own father say such fucking horrific things to you, but Sharon could take it. She was unbelievably tough like that. And I suppose she was just used to it.
Most of the time it was me who got upset. I’d sit there and ask myself, How can a human being even come up with that shit? Never mind say it to their own flesh and blood. It was just the vilest stuff, from the depths of the lowest places.
Then, the next thing you knew, they were friends again.
That’s how Sharon was raised—and why she’s so extreme. But I needed someone like her in my life, because she could stand up to me. In fact, standing up to me was nothing compared with standing up to her father.
In the end, what happened between Sharon and her old man was tragic. At the time, I was too out of it on booze and drugs to know exactly what went down, and it’s not my place to say much about it now. All I know is that Sharon found out that Don was having an affair with a girl younger than she was; that we left Jet Records, which made Don go apeshit; and that we had to pay him $1.5 million to buy out our contract and stop him bankrupting us with lawsuits.
There had always been bad blood between the two of them, but it got out of control. Eventually, they stopped talking to each other altogether, and the silence continued for almost twenty years.
If any good came out of that situation, it was that we borrowed as much dough as we could to buy out all of my contracts, so that we weren’t controlled by anyone. I remember Sharon going in for a meeting with Essex Music and saying, ‘OK, how much do you want to fuck off? This is going to get ugly, because we’re not playing along any more. Just give us the number, and we’ll pay it.’
A week later, I had my own publishing company.
Meanwhile, Don might have thought I was a vegetable, but from the moment Sharon bought out my contract, he never stopped trying to get it back—usually by attempting to fuck up our marriage. He could be a really devious guy when he wanted to be, could my father-in-law. One time, for example, I was staying with Sharon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and we’d rented this very conspicuous white Rolls-Royce Corniche to ride around town in. But then I got shitfaced, we had this crazy fight about something, and Sharon fucked off, saying she was going back to England. Literally two minutes after she walked out of the door, the phone rang. It was Don. ‘I need to talk to you, Veg… er, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent.’
Looking back, he must have had someone outside the hotel, looking out for Sharon driving the Roller by herself. Otherwise, how would he have known that I was alone? The last thing I wanted to do was talk to him, but I couldn’t say no. The guy was terrifying. If you believed the rumours, he kept a loaded gun in his desk.
So Don came over and started telling me the most vile things you could ever imagine about my wife. It was the most disgusting stuff I’d ever heard. It was inhuman, what he said.
And he was talking about his own daughter.
Eventually, he paused for breath, then asked me, ‘Did you know all that, Ozzy? Did you know what your wife’s really like?’
Obviously, he wanted me to go crazy, leave Sharon, return to Jet Records, and start over.
But I wasn’t gonna give him the pleasure.
He had no right to come to my room and make up all this horrendous bullshit about my wife. I didn’t believe a single fucking word of it. Anyway, whatever Sharon had done, it couldn’t have been any worse than what I’d done. And it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what Don himself was doing. But I thought that the best way to piss him off would be just to act like it was no big deal.
‘Yeah, Don,’ I said. ‘I know all that about Sharon.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And?’
‘And what, Don? I love her.’
‘If you want to get the marriage annulled, we can always arrange that for you, y’know?’
‘No thanks, Don.’
I could never believe what that guy was willing to do to his own family. Years later, for example, we found out that when he’d been managing me—and before then, even—he’d used Sharon as a shield. All of his companies,
