‘Darling,’ said Sharon, a few months after the Bark at the Moon tour, when she found out that she was pregnant with Kelly. ‘I’ve heard about this great place in Palm Springs where you can take a break before the next tour. It’s a hotel, and they have classes every day where they teach you how to drink like a gentleman.’
‘Really?’ I said.
In my head, I was going, That’s it! I’ve been doing it wrong. That must be why I’ve been getting these terrible hangovers. I need to learn how to drink like James Bond!
‘What’s the name of this place?’ I said.
‘The Betty Ford Center. Have you heard of it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Well, it just opened, and it’s run by the wife of a former president. I think you’ll have a good time there.’
‘Sounds magic,’ I said. ‘Sign me up.’
‘Actually, I’ve already booked you in for the week after the baby’s due,’ Sharon replied.
In the end, Kelly arrived on October 28, 1984. It was an eventful birth, to say the least. For some insane reason, Sharon had decided that she didn’t want an epidural. But then as soon as the contractions started, she went, ‘I’ve changed my mind! Get me the anaesthetist!’ Now, for Sharon to say that meant that she was in fucking agony—’cos my wife can take a bit of pain, certainly a lot more than I can. But the nurse wasn’t having any of it. She goes, ‘Mrs Osbourne, you do realise that there are people in third world countries who give birth without an epidural all the time, don’t you?’ Big mistake, that was. Sharon sat up in bed and screamed,
‘LISTEN, YOU FUCKHEAD, THIS ISN’T A FUCKING THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, SO GET ME A FUCKING ANAESTHETIST!’
An hour later, Kelly came out into the world, screaming—and she hasn’t stopped since, bless her. She’s a real chip off the old block, is Kelly. I think that’s why I’ve always felt so protective of her. It certainly wasn’t easy, leaving my beautiful little girl with Sharon and the nurses only a few hours after she was born, but at the same time I knew I had to get my drinking under control. With any luck, I thought, I’ll come home from Palm Springs a new man. So the next morning I got on the plane, drank three bottles of champagne in first class, landed at LAX twelve hours later, threw up, had a few toots of cocaine, then passed out in the back of a limo as it drove me to the Betty Ford Center. I hope this place is relaxing, I thought, ’cos I’m knackered.
I’d never even heard the word ‘rehab’ before. And I certainly didn’t know that Betty Ford—the wife of President Gerald Ford—had been an alcoholic herself. While I was on tour I never spent much time watching telly or looking at newspapers, so I had no idea what a big deal the clinic was, or that the press had been calling it ‘Camp Betty’. In my head, I imagined this beautiful oasis of a hotel out in the middle of the Californian desert, with a shimmering swimming pool outside, a golf course, lots of hot chicks in bikinis everywhere, and all these Hugh Hefner types in velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, leaning against an outdoor bar, while a middle-aged woman with a voice like Barbara Woodhouse said, ‘OK, gentlemen, after me: take the olive, stir it around the martini, pick up the glass with your fingers arranged like so.
That’s right, good, good. Now, take a sip, count to three, and do it again. Slowly, slowly.’
This is going to be my dream holiday of a lifetime, I said to myself.
But when I got there, the place looked more like a hospital than a hotel. Mind you, the grounds were stunning: freshly sprinkled lawns, tall palm trees and man-made lakes everywhere, and these huge, brown, alien- looking mountains looming in the background.
I walk in the door and Betty herself is waiting for me. She’s a tiny little thing. Polo-neck sweater, big hairdo. Not much of a sense of humour, by the look of it.
‘Hello, Mr Osbourne,’ she goes. ‘I’m Mrs Ford. I spoke with your wife Sharon a few days ago.’
‘Look, Betty, d’you mind if I check in a bit later?’ I say. ‘I’m gasping. Terrible flight. Where’s the bar?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The bar. It must be around here somewhere.’
‘You do know where you are, don’t you, Mr Osbourne?’
‘Er, yeah?’
‘So you’ll know that we don’t… have a bar.’
‘How do you teach people to drink properly, then?’
‘Mr Osbourne, I think your wife might have misled you slightly. We don’t teach you how to drink here.’
‘You don’t?’
‘We teach you not to drink.’
‘Oh. Maybe I should stay somewhere else, then.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not an option, Mr Osbourne. Your wife was… How can I put this? She was very insistent.’
I can’t even begin to describe the disappointment. It was almost as bad as the boredom.
After one hour in that place, I felt like I’d been there a thousand years. The thing I hated most about the weeks that followed was talking about my drinking in front of all these strangers during the group sessions. Although I learned some pretty cool things. One bloke was a dentist from LA. His wife found out about his drinking and she was on his case twenty-four hours a day. So he emptied the tank of wind-screen-washer fluid in his BMW, refilled it with gin and tonic, disconnected the plastic tube from the nozzles on the bonnet, and re-routed it so it came out of one of the air vents under the dashboard. Whenever he wanted a drink, all he had to do was get in his car, put the tube in his mouth, pull on the indicator stalk, and he’d get a squirt of G&T down his throat. It worked brilliantly, apparently, until one day there was a really bad traffic jam and he turned up at work so out of his shitter that he accidentally drilled a hole in the head of one of his patients.
I’m telling you, the ingenuity of alcoholics is something else. If only it could be put to some kind of good use. I mean, if you said to an alcoholic, ‘Look, the only way for you to get another drink is to cure cancer,’ the disease would be history in five seconds.
As well as the group sessions, I had to see a therapist on my own. It was hard, being sober and having to discuss all the things I’d just found out were wrong with me. Like being dyslexic and having attention deficit disorder. (They didn’t add the word ‘hyperactivity’ to it until a few years later.) It explained a lot, I suppose. The shrink said that my dyslexia had given me a terrible insecurity complex, so I couldn’t take rejection or failure or pressure of any sort, which was why I was self-medicating with booze. She also said that because I was poorly educated, and knew I was poorly educated, I always thought people were taking me for a ride, so I didn’t trust anyone. She was right, but it didn’t help that I usually was being taken for a ride—until Sharon came along. Mind you, I had moments of coked-up paranoia when I didn’t trust my wife, either.
The shrink also told me that I have an addictive personality, which means that I do everything addictively. And, on top of that, I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes it all ten times worse. I’m like a walking dictionary of psychiatric disorders, I am. It blew my mind. And it took me a long time to accept any of it.
My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I’d been without drink or drugs in my adult life, and the comedown was horrendous. Everyone else was going through the same thing, but I can’t say that made me feel any better. At first, they put me in a room with a guy who owned a bowling alley, but he snored like an asthmatic horse, so I moved and ended up with a depressive mortician. I said to him, ‘Look, if you suffer from depression, why the fuck do you work in a mortuary?’
‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I do.’
The mortician snored even louder than the bowling alley guy—he was like a moose with a tracheotomy. The whole room shook. So I ended up spending every night on the sofa in the lobby, shivering and sweating.
Eventually, Sharon came to get me. I’d been in there six weeks. I looked better—I’d lost a bit of weight—but I’d got the whole rehab thing wrong. I thought it was supposed to cure me.
But there ain’t no cure for what I’ve got. All rehab can do is tell you what’s wrong with you and then suggest ways for you to get better. Later, when I realised it wasn’t a solution by itself, I used to go there just to take the heat off myself a bit when things got out of hand. Rehab can work, but you’ve got to want it. If you really want to quit, you can’t say, ‘Well, I want to quit today, but I might have a drink next week at my friend’s wedding.’ You’ve got to commit, then live each day as it comes. Every morning, you’ve got to wake up and say, ‘OK, today’s gonna be one more day without a drink,’ or a cigarette, or a pill, or a joint, or whatever it is that’s been killing you.
That’s as much as you can hope for when you’re an addict.
