Then we drove up to Manor Hospital in Walsall, where she was being treated.
My mum was eighty-seven, and she’d been ill for a while. She was diabetic, had kidney trouble, and her ticker was on the blink. She knew her time was up. I’d never known her go to church before, but all of a sudden she’d become very religious. She spent half the time I was there reciting prayers. She’d been raised a Catholic, so I suppose she thought she’d better catch up on her homework before going over the great divide. But she didn’t seem frightened, and she wasn’t suffering—or, if she was, she didn’t let me know. The first thing I said to her was: ‘Mum, are you in pain? You’re not just putting on a brave face, are you?’
‘No dear, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been such a worrier. Ever since you were a little baby.’
I stayed for a few days. Mum sat up in bed for hours talking to me with her arm hooked up to this whirring and bleeping dialysis machine. She seemed so well, I began to wonder what all the fuss was about. Then, on my last day there, she asked me to pull my chair closer to the bed, because she had something very important to ask me.
I leaned in really close, not knowing what to expect.
‘John,’ she said, ‘is it true?’
‘Is what true, Mum?’
‘Are you really a millionaire?’
‘Oh, for fu—’ I had to stop myself. After all, my mum was dying. So I just said, ‘I don’t really want to talk about it.’
‘Oh, go on, John, tell me. Pleeeease.’
‘OK, then. Yeah, I am.’
She smiled and her eyes twinkled like a schoolgirl’s. I thought, Well, at least I finally made her happy.
Then she said, ‘But tell me, John, are you a multi-multi-multi-multi-millionaire?’
‘C’mon, Mum,’ I said. ‘Let’s not talk about this.’
‘But I want to!’
I sighed and said, ‘OK, then. Yeah, I am.’
Her face broke into that huge grin again. Part of me was thinking, Is this really that important to her? But at the same time, I knew this moment was the closest we’d been in years.
So I just laughed. Then she laughed, too.
‘What’s it like?’ she asked, with a giggle.
‘Could be worse, Mum,’ I said. ‘Could be worse.’
After that we said our goodbyes and I flew back to California with Tony. As soon as I landed, I had to go and do a gig with Black Sabbath at the Universal Amphitheatre. I can’t remember much of it, ’cos I couldn’t concentrate. I just kept thinking about my mum, asking me if I was a millionaire. After the gig, I went back to the house in Malibu. When I opened the door, the phone was ringing.
It was Norman.
‘John,’ he said. ‘She’s gone.’
I sobbed, man.
I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
It was April 8, 2001—just forty-eight hours since we’d been talking in the hospital.
I don’t know why, but I took it very hard. One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I’m no good at dealing with people dying. It’s not that I’m afraid of it—I know that everyone’s gotta go eventually—but I can’t help thinking that there are only one or two ways of being brought into this world, but there are so many fucked-up ways of leaving it. Not that my mum went out in a bad way: Norman told me that she just went to sleep that night and never woke up.
I couldn’t face the funeral—not after what had gone down at my father’s. Besides, I didn’t want it to be a press event, which it would have been, with people asking me for a photograph outside the church. I just wanted my mum to go out in peace, without it being about me. I’d given her enough grief over the years, and I didn’t want to add to it. So I didn’t go.
I still think it was the right decision—if only because my final memory of my mum is such a fond one. I can see her so clearly, lying in the hospital bed, smiling up at me, asking what it’s like to be a ‘multi-multi-multi-multi- millionaire’, and me answering, ‘It could be worse, Mum. It could be worse.’
11. Dead Again
The first time we allowed TV cameras into our house was in 1997, the year Black Sabbath got back together. We were renting Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith’s old place in Beverly Hills. I was off the booze—most of the time, anyway—but I was still scamming as many pills as I could from any doctor who’d write me a prescription. I was smoking my head off, too. Cigars, mainly. I thought it was quite acceptable to fire up a foot-long Cuban while lying in bed at nine o’clock at night. I’d say to Sharon, ‘D’you mind?’ and she’d look up from her magazine and go, ‘Oh no, please, don’t mind me.’
I don’t think the TV guys could believe what they were seeing most of the time. On the first day, I remember this producer turning to me and saying, ‘Is it always like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘A sit-com.’
‘What d’you mean, “a sit-com”?’
‘It’s the timing,’ he said. ‘You walk in one door, the dog walks out of the other, then your daughter says, “Dad, why does the dog walk like that?” and you say, “Because it’s got four legs.” And then she goes into a huff and storms off, stage left. You couldn’t script this stuff.’
‘We’re not trying to be funny, you know.’
‘I know. That’s what makes it so funny.’
‘Things just happen to my family,’ I told him. ‘But things happen to every family, don’t they?’
‘Not like this,’ he said.
A company called September Films made the documentary—Ozzy Osbourne Uncut, they called it—and it was shown on Channel Five in Britain and the Travel Channel in America.
People went crazy over it. In the year after it came out, Five repeated it over and over. I don’t think anyone could get over the fact that we had to deal with the exact same boring, day-today bullshit as any other family. I mean, yes, I’m the crazy rock ’n’ roller who bit the head off a bat and pissed on the Alamo, but I also have a son who likes to mess around with the settings on my telly, so when I make myself a nice pot of tea, put my feet up, and try to watch a programme on the History Channel, I can’t get the fucking thing to work. That kind of stuff blew people’s minds. I think they had this idea in their heads that when I wasn’t being arrested for public intoxication, I went to a cave and hung upside down, drinking snakes’ blood. But I’m like Coco the Clown, me: at the end of the day, I come home, take off my greasepaint and my big red nose, and become Dad.
The documentary won a Rose d’Or award at the Montreux TV festival in Switzerland, and all of a sudden everyone wanted to make TV stars out of us. Now, I’ve never much liked being on telly. I just feel so hokey doing it. Plus, I can’t read scripts, and I when I see myself on screen, I get a fucking panic attack. But Sharon was all for it, so we did a deal with MTV to do a one-off appearance on Cribs, which was a bit like a cooler American version of Through the Keyhole. By then, we’d long since stopped renting Don Johnson’s old place and I’d forked out just over six million dollars for a house around the corner at 513 Doheny Road. We were living there full-time, going to Welders House only when we were in England for business or on family visits.
Again, people went crazy for it. That Cribs episode became a cult classic overnight. So one thing led to another, and MTV ended up offering us a show of our own.
Don’t ask me how all the business stuff went down, ’cos that’s Sharon’s department. As far as I was concerned, I just woke up one morning and we had this thing to do called
But if I’m honest, I was hoping that it would all be shelved before it ever made it on to the air.
A few days before we agreed to the filming, we had a family meeting, to make sure the kids were OK with it.
