Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE TIME I REALLY WENT BUMP IN THE NIGHT!
Who better to kick off our special issue than Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness, with tales of disastrous Halloween parties – and the terrifying tumble that put him in hospital
When their kids were young, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne decided to hold a Halloween party at Welders House – their Grade Iilisted home in Buckinghamshire. The place was filled with friends of their three children – Aimee, now 36, Kelly, 34, and Jack, 33 – and Ozzy, the consummate entertainer, decided to frighten the partygoers in his own inimitable way. ‘You were in your underpants, dancing and singing to a Backstreet Boys song,’ Sharon, who’s here with him at the Osbournes’ lavish LA home today, reminds him.
‘Was I drunk?’ Ozzy enquires.
‘Of course,’ says Sharon. ‘All the mothers were there picking up their kids and I was trying to look normal, asking them, “Did you have a good time?”, while their mums were just trying to get the hell out of there.’
‘Did you spank me on the face to stop me?’
‘No,’ says Sharon, ‘I just let you carry on.’
Of course she did because, well, he’s Ozzy Osbourne – ‘Prince of Darkness’, and the chap who once bit the head off a dead bat that had been thrown on stage. Today he’s in black, biting the head off nothing more controversial than an ice lolly. His underpants are hidden from view. ‘Halloween is huge out here,’ he says, ‘People pay a fortune for professional makeup artists and costumes. We’ve gone out trickortreating with the grandchildren too.’ Did Ozzy dress up for the occasion? ‘I dress up every night,’ he says. ‘It’s always Halloween for me.’
This Halloween may give Ozzy some respite, however, for as he freely admits, 2019 has been a horror show for all the wrong reasons. At the beginning of the year he was hospitalised with pneumonia, and in January a fall here at his LA home dislodged the metal rods in his spine that had been put in after a quadbike accident in 2003 in which he broke eight ribs, his collarbone and a neck vertebra, and his heart stopped twice on the way to hospital.
The recent tumble wasn’t quite so dramatic, but was no less traumatic. ‘I went to the bathroom in the night, lost my balance and landed flat on my face,’ he says. ‘I saw this big white flash when I hit the floor and I thought, “You’ve finally done it now.” I knew it was bad, I thought I was paralysed, so very calmly I said, “Sharon, I can’t move. I think I’ve done my neck.
Phone an ambulance.”’ He needed three operations that left him in hospital for two months, and his recovery has been slower than anticipated, resulting in a second postponement of his planned 2020 European tour. Ozzy even felt the need to take to social media earlier this month to reassure his fans. ‘I’m not dying,’ he posted. ‘I’m recovering. It’s just taking a bit longer than everyone thought.’ Certainly when we meet he’s in a lot of discomfort. He shuffles slowly to the sofa, leaning forward every few minutes to ease the pain in his neck. Fifteen screws have been inserted in his spine and he shows me the deep scar down the back of his neck. ‘The pain is constant,’ he says. ‘The first six months I was in agony. I’d say, “Sharon – you’re not telling me the truth. I’m dying, aren’t I?” I thought I’d got some terminal illness because the improvement was so slow.
‘I’m getting better, but after the surgery the nurses asked me on a scale of one to ten how much pain I was in, and I said, “55!” Six months of waking up in the morning and being unable to move is a miserable existence.’ He turned 70 last December, but today he says, ‘I feel 90. When I was drinking and on drugs nothing really happened to me, but I got sober and did my neck in.’ He laughs. ‘I should’ve stayed drunk!’
Ozzy’s addictions are the stuff of legend. When he met Prince Charles and his wife Camilla at Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Jubilee concert
‘It’s always Halloween for me, I dress up every night’
in 2002 Camilla said, ‘You’re the one who can’t stop taking the drugs.’ He’s had treatment for everything from alcohol to drugs to sex addiction, and it doesn’t help that scientists analysing his DNA recently discovered he’s a genetic mutant. ‘They mapped my genes out – apparently I’ve got this thing where I have a really high tolerance for drugs and drink.’
So, given all that, did he worry that after the fall he might jeopardise the last seven years of sobriety and become addicted to his pain medication? ‘No, because coming off that stuff is miserable. Why would I take something that makes me feel temporarily OK if I know misery awaits? The medication I’m taking now is dangerously addictive, so it isn’t in my possession. A nurse gives it to me. ‘There’ve been times when I’ve said, “Sharon, you’ve got to give me something stronger”, but she wouldn’t give in. And I’m glad because I’d be chewing up morphine tablets now if it was down to me.’ Sharon is, of course, the woman who’s kept the Ozzy show on the road for longer than many people thought possible. She took over as his manager from her father, music entrepreneur Don Arden, orchestrating his hugely successful solo career after Ozzy was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979. She too has had her share of problems (she was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002, recovering after a course of chemotherapy, and has battled bulimia for decades), yet despite Ozzy’s addictions, infidelities and the time he tried to strangle her they’ve managed to stay married for 37 years. She pops in again during our chat, looking fabulous at 67 (she’s just had her fourth facelift, which she unveiled recently on her US TV show, The Talk), and plants kisses on his head, which Ozzy laps up.
‘Sharon looks great,’ he says. ‘When you meet your soulmate, that’s it.’ He says they’ve ‘become really close friends and lovers in the last two or three years’, after news emerged in 2016 of Ozzy’s sixmonth affair with LA hairstylist Michelle Pugh. The couple briefly separated but after being treated later for sex addiction,
Ozzy insists his days of fooling around are finally over.
‘That stuff is just not important any more, and I’m the worst liar on earth. Sharon will say, “Where have you been?” and I’ll say, “Uh... uh... uh... nowhere”,’ he stutters. ‘I’m like the Norman Wisdom of romance.’
So they’ve got over that bump? ‘God, yeah,’ says Sharon. ‘When you fear losing what you’ve got and you realise what your life would be without it, you think, “It’s too many years, too much investment, too much heartache to let it go.” I realised very early on I was marrying an addict. He does what he does when he’s stoned. He never does anything wrong sober.’
Ozzy’s tussles with sobriety have led to some amusing incidents – such as the aforementioned Halloween party – but also to more disturbing ones. ‘Oh God,’ he says, ‘remember Amersham?’ Sharon nods as Ozzy recounts a very dark episode from 1989. ‘I woke up in a cell in Amersham police station, and I didn’t know how I’d got there. So I called the guard and said, “You’re going to think this is insane, but what have I done?” He read the charge sheet and it said, “John Michael Osbourne, charged with attempted murder, Sharon Osbourne.”’
It transpired Ozzy had attempted to strangle Sharon, but fortunately for him she refused to press charges. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard,’ he says. ‘It was scary. I’d break my neck four more times to have had that not happen. I can’t even remember what happened.’ Sharon clearly can – it’s the first time today that s e oo s genuinely crestfallen – and when asked why she hung in there when most women would have given up long ago, she replies, ‘Because I love him. He’s never done anything cruel when sober. And I’m proud of him. Despite everything he’s been through – a lot of which he’s done to himself – he keeps bouncing back. He’s like Iron Man.’
It’s easier to understand Sharon’s softness towards Ozzy because his remorse at past misdeeds appears so genuine (‘I was a complete loser’ is a frequent refrain). His regret is particularly acute regarding his children. ‘With our kids I was always on the
oad and stoned or whatever, so now with my grandchildren it’s great to spend some quality time with them,’ he says. ‘I try to make amends to my son for me not being there when he was little.’
Jack has three daughters by actress Lisa Stelly – Pearl, seven, Andy, four, and 20-month-old Minnie – although the couple divorced earlier this year (Ozzy also has five grandchildren by his two children from his first marriage to teacher Thelma Riley). ‘I look at Minnie now they’ve got divorced and it breaks my heart, because I always had a mum and dad there and I had that confidence behind me,’ says Ozzy. ‘I think it’s too easy to get divorced now, and the kids always suffer. But we give our grandchildren as much love as we can. They come here, pull my hair and smack me on the head with a plastic hammer. It’s lovely. We’re getting a bit like the Waltons!’
Despite his early absences from their lives, he’s close to his children. ‘Aimee won’t let us eat anything that isn’t super-organic,’ he says, looking slightly put out. ‘Kelly’s got 90,000 dogs and wants to move back to England, I think. Jack is doing well too and is really strong,’ says Ozzy of his son, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2012. ‘He goes to the same gym as me and I’ll sometimes look at him and forget he’s got MS. He went to Germany for stem-cell treatment and Sharon went with him. She has arthritis in her hand and it fixed it.’
Ozzy’s own health issues have been well documented, and as well as his fall he’s had to fight a staphylococcus infection in his right hand and an ongoing battle with Parkin syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes tremors – ‘I take a pill once a day for it and I’m OK,’ he says. So why put himself through the rigours of touring? With an estimated £175 million fortune and homes in LA, London and Buckinghamshire, he hardly needs the money. ‘I love doing it,’ he says. ‘But I’m not going to do the thing where I start off the tour in Australia and come back in pieces two years later. I just want to go on the road and kick some a** again. It’s what keeps me alive.’
There’s a certain acceptance on Ozzy’s part that his years of misadventure have caught up with him. ‘I’ve cheated death many times and I’ve got away with it for years, yet since I hit 70 everything’s happened. But then I thought I’d be dead by 40, so I’ve still got a few of my nine lives yet.’
There are signs he’s mellowing just a touch. At the New Orleans Voodoo Fest on Halloween weekend a few years ago, he refrained from his usual custom of throwing meat into the crowd and opted to spray foam on them instead (mums had been complaining about having to get the blood stains out of their children’s shirts). Ozzy admits, though, that he takes a bit of a breather on 31 October. ‘Let everybody else be Ozzy for the night. People go out dressed as me!’
Not that the Prince of Darkness doesn’t still have a few more ghoulish tricks up his sleeve. ‘When I die and they’re nailing the lid on my coffin,’ he says, ‘I’m thinking of having them play a recording of my voice at the service, shouting, “I’m not dead yet!” That’ll scare them!’
‘I thought I’d be dead by 40, I’ve got a few lives left’