Mrs Nasty’s back on TV — but is she really back for good with her toxic hubby?
SHE’S back — and this time everyone is acknowledging that Sharon Osbourne is the queen of The X Factor. Now 60 years old — she’s 61 in October — she has kept her surgically enhanced face as smooth as a peach. And it seems her formidable Grande Dame act has become even more terrifying during her absence from our screens.
Her pantomime act in front of the Mayfair Hotel at the series launch this week was pure Sharon. While the rest of the X Factor judges smiled for the cameras, she proudly gave a onefingered salute, showcasing a smart, red manicure and nicely veneered gnashers, and deadpanned: ‘ What would I sing if I had to audition? The Bitch Is Back.’
As her old friend Louis Walsh says: ‘As long as Sharon gets her own way, she’s fine. She can do whatever she wants. Just don’t tell her otherwise.’
In the new series, which starts tonight, she makes the other judges — Walsh, Gary Barlow and Nicole Scherzinger — seem utterly boring. She even tells one quivering hopeful: ‘Oh, stop crying!’ with all the tenderness of a shark chasing down its prey.
The fact Sharon brings her dog Bella along to filming, and insists on having the 5lb Pomeranian on her lap as she judges the acts, simply proves her primacy in the pack. Indeed, it transpires that Bella is the ‘surprise’ fifth judge whom ITV has been teasing in trailers — not Simon cowell.
A source at ITV tells me that bosses are happy to accommodate anything the exacting Mrs Osbourne requires, including numerous dogs in her dressing room and the presence of a ‘dog nanny’ in her entourage. They are also paying her a huge amount — £1.8 million, which is comprised of £1.5 million in salary and £300,000 in agreed expenses, including transatlantic flights and accommodation.
She is being put up at claridge’s, in a newly refurbished suite. You may think it odd, given that she has a lovely house in Buckinghamshire, but she likes the fabulousness of the five-star hotel, apparently, so that’s that.
Husband Ozzy is in Las Vegas, performing with Black Sabbath. He and Sharon will see little of each other until December because of his band commitments. Not, you might think, the best of circumstances to launch a book about their marriage. However, with her trademark chutzpah, Mrs O is about to do just that.
The tome, entitled Unbreakable, is due out in October. Sharon wrote it post-haste this summer, just after she and Ozzy moved back in together in June. It will cover his fall off the wagon earlier this year, her discovery of it, and the ensuing marital crisis. An associate of hers has been touting the book for serialisation in newspapers, at an eye-watering price of £250,000.
ONE might think it’s rather tempting fate to write a ‘ how we made up’ book within a few weeks of the patch-up. But Sharon, the daughter of notorious showbiz manager Don Arden, is made of the sternest stuff and knows full well that if you want to release a blockbuster autobiography, you must have it in the shops by christmas — which means getting it written in July.
She certainly has the experience, with two best-selling autobiographies — Extreme, in 2005, and Survivor two years later — under her belt.
And so, with the help of a ghost writer, she has given a full account of her marriage, and a mischievous and detailed recalling of her feud with former X Factor judge Dannii Minogue and what she knew about Dannii and cowell’s dalliance.
So what kind of shape is Sharon’s publicity–drenched marriage in? She and Ozzy have been seen together very seldom since their troubles in spring. They were last spotted having a ‘romantic meal’ in New York two weeks ago.
However, the cosy picture was rather spoiled by the presence of Billy Morrison, Ozzy’s best pal and longterm sobriety ‘sponsor’. It is Morrison — a British-born musician from Los Angeles — and not the largely absent Sharon, who has been supporting Ozzy daily in recent months.
Morrison, who fought a 14-year heroin habit, is the one person Ozzy believes can really help him. ‘If I ever get the feeling I should have a joint ’cos it would help me write a song or whatever, I pick up the phone to Billy and that defuses the thought,’ he’s said.
There have been many weeks when he and Sharon have been apart, while he has toured with Sabbath and she has been making The Talk, the cBS chat show she co-hosts in LA, or flying to the UK for X Factor auditions.
So what is the truth about their marital woes? They split in April this year and lived separate lives in separate houses for several weeks — she in a hotel in Beverly Hills and he in a rented place a few miles away.
Shortly after the news of their separation emerged, Ozzy confessed he had been drinking and taking drugs, and took the blame. ‘I’m just trying to be a better person,’ he said.
Sharon was seen looking photogenically wistful on a yacht in Mexico. Stressing that this was just the latest of many crises in their 30- year marriage, she remarked: ‘We shall deal with it, and this too shall pass. Otherwise my husband will be taken to hospital to get my foot removed from his ass.’ It was not, perhaps, the most caring thing she has ever said.
They have both now moved into a modest four-bedroom bungalow in Los Angeles, worth £2.5 million.
According to those who know them, their daily pattern is that Sharon leaves for work every morning and returns mid-afternoon. Ozzy stays home day and night, barring a lunchtime trip to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in West Hollywood with his assistant and Billy Morrison.
Their friends also insist that the latest problems were no PR stunt. One confirmed to me: ‘They were living separately. Sharon said to me that he was getting on her nerves.’ Another confidante added that Ozzy had been feeling down, and had infuriated Sharon by refusing to accompany her to any showbiz events.
certainly they appeared a notably awkward couple at a Grammy’s party in February. Ozzy was pale and vague, while Sharon looked the business —– dripping with jewellery and working the room.
But this was always going to be a tough year for them — even without their daughter Kelly’s mystery seizure in January and son Jack’s recently diagnosed multiple sclerosis — as both Sharon and Ozzy are prey to toxic jealousies when they are apart. And with the Black Sabbath reunion, separations were inevitable.
Sharon in particular is quick to suspect the worst of Ozzy when it comes to other women, but appears to take the pragmatic view that what happens on tour, stays on tour. ‘As long as he doesn’t know her name, doesn’t get her phone number and doesn’t do it a second time, it’s OK,’ she said. She was cheated on by Ozzy repeatedly and obviously for years. He even betrayed her with the nanny when she was in hospital having Jack.
Ozzy, meanwhile, is an anxious and vulnerable 64-year- old man, and worries Sharon might cheat on him. In 2011, she said he thought she was having an affair with her make-up artist. Even when she brought the man — and his male partner — to meet Ozzy, he wasn’t convinced.
Sharon has been on antidepressants long-term and says she ‘wouldn’t even try’ to come off them.
And Ozzy also has a long history of antidepressant use, explaining that he suffers from an almost pathological insecurity, which is what led him to drink and drugs in the first place.
HOWEVER, Sharon suffers from no such self- doubt. Of the X Factor series, she said on Thursday: ‘ I only watch when I’m in it. I never watch anyone else. Don’t be ridiculous. But I’ve watched this year’s and I think I’m amazing.’
She is nothing if not calculating. A close associate tells me: ‘Sharon has played the break-up and makeup for every last dime. She was in her element. She’s the master of the stunt. She has a great instinct for when it’s the perfect moment to throw a fit or glass of water [as she’s done on The X Factor before].
‘She cannot be an easy person to live with. She has an almost manic focus on work.
‘Ozzy is very likeable, very affable, but Sharon is really high-maintenance, uninhibited and ambitious.’
Those who’ve been lashed by her tongue include cowell, whom she accused on TV of suffering from ‘small penis syndrome’ when his affair with Dannii was revealed. Amazingly, he forgave her lack of tact to rehire her for X Factor. But he knows the public lap up her ‘loveable monster’ act.
By all accounts, six years away from The X Factor have not mellowed Sharon one bit. In the meantime, she has worked on America’s Got Talent and The Talk. Indeed, she has never worked so hard. Ozzy will tell you she absolutely loves being on television — and the fame that comes with it.
But as she tells the hopefuls, it’s not enough to be good at what you do. ‘I’m looking for someone who people will like and remember, someone who’s prepared to put in all the hard work, because this is a tough business.’
Surely nobody knows that better than the indestructible Mrs O.