Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (20 page)

He was fine with Jack and Lisa themselves. Even
he
couldn’t be such an arse that he’d spoil his own son’s wedding with his moody shit – but, at best, he was still remote, slightly removed from the occasion, just not connecting. If I found myself anywhere near him, I felt my body tense up, so I kept out of his way as much as possible. I have never been much good at hiding my emotions, and after the ceremony was over and my new daughter-in-law came over to hug me, I knew that my eyes were puffed and blotchy, and when we pulled apart, she looked perplexed.

‘I just have to ask… are these tears of joy, or tears of sorrow?’

‘Joy,’ I smiled, but the truth was that it was a bit of both. Happiness at their marriage, sadness at the state of Ozzy’s and mine. It should have been one of the happiest days of our lives; instead, we sleepwalked through it like two strangers.

As a special wedding memento, we had bought Jack a Tiffany watch and Lisa a gold Tiffany locket. Correction;
I
had bought them and added Ozzy’s name to the card. He was so detached at the time that if you asked him now what we’d bought, he wouldn’t have a clue.

It’s funny, we all grow up witnessing the pattern of our parents’ behaviour towards each other, and some of us repeat it whether we want to or not and some of us kick against it and plough a new furrow for ourselves. Jack is the latter. And he has married a woman who is beautiful on the inside and the outside, someone who comes from a normal, loving family and is calm personified.

He and Lisa are so mature, measured and sensible that I am in complete awe of them. Their obvious compatibility and happiness makes me emotional every time I think about it.

At the start of the ceremony, Jack faced Lisa and read out a speech.

‘I promise to always take care of you the way you take care of me. I will always do my best to be a good husband and father, no matter what. You are my best friend, the mother of my child, and I’m very excited that, in a few minutes, you’re going to be my wife.’

For the umpteenth time since we’d flown in from LA, I glanced sideways at my husband and wondered what he was thinking, whether the solid message – that love is a decision, not just a feeling – had sunk in. But he was just staring straight ahead at the happy couple, his face betraying nothing.

Night descends swiftly in Hawaii, and before we knew it, it was dark and time for a celebratory supper illuminated by table candles and those tall tiki torches. We ate traditional Hawaiian fare: grilled local fish, Lilikoi ribs, teriyaki-glazed steaks and tropical fruit. Jamie made a speech that he said had been tricky to write because, as Jack had been sober for so long, ‘he has more stories to tell about me than I do about him’.

Then it was Kelly’s turn. We all expected something quirky and outlandish, but she kept it simple and heartfelt.

‘Jack, I am so unbelievably proud of you, of the man you have become… even though I am your older sister, I am pretty much the younger sister because you are a lot cleverer than me, a lot smarter and a lot more put-together than I am. I love you and Lisa so much.’

My speech was a short one, but said it all. I told Jack that I couldn’t have asked for a better son and that I had learnt so much from him.

Ozzy did not want to be involved and, once the dancing started, he left. He didn’t dance with the new bride, the bride’s mother, or his wife of thirty years. He just buggered off, the first one to leave. The evening ended with the young people back on the beach, laughing and chatting. For a while I joined them, but then thought, No. This is the time for Jack to be with his friends, so I left and went to bed.

The next morning we had a buffet-style brunch. Everyone was relaxed, talking about the previous day’s festivities. Nobody had to struggle for conversation. It was just so lovely and natural, with Pearl being carried from table to table. It had been a long way from Louisiana, but Lisa’s family had fallen in love with Hawaii. They left determined to come back. In fact, Lisa’s sister Betsey and brother-in-law Ryan – the preacher who married them – are now thinking of moving there.

While the wedding was over, the festivities were not. The next day was my sixtieth birthday and I had asked all the close friends and family who’d come for the ceremony to stay. Gloria was there with Geezer, and Colin Newman and his wife Mette. Gina had to get special permission to take Olly and Amelia out of school. And Melinda, the nanny when we were filming
The Osbournes
, came with her children from Australia. And of course there were Aimee, Kelly, Jack, Lisa and Pearl. I thought it was time we got out on to that sparkling sea. So I’d chartered a boat to take us around the coast to where there’s a monument to the great navigator, Captain Cook, who mapped the South Pacific and discovered Australia and who was murdered when he came back unexpectedly to Hawaii. Once we got there, we all went snorkelling, even Ozzy.

The one person who hadn’t been looking forward to this sea excursion was Colin, who always gets seasick. But as a gesture of friendship and of the occasion, he agreed to come. Big mistake. There’s always a bit of a roll on the Pacific. He was standing next to Gloria, Geezer and me at the rail, just chatting, when suddenly his head slumped on to Geezer’s shoulder, his eyes rolled into his head and his stomach began visibly to undulate, like a belly dancer’s, or as if an alien was about to pop out. My first thought was that he had had a stroke. Ozzy thought it was epilepsy and started slapping his face, then Jack started screaming at his father because he was hitting Colin, and I was screaming because that’s what I do when I panic. It was like something out of a comedy skit.

We immediately turned the boat round and headed back. Three other sailors offered to bail with Colin and took him back to the hotel to sleep it off. Mette had seen it all before and knew it wasn’t serious, so she stayed with us. ‘I’m not wasting a great day like this in a darkened hotel room,’ she said. As she predicted, Colin was fine. It was just a violent attack of seasickness. And it
was
a great day, perhaps the best birthday I think I’ve ever had. What could have been nicer than to spend the day with friends and family? We had sailed on an azure sea, had a picnic lunch on a South Sea island beach and had the fun of snorkelling among tropical fish. We’d even had comedy and drama.

And for once, Ozzy was even pleasant, though – as usual – he failed to give me a present. I told people he’d bought me a Richard Avedon photograph, but the truth was that I’d bought it for myself.

14

Hell with Chandeliers

It was getting harder to hide the fact that my marriage was now in serious trouble.

B
ack in LA, life’s rhythm returned to something like normal. Ozzy was now in Malibu, recording with the band. I was back at
The Talk
. Jack was getting on with his life, as were Kelly and Aimee. They were all living in their own places, doing their own thing. They were always trying to involve me, but I often felt like an encumbrance. I wanted to be a parent they came to see when they
wanted
to, not one they fretted about.

As usual, we tried to have Sunday lunch together whenever we could, but I knew the hurdle of Christmas was looming. Although I love the run-up and all the preparations, Christmas is always a hard time in our house, and always has been, largely because of alcohol.

More than any other season, it’s the time of year which revolves around drink, from chocolate liqueurs to rum punch to Santa’s sherry and brandy butter – the entire period is soaked in booze. Recovering alcoholics are always reminding each other that Christmas Day is 25 December and that’s all. But AA are the first to recognise that Christmas is a particularly vulnerable time – and in large cities there are marathons, meetings that run from lunchtime on Christmas Eve right through to Boxing Day, where you can have a cup of tea or just be with people who know you’re not feeling great. Alcoholics are often estranged from their families. The rest of the year they learn to cope, helped by regular meetings and by their sponsors and sober coaches, but at Christmas there’s often no escape. Finding yourself alone – knowing your children are opening their presents without you – is very hard. But if you’re allowed back, then alcohol will always be around and often in liberal quantities, festive packs of beer stacked up in the fridge being the least of it. In every house you go to there’ll be bottles of bubbly on the go, half-glasses of this and that will be littering the place, abandoned on the hall table, on mantelpieces, on the cistern when you go for a piss. This is temptation at its most biblical.

Given Ozzy’s recent volatile moods, I was feeling particularly apprehensive. Once children leave home, you can’t count on them to be around for Christmas. Kelly had already told me she was going to be spending the holiday with her boyfriend Matt’s family in Detroit. So that was going to feel weird anyway. And Lisa’s parents were coming up from Louisiana to spend Christmas with the new little family. We would see Jack, of course, but it would be different. The plan was that Ozzy and I would spend Christmas morning at their house for a late brunch, so that both sets of grandparents could enjoy Pearl opening up her first Christmas gifts.

And that’s what happened. When we got there, it was a hive of activity: kids running around, food being prepared, family everywhere. It was exactly as a happy house should be at Christmas: warm, inviting, festooned with decorations. At the heart of it all was our gorgeous little granddaughter, who was inevitably the centre of attention. Ozzy tried as best he could to socialise, but I could see it was a struggle. He was completely detached from the rest of us, smiling when required but seemingly not spontaneously or genuinely. He was very, very quiet.

We left Jack’s house at around 4 p.m. and went back to Walden Drive, where I had arranged a traditional Christmas dinner for a few friends. Aimee would be the only one of our children celebrating with us this year, and she too had invited a couple of friends. I had also invited Gloria and Geezer and Belle Zwerdling, plus an interior designer friend called Martyn Laurence-Ballard. Then Aimee called me to say that she wasn’t up to coming. She was running a temperature and thought she’d probably got the tummy bug which was doing the rounds in LA that winter, a twenty-four-hour gastric flu.

The evening was fine. Very low-key, which was exactly what I needed. We had our English Christmas dinner with turkey, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, bread sauce, the lot. Even plum pudding. But when everyone had gone, and I’d finished pottering around in the kitchen, Ozzy disappeared again, cutting himself off from me. In the old days we’d have had a chat, talked about what was said, all the usual things couples do when they’ve had friends in. I found him in the living room with the curtains pulled tight, the television blaring, just like he was most days, even when it was bright sunshine outside.

He had been fine about going to Jack and Lisa’s, but other than that, he didn’t want to go anywhere. He would complain bitterly if I even mentioned going out, acting short-tempered and nasty, trying to belittle me by saying that I would go to the opening of an envelope when all I was actually suggesting was a supper with some friends. I now knew what people meant when they referred to their marriage feeling like two strangers living under the same roof. The situation was becoming impossible.

Despite his animosity towards me, we were still sleeping in the same bed. If I haven’t flounced off to a hotel and we are actually under the same roof, I have always stayed in the marital bed come hell or high water. I have always felt that if we started to occupy separate bedrooms, it would stay that way permanently and there would be no going back.

A couple of weeks after the tricky Christmas, we were fast asleep, having both taken a sleeping pill. I take them sporadically, usually when I have a lot on my mind, but Ozzy has to take one every night or he’d be pacing the floor like a wide-eyed lunatic. Presumably, because his body is so used to them, the tablets don’t put him into such a deep sleep as they do me, though he claims I could be in an actual coma and still take a phone call. But this particular night I heard the sound of something like glass breaking, and it had stirred me. I ignored it and tried to go back to sleep. It was he who woke up at 3.30 a.m. to find the bedroom filled with smoke.

‘Shaaaaaaaron! The fucking house is on fire!’

That
woke me up. I leapt out of bed, ran for where I thought the door was and crashed straight into Ozzy, who was panicking like a headless chicken because he couldn’t see anything.

To add to the comedic element, he had just had a small operation to try and alleviate a spot of arthritis in his right hand and, although we thought it was only a minor procedure, it actually took two hours and he had come home with his arm fully plastered at right angles to his body, his forearm raised and a splint structure connecting it to his neck. He looked like a fucking deranged air-traffic controller.

As I went around opening doors and windows, which Ozzy later claimed only exacerbated the fire, he headed off to the living room to find the wooden coffee table ablaze.