Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (21 page)

Ask Ozzy about ‘the candle fire’ and he’ll reply, ‘
Which
fucking candle fire? We’ve had loads.’

In reality, we have only had a couple, both at Welders in England, and this one in LA was, ahem,
only
the third. My problem is that I love candles. Every house I have ever lived in has looked like a church on All Saints Day. They’re everywhere – on every table, shelf, mantelpiece and in the downstairs loo. But occasionally, I forget to blow one of them out.

The guilty candle on this occasion was a Christmas present from my former
America’s Got Talent
co-host Howard Stern. It had burned so low that the glass had shattered and the naked flame had caught the coffee table, which now resembled a bonfire in the middle of the room.

We rang the fire brigade but, in the meantime, tried to put the fire out ourselves. Ozzy went to fetch a wet towel to throw over it, and I returned from the kitchen bearing a saucepan of water. But as I threw it, it seemed to push the flames towards Ozzy and suddenly his arm was on fire. Thankfully he managed to pat it out straight away, but his plaster was left slightly charred.

As the house was still full of smoke, we went out into the front garden to wait for the firemen. So there we were, surrounded by a menagerie of dogs, when the fire engine arrived.

‘Has someone here reported a fire?’ the first one asked.

‘No, I always sit in the garden fucking smouldering,’ said Ozzy.

Dramas over, I returned to
The Talk
and carried on with my other job of managing Ozzy’s career. For three years we’d been working on making a movie out of Ozzy’s autobiography and, as ever with the film industry, it was taking an age to find the financing, the right writer, and so on. Then, one of the people we were working with on developing it said they had found the perfect writer and could Ozzy and I fly to England in February to meet him? ‘Consider it done,’ I said, ‘we’re there.’

The timing was perfect, as Ozzy and I had been asked to present at the Brits. Also, I’d been asked by Richard Curtis, the founder of Comic Relief, if I’d be interested in doing a sketch. I have loved David Walliams ever since seeing
Little Britain
all those years ago. So this sounded like just what the doctor ordered. I said yes straight away. I took a week off from
The Talk
and we flew to England.

While I was busy filming in a church in Hampshire, Ozzy met up with the writer and they bonded. It finally started to look like the movie was becoming a reality, and his mood was upbeat.

Unfortunately the tight schedule meant that I had to abandon him at Heathrow the moment we landed at around 11 a.m. And that’s all part of the problem: Ozzy and I are always fighting time. So that didn’t go down too well.

Two days later we were due to present the award for International Best Female Solo Artist at the Brits, but on the morning of the show he said, ‘I’m not fucking doing it.’ So, fine. So much for raising his profile a few weeks before the release of
13
. It didn’t matter; I ended up presenting it with
X Factor
host Dermot O’Leary. I simply left my miserable husband at home, muttering to himself about ‘Mrs Fucking TV’, which was his new term of abuse.

When we’re over in England we always stay at Welders, if humanly possible. It’s the loveliest house, set in acres of beautiful rolling hills. Incredibly, it’s not even an hour’s drive from the centre of London. It’s our home. The plan had always been that we would stay for eight days and then fly back to LA. The main reason was
The Talk
. I’d been given a week off, but that was it. Afterwards, I had to go back to work.

Two days before we were due to leave, Ozzy blows a gasket.

‘I’m not coming.’

‘What do you mean, you’re not coming?’

‘I’m not fucking coming.’

He then comes out with the usual spiel: ‘I’m fed up of travelling. I never spend enough time at Welders.’ All of which was true.

As he was scheduled to be back in England three weeks later to do a lot of press for the Sabbath album – interviews for magazines which have long lead times – he didn’t see the point of coming back with me now just to turn round again in three weeks. All the reasons he gave for not going back were perfectly reasonable. But he didn’t argue reasonably or coherently. He just went on and on about it. Finally I told him, ‘You do what you want. I have commitments in LA, I have to return.’

And then it really kicked off.

‘I fucking hate you.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I
said
, I fucking hate you.’

Right. Here we go again, I thought. Back on the bloody roller-coaster.

I knew he had just employed the oldest trick in the book: start an argument so you can flounce off and do what you want. But I was too tired to fight it. Besides, I had commitments and contracts to uphold, so I
had
to go back.

So he stayed behind, poncing about in his Audi R8 convertible that he kept at Welders, and I left for the States wondering what the hell was going to happen next. It didn’t take long for me to find out. A lovely couple called Dave and Sharon run the house for us in the UK. They’ve been working for us for at least ten years and they know Ozzy of old. After a couple of days, Dave rang and told me that Ozzy was behaving so unpredictably that it was like ‘having the Exorcist in the house’. Not a lot I could do.

Then, one week in, I got an email from Ozzy to say that he was going away for a couple of days to try and ‘find’ himself. I resisted the temptation to reply that he should start by looking up his own arse.

People have the impression, I’m told, that Ozzy is a technophobe. Nonsense. Ozzy can email, Skype, text, you name it. He’s perfectly competent at new technology if he wants to be. I called the house and, by some miracle, he answered. He said, ‘Hello,’ but anything beyond that was like getting blood from a stone. He was sullen and wholly uncommunicative, but even I couldn’t have predicted what came next.

‘I think I need to be a bachelor.’

‘Whaaaat? A bachelor? Have you heard yourself? You’re a fucking
pensioner
. You need a bus pass, that’s what you need.’

I slammed the phone down and stared into space for a while, wondering what on earth was going on inside my husband’s head. Was this just a classic mid-life crisis? He’d always had long hair and a penchant for rock music, so they couldn’t be classed as defining features, but the sports cars were a new development – the Audi R8 and
two
fucking Ferraris lying idle in LA – and so too was this recent Greta Garbo ‘I vont to be alone’ bollocks.

Later in the day, I called the house again and this time, Dave answered. He said that Ozzy had gone out hours earlier and had not yet returned home. Worse, he’d taken the car.

That frightened me, the thought of him driving back drunk. I wasn’t worried for him, but for everybody else; because invariably the fuckers who drive drunk don’t get hurt themselves, they just hurt other people. I was fuming.
Fuming
. I felt impotent, stuck in LA, but sent Dave and his wife Sharon driving round Buckinghamshire to look for him. Eventually, they saw the car parked outside a pub, and tucked under the windscreen wiper was a note from a dealer offering to get him drugs! Beyond pathetic.

So Dave went inside the pub and Ozzy was just sitting there, drinking God knows what, and he refused to come home. Dave made an effort to persuade him, but Ozzy tried to start a fight so he backed off and left him. And all this time I was at my wit’s end in Beverly Hills, getting updates on my husband’s drunken idiocy and feeling completely helpless to do anything about it.

He must have slept in the car, because he arrived back at the house the next day carrying a bottle of vodka and a crate of beer. By now it had been established that he’d drunk our garage dry. There was no alcohol in the main house, but in the garage there were a few bits and pieces like old Christmas hampers people had sent us. God knows how long they’d been there, but he’d worked his way through every drop of alcohol he could find.

Everything fell into place. The arsehole behaviour at Jack and Lisa’s wedding; the same crap over most of Christmas. Just as, earlier, I had thought it might be, I now knew for sure. He was begrudging every drink that anyone took and every laugh that anyone had because he was craving alcohol and was unhappy with himself. The hostility finally made sense: it was his guilt, his anger at himself for being so weak.

I called Dave again.

‘Get his car removed from the house. In fact, take
every
car away. I’m going to sell every last fucking one of them.’

Within twenty-four hours, I had sold the Audi R8 in England and one of the Ferraris he kept in America. The other one went to Jack. All gone. There was no way I was going to risk him getting in one of them while he was drunk and hurting someone.

Ozzy says now that it proved to be the most expensive drink he’s ever had, but at the time he was none the wiser because I had stopped talking to him. The way I felt, he could have stayed in England for good and drunk himself to death.

Then the text came.

‘I need help. I’m hurting. I’ve been using for a year and a half.’

And that was it. I knew he had reached probably one of the lowest points that addicts have to hit before they finally accept that they need help. I also know, from my years of experience with it, that
until
that acceptance hits them, there’s not a damn thing anyone else can do to make them get sober.

A friend of ours, Billy Morrison, who has been in the programme for years, flew to England to collect him. But Ozzy was in no fit state to fly. He was screaming for help. Quite apart from having the shakes, he had a terrible stabbing pain in his chest and didn’t know why. He just woke up with it one morning after blanking out on booze, just like the bad old days.

Billy took him to the doctor’s. His blood pressure was totally through the roof and an X-ray showed that he’d broken his sternum, but to this day he doesn’t know how he did it. Add to this the fact that he was detoxing, and you get the picture. It was eight days before he was considered well enough to board a plane back to LA.

As luck would have it, I had just sold our house in Hidden Hills to singer and actress Jessica Simpson. The downside was that I had to pack up 13,500 square foot of house in a matter of weeks. Jessica wanted to move in within the month. I was in the middle of packing when Ozzy returned with Billy. Talk about stressful. I had moved out of the rented house on Walden Drive and taken my stuff to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Every afternoon, once
The Talk
was over, it was back to Hidden Hills with the packers, trying to get out in time. I’d made up my mind. There was no way I was going to be in the same house as Ozzy this time, playing happy families. I was furious with him for taking the second chance I had given him and throwing it back in my face. He had betrayed my trust, but worse, he was failing as a father and now a grandfather. It was time, I felt, for him to grow up.

I knew he would be staying at Walden Drive, which I was constantly referring to as the Dark House. I had come to loathe it there. Its gloominess made me feel stifled, as if my throat was constricted. Every time I pulled on to the driveway and then on through the small tunnel that led to the front of the house, I felt a sense of impending doom. The dark wooden floors and panelling that I had always been fond of now felt crushing and life-sapping to me. I needed somewhere light and spacious to live. No more dungeons.

I thought back to the previous July, how Ozzy had promised he was going to work a rigid programme of sobriety, how sorry he was, asking for forgiveness. To think I’d actually believed him! It was nothing more than the usual bullshit. I couldn’t bear to think that he was back to square one; same old shit, just a different day.

At Walden Drive, Billy Morrison was trying to work out a rigid programme for Ozzy. This would involve attending at least one AA meeting a day, maybe two. Sometime earlier, we had arranged for Jack to go to Germany for treatment for his MS. Originally, Ozzy was supposed to be coming, but the last thing Jack needed was his father ricocheting around the clinic going cold turkey from drugs and alcohol, so we left him behind at the Dark House where, as far as I was concerned, he could stew in his own juice. Having Ozzy along was never an option at this point.

In retrospect, perhaps Jack’s having MS, and his courage in fighting it, strengthened my resolve in staying away from Ozzy for far longer than I might normally have done. When one of your children is sick or given a potentially life-threatening diagnosis, everything else diminishes in importance. I loved Ozzy as much as I had always done, but this time,
his
illness seemed somehow pathetic compared to our son’s. It was something I just didn’t have the inclination or the time to focus on. There were bigger issues at play.

In February 2013, right after Ozzy had been rescued from himself at Welders and brought back to LA a jabbering wreck by Billy, Jack, Lisa and I headed off to the Infusio Center for New Medicine in Frankfurt, Germany.

We had been told about a revolutionary stem-cell treatment that isn’t allowed in the States because it hasn’t been trialled for long enough, and its efficacy has not yet been fully evaluated. But as far as we could tell, the worst thing that could happen would be nothing.

Jack said that his philosophy was to take a 360-degree approach to his MS to maximise his chances of thwarting its symptoms. A balanced diet, keep fit, sleep well, positive thinking, that kind of thing. And the stem-cell treatment was part of that overview. We knew that the treatment wouldn’t cure Jack’s MS, but the best-case scenario was that it would possibly help his body to repair some of the existing damage and build up his immune system to make him as healthy as he could be to fight the onset of the disease.

The clinic describes stem cells as life’s ‘library’ and ‘construction workers’, responsible for the renewal and healing of the entire body. They harvest them from bone marrow or, in my and Jack’s case, from about 300 cc of circulating blood that was taken once we had arrived at the clinic. They sorted the cells and checked them for quality, then incubated them with cytokines (cell-signalling molecules) to stimulate replication. About a week later, they had enough stem cells for implantation and injected them into our lymphatic system. The idea was that those new cells would then utilise the rest to rejuvenate necrotic and damaged tissue and, in an ideal world, bring the body’s healing elements into play to fix what was wrong. Depending on your age and fitness, they can get something like 800,000 to nearly two million stem cells that way.