Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (4 page)

Anyway, the night of the showdown in her dressing room, I came home to Welders, our home in Buckinghamshire, tired and upset. I was still in turmoil about it, and I curled up on our sofa in the kitchen and let rip with, ‘Dannii Minogue did this,’ and ‘Dannii Minogue did that,’ as Ozzy sat opposite me.

After a couple of minutes, I glanced across to find him looking faintly perplexed.

‘I didn’t know Kylie had a brother.’

2

Minnie

A woman’s best friend.

T
here was another reason why series four of
The X Factor
was such a strain. Ever since I’d started working on the show I’d had a special companion – someone who always took my side, defended me at every turn… and could bite your hand off if she felt like it. No human could ever fill this role. I am talking about Minnie, my unutterably gorgeous, white fluffy Pomeranian who was the canine love of my life. She was my best friend in the world and went everywhere with me. But during that last season, she had got a lot quieter and I’d started to worry about her. I wondered if the constant travelling, the interminable transatlantic flights, weren’t taking their toll.

Originally she had been Kelly’s dog, but from the moment she and I met, we just connected. It was kismet, and she never left my side. Every single day for the previous twelve years she had been there, no matter what. During those terrible months when I had colon cancer, unable and unwilling to communicate with human beings, she was glued to my side, even in the hospital. If I went to make a cup of tea, she would wake up from her snooze and follow me to the kitchen. If I got up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, there she would be trotting along beside me. When Ozzy and I went on tour, she would just pine and refuse to eat until we got back. In the end we had no option but to take her with us, and she and Maggie – a Japanese Chin that we got at the same time – became a familiar sight on the hard-rock circuit.

Her loyalty and her devotion to me were quite extraordinary. But she didn’t see herself as a lapdog. She was my guard dog, albeit a diminutive one, but what she lacked in stature she made up for in ferocity, snapping at anyone who came too close to her precious mama.

The list of those who learnt to give her a wide berth could be enough for a feature in
Hello!
magazine. She went for Piers Morgan backstage at
America’s Got Talent
. She had also taken chunks out of Patrick Swayze and David Hasselhoff. Even Ozzy incurred her wrath on a regular basis. Every time he got into bed, she would curl her lip at him and make low growling noises.

‘Fucking hell, Sharon, it’s been
twelve years
. Surely she must recognise me by now?’

Poms live to a good age – often as old as eighteen – so that April I had no reason to worry when she started to cough. But we knew she had had heart issues for a couple of years, and we’d been told to watch her weight, but I didn’t put two and two together.

It was a Saturday evening in July 2008. Ozzy and I were at home, enjoying the comparative peace of our new house at Hidden Hills, a gated community in Calabasas right on the northernmost tip of LA with nothing else beyond it except wilderness. The dogs, of course, loved the space and freedom it gave them. Even Minnie had been known to gambol about on the grass. Not this night. She was curled up beside me, not even moving when I did. Something wasn’t right. I was aware that she was unable to walk more than a few yards without needing to rest. And now there was the coughing. I had got used to it over the preceding few months. It was Ozzy who picked up that tonight something was different. Although by now it was gone ten, I called Dr Lisa, the vet who’d looked after all our dogs since way back when and whose practice was in Malibu, where we used to spend our summers and where we bought so many of our dogs. She was usually happy to make house calls, and with sixteen dogs to take care of, from inoculations to minor ailments, she was a regular visitor to Hidden Hills. However, this time she said we should bring Minnie to the clinic immediately. There were scans that would need to be done in situ, she explained. Malibu lies ten or so miles up the coast north of Los Angeles, on the narrow strip of road known as the Pacific Coast Highway which is squeezed in between the Santa Monica Mountains and the ocean. As the crow flies it’s not that far from Hidden Hills – roughly due west. But there are mountains in between, and the only way down is through the canyons, on the kind of road they use in advertisements for sports cars, and which only the foolhardy would dream of driving down at night. That’s the way we went. Ozzy had only just passed his test so his driving skills were at best unpolished, and when he braked, you knew it. This road demanded near-constant braking as bend followed vertiginous bend. With Minnie cradled on my lap, we set off. Her breathing was rasping and her eyes were watering, the tears falling on my hands as I stroked her soft, pale fur, something I had done so very often. We were there in less than half an hour and by the time we arrived, Lisa had opened up the clinic and called in a heart specialist. We were asked to sit in the waiting room while they ran some tests. Ozzy and I sat there holding hands, saying nothing. When they called us in, Minnie was lying on her side, just panting, unable to move. They had strapped on a little oxygen mask which looked like a child’s toy. They needed to do a few more tests, they said. We should go home and phone in an hour when they’d have a clearer picture.

So back we went up that dark, winding road, back to the house, back to the kitchen with all the dogs ranged around us. I put the kettle on and we had a cup of tea. All the time I was watching the clock and the moment the hour was up, I called.

‘What did she say?’ asked Ozzy when I came off the phone.

‘She wants us to go back.’

‘What, now?’

‘Now. We have to make a decision.’

Dr Lisa didn’t embellish it, but we understood. We both knew what that decision was. I was hysterical, but Ozzy stayed calm. He knew what Minnie meant to me. We got back in the car and Ozzy twisted his way down the canyon to Malibu. I was still in my pyjama bottoms, a hooded top and flip-flops.

The moment we arrived I went straight in to Minnie who was lying on her side, still, though she attempted to wave her front paws when I picked her off the cold steel examination table to comfort her.

There was nothing they could do, Lisa said. So we had a choice. She could either come home with us, and we could wait for nature to take its course – a day or two at most. But we had to bear in mind that she was extremely uncomfortable, she explained. The alternative was that they gave her an injection there and then.

I knew I couldn’t leave her in discomfort for my own selfish reasons, just for me to have one more day, one more night to hold her, to put my nose in her fur and breathe her in. I just couldn’t do it. Ozzy agreed. They put us in a little anteroom and I sat there with her on my knee, her little head resting on the bend of my elbow, her dry nose on my arm. And all the while I was talking to her, reminding her of all we’d been through together, telling her how much I loved her. Her eyes, which had been wide open when we first brought her in, were now half closed though the tears were still flowing, leaving matted stains on her face. Lisa gave her a shot of Valium first, to allow her to go to sleep normally before the final injection. That was the plan, anyway. But she was so weak that the Valium proved to be enough. Within seconds her breathing got shallower and shallower and then it stopped. She died in my arms.

Emotionally distraught as I was, there were the inevitable practicalities to attend to.

Lisa explained that we could either bury her at home, or she could be cremated. They’d send her body away and her remains would be returned to us by mail.
By mail?
I mean, how would you know whose ashes you were getting? It struck me as so cold and undignified. Minnie deserved better than being posted off somewhere. The decision was made: we would take her home. That night, back at Hidden Hills, I put her in her basket – a child’s toy in the shape of a lamb, lined with soft fleece – wrapped in one of my shawls. She’d always had a thing about Ozzy’s socks, piling them up on our bed, so I found an old pair and tucked them under her. The air-conditioning in the downstairs cloakroom wasn’t working properly, so it was always freezing in there, and that’s where we put her. She looked so peaceful – there was nothing to show that she wasn’t just sleeping, so I took some pictures and cut off some of her beautiful fur as a memento.

It happened that we had carpenters working in the house, so the next morning Ozzy asked them to build Minnie a little coffin made of oak, a wood that would last, he said. Then, with all due ceremony, we buried her under a willow tree in the garden. To mark the place, I had her name carved on a rock beneath the sign of an angel.

I realise that some people will find it hard to understand how I could be so affected by the death of a dog. But throughout my life I have been betrayed, by my mother, by my father, by my first boyfriend and by my husband. Minnie never betrayed me, and I loved her for that.

Maggie, her constant companion, spent the next weeks looking for her. It was heartbreaking; she would search constantly, going into room after room. Her tail, usually like a quivering question mark, began to droop, and it stayed that way until she died this year. By that time we had sold Hidden Hills and I knew I couldn’t leave Minnie to be dug up by a fox or a bulldozer making way for an outhouse or whatever. Luckily, one of the biggest pet cemeteries in Los Angeles was just down the road, so we disinterred her, drove to the pet cemetery and waited as she was cremated. We chose an urn to put her ashes in, and they’re on top of the fireplace in our living room in Beverly Hills. In due course, Maggie joined her. Maggie was sixteen, blind and deaf when she passed in her sleep.

And despite her penchant for biting him, Ozzy loved Minnie too. He was hurting because I was. He’s a huge Beatles fan and, when he first met Paul McCartney, he had a photo taken with him. That photo meant so much to him that he had a solid gold picture frame made for it, with musical notes engraved around the side. But after Minnie died, he did the sweetest thing. He took his cherished photo out, replaced it with one of Minnie and gave it to me with a handwritten inscription.

Minnie was bigger than any Beatle.

It turned out that Piers had a soft spot for Minnie too, despite her regular attacks on him. After her death he wrote a tribute to her in the
Mail On Sunday
:

For the last two years, the bane of my life has been Sharon Osbourne’s small white Pomeranian dog, Minnie. Every time I went near this ferocious creature, it would go berserk – snarling, growling and attempting to bite me. A behavioural pattern, in fact, rather similar to its owner. Minnie died this week, after a long illness. And I found myself feeling unexpectedly sad. ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ll actually miss her,’ I told a heartbroken Sharon on the phone tonight. ‘She was a real character.’ I don’t normally ‘do’ dogs, but this was no ordinary dog.

3

Reloaded

The Osbournes back together again.

A
fter the dramas of
The X Factor
and the loss of my beloved Minnie, I retreated to Hidden Hills.
America’s Got Talent
was over for another season, and I planned to enjoy being a wife and mother again. Jack and Aimee were both based in LA and, like any mum, I kept an eye on them while trying my best not to interfere.

Kelly was another matter. She’d been living in London for a couple of years by then. She’d gone back originally in 2007, opening on 10 September for a seven-week run playing Mama Morton in
Chicago
, the youngest actress ever to take the role. I remember going to the opening night and being staggered at what she had achieved. Although one of nature’s drama queens, she had never acted professionally and yet here she was, starting at the top, wowing a West End audience and the critics, too. The following June she won the
Glamour
magazine award for Best Theatre Actress. Kelly’s vivacious personality was perfect for musical theatre, and London took her to its heart. The prodigal daughter – she was born just down the road, after all – was hired by Radio 1 to host a Sunday-night show,
The Surgery
, where she answered young people’s questions. It was an inspired choice, because she had packed a lot into her twenty-three years and her natural rebelliousness resonated with her generation, although from my point of view she’d probably seen too much for her own good. While I took pride in her success, I hated being so far away from her. However much we talked on the phone, I missed our cuddles, and it’s hard to pick up those clues that things aren’t going well if you’re several thousand miles away.