Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

After that we didn’t see or hear from Don for years. Then, at the end of the nineties, Sharon’s mother died. I don’t know all the ins-and-outs of it, but Sharon’s mum had taken a few funny turns over the years, and the upshot was that the two of them had stopped talking, too.

They’re a very intense family, the Ardens. They’ve always gone in for a lot of verbal abuse—which sometimes I think can be even worse than physical abuse. Anyway, a year or so after her mother died, we heard from the family in England that Don was sick and had fallen on hard times. Even though they still weren’t talking, Sharon sorted him out with a place to live.

Then I got a call from Sharon’s brother, David. ‘I’ve got some bad news,’ he said. ‘Don’s got Alzheimer’s.’

There was no way I could keep that from Sharon.

At first she brushed it off, and said she was supporting him financially anyway. But I said to her, ‘Look, I don’t know what your real feelings are towards your father, but I strongly advise you, if you’ve got anything to say to him, even if it’s just to call him an arsehole again, do it now. Because with every day that goes by, he’s gonna be like a dying flame.’

The thing is, I’ve never believed in feuds. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been angry with people. Very angry—with people like Patrick Meehan, or that lawyer who tried to bill me for a drink, or Bob Daisley. But I don’t hate them. And I don’t wish them any harm. I reckon hating someone is just a total fucking waste of time and effort. What do you get out of it in the end?

Nothing. I’m not trying to come over like the Archangel Gabriel here. I just think that if you’re pissed off with someone, call them an arsehole, get it out of your system, and move on. It’s not like we’re on this earth very long.

Anyway, Sharon finally decided she wanted to see him again, so he came back into our lives. He even ended up in a couple of episodes of The Osbournes . And I was happy about it, y’know—even though he’d called me Vegetable for most of the time I knew him. Then, when Sharon decided she wanted to renew our wedding vows—she was still going through chemo at the time—we made Don part of the ceremony, which we held on New Year’s Eve at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We did it Jewish-style—with the little canopy, the broken glass, everything.

A lot of people came up to me that night and asked, ‘How come you and Sharon have stayed together all this time?’ My answer was the same then as it is now: I’ve never stopped telling my wife that I love her; I’ve never stopped taking her out for dinner; I’ve never stopped surprising her with little gifts. Unfortunately, back then, I’d never stopped drinking and taking drugs, either, so the ceremony ended much the same as our original wedding had: with me slumped in a corridor, pissed out of my brains.

The Don Arden I’d known since the early seventies just disappeared after that. The light was on but no one was home. It was a terrible way to die. I’m telling you, having seen what happened to my father-in-law, I wouldn’t wish Alzheimer’s on my worst fucking enemy. Even after everything that had gone down between us over the years—even though he’d played a part in Bob Daisley’s lawsuit—I felt truly sorry for him during his final years.

In the end, we put him in a care home.

I remember he had this wax build-up in his ears, and whenever we went to see him, I used to put these drops in for him. I don’t know why I thought it was my job, I just did it. I suppose it probably had something to do with the immense pity I felt for him. This vicious, powerful, frightening man had become a child.

‘Dad,’ said Jack one day. ‘When you’re on the telly, d’you think people are laughing with you or at you?’

The question had obviously been bothering him for a while.

‘Y’know what,’ I said to him, ‘as long as they’re laughing, I don’t care.’

‘But why, Dad? Why would you want to be a clown?’

‘Because I’ve always been able to laugh at myself, Jack. Humour has kept me alive over all these years.’

And it’s true, y’know. I mean, it doesn’t take much to rattle my cage, either—although, as I’m getting older, I increasingly think, Fuck it, what’s the point, it’ll all work out one way or another—but humour has saved my life too many times to count. And it didn’t start with The Osbournes . Even in Black Sabbath, I was the clown. I was always the one making the others crack up.

But I felt bad for Jack.

It couldn’t have been easy for him, especially during those first two years of the show, when I was this shaking, mumbling, fucked-up wreck. I can’t even imagine it, to be honest with you. Same goes for Kelly. When we all became these mega-celebrities, it was the first time I really understood why all these young Hollywood starlets get doped up and go into rehab every other day of the week. It’s the pressure—it’s fucking ridiculous. Non-stop. Day-in, day-out. I mean, the first year we went on air, Kelly sang ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ at the MTV

Movie Awards. She had to come down this big flight of stairs with every star in the business sitting there, watching her. But she just took it by the horns. And of course she ended up loving every minute of it, as did the audience.

But she had her problems, like we all do. And it broke my heart when Jack started to get fucked up too. He took Sharon’s cancer as hard as I did, to the point where he ended up on OxyContin, which they call ‘hillbilly heroin’ in LA. I remember we had this huge blow up about it, and I said, ‘What the fuck, Jack? Why are you going around getting pissed all the time?

You’ve never wanted for a thing! What have you ever wanted for?’

He just looked at me and said, ‘A father.’

I won’t forget that moment in a hurry.

It was the first time I’d really had to face the cost of how I’d been living all those years—the cost to my son, who I loved so much, who I was so proud of, but who I’d never been there for. It was a terrible feeling.

All I could say was: ‘Jack, I’m so sorry.’

Jack got sober after that. But I didn’t.

By August 2003, I was shaking so much that I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t hold anything, I couldn’t communicate. It got to the point where Sharon started to get pissed off with my doctors. The stuff they were giving me seemed to be making me worse, not better.

So then I got a new doctor, Allan Ropper, who was based in the same teaching hospital in Boston where I’d been told I didn’t have MS in the early nineties. He was treating Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease at the time—Sharon had read an article about him in People magazine. The first thing Dr Ropper did when we flew out to see him was throw away all the pills I was on. Then he checked me into hospital for five days and ran every test ever invented on me. After that, I had to wait another week for the results, Finally, me and Sharon went back to his office to find out what the fuck was wrong with me, once and for all.

‘I’ve think I’ve got to the bottom of this,’ he said. ‘Basically, Mr Osbourne, you have a very, very rare condition, which is caused by your mother and your father both having the same damaged chromosome in their DNA. And when I say it’s very rare, think one-in-a-billion rare.

The good news is that it’s not MS or Parkinson’s disease. The bad news is that we don’t really have a name for it. The best description is probably Parkinsonian syndrome.’

‘Is that what’s been giving me the tremor?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And it’s hereditary? It has nothing to do with the booze or the drugs?’

‘The alcohol and some of the drugs you were taking were definitely making it worse. But they weren’t the primary cause.’