Rock matriarch writes about life, family & more

Sharon Osbourne became an international celebrity with her hit MTV reality show, “The Osbournes.” The show debuted in 2002 and chronicled the lives of Sharon, her husband, rocker Ozzy Osbourne, and two of their children, Kelly and Jack. On the show, Sharon became known for her frank and candid way with words. Sharon has put her words on paper in a new autobiography, “Sharon Osbourne Extreme.” Here's an excerpt:

1
Brixton
Memory is a strange thing, and since starting this book I have discovered that people's memories of the same event can be very, very different. What follows, therefore, is only my memory of what happened in my life. I cannot say this is how it happened. I can only say this is how it seemed to me at the time.

My earliest memory is of sitting on a wooden chair, watching some girls going through their dance routines in fishnet tights and silver shoes. I can't have been much more than two, but far from this being unusual, it was everyday life for me.

The church hall where my father would always do these rehearsals is no longer there, though the church still is, and the house where we lived — 68 Angell Road — has become one of a row of townhouse-style public-housing apartments.

The area has changed too. There's an edge of danger to it now, which wasn't the case back then. In the fifties and early sixties, Brixton, south of the Thames, was where all the vaudeville artists lived, comedians, singers, ventriloquists, acrobats. Entertainers. Pre-TV, vaudeville was the only entertainment there was for ordinary people, and with the Brixton Empress and the Camberwell Palace being less than a mile away, Brixton was the hub. Across the street from us were the fire-eater and a juggler. A dog act, a man called Reg, lived in a trailer in a bombsite behind our road and I used to play with his little girl.

Our house was large and old, with six steps leading up from the pavement and pillars on either side. At one time it must have been quite grand, but by the fifties the plaster was peeling off, and once you got inside everywhere was dingy and drafty and damp.

NBC VIDEO Sharon Osbourne on her new book Oct. 24: "Today" host Matt Lauer talks with Ozzy Osbourne's wife about her new autobiography, "Sharon Osbourne Extreme," her troubled childhood, her marriage, and her kids. Today Show Books

Before I was born, in 1952, my mother ran it as a theatrical digs, a boardinghouse for artists who needed a place to stay when they were working in town. And that was how she met my father. He took a room for the week in 1950, and six weeks later they were married.

Looking back, it's hard to see what they saw in each other — she didn't own the house, it was rented, and belonged to a chart-topping honky-tonk piano player named Winifred Atwell. And although my mother was obviously nice to look at — at least my father must have thought so — she was ten years older than him and divorced with two children. Her name was Hope Shaw (Mr. Shaw had been a bandleader and had fucked off to Canada with somebody else) but she was always called Paddy because of her Irish background, though my father would often call her Paddler because he thought it sounded more Jewish.

Maybe my father saw her as being a bit bohemian, because he himself had come from this very strict Jewish background, very frum as they say in Yiddish, while my mother was the polar opposite: an Irish Catholic and a former dancer.

My father's family were Russian Jews who had arrived in Manchester (in the north of England) around the time of the First World War. He was born Harry Levy, but changed it to Don Arden when he decided to make a career in show business. With such an obviously Jewish name he'd get nowhere, he said, and he'd had his fill of anti-Semitism in the army during the war. I don't know where he got it from — perhaps from Elizabeth Arden, the makeup line — but it did what he wanted. It's a name that says nothing about who you are or where you come from. A blank canvas.

My father was a singer, and although popular with audiences he was always in trouble with management. Things came to a head one night when he had a fight with a stage manager who had called him a Jewboy. It ended with them both rolling around the stage kicking the shit out of each other and the other guy falling into the orchestra pit. Not only was he told to pack his things and get out, Don Arden was banned from performing in any venue owned by Moss Empires for two years, and as these people had a virtual monopoly in vaudeville theaters, this was like a death sentence for his career. (They owned fifty of them, so artists would be under permanent contract, moving around the country playing one town a week.)

In order to make enough money to survive, he began packaging whole shows, which he'd then tour around independent theaters where his name still held good. He continued to perform, topping the bill with his own act — not only singing but doing impressions of American stars like Bing Crosby and Al Jolson that people knew from films — but also emceeing the rest of the show: a comic, puppet act, dancers, whatever. He was like a one-man band. He did so well that when the ban was lifted he never went back to simply performing.

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