IT was the craziest start to a love affair that survived against the odds for more than 40 years.
Superstar rocker Ozzy Osbourne had been given an envelope stuffed with cash to hand over to Sharon Arden, daughter of his band Black Sabbath’s manager.
Instead, Ozzy blew the money on cocaine — which he was working his way through when Sharon arrived at his hotel.
Despite being completely off his head, Ozzy, who died on Tuesday age 76, never forgot that strange meeting when Sharon asked, “Do you have anything for me?”.
He recalled: “‘No, I don’t think so’, I said, all innocent.
“But it didn’t take Einstein to work out what had happened. There was a massive bag of coke on the table next to a ripped-up envelope with ‘Sharon’ written on it in felt-tip pen.
“Sharon gave me a monumental bollocking when she saw it, shouting and cursing and telling me I was a f***ing disaster.
“I guess I won’t be shagging her any time soon, then, I thought.
“But she came back the next day, to find me lying in a puddle of my own p**s, smoking a joint.
“She said, ‘Look, if you want to get your s**t together, we want to manage you’.”
That ill-fated meeting led to an incredible marriage that lasted 33 years — despite Ozzy’s drug and sex addiction and even his attempt to strangle Sharon.
He admitted: “I fell for Sharon so badly, man . . . she saved my life every day.”
In one of his last interviews, Ozzy described the reality TV star and X Factor judge as his “soulmate”.
He said: “Sometimes I love her, sometimes I don’t love her, sometimes I’m angry with her, sometimes I’m crazy about her, sometimes I’m very jealous of her, sometimes I wanna f***ing kill her.
“But through it all, at the end of the day, I love her more than anything in the world.”
As Sharon took over running Ozzy’s professional life, the Brummie lad quickly realised that he had never met a woman like her before.
In his 2009 biography, I Am Ozzy, he revealed: “I’d never come across a girl who was like me. Wherever we went, we were always the drunkest and the loudest.
“I learned that when Sharon is on a mission, she’ll throw herself at it, lock, stock and barrel, and not stop fighting until well after the bell’s rung.
“I trusted Sharon like I’d never trusted anyone before on the business side of things.”
When Sharon was relaunching Ozzy as a solo star with a new album, Blizzard Of Ozz, and a tour following his firing from Black Sabbath in 1979, the star’s private life was falling apart.
He was married to Thelma Riley, had adopted her son Elliot from an earlier marriage and they had two kids of their own, Jessica and Louis.
After months of trying, Ozzy finally bedded Sharon after leaping into her bath at a hotel near Shepperton Studios.
He recalled: “Me and Sharon were bonking all over the place. We couldn’t stop. Some nights, Sharon would go out of one door and Thelma would come in the other.
“I was knackered all the time, having two women on the go. I don’t know how those French blokes do it.
“When I was with Sharon, I’d end up calling her ‘Tharon’, which earned me more than a few black eyes. I’d never known what it was like to fall in love before I met Sharon. We were inseparable.
“I realised that when you’re in love, it’s not just about the messing around in the sack, it’s about how empty you feel when they’re gone. And I couldn’t stand it when Sharon was gone.”
But when he split up with Thelma in 1981, Sharon bore the brunt of Ozzy’s anger.
He said: “I was a wreck. I was in love with Sharon, but at the same time I was cut to pieces by losing my family.
“I’d get drunk and try to hit her, and she’d throw things at me.
“Wine bottles, gold discs, TVs — you name it, it would all come flying across the room.
“I ain’t proud to admit that a few of my punches reached their target.”
But the following year, Ozzy and Sharon married in Hawaii on the way to a gig.
The rocker didn’t make it back to their hotel room after the ceremony.
Sharon recalled: “The manager called and said, ‘Your husband is lying in the hall, will you come and get him’ and I said, ‘No I won’t’.”
While Sharon managed Ozzy’s soaring solo career, the couple welcomed their three children Aimee, 41, Kelly, 40, and Jack, 39.
But she could not curb her husband’s appetite for booze, illegal drugs and prescription pills.
When he got violent, Sharon would take her revenge, like the time she took a hammer to all his gold records.
But seven years after their wedding, Ozzy tried to strangle Sharon while high on drugs and Russian vodka, at their 17th Century home in Little Chalfont, Bucks.
The family had gone to their bedrooms after returning from a local Chinese restaurant to celebrate Aimee’s sixth birthday.
Before lunging at Sharon, Ozzy stripped naked and told her: “We’ve had a little talk and it’s clear that you have to die.”
She pressed the panic button, alerting the police.
Ozzy woke up in a cell the next morning with no recollection of the attack, to find he had been charged with attempted murder.
Three months later, ahead of his court case, Sharon visited the rehab centre where Ozzy had been sent to dry out.
In his autobiography, Ozzy recalled how she told him: “I’m going to drop the charges. I don’t believe you’re capable of attempted murder, Ozzy.
“You’re a sweet, gentle man. But when you get drunk, Ozzy Osbourne disappears and someone else takes over. I want that other person to go away. I don’t want to see him again.”
But Ozzy instead developed a prescription pill addiction.
Sharon almost died from colon cancer during the making of their Noughties fly-on-the-wall MTV show, The Osbournes.
While she was still undergoing chemo, the couple retook their vows on New Year’s Eve 2002.
Ozzy revealed: “People keep asking, ‘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, I’d never stopped drinking and taking drugs, so the ceremony ended much the same as our original wedding — with me slumped in a corridor, p**sed out of my brains.”
A year later, Ozzy had a near-fatal quad bike accident on their estate that required multiple surgeries and affected his long-term mobility. In the aftermath of the crash, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, only going public with the condition in 2020.
Meanwhile, Sharon — who described their life together as “a Shakespeare play” — slipped Ozzy extra sleeping pills in 2016 to extract a confession that he had been having an affair with his hairdresser.
It was also revealed that there were more mistresses.
Devastated, Sharon tried to kill herself but was found by a cleaner.
Jessie Breakwell, who worked as their nanny, said: “Ozzy was obsessed with her. They’d giggle and make jokes. It was genuine love.”
After Ozzy went to rehab for sex addiction, the couple reconciled and renewed their vows in Las Vegas in 2017.
Sharon admitted: “I love him. I can leave if I want, take half of everything and go. I don’t want to.”
1. Ozzy once told Sharon: “Don’t cremate me, whatever you do.
“I want to be put in the ground, in a nice garden somewhere, with a tree over my head.
“A crabapple tree, preferably, so the kids can make wine out of me and get pissed out of their heads.
“As for what they’ll put on my headstone, I ain’t under any illusions.
2. Ozzy decided to stop using acid while recording Black Sabbath album Vol 4.
He said: “I took ten tabs of acid then went for a walk in a field.
“I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour.
“In the end, the horse turned around and told me to f**k off.
“That was it for me.”
3. The rocker began tattooing himself as a teenager while growing up in Birmingham.
He said: “I even put a smiley face on each of my knees to cheer myself up when I was sitting on the bog in the morning.”
Decades later he had ‘thanks’ tattooed on his right palm.
He said: “It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.
“How many times do you say ‘thanks’ to people during your lifetime?
4. The Osbournes had a donkey called Sally, who used to sit in the living room with Ozzy and watch Match Of The Day.
5. Former slaughterhouse worker Ozzy claimed to have killed his family’s cats while high.
“My wife found me under the piano in a white suit – a shotgun in one hand and a knife in the other.”
6. The Prince of Darkness was interested in the Bible.
He said: “I’ve tried to read it several times.
“But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, ‘What were these people smoking back then?'”
7. Ozzy met the late Queen at the Royal Variety Performance.
He recalled: “I was standing next to Cliff Richard.
“She took one look at the two of us, and said, “Oh, so this is what they call variety, is it?” then cracked up laughing.
“I honestly thought Sharon must have slipped some acid into my cornflakes that morning.”
8. Ozzy loved putting hidden messages in songs.
He said: “On No Rest For The Wicked, if you play Bloodbath In Paradise backwards, you can clearly hear me saying, ‘Your mother sells whelks in Hull’.”
