Marie Osmond: An Audience With…

November 8, 2009 by Baby Chums
Filed under: News

An Audience with Donny & Marie airs on ITV1 on Wednesday in front of a host of UK celebrities. Vegas shows and an album release, but there’s a side to Marie Osmond that’s less showbiz than her toothy smile, incredible legs and singing talents. It’s a story of Motherhood.

She was 50 last month. She says: ‘Still, I’d rather be 50 than pregnant.’

Marie Osmond is currently a single mother to eight; Four boys and four girls, three of them her offspring, five adopted.

Stephen Craig was her husband back in 1982 and she gave birth to a son, also Stephen, the following year. In 1984 the couple divorced, with husband Stephen admitting that he hadn’t been ready for marriage or fatherhood.

Two years later, Marie married record producer Brian Blosil but doctors had told her that she might have trouble conceiving so, in 1987, the couple adopted their first child, Jessica.

As it happens, she conceived naturally in 1989 when daughter Rachael was born. Sons Michael and Brandon were adopted in 1991 and 1997 respectively, followed by daughter Brianna in 1998.

Then baby Matthew arrived naturally the following year, with little Abigail being adopted three years later in 2002. But the mother of eight makes no distinction between any of her children.

“God had a plan. I didn’t find those children. They found me. I really believe that. And anybody who has adopted will tell you the same. There is absolutely no difference in what I feel for any of my kids.’”

But the birth of Matthew in 1999 was to prove the catalyst for so much of what was to follow.

“I’d had the baby blues before,” says Marie, “but this was different.”

Unable to summon the energy some mornings to climb out from under the duvet, she was at a loss to understand what had taken hold of her.

One day, Marie Osmond snapped; “I remember walking down the stairs and putting Matthew in the arms of the nanny. “I can’t stay here,” I told her. “There is something wrong, really wrong with me. I have to leave until I figure it out.”"

This was ten years ago. “I turned away from her, away from my precious baby, away from my life and walked out of the door. I have no idea how my feet carried me to the car.

“When I switched on the engine, something overpowering moved inside of me, something from the deepest part of my soul. My body was racked with hysterical crying and I began to understand for the first time why a person would want to take their own life.”

Catatonic with grief, she drove 250 miles up the Californian coast and checked into a motel.

“In the end, Brian found me via the mobile my eldest son had left in the car from the previous night. It had kept ringing and eventually I’d answered it.”

Husband Brian told her he’d be there as fast as he could. The next call came from the Osmond family mother and matriarch, Olive.

Marie said her mother had empathised with her, Olive said: “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone,” said my mother. “I went through exactly the same thing when I had my last child.” Her mother had also known the severity of post-natal depression.’

Marie was prescribed a course of pills and with the show-must-go-on attitude drummed into all nine Osmonds and the help of a trusted therapist, Marie began to pull her life back together.

She looked after her mother when she became ill and was effectively paralysed from the neck down.

“I nursed her to her death on Mother’s Day in 2004 and I helped with my father until he died three years later in the middle of my stint on Dancing With The Stars.”

Marie nonetheless finished third in the contest.

Slowly, though, it began to dawn on Marie that her depression hadn’t simply been caused by the fact that her mind and body had effectively shut down.

“It hadn’t been easy growing up in the music industry in the Seventies,” she says, “and for two reasons. Not only was I a girl, but I was the only female Osmond. I felt a huge pressure on all sides.”

And then there was the revelation only released to the public in her book, “Behind The Smile” the long-suppressed memories of the sexual abuse she’d suffered during her formative years. She has remained resolute refusing to name her abusers, who were outside of the family circle.

Again, therapy proved invaluable in facing those demons. But she wasn’t yet out of the woods. “Gradually, I came to the sad but inescapable conclusion that something was essentially wrong with my marriage.

Her brother Jimmy was an anchor for her through this time: “When your children start telling you to leave, it’s time to go. It was an unbelievably tough decision, though. Jimmy’s the one who saved my life,’ she says, with tears in her eyes.

“When I went through the whole mess, he not only took me under his wing, he carried me financially while my assets were frozen.

“I was so beaten down by then. I’d been told [by Brian] that my career was all washed up, that my voice was anyway average at best. My self-esteem was on the floor. Jimmy turned to me one day and simply said: “I want my sister back.” He’s an angel.”

The idea of teaming up with brother Donny again came at just the right time. “We knew we’d inevitably get back together one day. And moving from Utah to Las Vegas has given the children new stability.’” Nonetheless, those children have sometimes put their mother through difficult and trying times.

She says though that this is true of all families. In 2006, daughters Jessica and Rachael were caught indulging in internet sex, posting messages online revealing how much they enjoyed sex and were open to offers.

Marie - and this must have been particularly tough for someone born and raised as a Mormon - said she was “saddened” by their actions. “But, if my celebrity is good for anything, let it be as a voice of warning to other parents to become more knowledgeable about what our children get up to.”

The next year, adopted son Michael, then 16, spent a spell in rehab. Whether for drink or drugs has never been made clear.

Last June, Jessica came out as lesbian, the reaction in the downmarket U.S. tabloids being that her mother, a woman who turned down the role of Sandy in Grease because she disapproved of the film’s moral content, would turn her back on her daughter, because Mormons don’t recognise same-sex relationships.

To her credit, Marie went on public record in support of Jessica. “When it comes to marriage,” she said at the time, “I think civil rights need to apply to everyone whatever their gender and orientation.”

She say’s now, “Anyway, He wouldn’t be much of a caring God, would He, if He put anything above love? Nothing is more precious to me than my children.”

For the thoroughly sorted, born again, Marie Osmond, there’s no time now, she says, for men. “I did date last year, but there’s no one at the moment. I do get hit on, though, by younger guys, which is kind of flattering.”

“Right now, I don’t call it the menopause. I call it men-on-pause. Anyway, I’m too busy.”