By Jenny Johnston "How fucking crap is that?" she wails, ever her father's daughter. "Who gets dumped on Valentine's fucking Day? By an arsehole who can't even stay on the phone long enough to explain why? I still don't understand it. "He was the one who fucking came after me. Then he decides he doesn't want to be Kelly Osbourne's boyfriend. He doesn't even end it in a decent way. He ends it in stupid pussy's way. Well, he can fuck off. I don't give two shits. I gave him my heart and he shovelled it under the rug. He doesn't even fucking deserve me. Fuck." Then she falls silent. She gives a huge sniff, which reminds you that even yellow glitter eyeshadow and a famously bolshy attitude are no protection when you have your heart broken for the first time. It is only three weeks since Bert McCracken, the 20-year-old lead singer of punk group The Used, ended his seven-month relationship with the daughter of Ozzy Osbourne. Some would say good riddance. Bert, after all, is more famous for his penchant for vomiting in public and his refusal to shower than for his lovegod qualities. Still Kelly - who is only 18 - is just a teeny bit lost without him. "I hate boys," she says quietly, between expletives. "I've been on four dates since Bert dumped me and I've had to leave halfway through each one. I'm really afraid of liking someone. I don't think I ever want a boyfriend again. "You let someone in. You pour your heart out to them, like you've never done to anyone, and they trample over you. This really hurts. I had no idea being dumped would be this awful. He has broken my heart and I've never had a broken heart before. It feels like a whole heap of shit. "I suppose it was the first time I was really in love. I thought the world of him. I'm not saying I imagined I'd be with him for ever and ever, but I didn't expect it to end. We'd been together for seven months and I thought we were pretty solid." The humiliating rejection certainly wasn't the Valentine's present she had hoped for. When Bert called on February 14, Kelly - who was on tour with her band - wondered if he might have planned a surprise weekend away, or a holiday in the sun. She quickly discovered that he hadn't. He was phoning to tell her their relationship was over. "He said he loved me and then split up with me in the same sentence. That came out of nowhere. I was reeling, but he didn't even give me time to react. HE hung up - just like that. I called him back to ask what the hell he was talking about. But he just said he didn't even want to talk to me. "I do still love him. I don't think you ever stop loving someone like that." A global The Osbournes audience had watched the relationship between Kelly and Bert develop. It was the stuff of spectacular viewing figures - especially when Ozzy waggled his finger in Bert's face during their introduction and said: "No sex." She had shocking hair and a stunning knowledge of swear words; he looked like a goblin with a beard and was at the forefront of a new musical genre called "screamo". They seemed strangely suited. Kelly obviously thought so. She is still trying to work out what went wrong, and she's almost decided that the Osbourne name is to blame. "He made me feel bad for being Kelly Osbourne," she explains. "He didn't seem to understand that I can't help who I am. I think he thought I was affecting his music. He kept saying he wanted to be recognised for his own talent, not for being Kelly Osbourne's boyfriend. But that's crap. "The truth is he is too selfish to have a girlfriend. He shouldn't even try. He should be hooking up with groupies, because after all that's what he wants to do. I hate boys. They have it much easier than girls. Girls are stupid. They fall in love too quickly. Boys just fall out too quickly. Girls are the ones who end up getting hurt." For someone still in her teens, Kelly seems to have had her share of dysfunctional relationships. Maybe that's not surprising, given that she has a father famed for biting heads off bats, for attempting to strangle her mother and for going into drug rehab the day after she was born. But, the way she explains it, it does seem rather sad. "I seem to have attracted the biggest loonies in the world," she reveals. "I've tended to be attracted to drug addicts who might not be using drugs any more but they are still pretty screwed up. They seem to need some sort of high and they get it by doing mad things like spewing in people's faces or screaming in the middle of the street. "At the beginning, I thought Bert was quite boring, but a bit hot. Very soon, I realised he was nuts." The rest of us might see a blindingly obvious link between being the daughter of Ozzy Osbourne and having a penchant for dating shock-seeking rockers with drug problems. Kelly won't have any of it. "No, no. That's crap. I don't know why people say that. Bert is nothing like my Dad. Just because he's a lead singer and he has long hair. I don't see any similarities at all. "Anyway, I didn't actually know he was a lead singer when we started going out. I thought he was a roadie. If I'd known I probably wouldn't have got involved. I know enough about the music business to run a mile from all that stuff." For all that they are supposed to be this close-knit, if highly unconventional, family, there doesn't seem to have been much support from Ozzy or her mum Sharon. Though Kelly is prepared to pour her heart out to a journalist, she hasn't shared any of these emotions with her family. She admits: "I don't talk to my family about relationship stuff. Yeah, they must know I've been really upset about it. I didn't leave the house for days. But they don't get involved." In fact, they appear to have added to the pressures on the couple. "My mother hated Bert, and it doesn't really help when your mother is giving interviews saying how much she hates your boyfriend. She's always hated my boyfriends. She always will, until the day I start dating a 32-year-old Jewish doctor's son. And my brother Jack was a complete asshole about him." The show that made Kelly famous might all have been a load of fun when it started, but she has had to cope with her mum's cancer and now her first heartbreak in front of the whole world. "When Mum got ill that was terrible," she admits. "I cried for six months, and it is hard enough to cry as it is, let alone crying in front of a camera. It was the hardest thing to go through. My mother is like the walls of our family. She's OK now, she's doing well, but it was a huge blow. "All this stuff with Bert has made me wonder if I want to do this any more. It is hard enough growing up and being a teenager, but doing it in front of the whole world is bloody hard too. "You say you don't give two shits about what people think, but everyone cares, really, deep down." The arrival of the MTV cameras once seemed to have given Kelly a much-needed focus in her life. "I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life," she says. "I was actually quite depressed about it. Everyone around me knew what they wanted from life. My sister had this beautiful voice and she was always in the recording studio. My brother was working as a talent scout. I was really upset that I just didn't have a clue. I was working in an office, answering phones. "Then the show took off, and it blew me away. Suddenly all these opportunities came my way, and I'd have been mad not to take them." Now she is a fashion icon, pop star and teen role model. In the next few weeks, she begins a tour in the US and on this side of the Atlantic becomes the unlikely face of Doritos in a series of ads. "It's all a bit mental, isn't it?" she asks, genuinely bewildered. She, more than anyone, can see the irony in a super-soaraway career happening to a girl who still has a nanny and admits to sucking her thumb every night. "People ask me what my ambitions are, where do I want to be in five years or 10 years, and it does piss me off. I still don't have a fucking clue. I'm 18 years old. I'm not supposed to know what I am doing. "I'm supposed to screw up, and make mistakes and get hurt. I'm supposed to be a bit of a mess. It's life, for fuck's sake." Kelly can be seen in her two new Doritos ads from March 17 |