Osmond, 55, said that it was Elvis Presley who convinced him and his singing brothers to study karate in the 1970s, when the Osmonds had first become a huge sensation. “He got us interested in karate, he talked us into wearing jumpsuits,” Osmond said. “He was like a big brother, in a way.”
Following Presley’s recommendation, the brothers ended up learning karate from Norris, who hadn’t yet become a film and television star at the time, but was a highly successful karate instructor. A section in “Stages” with the apt heading “Don’t Mess with Chuck Norris” describes Osmond’s close encounter, which happened at the end of a lesson in which Norris encouraged his pupils to hone their peripheral vision, to increase their awareness of a potential foe striking from behind.
“I wanted to see if he could sense me ‘attacking’ him from behind when he wasn’t expecting it,” Osmond writes. “He was talking to one of my brothers and I did a flying round kick to his back. He caught me in mid-air, right after I kicked him, and turned my ankle, flipping me in the air.”
The successful sneak attack earned Osmond a verbal flogging from Norris — and provided a terrific anecdote for “Stages.” Osmond’s personal assistant, Terri Shoemaker, helped him write the book and said in an e-mail that her boss has always had stories to tell. “I’ve always been impressed with the detail in which Jay remembers things that have happened throughout his life,” she said.
How it all began
Osmond said that he didn’t decide to write a book about his life overnight. His newest CD, “It’s About Time Again,” released earlier this year, is a compilation of favorite songs from years of performing, a sort of career retrospective. When he first started thinking about putting the disc together, Osmond said, it occurred to him that there should be a similar vehicle for his favorite stories about his life.
“I thought, ‘That’s what I should do with this book,’ ” he said. He’d been meaning to write “this book” for a number of years, partly because his own story, along with the larger story of his famous family, is something people still ask him about frequently.
All of the Osmonds are familiar with the questions, he said: “What caused us to want to go into show business? What made us stay in it? What was our purpose?”
A lot of the Osmond family lore is out there already: It was the four middle Osmonds — Alan, Wayne, Merrill and Jay — who launched the family to stardom, starting a singing group when Jay was barely old enough to sing, as a means of helping older brothers Virl and Tom pay for hearing aids and save money to serve proselytizing missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
(Their religious faith has always been important to the family. Osmond said that there were always pictures of Jesus Christ and of LDS temples hung on the walls all through the home in Ogden where he grew up.)
After being featured on local television by promoter Eugene Jelesnik, the youthful quartet went to California hoping to audition for Lawrence Welk. Welk didn’t actually meet with the family, the first disappointment of a career that would have both highs and lows.
Instead of returning to Utah, however, the boys’ father took them to Disneyland, where an impromptu performance on Main Street USA led to an audition for the park’s entertainment director that resulted in a regular gig. Working at Disneyland eventually got the Osmonds on television with entertainer Andy Williams, which led to Elvis, Chuck Norris and thousands of screaming girls.
When the going gets tough
That’s the sort of resiliency that Osmond said helped the family later in life. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, he said, the family lost almost all of the money that had come from its early successes.
“We invested a lot and we trusted too much. A lot of people had their hands in the pie,” he said. “We basically lost everything.”
The family patriarch, the late George Osmond, decided that they would learn a lesson from their hard luck, Osmond said: “He forgave everybody. He always wanted to do the right thing.”
Osmond said that living through ups and downs taught him about the importance of enduring bad times and not giving up. If his life’s story had a theme, Osmond said, that’s the one he’d choose: “Stick it out when things get tough, because they will get better.”
When he started writing “Stages,” Osmond pored over journals, news articles, old photographs and books. As he did so, he said, he would have “flashes,” moments where he’d remember a story, or an insight. He wrote all of those things down and tried to divide them up.
One group was for reflections he thought would be interesting to readers who were already Osmond fans. The other was for things he thought would be interesting to readers who were less familiar with the family. “I made two separate lists and then tried to put them together,” he said.
His wife, Kandilyn, helped him sift through his many recollections. Kandilyn Osmond, who met Jay while attending Brigham Young University, said that she tried to help her husband stay focused on his readers.
The book also has a section that includes reminiscences from family members and friends — some of which Osmond didn’t read before including them. He was OK knowing what his friends had said, but he didn’t want family members to be influenced in what they would write by thinking that he would read and edit their remarks.
As Osmond put it, “I said, ‘I want you to write what you feel from your heart. Be as honest as you can.’ ”
In the end, Osmond said he hopes that readers will feel the same way about “Stages”: that it’s an honest, heartfelt attempt by one guy to talk about growing up and getting to middle age in the public eye. If he’s written it well, he said, “Stages” will be “like a journey. People can get on a train with us and just ride it through.”
