America made sense. In the UK it had got to the stage where we were spending too much time apart from my dad because he was always touring or recording in America. My mum was spending more and more time away from us too. As my father’s manager, she was alwaysbeing called back on tour because Dad was being so naughty and had fallen off the tracks again. He would be off the rails on drink and drugs.
My mum would get phone calls from the crew who were with him on tour in America, saying, ‘Sharon, you’ve got to come back, Ozzy is off his head.’
There was no master plan when we moved to America. We literally packed our bags, left Welders and jumped on a plane for the eleven-hour flight to Los Angeles. I was too excited to give a shit about whether I would fit in or make friends. It was going to be fun to hang out in Los Angeles for a while. That’s the great thing about growing up with a dad who is on the road touring. You do become very used to change. But I was really missing my best friends Sammy and Fleur.
Every time my mum was on the phone to her business partner Colin Newman, who is Fleur’s dad, I’d screech in the background, ‘Put Fleur on. I want to speak to Fleur.’ I was excited about making friends at my new school. But that whole being the new girl thing was going to be absolutely shit. I started writing to Sammy and Fleur. We made a pact that they would come and visit during the next school holidays, which I was really looking forward to. I planned to take them swimming and shopping.
M Y mum registered me at a school about ten minutes’ drive away from the Beverly Hills Hotel, which everyone calls the Pink Palace. We were staying there while we looked for a new house.
I thought, ‘Fuck me. This is a cool place to live.’
The Pink Palace is on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which is an area in Los Angeles. The Palace is the most exclusive hotel in the city and has kept its traditions from the 1950s. It’s very old-school Hollywood. It’s impossible to go there and not see an A-list star. It really values its guests’ privacy, which is why it’s so popular. My mum has been going to there since the 1970s and all the staff really look after her. It has the most amazing spa, where my mum used to get all her treatments done.
We were staying in one of the twenty-one private bungalows that sit in the hotel’s tropical gardens. The bungalow had a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi and the sun was always shining.
Every celebrity you can think of dines or has meetings at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was such a surreal experience for me. On my first day of school, as I walked through the lobby, Tom Hanks was having breakfast in the Polo Lounge, which is the hotel’s famous restaurant. I was lucky if I passed a sheep on my way to school in the UK, it was so remote.
From that day on, I saw every actor, TV presenter and singer in that place. Was it cool? Hell, yeah. There was Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts – everyone! My new school, Hawthorne School, was so fucking different to Pipers Corner School, the all-girls school that I’d left behind in the UK. I’d been used to going to a school where there were just 580 pupils. Hawthorne had more than 5,000 pupils and it was mixed. I felt my new school was not going to be anywhere near as strict as the one I’d left behind, which wasn’t going to be a bad thing. I didn’t have to wear a uniform at my new school either, which meantI had been shitting myself because I didn’t know what to wear.
I’d just arrived in America, so I wasn’t up on what everyone else would be wearing. At my last school, I’d worn a bloody cape! So Mum took me to Fred Segal, which is a really popular store in America. It instantly became my favourite place. It was Mum’s favourite store too and it certainly beat the Marks & Spencer shopping trips. No offence. Because Fred Segal is one of the coolest places to hang out in LA, it’s always full of people
My mum would get phone calls from the crew who were with him on tour in America, saying, ‘Sharon, you’ve got to come back, Ozzy is off his head.’
There was no master plan when we moved to America. We literally packed our bags, left Welders and jumped on a plane for the eleven-hour flight to Los Angeles. I was too excited to give a shit about whether I would fit in or make friends. It was going to be fun to hang out in Los Angeles for a while. That’s the great thing about growing up with a dad who is on the road touring. You do become very used to change. But I was really missing my best friends Sammy and Fleur.
Every time my mum was on the phone to her business partner Colin Newman, who is Fleur’s dad, I’d screech in the background, ‘Put Fleur on. I want to speak to Fleur.’ I was excited about making friends at my new school. But that whole being the new girl thing was going to be absolutely shit. I started writing to Sammy and Fleur. We made a pact that they would come and visit during the next school holidays, which I was really looking forward to. I planned to take them swimming and shopping.
M Y mum registered me at a school about ten minutes’ drive away from the Beverly Hills Hotel, which everyone calls the Pink Palace. We were staying there while we looked for a new house.
I thought, ‘Fuck me. This is a cool place to live.’
The Pink Palace is on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills, which is an area in Los Angeles. The Palace is the most exclusive hotel in the city and has kept its traditions from the 1950s. It’s very old-school Hollywood. It’s impossible to go there and not see an A-list star. It really values its guests’ privacy, which is why it’s so popular. My mum has been going to there since the 1970s and all the staff really look after her. It has the most amazing spa, where my mum used to get all her treatments done.
We were staying in one of the twenty-one private bungalows that sit in the hotel’s tropical gardens. The bungalow had a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi and the sun was always shining.
Every celebrity you can think of dines or has meetings at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was such a surreal experience for me. On my first day of school, as I walked through the lobby, Tom Hanks was having breakfast in the Polo Lounge, which is the hotel’s famous restaurant. I was lucky if I passed a sheep on my way to school in the UK, it was so remote.
From that day on, I saw every actor, TV presenter and singer in that place. Was it cool? Hell, yeah. There was Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts – everyone! My new school, Hawthorne School, was so fucking different to Pipers Corner School, the all-girls school that I’d left behind in the UK. I’d been used to going to a school where there were just 580 pupils. Hawthorne had more than 5,000 pupils and it was mixed. I felt my new school was not going to be anywhere near as strict as the one I’d left behind, which wasn’t going to be a bad thing. I didn’t have to wear a uniform at my new school either, which meantI had been shitting myself because I didn’t know what to wear.
I’d just arrived in America, so I wasn’t up on what everyone else would be wearing. At my last school, I’d worn a bloody cape! So Mum took me to Fred Segal, which is a really popular store in America. It instantly became my favourite place. It was Mum’s favourite store too and it certainly beat the Marks & Spencer shopping trips. No offence. Because Fred Segal is one of the coolest places to hang out in LA, it’s always full of people
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