My Dad always left before us by a few weeks and my Mum would have to drag us across the Atlantic every summer on the long flights with TWA, the now defunct but well loved airline. My Mum always seemed exasperated by the whole experience and it turned out LA wasn't really her cup of tea, she was just following my Dad on his jet set adventure and seemed like a reluctant participant most of the time.
My Dad was a talented entrepreneur with an interest in fun, sun and the entertainment business. Successful as a property agent in London he ventured into clubs, casinos, theatre and eventually to LA to get involved with the movies, it was the early 80's, the dawn of video cassettes, slashers and space invaders, USA was the place to be.
As a boy from rainy England arriving in Hollywood was like going from black and white to technicolour. Suddenly we had a hundred TV channels, ten times as many cereal brands, cherry coke, hot dogs, toys 'r us, drive thru's, a jacuzzi, a swimming pool and all the stuff you couldn't get in old Blighty. The first thing my brother and I would do on arrival was binge on junk food and watch cartoons non-stop.
My Dad had bought a house with a swimming pool on the famous Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills, I guess if you want to be a movie producer you have to look the part.
The reason we were here was actually a mystery to me, Dad always said he was a businessman, he never referred to himself as a film producer, to me he was just doing 'business', like he did in other countries.
On paper Dad was chairman of an oil refining company based in Texas but there we were in La La Land, as a kid you don't care about the details, welcome to my childhood.
He had various connections from business and movies, I don't remember all the names
but one of them was Hal Needham who we went to see a few times in Burbank, Hal was a stuntman and director behind the huge movies 'Smokey and the Bandit' and 'Cannonball Run'. He let us play in his office arcade room and gave us 'Skoal Bandit' t-shirts, a chewing tobacco brand he had started. I became obsessed with Burt Reynolds, trans-am firebirds and 18 wheelers!
I was becoming an American.
Thats what I thought until I went to summer camp or whatever the term is for a place parents can drop off their kids for the day. My Mum was German, she moved to England and married my Dad, this was her opportunity to dress my brother and I as nice German Boys, we looked like dorks. American kids were much rougher than us reserved English types, they were loud and wore ripped jeans and t-shirts, it was a struggle to fit in, I did make a couple of friends but I refused to go after a week or so.
Much of the time was spent hanging out at the house, messing around with our dogs, swimming in the pool, watching movies on cable or playing with my He-Man figures. I would also go out and explore, climbing rocks or playing with my toy firebird on the road. Once I was walking down Mulholland and found a car wreck down the side of the hill, I later found out about the 'Mulholland racers' who often meet a fatal end around there.
There was a kid I met outside the house, he was ambling around like me, he lived further up the drive and took me to his place, he showed me his weapons collection under his pillow. I was a bit shocked but it was the time of the night stalker and LA was on high alert, he told me his Dad was a musician and I could hear him playing upstairs, he was probably very famous but I guess i'll never know who it was.
One day i'm outside trying to climb the rocks at the end of our drive and the guy who parks his black Cadillac there for his morning jog comes over to say hi, he says he's Tony Danza, I looked at him with a confused expression and he said 'You know Tony from 'Taxi' and i'm like 'Oh yeah, I've seen that show'.
I asked him if he's in any movies and he said he was in Cannonball Run which I should have known.
I felt really bad that I hadn't recognised Tony from Cannonball Run 2, so when I saw him going for his morning jog the next day I ran over to him and said 'Hey Tony, can I have your autograph?'.
I gave him the pen and paper I had brought specially, he smiled and said 'Hey I thought we were friends, now you want my autograph?'
Tony signed the paper, then wiped it on his chest saying 'Here you go and have some sweat to go with it'
I wish I still had that autograph even though the ink was totally smudged.
I got taken to Madonna's mansion at the top of the drive and it looked like she hadn't been there for years, leaves everywhere and the pool was empty, it felt like a haunted house. I wasn't impressed and thought how strange it was to leave the place looking like it was abandoned.
We made regular visits to Universal Studios with its many cool rides, theme parks like Magic Mountain, Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm. We got rides in corvettes to get ice cream, I saw ET at a drive thru cinema, met one of the girls from Fame in the park and rode beach buggys on Pismo Beach.
Coming back to grey England was always a harsh reality, we had to leave our dogs and I would cry for days, missing the sunshine and the TV channels but at least I could play football and be an English dork. Soon we had some extra channels and cherry coke so it didn't seem too bad, although I could never find a corndog or twinkies anywhere.