Sharon Sheeley wrote songs for Glen Campbell and Brenda Lee. At 18, she was the youngest woman to ever write a #1 hit song; Poor Little Fool, recorded by Ricky Nelson.

She fell in love with the 21-year-old rock star Eddie Cochran when she was 16 and did everything she could to get Eddie’s attention. Eddie had the hit songs Summertime Blues & C'mon Everybody.

Sharon had the same manager as Eddie and once overheard Eddie complaining to him, “Everywhere I turn around I smack into this kid. Does she have to be everywhere I go?”

This continued for over a year.

Finally, on tour with Eddie, Buddy Holly & The Everly Brothers, the band drummer invited her to Eddie’s suite for a New Year’s Eve party.

Sharon has spent all her money on clothes to attract Eddie. She even dyed her hair platinum blond. But she got no attention from Eddie during the tour. So that night, she gave up. She put her hair in pigtails, put on blue-jeans and a sweater, and went to the party.

SHARON SAID: When the party was over and everyone was leaving, Eddie asked me to stay. When we were alone, he asked, “Are you in love with me?”

I wanted to die on the spot of embarrassment. I said, “That’s a very embarrassing thing to ask someone. And I resent the fact ….”

“….Well, you sure better be, because I’m sure in love with you,” Eddie said.

We never had a date. We never kissed. And then he came over, sat next to me and kissed me. Bells rang. I could hear them all over the city. Then Eddie said, “Will you marry me?”
“You bet,” I answered. Then I added. "Which of my outfits made you fall for me?”

“I fell for you, the first time I saw you.”

I wanted to take off my shoe and beat him over the head.

“What? I chased you for two years, making a fool out of myself in front of everyone in the industry. Why did you wait?”

“I had to be really, really sure, before I gave my heart away.”

A year later, their speeding taxi blew a tire and headed toward a lamppost. Eddie threw himself on top of Sharon to protect her, his final act of love. She lived to tell the story.

FLASHBACK TO: A year before, after they were engaged, Eddie was touring England. Sharon was in Hollywood living with her mother.

Sharon got a call from Eddie asking her to join him in London. “There was an urgency in his voice I had never heard before,” Sharon said. “I felt like I had to be there with him, no matter what.”

SHARON SAID: I asked my mom, who said “Absolutely not. Nice girls don’t go halfway around the world to be with their boyfriends.”

It became a screaming match. Then she said, “We’ll leave it up to your grandmother.”

I figured I was dead-in-the-water. She was an old Italian lady who was the head of about 400 people in our family and got up every morning to open the church for the priest. And my mother is going to ask her if I could go to England and be with my boyfriend in the 1950s? I knew the odds were not good.

So, my mother wrote to my grandmother. My grandmother wrote back saying, “Let her go. How much time do they have to love? How much time do they have to live?”