It was the summer of 1990 and troubled actor Charlie Sheen had just been packed off to rehab after his worried father Martin joined forces with Charlie’s co-star Clint Eastwood to stage an intervention in his drink and drug-crazed life.
But as the 24-year-old was driven to a facility in Los Angeles while filming The Rookie with Eastwood, all he could think about was how to sneak out again and join fellow reprobate Nicolas Cage in judging a Hawaiian Tropic bikini contest in Palm Springs, Sheen reveals in a new autobiography.
And he managed it… after promising his nurse $1million if he wasn’t back in his room by 9am. Joining forces with a group of debauched friends who called themselves the Jackson Five, Sheen indulged in a cocaine and ecstasy blowout with a ‘lovely gal’ before staggering back on to the private jet and keeping his $1million.
This extraordinary story, along with countless other tales of nights with porn stars, hookers and so much cocaine snorting that a Mexican drug cartel refused to keep supplying him, is contained in The Book Of Sheen, published this week.
‘Charlie Sheen’ and ‘memoir’ sound like a contradiction in terms. How could Hollywood’s most notorious wildman possibly remember the details of a life of which so much was spent insensible?
Sheen, who had no ghost writer, admits it wasn’t always easy. However, he has marshalled his thoughts and memories to provide what he claims is an ‘all-access, backstage pass to the truth’.
But the self-proclaimed ‘high priest Vatican assassin warlock’ who boasted of being powered by ‘tiger blood’ and ‘Adonis DNA’ doesn’t actually tackle every sordid episode of his life.
Charlie Sheen with co-stars Charlotte McKinney, left, and Chanel Iman at the 2017 premiere for Mad Families
The Platoon and Wall Street star’s most shocking revelation, that he had sex with men while using crack cocaine, is sufficiently garbled and vague that it’s easy to miss what he’s actually saying.
The professed ‘sex addict’ refers to these men only as the ‘other side of the menu’ and doesn’t identify any, except to say they were all consenting adults.
Sheen writes that his male sexual partners were always on crack cocaine, too, and that some of them later tried to blackmail him.
Twenty years after he denied claims by former wife Denise Richards in her divorce application that he looked at gay pornography, Sheen – who announced in 2015 that he has HIV as a result of his drug-taking – says in a new Netflix documentary accompanying his book that it was ‘f***ing liberating’ finally to be talking for the first time about his sexual experiences with other men.
Other fresh disclosures in his book about his deranged past include an instance when, despite being ‘hammered’ on four double whiskies, he persuaded the star-struck pilots of a passenger jet crossing the Atlantic to allow him to dress in the captain’s uniform and take the controls for a terrifying 90 seconds.
As for his drug consumption, at his worst Sheen took two kilograms of cocaine in under three weeks – so much that the Mexican Sinaloa cartel were convinced it couldn’t be merely for personal consumption and that he was re-selling it. His dealer told him he had to cut his consumption by a half, but instead Sheen simply found an additional supplier.
Although 60-year-old Sheen, who insists he’s been sober for nearly eight years and celibate for a decade, still seems to take some pride in his outrageous behaviour, he maintains he isn’t trying to make excuses.
‘Most of my fifties were spent apologising to the people I hurt,’ he said this week. ‘I also didn’t want to write from the place of being a victim. I wasn’t and I own everything I did. It’s just me, finally telling the stories in the way they actually happened. The stories I can remember, anyway.’
Sheen was once a promising member of an acting dynasty that included his Apocalypse Now father Martin Sheen and Breakfast Club brother Emilio Estevez.
However, as he reveals, the rot that blighted his career set in early. He was smoking cannabis by the age of 11 and lost his virginity when he was 15 to a redhead prostitute named Candy in Las Vegas while his father – whose credit card he used to pay her –slept next door.
Sheen with his father Martin as presenters during the 2006 Annual Primetime Emmy Awards
Candy asked if he’d wake his father so she could get his autograph but Sheen – with rare good judgment – declined.
He was 18 when his high school girlfriend, Paula, became pregnant and – against his wishes – had the baby in December 1984.
He would occasionally babysit so she could attend night school, but would get stoned.
Growing up in LA, Sheen was friends with a pack of young actors who included brothers Sean and Chris Penn and Rob Lowe. He was desperate to emulate them when – along with his sibling Emilio – they shot to fame in the 1980s Brat Pack movies. He won his own break-out role in Platoon, Oliver Stone’s acclaimed 1986 Vietnam War drama.
The film made him a star but the fame super-charged his narcissism and craving for excess. Aged 21, he dumped actress girlfriend Dolly Fox, started smoking cocaine, watching endless porn and going to seedy parties at the Playboy Mansion.
Sheen agreed to make another Oliver Stone film, Wall Street, with Michael Douglas, without even reading the script. Going through the Yellow Pages one night looking for prostitutes, he found one who turned out to have a theatrical background. She would visit him regularly and run through his lines with him for the next day. His addiction problems and terrible judgment of women only worsened in the 1990s. He broke off a 14-month engagement to actress Kelly Preston and lived instead with porn star Ginger Lynn, another heavy drug user.
In 1992, he met Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and, after shelling out $12,000 for a night with two of her call girls, became a frequent client.
Sheen, clueless even for a Tinseltown nepo baby, paid Fleiss with cheques rather than cash – with the predictable result that when she was finally arrested in 1993, the police nabbed him, too.
After agreeing to an immunity (from prosecution) deal, he gave video evidence against her at trial, revealing he’d spent £34,000 a year on her girls.
His appetite for drugs was as insatiable as it was for women. While filming The Rookie (pre the Hawaiian Tropic bikini contest), Sheen disappeared off to Las Vegas with Nicolas Cage and the Jackson Five. The young actor mixed ecstasy with anabolic steroids, causing his face to swell up so much that an alarmed Eastwood contacted his father.
Lured back to the family home to celebrate his father’s 50th birthday, Sheen was instead confronted by an ‘intervention’ force that included his entire family, a former history teacher, pal Rob Lowe and even yoga guru Bikram Choudhury. The rehab they forced upon him didn’t work for long, naturally, and he was soon back on drugs and alcohol, addictions that continued to ratchet up in their seriousness.
Having halted the filming of one of his increasingly dire movies after developing a nosebleed that lasted 32 hours, Sheen decided he needed to find a different way of taking drugs to snorting industrial amounts of cocaine.
So, in 1992, he started smoking crack cocaine. His addiction made the young star an easy target for criminals. In 1993, on a stopover in Rome while filming a Disney version of The Three Musketeers, he had his drink spiked.
Sheen woke up the following morning in a strange house 100 miles away with all his possessions gone.
He had to hitchhike back to the city and, despite not speaking a word of Italian, stumbled on a driver who was a big fan of his.
As the drug-taking got ever more dangerous, so did the women in his life.
‘It can roundly be said that I knew how to pick ‘em,’ he writes. ‘Maybe it was more about them knowing how to pick me.’ While filming in Arizona, he met a nurse at a party who, after coming back to his room dressed (at his request) in her work uniform, introduced him to Nubain, a very strong painkiller she was stealing from the hospital to sell. He started injecting himself, developing a synthetic morphine habit.
But he hadn’t lost his taste for prostitutes and the more deranged the better. Jane, who he asked to become his exclusive girlfriend, once tried to gouge his eyes with car keys during an argument so he grabbed and hit her.
He paid her $200,000 and agreed to a restraining order and two years’ probation in 1996. Even so, he insists she later phoned him out of the blue, saying she was outside his home lying naked in the back of a limo and unless he joined her for sex she would accuse him of breaking the restraining order.
Sheen is seen on the rooftop of Live Nation building drinking ‘Tiger Blood’ in 2011
Sheen with his second wife, former Bond Girl Denise Richards, in 2003
In 1998, he tried injecting cocaine, but with only what he’d seen in films as a guide, he overdosed and suffered a stroke – his life saved because his bodyguard found him.
He absconded (for the second time) from rehab and discovered that his father – desperate to get him treatment – had informed police he had violated his probation by taking the cocaine.
Sheen was sentenced to another stay in rehab only for his bodyguard to bring crack cocaine and throw it over the wall to him.
This depressing cycle of pointless stints in rehab ruined by his determination to keep taking drugs and consorting with the sort of women (usually prostitutes) who shared his addictions was interrupted in 2000 when he replaced Michael J Fox on the hit sitcom Spin City. Sheen’s life took a second upturn when he started a relationship with former Bond Girl Denise Richards. They married in 2002 and would go on to have two daughters together.
In 2003, he was offered another plum sitcom role with Two And A Half Men.
Needless to say, his self-destructive tendencies returned. Richards forgave him after he reconnected with a former porn star girlfriend (Sheen insists he never cheated on any of his three wives) and when he spent $30,000 on a Panama hat. But he slipped back into opioid drug abuse and the marriage fell apart.
In her divorce application in 2006, Richards accused Sheen of alcohol and drug abuse with threats of violence, looking at gay pornography featuring apparently underage boys and being ‘attracted’ to underage girls.
Sheen denied the accusations at the time but skates over the details in his memoir, saying ‘it’s in really poor taste to stoop down into any of that muck’.
In 2007, he met actress Brooke Mueller, another recovering addict, at a party.
They married in 2008 and she gave birth to their twin sons the following year. But the pair were soon back on drugs and Sheen implies Brooke was chiefly to blame. This time he was the one who filed for divorce, in 2011.
The actor says he managed to shake the drink and drugs habits that had dominated his early life by himself, only to become addicted to a testosterone cream he was taking to get his body back in shape and it turned him into a ‘raging demon’.
His demented behaviour in interviews became the stuff of viral legend. In 2011, he brandished a machete from the roof of an office building in Beverly Hills as he wolfed down a drink he called ‘tiger blood’.
Sacked from his TV show, he went on his sell-out Violent Torpedo Of Truth tour, dispensing his unhinged views about how he had ‘Adonis DNA’ and was ‘winning’ the battle with his demons when he clearly wasn’t.
He says he finally cleaned up his act at the end of 2017 when his daughter Sami asked him to drive her to an appointment. Drunk on whisky-laced coffee, he faced the embarrassment of once again having someone else drive her.
Belatedly realising that even his children couldn’t rely on him, he vowed to change. Sheen – who became a grandfather at just 48 in 2013 – says he turned around his life for the sake of his growing family. His friends have admitted that they’re not holding their breath that he’ll remain sober.
‘I am on a drug – it’s called Charlie Sheen,’ he told a TV interviewer 14 years ago.
He was asked if he was worried about dying. ‘No, dying’s for fools,’ he replied.
After the catalogue of self-abuse detailed in a memoir outrageous even by Hollywood standards, it seems blind luck rather than wisdom explains why Charlie Sheen is still alive today.