When Charlie Sheen thinks back to the years he spent addicted to alcohol, cocaine, pills and crack, he remembers projectile-vomiting blood over his balcony. Or his hands shaking so severely that he couldn’t pour himself a glass of Patrón Silver.
These memories come back to him without warning, dangling over his thoughts like a mobile over a crib, when he is driving down the Pacific Coast Highway blaring Led Zeppelin, or watching the Cincinnati Reds at home. For nearly eight years, these thoughts, as disturbing as they are, have helped to keep him from crashing back into chaos.
On Dec. 12, 2017, Sheen — a four-time Emmy nominee for “Two and a Half Men,” and for a time one of Hollywood’s highest-paid television actors on a show with 15 million viewers per episode — got sober. He has been fairly quiet since then, teetering on the verge of becoming one of those what-happened-to-that-guy situations. In 2023, he appeared in a few episodes of the comedy series “Bookie,” which reunited him with his old “Two and a Half Men” boss/nemesis, Chuck Lorre. Clips of Sheen asserting that tiger blood runs through his veins no longer light up social media (though you can still find them). He is content hanging out in Southern California with his five kids and three grandchildren, getting smoothies and pedicures with his daughter Lola or watching sports.
He has also spent time alone at home writing a memoir, “The Book of Sheen,” due out from Gallery Books on Tuesday. For years, rumors have swirled about him. The book, along with the upcoming Netflix documentary “aka Charlie Sheen,” has him facing those rumors head on. Yes, all of them. He calls the book an “all-access, backstage pass to the truth.”
I met Sheen, 60, in August at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows in Santa Monica. The sunny California scene, with children splashing in the pool and tourists brunching at cafe tables, seemed a little cheery for a guy whose memoir begins with the line, “On September 3, 1965, in New York City, at 10:58 p.m., I was born dead.”
That night, his mother, Janet Sheen, and father, Martin Sheen (real name Ramon Antonio Gerard Estevez), watched in panic as Dr. Irwin Chabon (intentionally misspelled “Shaybone” in the book to capture “its phonic vibe”) revived their son after an “umbilical-strangulation” emergency. The baby was named Carlos Irwin Estevez in his honor. The family, including Charlie Sheen’s older brothers Ramon and Emilio and younger sister Renée, eventually settled in Malibu. As Sheen writes in the book, when he started acting and landed his first gig three weeks out of high school, “Carlos evolved into Charlie, and Estevez made way for Sheen.”
At the Fairmont, Sheen, double-fisting a bottle of chocolate Muscle Milk and a vape pen, apologized for picking a noisy spot, so we moved to a tucked-away table. He pulled a finished copy of the book out of his satchel so he could show me the color photo inserts. I was a little startled that this onetime self-proclaimed “high priest Vatican assassin warlock” now carries a satchel, complete with a travel-size coffee spoon because he doesn’t like the sticks they hand out on airplanes. I was expecting him to blaze up on a Harley with a Bowie knife in his boot.
Sheen said the “initial flashpoint” for the book came in 2018. After decades spent struggling with substance abuse, including crack, tequila and testosterone cream that he was “slathering on in mind-altering gobs,” as he writes, he was clearheaded enough to start taking stock of his life. He had been walking around with the “born dead” line in his head for years, and he’d written early pages that he showed to Jennifer Bergstrom, the senior vice president and publisher at Gallery.
“She said all of it isn’t gold, but there’s a little bit of gold everywhere,” Sheen said. “It was unique enough for them to get curious.”
Sheen had plenty of material to mine. There was his early childhood spent traveling to his father’s film sets. Young Charlie lunched with Marlon Brando on “Apocalypse Now” and played a “heated and surreal” game of table tennis with O.J. Simpson on the set of the 1976 movie “The Cassandra Crossing.” Then came the stutter he developed in third grade. He describes it as a “brain glitch” that still plagues him, and he believes it was one of the things that drove him to drink. There was also the early stardom with “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Platoon” and “Wall Street.” And then, of course, the spectacular yearslong crash and burn that spawned a million unflattering headlines and accusations.
“I got overwhelmed and I didn’t seek the help that I needed,” he said of his most tumultuous years, which led to him being fired from “Two and a Half Men” in 2011. “I just figured, ‘I got this.’ But I didn’t.”
Unlike many celebrity memoirists, Sheen didn’t work with a ghostwriter (“I can never claim stuff that’s not mine, even if it’s a bad dad joke,” he said). His is possibly the only celebrity memoir that spells the word cool “kool” and dude as “dood.” For example, he writes that Tom Cruise is “one of the koolest guys ever.” If you consider that Sheen grew up in Malibu making no-budget Super 8 horror movies with his brother Emilio Estevez and his buddy Chris Penn (brother to Sean, who was part of the scene too), the bro-ification of the English language makes sense. When I asked about these linguistic flourishes, which come across as endearing rather than ridiculous, Sheen said it just made sense to write it that way.
“That’s how I see the words in my mind,” he said. “Probably from looking at a pack of cigarettes as a 5-year-old.”
Andrew Renzi, who directed the documentary, described Sheen to me as “an icon as known for his missteps as he is for his belovedness.” Renzi spent about a year getting to know Sheen before they started filming, and he interviewed multiple people from his life, including his ex-wives Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller and his “Two and a Half Men” co-star Jon Cryer, as well as Sean Penn, Lorre, Sheen’s brother Ramon, and Heidi Fleiss, a connection during her brief 1990s reign as the “Hollywood Madam.”
Estevez and Martin Sheen didn’t participate in the film. This will no doubt ignite rumors of familial estrangement, so let’s dispel them. One of the strongest through lines in the memoir is the closeness of the entire Sheen clan. It’s also one of the most heartbreaking.
His parents and three siblings stood by him through interventions (Rob Lowe and Clint Eastwood participated in the first one), rehabs and near-overdoses. And then came his poorly received touring show in 2011, dubbed “My Violent Torpedo of Truth/Death Is Not an Option,” which Sheen described as “an unspectacular quasar of a moment.” For years, his family and friends lived with the fear that the phone would ring one day, and it would be that call, the one that anyone who has loved someone who struggles with addiction prays will never come.
When I spoke to Estevez, he said he and his dad didn’t participate in the documentary simply because they watched a rough cut and felt as though their voices, their stories, weren’t necessary. (Martin Sheen declined to comment for this article, as did Richards.) The most surprising part of his brother’s memoir, Estevez said, was how he has managed to keep his sense of humor intact, despite all the darkness.
“I’m not sure I would have been able to do that,” he said. Through the toughest years, when his brother was at his worst, their mom had a mantra that helped them cope: Where there’s life, there’s hope.
“I think Charlie has arrived at his truth, and that’s a huge victory for him,” Estevez said.
His supporters also include people who worked with him during some of his most uproarious years.
“He was not the ‘bad boy’ the public had the right to assume,” Holland Taylor, who played his mother on “Two and a Half Men” for eight seasons, said in an email. “On the contrary, he was the most prepared and disciplined person I’ve ever worked with on a sitcom. He is wicked smart, has had incredible experiences, has a busy and analytical mind.”
Sheen worked closely on the memoir with his editor, Aimée Bell, who said she trusted his artistic choices and had no intention of downshifting his “kool” into cool.
“I think what shocked me the most was for someone who should be in the Guinness World Records book for doing the most crack and living, he has a photographic memory,” she said. She was also surprised that during edits, Sheen, who by his own admission ended up with a 1.2 G.P.A. in high school, cared deeply about things like dangling modifiers and em dashes. “I’m blown away by anyone who brings that much to the party,” she said.
At the Fairmont, a server brought Sheen a cup of coffee but forgot the spoon. No big deal. He was fully prepared with his own. “Ha! Look at that,” he said, holding it in the air triumphantly. This version of Sheen, one who is relaxed, humble, maybe a little goofy, seems far away from the teenager who lost his virginity in Vegas to a redheaded escort named Candy, or the guy who sneaked out of rehab to party with a posse called the Stingrays.
“Our collective hippocampi were soaked in banshee-Drano before even making it to the hotel,” Sheen writes in the book of one of his many bacchanalian nights with the Stingrays. The partying nearly killed him. People along the way got hurt. Not everyone gets a chance at redemption via memoir and movie, but Sheen isn’t here to make excuses. He’s here to come clean, and hopefully find a little peace in that.
In 2015, after he told Matt Lauer and millions of “Today” viewers that he was H.I.V. positive, he said he felt a sense of relief.
“It took the bullets out of so many guns out there still pointed at me,” he said. “The same is true about the stuff in the book and the documentary. This is the best way to cancel hostage demands once and for all and not feel like this is something I need to take to my grave. What’s that saying? We’re as sick as our secrets.”
When Matthew Perry’s memoir came out in 2022, Sheen said he read it in a day. They didn’t know each other well, but he meant to contact Perry and regrets that he never did. He writes about Perry in his own book, about the private men’s group he hosted that Sheen attended a few times, careful to add that he’s “not violating any code” talking about it. He writes, “Matt and I shared a deeper truth we saw in each other — we were both, as Bobby Dee Jay used to say, ‘veterans of the unspeakable.’” Bobby Dee Jay, if you’re wondering, is Robert Downey Jr.
Those years, the ones that might be considered “unspeakable” to some, are not glossed over in the memoir. It takes readers from those early days in Malibu to seedy Santa Monica massage parlors and the Playboy mansion. It careens through marriages, divorces, fame, infamy, money earned and lost, and mind-bending excess. He recounts having sex with men while he was using crack, something he hasn’t previously acknowledged. One of the most harrowing sections comes after Sheen is diagnosed with H.I.V. and he takes off to Mexico for a single reason: to drink.
“Those things are not fun to read, and they weren’t fun to live, but I wouldn’t trade them for the world,” Sheen said. These days, he’s not surrounded by temptation. He’d rather watch his beloved baseball than embark on a bender in Vegas. “I’m never in the presence of a fat bag that I have to talk myself out of or leave the room to avoid,” he said of this calmer era.
Getting sober doesn’t happen by magic. There’s no single formula to make it so. Sheen tried Alcoholics Anonymous for several years, but it never clicked for him. He stopped drinking for good because of his children. He wanted to be the one they called when they needed a ride somewhere, and, even more important than that, he wanted to be the one to drive. Sheen is now close with his children, and his son Max lives with him full time. He’s not in a relationship, and while he isn’t opposed to it, the “sole focus” for the last few years has been his kids.
“There’s such nobility in that, for me,” he said. “To be reliable and consistent without being predictable.”
He is open to acting again but isn’t actively pursuing it. “I’m a little out of practice,” he said. “I could do another sitcom falling out of bed, and that’s nothing against sitcoms. That’s just a gear that is readily accessible. Being right now comfortable enough on camera to deliver something really dramatic would take a little bit of a warm-up.”
Writing the memoir is the hardest and most rewarding job he’s ever had, Sheen said. As he heads into this new phase of his life, one where his past will likely get pulled out of the shadows and judged all over again, he feels ready. He has nothing left to hide.
“I’m keeping that stuff close,” Sheen said of the darkest moments. The things that give him “shame shivers” out of nowhere. When those memories enter his mind, he wonders what he was thinking, how he could have let things get so extreme, so dangerous.
“Then I have to remember that moment isn’t what today is about,” he said, sitting there in the glaring midday sun. “It doesn’t exist anymore, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”
Dina Gachman is an Austin-based writer.
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