Charlie Sheen memoir details the rise and drug-fuelled fall of the Hollywood and TV star

A young Charlie Sheen once had Hollywood in his pocket, starring in culture-shaping films like Wall Street and Platoon before eventually becoming the highest-paid actor in television. But underneath the glory lay decades of drug abuse, seven worried family interventions, innumerable drug-fuelled escapades and countless affairs. The actor’s tumultuous journey towards sobriety is unabashedly laid out in his tell-all memoir, The Book of Sheen. The 359-page book was released by Gallery Books this month. It reveals the story behind Sheen’s rise, fall and eventual sobriety in 2017. Netflix has also released a documentary on the actor that revisits his journey through fame. Sheen, 60, born as Carlos Irwin Estévez to Martin Sheen and Janet Templeton, was exposed to the acting world early, having grown up on his father’s film sets. As the child and brother of movie stars, Sheen has had famous friends and acquaintances for much of his life, from Sean Penn and Rob Lowe to George Clooney and Laura Dern. By his mid-20s, he had partied with Madonna and Jack Nicholson – on the same night – played basketball with Michael Jordan, met Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas and talked baseball with Reggie Jackson while both were guests at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. The budding actor eventually took on the stage name of Charlie Sheen, following his father, who made a similar change. He landed his first major acting role in the 1986 Vietnam war drama Platoon, and starred in the crime drama Wall Street alongside his father and Michael Douglas the following year. Platoon made him a star and changed his life: no wish or desire left unmet. Before that, he had already learned to live hard, drinking and snorting cocaine in school and conceiving his first child at 18. Around the time he filmed The Rookie, which came out in 1990, loved ones staged the first of what he writes have been seven interventions. Among those urging him to clean up: Lowe, brother Emilio and father Martin, one of his teachers, a yoga master, and the star and director of The Rookie, Clint Eastwood, who told him by telephone: “You got this, just a minor speed bump, go make me proud.” Sheen ushered in the ’90s by assembling what he called The Jackson 5, a group of men that included Nicolas Cage. He describes in detail the drug-filled adventures they went on as they “tested the ceiling of stardom against the reach of the law”. The Jackson 5 landed him in rehab for the first time. He left a new man – that is, until a chance encounter with a Foster’s Lager at Cage’s house exactly a year later, which is when he first broke his sobriety. Sheen cycled in and out of his sobriety for decades, including numerous rehab stays that he managed to escape almost every time. In 1999, he celebrated his first year of sobriety while filming Rated X. But he writes that he picked up crack cocaine, along with alcohol and prescription pills, once again, while in a relationship with Brooke Mueller, whom he married in 2008. The actor found success in television, with a starring role in the popular CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men (2003-2015). It made him the highest-paid male actor on television, reportedly earning US$1.8 million per episode during the show’s eighth season. But that came to an end in 2011, when Sheen split with Mueller. The divorce – coupled with the infamous 20/20 interview he did that same year, which led to his firing from Two and a Half Men – pushed him further into his substance abuse. After announcing his HIV diagnosis to the world on the Today show in 2015, Sheen quit hard drugs, he wrote, but the alcohol was harder to shake. The drinking, he thought at the time, was “a friend for life to help me navigate the potholes and landmines the future had in store”. Ultimately, it was a car ride to an appointment for his daughter, Sam, who was 13 at the time, that sealed his long-term sobriety in December 2017. He had been drinking that morning and was unable to drive. “There was only one thing that felt worse than betraying myself, and that was failing my children,” Sheen wrote. He maintained a relatively low public profile after his decision to become sober in late 2017. What does Sheen say about the book? The first line of his book had occurred to Sheen years before he actually sat down to write the memoir, he said during a conversation with actor and writer David Duchovny during a recent event at 92nd Street Y, New York. “On September 3, 1965, in New York City at 10.58pm I was born dead,” the actor recited from memory on stage. That near-death experience right at birth, caused by an umbilical strangulation, set the tone for much of the rest of his life, Sheen said. “People always say you’ve got more lives than a cat, right, and they come in at nine or something,” Sheen said. “So I already got – we’re already at eight, right?” The book was released eight years after he got sober, time that he said gave him the distance necessary to reflect on his life experiences. “I needed this much distance between that other life, those other versions of me,” he said. “I don’t think that I could’ve committed to this and delivered the type of focus and passion and discipline that it required unless I also had the distance.”

Charlie Sheen memoir details the rise and drug-fuelled fall of the Hollywood and TV star

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}A sober Charlie Sheen, once the highest-paid TV star, looks back on a life of fame, drugs, excess and seven interventions in his book

A sober Charlie Sheen, once the highest-paid TV star, looks back on a life of fame, drugs, excess and seven interventions in his book