Exactly when Charlie Sheen’s craziness stopped being funny
is difficult to pinpoint. Many people were still laughing last
Monday when, in an interview aired on the Today show,
the actor proclaimed: “I’m tired of pretending like I’m not
special… a total fricking rock star from Mars.”
The laughter faded as Sheen continued his weeklong media
blitzkrieg, prompted by the decision of CBS to cancel taping of his
situation comedy Two and a Half Men in the middle of its
eighth hit season. Sheen was interviewed on ABC, NBC, and CNN, as
well as by the online gossip site TMZ. Some people were still
laughing Tuesday when the British Guardian newspaper
offered an
online quiz with a series of 10 outlandish quotes, asking
readers to guess whether they were from Sheen or Libyan dictator
Moammar Gaddafi.
Yet as the $2-million-an-episode star of television’s No.
1 primetime show kept spewing deranged gibberish in public —
“These resentments, they are the rocket fuel that
lives in the tip of my saber” — it became obvious that Sheen was
not being intentionally funny. People weren’t laughing
with Charlie, they were laughing at Charlie, and
some weren’t laughing at all.
Celebrity psychiatrist
Dr. Drew Pinsky described Sheen’s condition as a “psychiatric
emergency,” most probably the manic phase of bipolar disorder (also
known as manic depression) and requiring hospitalization:
“He’s in an acute manic state right now.… Notice how
he goes from thought to thought and they are sort of disconnected?
That’s acute mania.” Practicing clinicians seldom offer such remote
diagnoses of public figures, which can be deemed an ethical
violation of the so-called “Goldwater Rule.”
However, Pinsky’s concerns were echoed by others in Hollywood who
have dealt with mental illness or addiction issues, including actor
Gary
Busey, who said Sheen is in a “tailspin,” and
Tom Arnold, who accused those close to Sheen of exploiting his
problems.
Perhaps the biggest of Sheen’s problems is that he has
succeeded so well by exploiting his own reputation as the baddest
of Hollywood’s bad boys. One of the most promising talents in the
1980s “Brat Pack” of young actors, Sheen starred in his first
Oscar-winner (Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War drama
Platoon) at a precocious age, as he pointed out in his
interview with NBC’s Jeff Rossen: “I
mean, c’mon bro, I won best
picture at 20. I
wasn’t even trying.”
Sheen also starred in Stone’s next drama (Wall Street,
1987), but displayed his comic flair in hits like Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and Major League
(1989).
Sheen’s star perceptibly dimmed in the
1990s, which was when he starred in his first major real-life
scandal, as “Client 9” in the 1995 federal trial of notorious
“Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss. Sheen wrote personal checks to pay
for the services of Fleiss’s prostitutes. An attorney pointed out
during Sheen’s testimony that these checks amounted to more than
$50,000 in a single year, to which the star replied: “Sheesh, it’s
starting to add up.”
His drug and booze habits were also
starting to add up. He first checked himself into rehab in 1990
and, after divorcing his first wife in 1997, publicly declared
himself a born-again Christian. But in 1998, paramedics rushed to
Sheen’s home in Malibu after the 32-year-old actor suffered an
overdose that landed him in the hospital in critical condition.
Despite all his high-profile problems, however, Sheen kept working
as an actor and — in what has lately become his famous
catch-phrase — kept “winning.” In 2000, he was tapped to replace
Michael J. Fox in the hit sitcom Spin City and two years
later married one of Hollywood’s most beautiful young actresses,
Denise Richards.
Then, in 2003, Sheen landed the role of a
lifetime, playing a thinly-disguised version of himself: Charlie
Harper, the womanizing songwriter and live-in uncle on Two and
a Half Men. The success of the CBS show is credited with
single-handedly reviving the situation comedy format, which TV
industry watchers had declared artistically and commercially “dead”
until Sheen’s show vaulted CBS to the top of the primetime
competition.
His professional success, however, did nothing to repair
Sheen’s catastrophic personal life. Richards filed for divorce in
2005 and, after an attempted reconciliation, went public with
devastating accusations against Sheen in a 2006 court filing:
He was addicted to gambling and prostitutes, mentally unstable,
prone to violence and obscene threats and — worst of all —
visited online porn sites that catered to pedophilia, Richards
said. Sheen did little to repair his reputation by lashing out at
Richards, with whom he has two daughters, in obscenity-strewn
e-mails
denouncing her as a “loser” and a “sad jobless pig.” His next
marriage, to actress Brooke Mueller, was brief and stormy. After
marrying Sheen in 2008, Mueller gave birth to twins in 2009. On
Christmas Day of that year, police arrested Sheen on a
domestic-violence charge at the couple’s Aspen vacation home. Their
divorce was finalized last month, by which time Sheen had
already given tabloids another juicy headline: Police were called
to Sheen’s room in New York’s Plaza Hotel after the actor allegedly
terrorized his “date,” a 22-year-old porn performer known as
Capri Anderson.
Another 22-year-old porn actress, Kacey Jordan, was at the
center of Sheen’s next headline-making scandal: A January
party to which the actor reportedly had a briefcase full of
cocaine delivered, wrote Jordan a $30,000 check, and ended up
hospitalized at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. Sheen at first agreed
to another round of rehab, but then said he could kick his
addictions without professional help, which led to a showdown with
the producers of Two and a Half Men.
On Feb. 24, Sheen called into a nationally syndicated
radio show hosted by Alex Jones, who is most famous for supporting
the conspiracy-theory claim that the 9/11 attacks were a U.S.
government plot. Sheen pronounced himself the victim of an
“unconscionable wrong,” and called Two and a Half Men
producer Chuck Lorre a “contaminated little maggot” and an
“earthworm.” CBS quickly
announced it was cancelling production on the show for the
remainder of the season. This seemed to have pushed Sheen further
into the “acute manic state” that Pinsky described. He appeared in
TV interviews with two 24-year-old live-in girlfriends (one of whom
was, predictably, a porn actress), ranting that he had “been kicked
around” by CBS and that the network had “picked a fight with a
warlock.”
It appears that his success has convinced Sheen that the
rules don’t apply to him, that the rulebook “was written for normal people, people who
aren’t special, people who don’t have tiger blood and Adonis
DNA,” as he told NBC. But he may have finally
located the limit of his own specialness. His week of demented TV
interviews was followed by a rambling Saturday night Webcast
(“a sloppy, self-indulgent bit of cringe theater” featuring “a
posse of chuckleheads and enablers,” one critic
called it), showcasing Sheen’s twisted mental condition for a
worldwide audience. “All of a sudden the idea of that
charming cad Charlie has started to fade,” Robert Thompson, a
professor of media studies at Syracuse University, told the
Los Angeles Times. After CBS cancelled Sheen’s show,
Thompson said, “now it’s like he doesn’t know when to exit the
stage.” Many will be amazed if the troubled actor can exit this
meltdown alive, but already the laugh-track has ended.
