So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  I knew the media would want a quote from me, and Charlie’s manager, Mark Burg, called me to say that any statement of support I could offer up would be great. I told him I would be happy to, but that it sounded like Charlie wasn’t sober anymore, and I hoped he’d get on track again. Situations like this are rough on your sense of friendship and loyalty, because the allegations are serious, yet you know Charlie and Brooke are a drug-troubled pair, and Charlie’s your longtime friend who was proud of his sobriety, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do something to her, and you should give a woman the benefit of the doubt when she’s been abused, and oh, boy . . .

  This would put everybody at the show in a weird position, I realized.

  * * *

  In January, at the first read-through of the script after his arrest, Charlie made the Kobe joke again, everybody laughed, and it was as though the whole incident was forgotten. Things seemed almost normal, with a low-level fog of denial settling in, although I could sense a slow-boil fury in Charlie. He felt persecuted. In February I got a knock on my trailer door one day, and it was Chuck Lorre. I invited him in, and he said, “Jon, can you talk to Charlie? I hear he’s going off the rails.”

  Chuck himself is a recovering alcoholic, and open and honest about it. This was such a sincere plea that I knew I had to consider it. “I can try,” I told him.

  The next day, though, Charlie went into rehab, so we never got to have that conversation. Charlie did, however, have a different kind of productive conversation—with Warner Bros. business affairs. Despite falling off the wagon, a rocky marriage, looming felony charges, and possible time behind bars, he managed to secure a massive raise, fully three times what I was being paid.

  I immediately began contemplating a series of well-publicized drunken brawls in retirement homes, or possibly leading cops on a destructive car chase along Santa Monica beach, just prior to my next contract negotiation.

  When Charlie’s punishment came down that fall regarding Aspen, it felt like a slap on the wrist: thirty days in rehab, thirty days of probation, and thirty-six hours of anger management—the therapy, not Anger Management the TV series, which didn’t exist yet, but would eventually because of upheavals such as this.

  There was a brief time when it was thought Charlie’s sentencing would involve his serving time at a community theater in Aspen, the news of which led me to think, Wow, they managed to find the only thing that sounds worse than jail.

  * * *

  Person or persons unknown have pushed Charlie’s expensive German sedan off a cliff.

  “Damn you, Bush!” I wanted to say to him, but didn’t.

  I’ll admit, this incident sounded fishy. How could someone break into Charlie’s gated, security camera–festooned Mulholland compound and make off with a Mercedes-Benz, the steering of which they don’t seem to know how to operate?

  I thought, If he comes in to work with scratches, I’ll know he was actually driving the car, and that he went off a ravine in a drugged-out stupor. Charlie arrived a little late, but looked the same, and when I said hi to him he must have thought I was trying to guess his weight, the way I was eyeing him up and down. Then I blurted, “Hey, shake!” and extended a hand, only so I could grasp his and turn it over, looking for cuts or bruises. None that I could see.

  When he talked about the incident, I asked if there was anything of value in the car for someone to steal. He said, “Well, I’m pissed because all my VHS copies of Spin City were in the trunk.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said. “Cops should be able to canvass the last VCR owners in the city, no problem.”

  We laughed about it and chalked it up to freakishly creative young vandals saddled with outdated video recorders.

  Then it happened again.

  * * *

  Charlie didn’t look so good as we started our eighth season in the fall of 2010—gaunt, pale, sallow, even sweaty occasionally. He started talking to himself. But most of all he just looked thinner, in a not-good way. Watching the new episodes at home, Lisa could tell how terrible he looked, and said as much.

  Even his teeth looked bad. They looked like they were going to fall out of his mouth.

  His timing started to go off, too. The pauses were now a little too short. He was rushing lines. He was still remembering them, at least, but there was now an incrementally more manic energy that threw his rhythm off by microseconds. These might not have been perceptible differences to the vast majority of viewers, but to me they felt substantial. Charlie just wasn’t hitting the jokes the way he used to. It was as if his psyche had been sped up.

  One time during rehearsals to choreograph the movement for a scene, he asked, “Can I just stand next to this couch?” He wanted to hold on to it for the duration of the scene.

  * * *

  During a week off in October 2010, I was in New York for a birthday party for my mother, and Charlie was there as well, taking time to see Denise and the kids. He invited me to go see the Broadway production of Mary Poppins with them, but I told him I couldn’t. Charlie texted me the next day that the kids had to wake him up forty-eight minutes into the show, and that they were “ready to bolt.”

  I’m not saying Mary Poppins always has a calming, cheerful influence on everybody, but it appeared Charlie had his own interpretation of the kind of spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, as I learned the following day when I read about Charlie’s Plaza Hotel “booze-and-blow binge”—so described by the New York Daily News—and the “semipro” escort found naked and locked in the closet of his trashed hotel room.

  I texted him asking if he wanted to talk, and he texted back, Thanks, bro. . . . Shoulda stayed for the whole Poppins show. . . . Oops . . . :)

  I began to imagine scenarios in which I enthusiastically agree to go to Mary Poppins with him. Then afterward, when he says, “Thought I’d head back to the room with a prostitute, get really fucking high, decimate the place, then toss her in the closet,” I say, “No, I don’t think you should do that.” Then he says, “You’re right. Let’s get ice cream.” Then everything is better.

  * * *

  Back in January, after the Colorado arrest, Charlie had been legitimately worried about how the audience would receive him. And yet they roared their approval on Friday night at the taping. The applause had been thunderous, as if, forced to make a choice between the polite clapping of reserved judgment and “we support you” raucousness, they openly took his side. And Charlie had been nervous. Yet there appeared to be no moral consequence. They wanted their Charlie Sheen.

  Then, after the Plaza insanity later that year, and the obvious conclusion that he was openly partying again, all of us at the show assumed his tabloid notoriety was going to result in a ratings drop. I even told Chuck, “Look, I don’t know when this stops being funny for people. We keep making jokes about the fact that the Charlie character’s an alcoholic on the show, and yet the real Charlie’s actually got an addiction problem. When does it stop being funny?”

  Then the ratings went up, and Charlie said, “Yeah, look at that! Look at that! How’s that, motherfucker?!” He was rejoicing in the fact that his off-camera exploits were in no way hurting the show’s appeal.

  This only added to the surrealism, to say the least.

  * * *

  Chuck Lorre came to me again about having a talk with Charlie. But this time it was clear that Chuck was desperate. His eyes were rimmed with tears. I told him I would.

  As Charlie and I arrived on the set the next morning, I pulled Charlie aside and said, “Hey, man, do you have some time later to talk?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “We can talk now, right?”

  “No, I really want to talk to you privately.”

  “Can’t we talk now?” He’s onto me, I thought. He wanted us to have this “talk” in front of everybody. Since he probably knew what it was about, he figured I wouldn’t actually
say anything negative with crew people around. And it would be short.

  “No, it’s a private thing,” I said.

  When our first five-minute break came that day—with Charlie around these were common, since he’d want a smoke, which meant going outside—he said, “Hey, can we talk now . . . ?”

  He was like a child sensing that a parent was mad at him, concerned about the seriousness of the topic, but eager to reduce the circumstances that could make it an uncomfortable powwow. I said no, but later, during another five-minute break, I acquiesced and followed him outside for his smoke.

  “Here’s the thing, dude,” I said. “It used to be that you could party all night and show up here and still hit it out of the park. Those days are gone. People can tell now.”

  “Really?” Charlie took it in, nodded, puffed, then said, “Okay, okay. I guess I gotta change things.” It sounded sincere, as if he’d listened.

  “Good,” I said. “We’re all rooting for you to fix it. Everyone’s here to help.”

  That was in December of 2010.

  * * *

  When your star can’t make it to rehearsals, your production doesn’t just stop. As Charlie’s appearances for table reads and rehearsals became more and more erratic, the producers resorted to rehearsing the scenes with Charlie’s stand-in, Jim Marshall.

  For me, performing with Jim turned out to be an unexpected treat. His impossibly droll delivery of Charlie Harper’s lines proved to be hilarious. Plus, rehearsals just went more quickly because Jim didn’t take smoke breaks.

  Often, our Sheen-less run-throughs would get more laughs than the real thing. It was a testament to the talent of the writers (and, of course, Jim) that the material still worked equally well with diametrically opposed performances. When Charlie did manage to show up at Stage 26 he was transparently making an effort to appear sober. But he was overdoing it. He’d be eagerly good-natured all the time, smiling and laughing excessively. Hugging bewildered crew members. I’d spend my time trying to decide which was more disturbing: Sheen loaded or Sheen “sober.”

  * * *

  At this point Charlie started complaining about the show more.

  But again, only to me, it seemed.

  On a Tuesday, Charlie came to me, rolling his eyes about the script that week. “What the hell are we doing here?” he said. “This is just a train wreck.” He was even vocal about it to our director, Jamie Widdoes.

  As we went through rehearsal, Charlie was actually his usual professional self. When the writers and Chuck showed up for the run-through for them—typically the time when changes are suggested—I got nervous, looking at Charlie, then Chuck, then back at Charlie, wondering when the blowup was going to happen, when he’d let everyone know about the “train wreck.” But instead Charlie kept quiet, and the scenes got a lot of laughs. As the writers migrated back to the writers’ room, Jamie and I were there to see Charlie walk up to Chuck and say, “Hey, this stuff is great this week. Thanks.”

  Jamie and I looked at each other with expressions that could only be described as, What the fuck? What happened to the “train wreck” comment?

  This further stressed to me the fact that Charlie was genuinely afraid of confrontation. But on a show like ours, when you have less than a week to get the thing up and running, letting people know your concerns isn’t confrontation—it’s collaboration. Over eight years, I had absolutely let it be known when a joke didn’t sit right with me, or an entire act didn’t work. The great thing about our writers is that when you let them know this, they do their damnedest to come up with something else. It wasn’t as if you could never let them know that you didn’t want to do something a certain way.

  And Charlie, as the guy making the biggest of the big bucks in sitcom land, should have known that his criticisms would carry a lot of weight.

  But Charlie wants people to like him. For eight years he’d been fun, charming, and smart. And nice. I guess I didn’t want to think about the fact that something was bottled up inside.

  * * *

  As 2010 became 2011, the promise of a brand-new year ahead still barely a blink in destiny’s eye, sin looked kindly upon Charlie Sheen and beckoned him to its namesake city in the Nevada desert the weekend before he was supposed to report back to work. Vodka shots, willing babes, and steep tabs awaited, and if you didn’t know any better reading about his weekend bender on gossip sites, you’d think he was the star of a show called Back in Vegas.

  I decided to passive-aggressively “live text” him throughout his debauched January weekend, interrupting what I figured were M. C. Escher–style sexual permutations to alert him that he should make some time during the weekend to see The King’s Speech. I might have casually suggested he try not to marry anybody, either.

  I joke, but I was worried. With TMZ reporting these excursions of his as they were happening, I knew that he was being watched by the media, as an adoring pet owner would hover with a camcorder over a cutesy-wootsy kitten in the hopes it’d do something oh, so cutesy-wootsy.

  * * *

  Then I started to get the surveillance treatment.

  I was the colleague of the incident-prone, off-the-wagon star, after all, so obviously my jogging, dog-walking, and stroller rituals needed to be scrutinized. I began noticing cars driving aimlessly around my neighborhood. Then there’d be a car at the end of the street, parked perpendicularly in the middle of an intersection, with the telltale circle of a massive zoom lens poking out the side window.

  Whilst I was walking my dogs, I’d invariably notice the lense right after one of my canines had dropped a steamer on the sidewalk. Then I’d be faced with the dilemma of how do I pick up this poo, knowing that whatever I do will be photographed with the highest-quality equipment available and almost instantly posted on the Internet for worldwide consumption. Do I whip out my plastic poo bag, adopt an Abercrombie & Fitch male-model pose, and try to sell this as a casually handsome, responsible dog owner deep-knee bend? Do I go for a balletic arabesque with a J. Crew expression of comely approachability? Do I curtsy?

  Occasionally I’d get the “nice” paparazzo, who starts off with, “Sorry to bother you, Jon . . .” as I’m doing my daily run. And up until this point in my life, I hadn’t minded the occasional walk-and-chat with a TMZ guy. Maybe that was why they were polite initially. They figured I’d talk. But then they were standing at the edge of my driveway yelling out questions when my kids were in tow, and I don’t live in a gated community.

  “Hey, what do you think, Jon? You think Charlie’s guilty?”

  “Did Charlie beat up his wife?”

  “You got anything to say to Charlie?”

  Meanwhile, my kids didn’t know anything about Charlie Sheen and his vices. This was beyond the pale. I called the police on these lurkers once, because if there are guys sitting outside your house taking pictures of your kids, you don’t know if they’re paparazzi or pedophiles. (You suspect the former, but love the excuse to call the police that the latter gives you.) When the cops came and ticketed one guy for being parked partly in a red zone, I felt all warm inside.

  But still, their following me on my jogs or while I was walking down the street was getting obnoxious. Then my wife, an experienced entertainment journalist, clued me in on something essential about the relationship between pestered celebrity and dogged reporter.

  “If you don’t speak to them, they have nothing,” she said. “It’s when you open your mouth, even to say, ‘No comment,’ that gives them a clip.” And she’s right! If I just run by, or walk by, or whatever, wherever, all they have is a shot of me being ambulatory—not so sexy! The video guys really don’t like that. Now I just pretend it’s a long tracking shot in a movie, and I’m the actor pretending the camera isn’t there as I make my way through the airport, or down the sidewalk, or along the ledge of a building when I’m deep into my parkour training. (That last one is a joke, peopl
e.)

  I went to the drugstore one day with a very particular shopping list, and as I was putting my items on the counter, I heard the click, click, click that can mean only photographic attention. Oh, shit, I thought. Then I looked up and was relieved to discover that it wasn’t me they were after; it was Britney Spears, who had entered the very same CVS. Whew. I looked back down at my purchases: a Duraflame log, a jar of mayonnaise, and an enema kit. What tabloid headline had I just narrowly escaped?

  * * *

  It was starting to get to me. Having my life intruded upon set me on edge in a way I’d never experienced. And it was all the more galling that it wasn’t even anything I’d done that warranted this crap. Around this time Theater Geek, the book about Stagedoor Manor, had come out, and to take my mind off the intrigue, I picked up a copy. Its portrayal of my youthful stomping grounds was spot-on, and provided some much-needed levity. I could even laugh off the egregious historical inaccuracy that attributed my subway improv to one Robert Downey Jr.

  But I also read something that genuinely shocked me: that our beloved artistic director, Dr. Jack Romano, the man who’d changed my life with his craft, passion, enthusiasm, and respect for acting, was not only never a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but he wasn’t even a doctor. It had all been a lie. I guess he’d gotten the job based on a résumé that was, to say the least, padded.

  I was already awash in an ocean of bullshit and now this. At first I felt betrayed, of course, but it occurred to me that his particular brand of bullshit was used to inspire children and give them the skills to pursue their dreams, not tear people down and hurt them. And it also occurred to me that the letter to the Royal Academy that he wrote for me must have really been something, ’cause it fucking worked. Learning this about Jack, who had died in 1993, taught me about the duality of bullshit: It always stinks, but sometimes something great grows from it.

  * * *

  As it was increasingly apparent that my famous workmate was taking a turn for the worse, I was facing the fact that things weren’t going so well for my childhood friends, either.