by Jon Cryer
For a while David Dennis had really seemed to be doing well. He’d been running the Plaza Hotel’s Oyster Bar, and had turned it around from a money loser into a hot spot where the Yankees gathered after they won the World Series. He’d gotten married and adopted a daughter. But then he began abusing prescription drugs—“Hey, at least I’m not drinking,” he’d throw out as a qualifier—and his addictions took their toll, to the extent that his visits to California invariably involved all manner of strange behavior. He stopped making sense when he talked. He’d rent a car and get into an accident, then walk away from it. He’d come to the set, then fall asleep in my trailer. He also kept trying to get close to Charlie, under the impression that the two could bond over sobriety issues, but Charlie thought he was mentally ill and kept referring to him as “Prozac Dave.” I love my friend, but it was getting harder and harder to have him around the way I used to.
Then Artie, who I’d always assumed was a highly functioning alcoholic, called me in the middle of the Charlie craziness with a tale of woe. I hadn’t really kept up with Artie. I would typically find out about him through David. But then out of the blue Artie phoned me saying his marriage was falling apart, and that a storage facility was selling off his stuff because of a billing screwup. He needed a thousand dollars to keep his possessions from being sold.
That was a no-brainer. If he needed a thousand dollars, I could give him a thousand dollars.
* * *
The blue Nissan Versa stayed behind us the whole way.
It was there when Lisa, the kids, and I pulled out of our driveway, and it was still there on the freeway as we headed north toward Santa Clarita.
My son was trying his best to enjoy this spy-movie moment with some very persistent paparazzi, but Lisa and I could tell that underneath, he was actually scared. Another freeway and one exit later, there was no way to look at our tail as fun in any way. I was beginning to get pretty riled. When would this shit end?
I pulled into my sister Robin’s driveway, got out, and looked back at the Versa, after which it peeled away and down the street. Thank God. The kids ran inside, and Robin’s husband, Phil (remember the PA who got screwed out of his driver’s license? Well, he ended up marrying my sister), asked me to help bring some firewood inside from the trunk of his car.
Screeeech, click, click, click, vroooommm.
With all the urgency of a drive-by shooting, they pulled up, rattled off a fusillade of photos, and tore off as if I were about to give chase. They’d come all this way for what had to be the most incredibly lame photo exclusive of all time. Unless they were from Firewood Monthly. I never found out. I guessed there’d be no escaping a headline this time: “Cryer Sports Wood with Male Companion!”
* * *
There’s a long history in Hollywood of performers with addiction issues being enabled and even abetted by the studios they work for. But on Two and a Half Men, the time had come for Warner Bros. honchos Bruce Rosenblum and Peter Roth to get involved. A couple weeks into January, Chuck Lorre informed Charlie that at the end of that week’s show taping on Friday, Bruce and Peter were going to have a meeting with him. If Charlie was only nervously apprehensive about me wanting a word with him last month, this kind of official-meeting shit would drive him up a wall.
Backstage, he was talking to himself, and getting madder and madder. Gabe and Janice, his respective makeup and hair people, were trying to do their jobs while he fidgeted and smoked. He started to get manic as he psyched himself for what he assumed was a meeting of incredible importance. It was so tension-filled backstage, I thought he was going to come to blows with someone.
I walked up to him and said, “What are you worried about?”
“All these assholes are gonna come, they’ll spend two hours giving me shit, and I’m just gonna have to nod and say yes. I’m tired of all the bullshit!”
“Okay,” I said. “Then do you want to give them a reason right now to give you even more shit, or do you want to buckle down and do the show?”
He looked me in the eye and said, “Yeah, you’re right. You’re right.”
Things didn’t start smoothly once the show began. We did a scene with the two of us sitting on a couch, and Charlie screwed up every line. He could not remember anything he was supposed to say. It was hard to comprehend what I was seeing, because Charlie had always prided himself on getting it done on show night. It was like watching HAL go haywire in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Mark Samuels, our assistant director, who is the soul of diplomacy and quiet competence, said to Charlie, “Do you need a minute?” (Over the years, Mark had acquired a courteous way of answering a frustrated director’s “Where’s Charlie?” query. He’d say, “He’s been invited.”)
Charlie paused, then said, “Wait a minute; just give me a second.”
Somebody handed him the pages, and as he went over them, the rest of us were extraordinarily uncomfortable. The audience was here, after all. And then a rather astonishing thing happened. On take two, Charlie completely nailed it. Every beat. Every line. When he absolutely had to focus, he did. It was a strange and impressive thing to behold.
Instead of sticking around for the meeting with Bruce and Peter, however, Charlie chose to walk out, still in full makeup, get in his car, and have his driver take him home. He left Bruce Rosenblum and Peter Roth just standing by his trailer. And with that, we all accepted that something was truly broken here, that Charlie couldn’t be counted on to even go through the motions anymore.
That was also the last episode of Two and a Half Men Charlie would ever shoot.
I, meanwhile, stayed late to film a scene in which I was dressed as a woman, and, I would like to add, got quite a few compliments on how good I looked in return. Just sayin’.
* * *
“Artie’s dead.”
“What?”
“He died yesterday. We’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”
I had gotten several voice mails from David, but long before, I’d come to the realization that his behavior had become so erratic that I had to stop listening to them. This call was actually from his brother Eric, who was undoubtedly overwhelmed.
Only a month before, Artie and I had had our conversation about the storage locker. Apparently he had had a seizure, then gone into a coma; then a lung infection ran rampant through his body. It was very shocking. Although Artie was prone to mystery ailments, he had lived the last five years with a neurological disorder that would paralyze his leg occasionally, then go away, but leave him in debilitating pain. He was also drinking enormous amounts of alcohol. Even David, who spent lots of time with Artie, couldn’t tell when Artie was drinking or how much.
The funeral for Artie was a sad, odd affair. Artie’s friends did their best to emphasize the joyful parts of his life, because Artie was such a funny guy. But it was a disconnect emotionally for me: seeing all these people from my childhood, which on one level was comforting, but tied to the fact that we were all there for a terribly tragic reason. It made me feel dazed. When David showed up—we all heard the thump, ssssshh, thump, sssssh of his caned walk before we saw him—he wore dark glasses, and looked pale and wan, in a way almost the picture of a grieving widow. Artie’s death was a loss for me, but for David it devastated him to his core. He clearly wasn’t going to be channeling his usual enthusiasm toward a light, celebratory story about his dear departed friend.
To this day, the mention of Artie triggers a flood of tears in David.
* * *
During an off week for the show, Charlie was hospitalized with abdominal pains. We were now at the stage when Chuck and I and others at the show were all pretty sure this was the overdose we’d been expecting. Charlie wasn’t answering my texts.
What followed, as I understood it later, was that after Charlie was released, he got a visit at his home from Bruce Rosenblum and Les Moonves, who told him they’d have a private jet ready to
take him to a rehab facility out of state so he could get help and have some privacy. This wasn’t a suggestion. It was either this or the show would be stopped for the season. We’d filmed sixteen episodes already out of a twenty-two-episode season.
Charlie agreed, then the next day changed his mind and said he’d complete a rehab program at home with a highly regarded sober coach, and a sober companion. But Chuck Lorre, who’d been keeping close tabs on everything, talked with the coach, and when he learned Charlie was going to do it all at home, he came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t work. Chuck’s view was that Charlie needed to be taken out of his comfort zone to effectively deal with his problems. This, naturally, pissed Charlie off.
All of this I learned later. What I knew at the time was that we were shutting down production for a few weeks—the second time in two years—in the hopes that Charlie could get better and we could complete four more episodes instead of six. I was hopeful, and made plans to visit Charlie at his Mulholland house on the first weekend in February. I had to see how all this was going down.
He greeted me at the door with, “Welcome to Sober Valley Lodge.” He hugged me, then said, “I gotta go pee in a cup.” I watched him walk off with a doctor.
Denise was there, as was one of the “goddesses,” the label he’d given his nubile Vegas companions. The one there that day was Natalie, the bikini model for High Times magazine who looked like a fourteen-year-old, not Bree, the porn star who looked like a fourteen-year-old. The sober companion was there, too, as well as the sober coach, who didn’t look like a fourteen-year-old, and answered my query as to what I could do to help with, “Just coming to visit is great. Keeping him involved in the world that worked for him sober would be great.”
Charlie seemed in good spirits that day—more coherent and clear-eyed than he’d been in a while—although his voice was completely shot for some reason. He was happy to have company, but I couldn’t help feeling that this was still an existence in which everything he wanted (save drugs and alcohol) was around him, his needs were being catered to, and issues weren’t being addressed. I worried that whatever this arrangement was at Charlie’s house, it wouldn’t truly be effective. But hey, with addiction, most of the time none of it works. Maybe trying anything different is better than nothing.
And yet, I asked Charlie as I was leaving, “What is it you ultimately want?”
“I don’t want Chuck on the show anymore,” he said. “I’m tired of his shit.”
“Really?” I said. “I’m sorry that your relationship with Chuck has deteriorated like this. I didn’t know your problems ran that deep.” The whole time I was thinking, When was this head-butting between Chuck and Charlie happening?
Charlie said, “I want Don Reo to take over the show.” Don, a sitcom veteran who’d created Blossom, had been on Two and a Half Men only a short while, and while I liked Don, I knew that Two and a Half Men without Chuck Lorre would suffer. I said as much, and Charlie added, “Oh, well, Chuck can still run the writers’ room. I just don’t want to deal with him ever on the set.”
This was something of a shock to me, because I simply did not have that kind of relationship with Chuck. I worked well with him. I told Charlie I couldn’t stop him from airing his grievances about Chuck to the network, but that if he was looking for us to band together on this campaign, it wasn’t going to happen.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “But I want you to know I’m going to pay you for these two shows we’re not doing.”
“Thanks, Charlie, but that’s a lot of money.”
“I’m gonna pay you, we’re gonna come back, and I’m gonna get everybody paid. Either I’ll pay you, or I’ll get Warner Bros. to make sure you get paid.” He seemed genuinely intent on this point, especially his concern that the crew was losing two weeks of pay. “Anyway, we’re coming back. Next week! I’m feeling great. I’m back next week.”
* * *
The theory going around at the time was that Charlie was desperate to get back to work because he needed the money. Yes, yes, I know: How does someone who makes that kind of dough suddenly “need” money? Well, as the speculation went, all the high living had taken its toll. If you’ve reached the point where paycheck-to-paycheck living isn’t a matter of hundreds of dollars, but millions, you might just go off the deep end about missing out on that weekly scratch.
Then the rants started. On February 14, he went on Dan Patrick’s radio show and offered up the image of a ready-to-work, one hundred percent clean-and-sober Charlie Sheen blithely showing up to the studio lot to earn his keep, only to find an empty workplace, like a ghost town right out of an old Western. He’s banging on the stage door, a lone figure of responsibility and promptness howling to an uncaring, soulless corporate entity, “Where is everybody?”
That was actually kind of funny. Completely untrue, but funny.
The reality, as I later learned, was that Chuck Lorre knew a week and a half of home rehab wasn’t enough, and wouldn’t sign off on cranking up production again that quickly. It angered Charlie so much that he felt all he could do was take his fight to the airwaves, calling out the show executives as the ones not ready. “Bewildered” doesn’t begin to describe my feeling at listening to this interview.
I would like to clarify something, however, that was misinterpreted by the by-now steady drumbeat of coverage on Charlie’s antics and the show’s turmoil. The night of that Dan Patrick interview, the season’s last (although we didn’t know it yet) episode aired, and in Chuck Lorre’s vanity card at the end of the show, he listed a litany of his own examples of healthy living—exercise, good food, doctor visits, no drink or drugs or smoking—and ended with a joke that read, “If Charlie Sheen outlives me, I’m gonna be really pissed.”
To almost everybody, this came off as a barbed retort, a deliberately antagonistic response to Charlie’s accusations. But in actuality, that vanity card had been written weeks before, and we’d all laughed about it on the set. Even Charlie.
* * *
The paps were now showing up when I dropped my son off at the school bus and when I took him out for a frozen yogurt. They were tailing my car whenever I drove to Disney to do voice work, and chasing my wife and me in and out of local stores. They’d even started to follow my assistant, Sarah. Two guys trailed her to her apartment complex, parked out front, and just waited. After several hours they finally took a break to get some food. My keen-eyed assistant picked up her cell and dialed. Turned out they’d parked with eight whole inches of their car blocking the apartment complex driveway. They returned, hoagies in hand, to see a tow truck pulling away with their piece-of-shit Prius dangling off the back. And my assistant laughing her ass off.
* * *
The insane rumors were flying fast and furious: that Charlie was spiraling, that he was being extorted by an underage girl who had video, that he sent former New York Met Lenny Dykstra (soon to be indicted for fraud) over to Warner Bros. Studios with a list of demands including Chuck Lorre’s dismissal, yet another pay raise, and that Bruce Rosenblum, only the head of Warner Bros. Television, be barred from the lot.
It occurred to me at that time that Lenny Dykstra would actually make a fantastic process server. Who wouldn’t open the door for a three-time all-star?
* * *
A-a-a-a-and we’re back to Alex Jones.
Because when you have truly berserk shit to say, where else do you go?
Charlie returned to Alex Jones’s radio show, and this time unloaded on Chuck. Labeled him a “charlatan,” claimed he’d turned Chuck’s “tin can” of a show into “pure gold,” and called him “Chaim Levine,” which while technically Chuck Lorre’s actual Hebrew name, to the ears of an audience not out of its mind might as well have been “Jewy Jewerson.”
What the fuck was going on with Charlie? Was this an attempt to embarrass Chuck, or coerce him into leaving the show of his own volition? The gambit seemed il
l-advised. As I mentioned earlier, regular protocol in the TV world—and this has happened a lot—dictates that an unhappy star simply go to the network brass and say, “Hey, I can’t work with this person any longer. Can you make a change?” The producer then steps aside, still retaining his or her massive paycheck, and goes to Fiji.
But Charlie hated confrontation. Loved doing plenty of drugs, stewing about shit, and having a meltdown on the radio. But not strolling over to an office and asking someone to take care of a little problem. Charlie Sheen would not have made a good Mafia don.
I learned a lot from Charlie out of that Alex Jones interview. Charlie’s a Vatican assassin. He’s addicted to winning. He’s our new sheriff. He’s got poetry in his fingertips. Alcoholism is a false construct. And Thomas Jefferson was a pussy.
I couldn’t let that last one stand. I texted him that day, If u say ANYTHING about Ben Franklin, I am gonna lose my shit!!
He texted back, four eyed wig thief.
I tried to ascertain what exactly Charlie was after. I sent him back a text asking what his plan was, what was behind this “PR stuff,” as I gingerly called it. He responded with a long text screed about Chuck, calling him a “cancer that needs to be punished” and ending with a twisted kind of life lesson:
hatred is fuel.
fuel is god. . . . .
or is it; dog. . . . . ?
hmmmm. . . .
Last, I tried to let him know that he was letting anger consume him, that he would lose all his power if he did that. Then he sent a cryptic response:
oh but dear man,
most of it is all an act,
I have a much bigger plan
that will benefit us all . . .
trust me.
It was our last text exchange. CBS announced that day that they were halting production on the show for the rest of the season, and shortly after that, on March 7, Charlie was fired.