The Book of Sheen: A Memoir

Charlie begins high school at Santa Monica High School and finds the large campus impersonal. In his first month, he wears a bulletproof vest loaned by a “Native American Vietnam vet friend” of his father’s, named Two Blue Jays, but abandons it (66). As a sophomore, he makes the baseball team as a pitcher and shortstop.

Before spring break, he travels to Las Vegas with Martin Sheen and his cousin Joey. He and Joey secretly use Martin’s credit card to hire an escort. Back in Los Angeles, he tells Chris Penn, and the pair start visiting Santa Monica massage parlors during lunch. They assemble fake IDs and fund outings by extracting money from their parents with cover stories.

During junior year, he commutes to school on Pacific Coast Highway, smoking marijuana with his friend Pat K, and he attends midnight screenings of The Song Remains the Same while taking psilocybin. One night, he falls asleep in the car and is arrested for marijuana possession. His parents bail him out and ground him. He soon returns to the screenings with adjusted habits.

During his senior year, he receives a conditional scholarship offer from Pratt Community College, contingent on improved grades. Because he is failing biology, he purchases the final exam answers. He receives a perfect score, is caught cheating, receives a failing mark, and is removed from the baseball team a week before the playoffs. His girlfriend Paula urges him to focus on graduation.

With nearly enough credits to graduate, he needs one five-credit English class. After studying for the final, he forgets an absence note, is denied a readmit by the office, and is turned away by the teacher. He reacts by throwing the balled exam into her face. Barred from graduation, he sneaks into the administration building intending to steal his file and “burn it on the beach” (74), but he finds the cabinet locked and leaves. He departs high school with a 1.2 GPA and 32% attendance. Thirty years later, he receives his diploma on television.

In the summer of 1983, Charlie tells his parents he will pursue auditions and, if unsuccessful, attend film school. Janet connects him with Glennis Liberty, who has worked for Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack and now hopes to become an agent. Charlie and Liberty assemble a résumé, and he adopts the stage name Sheen with Martin’s “blessing.”

Charlie’s first audition is for Camper Number 3 in Grizzly II: Revenge. Casting director Barbara Claman responds positively, and he gets the job, which also gives him his Screen Actors Guild (SAG) card. Momentum builds, and after Chris Penn shares the script for Ten Soldiers, Charlie meets writer-director John Milius and is cast as Matt in the film, later retitled Red Dawn. He trails Emilio’s famous friends on club nights and sees Penn’s profile rise after Footloose.

Charlie auditions for The Karate Kid and is briefly offered the lead, but he declines, on Martin’s advice, to honor his Grizzly commitment. In Budapest, he bonds with costars George Clooney and Laura Dern. During the shoot, MGM invites him to screen test for a different, bigger role in Red Dawn and offers a three-picture deal with escalating pay, but it will lock him into whatever films they want him to appear in. He debates the offer with Clooney over “glorious amounts of Hungarian whiskey” (83).

Charlie returns from Grizzly II and prepares for Red Dawn while weighing the MGM deal. He intentionally fails a screen test for the other role to remain cast as the younger brother. The role eventually goes to Patrick Swayze, whom Charlie praises. On his father’s advice, Sheen declines the MGM contract, which strains relations with his agent Glennis and ends MGM’s interest in him. Production for Red Dawn shoots for three months on Johnson Mesa in New Mexico, in extreme cold. The cast includes Swayze, Lea Thompson, Harry Dean Stanton, Jennifer Grey, Darren Dalton, and C. Thomas Howell.

Sheen forms a close trio with Dalton and Howell. Set conditions produce incidents such as a boom operator pinning a lavalier to his own thumb in a whiteout, and hot shell casings landing inside costumes during firefights. Director John Milius directs vigorously in the harsh weather. After a first-day scene in Swayze’s truck, Sheen experiences a sudden stutter that he conceals. Later, he drinks heavily at the bar. He describes using alcohol off set to loosen his speech but keeping it away from filming, saying that it is “one of the main reasons [he] learned to drink like [he] did” (87).

After Red Dawn, Charlie does not work for seven months. He worries about stalled auditions, recalling a poor reading for Oliver Stone’s The Platoon. He resumes a relationship with his high school girlfriend Paula, and she becomes pregnant. On December 12, 1984, their daughter Cassandra is born. He does not attend the delivery but later helps with childcare while Paula attends night classes, with financial and practical support from his “extremely helpful” parents.

Work resumes with the television film Silence of the Heart with Chad Lowe, followed by Penny Spheeris’s The Boys Next Door with Maxwell Caulfield, which has limited box office success. He appears with Martin Sheen on War of the Stars, where they defeat Michael Jordan in a two-on-one segment, a televised boost that he treats as a small turning point.

Jennifer Grey recommends him to John Hughes for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Hughes hires him on sight for a brief delinquent role, which Sheen performs after arriving late to set, dressed in his brother’s punk clothing. In 1985, Emilio is cast in The Platoon, but financing collapses, and the project is delayed. Oliver Stone later recalls Charlie and offers him the lead in the re-titled Platoon. Martin Sheen advises against the risk of shooting a Vietnam movie in the Philippines—recalling his experience on Apocalypse Now—but Charlie accepts.

Charlie returns to the Philippines for Platoon after “a soggy airborne frat party” (96) on the 15-hour flight with Johnny Depp. They arrive in Manila before deployment to a three-week field boot camp, designed by retired Marine captain Dale Dye. Sheen joins the cast for an early morning briefing by Dye’s team and a bus ride into the jungle.

At “Camp Dye” the actors live in foxholes, use only character names, and endure daily treks in extreme heat. They survive on MREs and warm water. Forest Whitaker loses significant weight. One night, a Marine corporal spirits Sheen to a nearby Philippine Constabulary outpost for grilled chicken, San Miguel beer, and ping pong before they slip back into camp before reveille.

Midway through training, Oliver Stone and cinematographer Robert Richardson host a table read, and Stone praises Sheen’s intensity. Sheen shares a hooch with Francesco Quinn and routinely wakes him early by advancing his wristwatch. Nearby are Depp and Kevin Dillon, while Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, and John C. McGinley bivouac across the command tent. Corey Glover’s singing on the marches later foreshadows his career with Living Colour. Depp coaxes Sheen into smoking, which Stone wants for the character.

Training peaks with a 90-foot rappel: Marines demonstrate a face-first sprint descent. The actors descend backward. Whitaker inverts midrope and is lowered safely, Quinn refuses, and Sheen halts midway and finishes cautiously.

The final field exercise splits the platoon into three units for a 15-kilometer hike to a staged firefight. Sheen’s team is ambushed; a smoke grenade strikes his groin, and he instinctively empties a magazine on full automatic before Dye removes him from the mission. Graduation follows with medals, Dye’s public assessments, and heavy lambanog drinking. Hungover, the men make a 10-kilometer “final hump” down a ravine. Stone and a small crew film them the morning they leave Camp Dye, signaling the end of training and the start of production.

Chapter 18 documents the filming of Platoon, shot in “perfect chronological order” so that performance and fatigue develop in step with the story (108). Sheen arrives near Los Baños, sleeps in a bare motel, and completes early patrol scenes that satisfy Oliver Stone, while producer Arnold Kopelson warns him to avoid nightlife after hearing concerns from a prior production. Sheen records the film’s narration with Stone and sound mixer Simon Kaye.

Tensions flare when a “difficult monkey” frustrates Willem Dafoe, and Francesco Quinn kicks him during a break. Dale Dye intervenes, and Quinn is informally ostracized. A brutal New Year’s sequence spans eight days of village atrocities, injuries, and moral collapse that Sheen finds difficult to compartmentalize. His girlfriend Dolly Fox visits during a rare break.

A complex friendly-fire set piece injures Sheen with red ants and rattles Corey Glover, who becomes briefly “shell-shocked” and develops a severe stutter. Sheen later drops grenades accurately into an enemy spider hole, then twists an ankle and is concussed during the night assault. He and Glover survive a tense roadside stop by armed soldiers while still in fatigues. Stone quietly binds Sheen to his next New York film by napkin agreement. As the cast thins in step with on-screen deaths, Sheen finishes the final combat beats and departs Manila, aware Platoon will “change everything” and expose him to a harsher fame.

After Platoon, Sheen moves into his own place in Malibu with his girlfriend Dolly Fox. A summer of courtyard barbecues draws friends from Malibu and new comrades from Platoon, including Johnny Depp, Paul “Doc” Sanchez, and Corporal Drew Clark. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off boosts Sheen’s visibility, which heightens his dissatisfaction with a domestic routine into which he has drifted.

He departs for Little Rock to shoot Three for the Road, a weak project he expects to fix, and attends a photo op with Governor Bill Clinton. Feeling trapped, Sheen slides into regular cocaine use facilitated by a crew connection, often smoking a cocaine laced cigarette known as a “coco-puff” and pairing the drug with pornography, a pattern that marks his first sustained substance abuse disorder and foreshadows later freebasing.

His relationships fray as he oscillates between people-pleasing and resentment; he finishes the film and returns to Malibu by Halloween. As Platoon’s awards rollout approaches, early reactions predict major success. Aware that fame will strain any commitment he is unsure of, he postpones breaking up with Dolly, then undercuts the relationship by beginning an affair with a Penthouse model, signaling the start of a sharper turn toward drugs and celebrity.

In January 1987, Sheen ends his relationship with Dolly amicably and steps into sudden celebrity. At a packed Westwood screening of Platoon, he is shocked by the line around the block and critics’ early Oscar talk. Already contracted to Orion’s No Man’s Land, he begins shooting, despite misgivings, while the social world around him explodes: prime tables, paparazzi, VIP clubs, and head-spinning encounters with David Bowie, Madonna, and Jack Nicholson, along with cocaine-charged nights with Sam Kinison.

He sits courtside for the Lakers and dates a cheerleader, takes quick trips to Hawaii, and hops private jets, treated as a movie star. A gold-embossed invitation to the Playboy Mansion confirms his new tier; the setting feels faded, but the crowd is extraordinary. Hugh Hefner circulates like a gracious host, and Sheen spends hours bonding with Reggie Jackson before slipping away at a playmate’s request, setting up later dates while Reggie teases him.

Driving home elated, he thinks about the “napkin” commitment to Oliver Stone’s next film, a New York finance drama. As departure nears, he worries he may not fit that world and resolves to level with Stone about his fears and inexperience with money. He wonders whether he should begin by telling Stone that he is “a scared child with a fractured soul” (133).

Sheen has an uneasy experience filming Wall Street. He would likely have passed on the film had he read it first. He feels miscast as a slick striver and struggles with an avalanche of technical dialogue and a role built on greed, which he cannot inhabit convincingly. Arriving in New York amid Platoon’s awards surge and personal notoriety, he resents working instead of reveling and finds Oliver Stone transformed by Oscar pressure.

Stone mandates a three-week finance boot camp, but Sheen remains confused and finally decides to deliver “technical lingo” with absolute confidence rather than true understanding. A weekend cocaine arrangement with a contact he calls Jarvis shadows the shoot. He praises Michael Douglas’s rigor and generosity, recalls Douglas chiding Stone during his famous monologue, and takes pride in giving him strong scenes. John C. McGinley provides ballast, though Sheen cannot find a steady rhythm. He values two sequences that work for him: the elevator confrontation with his father, and Gekko’s park beating. The balcony scene ends with a line he hates, his character asking, “Who am I?” (143). Later, this becomes a Sheen family punch line.

In the two years after Wall Street, Sheen works nonstop and unravels. He takes seven films, plus a regretted week on a Heidi TV project in Austria after Michael Douglas offers him $500,000. He closes 1987 with Eight Men Out, then shoots Young Guns in New Mexico, Major League in Milwaukee, Men at Work in Los Angeles, Cadence in British Columbia, Navy Seals in Virginia Beach and Spain, The Rookie in Los Angeles, and San Jose, with Clint Eastwood.

Entering the 1990s, he breaks off an engagement to Kelly Preston and moves in with Ginger Lynn. She helps him sober up briefly for The Rookie, but his “mischief” increases when he starts to party with Nicolas Cage; they form a hard-partying clique called J-5 and binge through Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Ecstasy and steroids bloat his face, his work slips, and Eastwood quietly coordinates with Martin Sheen. On the day he plans to judge a bikini contest with Cage, his family stages a morning intervention at his parents’ house. After hearing them, Sheen intends to accept help. A phone call from Eastwood seals the decision. He agrees to enter rehab while “masterminding” how to attend the contest anyway.