Decadence that destroyed prince of Hollywood

Charlie Sheen’s downward spiral included R30 000-a-day drug binges and thousands of women, writes Alison Boshoff

THE SCANDAL has been papered over with a certain amount of superficial charm – and the best PR that money can buy. But no one can be in any doubt that Charlie Sheen’s life is chaotic and dissolute to a lurid degree. On Tuesday, following a week of fevered speculation and an explosive article in the National Enquirer, the star finally admitted that he is the wild-living Hollywood womaniser who is HIV positive.

It was a subject Sheen broached with US presenter Matt Lauer with his customary on-screen bravado and that Tinseltown smile.

Once considered the brightest talent of a distinguished acting dynasty, Sheen has been out of work for around a year now.

Little wonder. For it has been something of an open secret in Hollywood for several years that behind closed doors Sheen’s life is extraordinarily debauched.

Waking at 5pm, it is claimed, he calls upon the services of porn stars and prostitutes for company, and whiles the nights away with drug binges and sex with multiple partners. And for the past four years, all this has taken place with the knowledge that he is HIV positive.

By his own reckoning there have been a dizzying number of sexual partners over the years – well over 5 000.

When he is “partying hard”, he is said to spend £1 400 a day on cocaine and at least £15 000 a month on call girls.

“It is almost impossible to overestimate how hard he parties,” I’m told.

Sheen has always prided himself on being “tons of fun”, doing his utmost to make his degeneracy seem like a heroic act. But no one is fooled any longer.

In recent weeks, he has been involved in a brawl in a bar south of Los Angeles – he took issue with a musician and was removed in a headlock by a bouncer.

There was also an out-of-court settlement with a dentist he apparently assaulted while receiving treatment for an abscess. Margarita Palestino said the actor, 50, ripped off a gas mask and yelled, “I’m going to f***ing kill you!” before grabbing her breast.

He is then said to have pulled a knife on her while “high on crack”.

Women unfortunate enough to have had more intimate dealings with the star – such as his three ex-wives, model Donna Peele and actresses Denise Richards and Brooke Mueller – would surely recognise the behaviour.

The fact that his most recent fiancée attempted suicide speaks volumes – as do the frequent, foul-mouthed spats Sheen has had with both Richards and Mueller.

Richards, who was Sheen’s second wife and is best known for her role as Bond Girl Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough, has supported him to a saintly extent. She even cared for his twins by Mueller, his third wife, when the latter went into rehab, only to be called a “heretic washed-up piglet shame pile” and a “terrorist sack of trash” by Sheen in July.

Actress and writer Tracy Richman, who dated Sheen in the ’90s, observed: “He has a lot of demons. He always had an addictive personality and he’s been on a roller coaster.”

That is something of an understatement. Born on September 3, 1965 to actor Martin Sheen and his wife Janet, there was drama in Charlie’s life from the start.

He was almost suffocated by the umbilical cord during delivery and came out blue because of oxygen deprivation.

“He was a blue baby,” Martin Sheen told an interviewer.

The doctor grabbed him by his feet and struck him.

“Charlie started screaming and he hasn’t stopped since,” his mother added.

His early life was peripatetic as his father struggled to make it as an actor.

Five days after his birth, Charlie went on the road with the family while Martin was in a touring production of a play.

Four years later, the family spent months in Mexico while Sheen Snr was making the film Catch-22.

Martin recalled: “We rented a duplex near a slaughterhouse. And every morning for months, Charlie would come upstairs screaming, ‘Where are we? What day is it? When are we going home?” ’

Aged 10, he spent eight months in the Philippines, where his father was shooting Apocalypse Now – amid the throes of an alcoholic breakdown.

Charlie, along with his siblings, witnessed the violence that accompanied Martin’s heavy drinking. PARTY ANIMAL: Actor Charlie Sheen appears in an interview on NBC’s in New York. In the interview on Tuesday, the 50-year-old Sheen said he tested positive four years ago for the virus that causes Aids. Picture: AP

“Picture being that age, and all the s***t I witnessed,” said Charlie.

“And the violence and the carnage. It was explained to me, but still it impacted me on my deepest cellular level.”

By the time he was a teenager, he attended Santa Monica High along with Sean Penn and Rob Lowe.

He was intensely jealous of the “Brat Pack” of actors who found success in their late teens – especially their money, girls and access to drugs.

“I said to myself, ‘I’m going to eclipse all of them.’ I was driven to have what they had – except more.”

His sexual awakening came at 15, when Sheen lost his virginity to a prostitute called Candy in Las Vegas while his father slept in the neighbouring hotel room.

He had stolen his father’s credit card in order to pay her.

“I remember having the greatest night of my life. Then two weeks later, my father wanted to know about this Friendly Introductions LLC, Las Vegas, bill on his statement. I explained it.

“His whole concern was that I didn’t mistake that for love. I’m still trying to process that one.”

He was predictably bratty as a teenager. Arrested for credit-card fraud, he was also found stoned and asleep in the BMW his parents had bought for him for his 16th birthday.

During his last year at school, he threw paper at his teacher and told her she was lucky he hadn’t killed her yet.

The school expelled him.

His first acting break came in the 1984 film Red Dawn, and two years later he stole the show in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, playing a rebellious slacker with huge sexual charisma.

However, it was his role in Platoon in 1986 which made him a star, soon followed by a part in Wall Street, when he played Gordon Gekko’s protégé Bud Fox.

He was often drunk on set, boasting, “We shot in New York City, so I’d be out to the bars every night till 3am or 4am, then try to show up for a 6am call to stand toe to toe with Michael Douglas and handle 50 percent of a scene.”

Around this time he dated promising actresses – including Winona Ryder and Charlotte Lewis.

He had a serious romance with actress Kelly Preston – now married to John Travolta.

But with success came the beginnings of his raucous party-animal behaviour – and while others matured, went to rehab or fell in love, Sheen became increasingly wild.

There were late nights in Los Angeles when he would roar around in his Porsche and pick up girls. As well as a fondness for alcohol, he also developed a taste for cocaine at this time which led to an overdose in 1998. By all accounts, three decades later, his love of the drug remains unabated.

Ironically, he scorns Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous, even though his father credits AA with helping him achieve sobriety 20 years ago.

“I’m taking the advice of who? A bunch of former homeless douchebags? I got a problem with AA, man.

“It was written by hard drunks 100 years ago, and a lot of it doesn’t apply to today’s standards and realities.”

Whatever the cause, his behaviour became ever more reckless.

Preston left him after being injured in a bizarre incident in 1990. Picking up a pair of his trousers, she discovered he had left a gun in the pocket.

It fell out and a round of bullets was shot into the toilet. A piece of porcelain shrapnel hit her in the arm.

After they split, Sheen started dating Playboy playmate Cathy St George, and then LA party girl Tracy Richman.

A six-year association with porn actress Ginger Lynn Allen also began around this time.

“When Charlie’s sober, he’s sweet, he’s loving, he’s generous, he’s caring,” Ginger told People magazine.

“When he’s drinking and using, he’s out of control.”

Indeed, as we shall see, Charlie Sheen has been a habitual user of porn stars and prostitutes, being exposed in the Heidi Fleiss scandal in 1993 in which a prostitution ring which catered to Hollywood stars and studio executives was busted.

At the Fleiss trial, two years later in 1995, Sheen revealed that he had spent £34 000 in a year on the services of her ‘girls’: “I love sex, and I can afford it,” he told the court.

He also, strangely, took the opportunity of a captive courtroom audience to announce his engagement to model Donna Peele, who he later called “an angel sent from heaven to take me through the rest of my journey”. Six months later they were divorced. The downward spiral was only just beginning. In 1997, Sheen pleaded no contest to a charge of battery with serious bodily injury after his then-girlfriend, model Brittany Ashland, accused him of smashing her face on the kitchen floor.

What could be classified as his first nadir came the following year when, in 1998, Sheen overdosed on cocaine, was hospitalised, and entered rehab.

Emerging several months later, a brief period of normality followed, during which Sheen is said to have been “clean”.

Settling down with Denise Richards in 2001 seemed to reinforce his stability and he took a role in the sitcom Two and A Half Men. It was a smash hit, and he became the highest paid actor on American television, earning a reported £1.2 million per episode.

His family have been hoping for years that Charlie will change his lifestyle.

Martin said: “Charlie’s as great a mystery to me as I am to myself, with no explanation possible. It’ll take a miracle, but his time has yet to come.

“When he gets a grasp on how much he is loved and begins to love himself, everything is going to change.”

One can only hope it is not too late. – Daily Mail

Picture being that age, and all that s***t I witnessed. And the violence and the carnage. It was explained to me but still impacted me