Gillian Telling is a Senior Reporter at People, where she has worked for 10 years. Her work has previously been seen in Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, and Cosmopolitan.
Charlie Sheen's new memoir The Book of Sheen is out today, Sept. 9, and while it certainly covers plenty of sordid tales of addiction and sex throughout his well-documented struggles, it also covers the first half of his life, including his unique childhood, his rise to fame in Hollywood, and fun stories about all the celebrities he's worked with along the way. Below, a few of the fun facts Sheen reveals in the delightfully juicy tome.
Charlie Sheen (born Carlos Irwin Estevez) was Martin and Janet Sheen's third child -- his two older brothers are Emilion and Ramon, and sister Renée came after him. When they were young, they traveled as a pack to Martin's sets so the family wouldn't have to be split up.
When he was nine, he spent months in the Philippines on the set of Apocalypse Now, the grueling Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam war film where he writes of watching his dad slowly lose his mind while portraying Captain Willard. He also writes of how he helped him recover after Martin's 1979 heart attack by playing catch with him.
Sheen grew up playing Little League, graduating to playing for his high school team. He was offered a full ride to a junior college that would lead him to playing at Kansas, but he blew it by not keeping his grades up and getting kicked off the team.
After spending so many years on sets, he found regular school boring -- by the end of his senior year, he had an attendance rate of 32%, and a 1.2 GPA. (He did try to graduate, but a series of unfortunate events led to him missing the final test.) When he got cast as Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn in Major League, he already knew how to throw a great pitch.
Sheen met Chris Penn during his first week at Point Dume Elementary, and they bonded immediately. They loved making movies in their backyard on the Sheen family Super 8 camcorder with their brothers, and Sheen writes of their closeness, running wild in Malibu and Point Dume together.
At age 11, he and Chris smoked their first joint together, and Sheen later writes of Penn’s success following his breakout role in 1984’s Footloose, and says he doesn’t believe Penn was ready for the limelight yet. Penn died in 2006 of coronary disease at age 40.
When Sheen was 18, he was cast as "Camper # 3" in the 1983 horror movie Grizzly Ii: Revenge, opposite a then-unknown George Clooney and Laura Dern. He and Clooney bonded on the 9-hour flight to Budapest by drinking and singing the Beatles together. Sheen says Clooney was immediately protective of him and Dern, and he became a pseudo "uncle," dishing out sound life and career advice, despite only being a few years older than Sheen.
Sheen was a total unknown when he won the role of Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid -- but he'd already committed to Grizzly II: Revenge and his dad Martin told him it was bad form to renege on commitments, and that honor and reputation were more important in Hollywood than being in one major film. (Sheen jokes in the book that he should never have listened to dear old dad.) The role of course went to Ralph Macchio, and Sheen says Macchio was "perfect for the role, and his performance was brilliant."
Sheen and Jennifer Grey had been costars in 1984's Red Dawn, and she suggested Sheen play the bad boy role in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, where she'd already been cast as Ferris’s moody sister. Sheen showed up to the audition ready to knock director John Hughes’ socks off with his line memorization -- he was also decked out in his brother Ramon's leather jacket, with cigarette ash under his eyes to make himself look strung out. Hughes took one look at him and told him he looked great and had the job -- he didn't even have to say the lines.
After filming Red Dawn, but before Platoon, Sheen began seeing his high school girlfriend Paula Profit again. Not long after, Paula got pregnant. Sheen was just 18, and says now that he was too young to have much involvement, but he made sure to be there in the evenings as needed as Paula went to night school, and his parents helped them out financially while he was hoping for his big break.
Despite not being around when she was young, he adores their daughter Cassandra, now 41, calling her an "absolute gift to the world'” and loves being a grandfather to her three children.
Sheen and Depp bonded on the plane to the Philippines the same way he had with George Clooney -- by drinking for 15 hours on the flight. (He says he was actually no match for Depp’s drinking prowess back then.)
Sheen had never really smoked cigarettes before, but that changed after hanging with Depp during the filming of Platoon, who would offer them up with frequency. Director Oliver Stone also wanted Sheen’s character to smoke, and it wasn’t long before he was hooked. Depp told him gleefully that he’d successfully converted at least one non-smoker on each of his previous films. (Sheen finally quit cigarettes in 2019.)
Sheen met Heidi Fleiss at a club in Hollywood one night, after wondering why she was at a table filled with such beautiful women. The late producer Steve Bing introduced them, and Sheen became a frequent client of Fleiss’s, paying thousands and thousands for the company of her escorts. When Fleiss was arrested in 1993, the feds told Sheen that he could face five years in jail for "pandering," i.e., buying sexual services from the women for his friends, and spooked, he testified against her. Fleiss went to jail for tax evasion, and Sheen says he regrets the move in hindsight, noting, "snitch is not a color I wear well."
Sheen was married three times: First to model Donna Peele, whom he met on the set of a Parliament cigarette ad in Japan in 1995, but the relationship fell apart after a year, and they divorced in 1996. He was married to Denise Richards between 2002-2006, and then to Brooke Mueller, whom he met in 2008 when they were both sober. They divorced in 2011. He notes in the book that when he was married, he never cheated on his wives, not once. (He does say that when he was "legally separated," however, the opposite was the case.)
During the height of Charlie Sheen's addiction, he says he could take down a 7-gram rock in one evening -- the equivalent of two eight balls of cocaine. He writes that his dealer got in trouble from the Mexican cartels who were supplying him because they assumed Sheen was dealing on the side -- they couldn't believe that one man could do so many drugs by himself and live to tell the tale. They decided to cut his supply in half, and he had to supplement with a different dealer.
Sheen also opens up about his now infamous 20/20 interview in 2011, where he spoke of having "tiger blood." He notes that a few days prior, he'd managed to get a phone call with San Francisco Giants pitcher Brian Wilson, one of his idols, who told him that guys like them were built differently, and had tiger blood running through their veins and "Adonis DNA."
At the time, Sheen was also addicted to a testosterone cream that he dubs "Krazy Kreem," that he says made him a ''raving lunatic." The phrase about tiger blood and never losing stuck with him during the interview, and the unhinged moment went viral.
The Book of Sheen hits shelves on Sept. 9 and is available wherever books are sold. The documentary aka Charlie Sheen streams on Netflix starting Sept. 10.