Charlie Sheen Goes to War

I took it as a sign of friendship when Charlie Sheen allowed me to smash the cellular telephone with him. We used the 20-pound dumbbells. We had been in the trailer for many days, locked in a savage, inward-looking psychosis that inevitably creeps up during the making of a big-budget motion picture. He had already tried the Binaca blast: a commando technique for killing flies, using a Bic lighter and a Binaca breath-spray canister to make an improvised flame thrower. But clearly, other, more bizarre diversions would have to be found lest dementia set in.

I sat at the kitchen table, Sheen sat on the couch and his lifelong friend, Pat Kenney, stood in the kitchen, opening cupboards, looking for a bowl. He opened one above the refrigerator and said, "Hey, look, a microwave."

"Let's get a hamster and a video camera," Sheen said.

The trailer, which looked like an injection-molded motel room inside, sat in a line of trailers in the Knights of Columbus parking lot in Virginia Beach, Virginia, in the middle of a pine forest right next to Camp Pendleton and Naval Air Station Oceana.

Sheen was starring in Navy SEALS, directed by Lewis (Jewel of the Nile) Teague. Troubled Orion Pictures had high hopes for the film, an action-adventure saga about Navy commandos versus Arab terrorists. To enhance its box-office potential, Navy SEALS features a rowdy, daredevil line-up of male stars from Platoon, The Abyss, Aliens and The Terminator, all of whom (it was hoped) would make Top Gun look like Restoration drama. And Sheen was the most bankable of the group.

But there were complaints about the director--not only from the actors but at every level of the production. Leadership is never an easy quality to come by on a grand, rolling ship in the choppy sea of cinema. Now there was the chafing of icebergs against the gunwales, the muttering among the crew. "Failing upward," I heard several actors say, in reference to how this film had come to be made at all.

Sheen himself said, "Orion sends some executive down here for the day with 'tips.' We really need his tips. He spends half the day on the phone talking to his secretary so he doesn't miss any calls. Then he has lunch, talks to me about future projects and bails. No wonder things get fucked up."

Chuck Pfarrer, who wrote the story on which Navy SEALS is based, told me, "This is what we used to call in the military a goat fuck."

Sheen was a professional. He showed up in the make-up trailer on time every morning. He didn't throw tantrums when others around him were losing their heads. He did what the director told him, even when it was clearly silly. He gave every performance his best shot, even under the worst conditions. Still, it was inevitable that a certain irritability would build. There had been long delays in getting a sequence that was supposed to have taken one day to shoot. There had been much rewriting, with high-priced script doctors flown in from L.A. One scene, a football game on a beach, was such an obvious copy of the volleyball scene from Top Gun that the actors unanimously refused to do it, and a golf-course scene was invented by one of the actors, Bill Paxton.

The cellular phone in the trailer was simply the last of many straws. Every time Sheen tried to call his then-fiancée, Kelly Preston, just as they would get to the intimate part (such as "Hello"), some kind of hounds-of-hell squeal would cut in, the line would go dead and he would be sitting there talking to himself.

Sheen, on the couch, held the phone to his ear, saying, "Hello. Hello. Hello." No expression. He didn't seem angry. We had been working out with the 20-pound dumbbells, doing curls, and they were on the floor beside my chair. He seemed calm when he walked over and said, "Excuse me," and picked up one of the dumbbells. I picked up the other and followed him out of the trailer into the hot Virginia sun--not sure yet what we were going to do.

Sheen set the cellular phone on the asphalt. Then, without a word, without a sign of emotion, he held the dumbbell high and aimed carefully before letting it drop squarely onto the handset. Suddenly, it was a killing frenzy, with both of us dropping dumbbells, over and over, onto the various parts of the phone, until the device was reduced to a collection of shattered microcircuitry and shards of plastic.

Without a word, we went back inside and set the dumbbells down. In a few more minutes, a middle-aged woman came to the door and asked if the air conditioning was working all right (it wasn't) and Sheen apologized to her about the phone. "I kind of put an end to it," he said, now bashful and boyish. "Just tell them to send me a bill."

•

We worked out every night after the shooting day was done. Wareing's was a serious bodybuilding gym not far from the Navy base, where emerging gods and goddesses buffed up their corporeal reality with Olympic weight routines and special pain machines. Men would come up to talk to Sheen. "Good to have you working out here," they'd say, or "We're having a party later. Be great if you'd stop by."

Sheen would shake hands, always cordial. But he'd try to be honest with them, too. "Actually, I've got to go watch the play-offs." Or "I don't usually party much." He told me that sometimes he would wrap two fingers of his right hand with tape before going out to dinner to avoid signing autographs.

"And you know what people do?" Kenney asked. "They say, 'Well, how about signing with your left hand?'"

Our workout was intense, with little talking, and 45 minutes later ("If I do abs, I'll throw up," Sheen said apologetically as we left), we were on our way to a bar for the first game of the American League play-offs. He was mostly cool about fans, but that bar was chosen in part because of its distinct lack of popularity and its big-screen TV and in part because of Pam, the bartender, who was relaxed about the fact that she got to serve Sheen all night long and that he actually talked to her--actually liked her. The whole cast liked her.

Sheen doesn't think it's right to be mean to fans. He told me that when Roseanne Barr was filming She-Devil, she had had a covered walkway--three blocks long--built from the set of the movie to her trailer so that fans couldn't even see her. "What a fucking pig that lady is," he said. "But she's parlayed pigness into a multimillion-dollar business, so that's the name of the game, I guess."

But there was a down side to being in such a bar. At least if you're in a lovely bar, then lovely people will pester you. But if you're in a nowhere bar...well, every plan has its drawbacks. Such as the plump blonde who lurched in with her friend one night and stopped dead in her tracks when she realized her amazing good fortune--she had stumbled upon Charlie Sheen and other stars whom she may have recognized from Aliens, The Abyss, The Lords of Discipline and Hill Street Blues.

She and her friend walked past us, very close, and she said, "Excuse me." They sat close to us and loudly ordered drinks and watched Sheen intently as he watched the baseball game. Finally, unable to control herself any longer, the plump girl planted herself right beside Sheen, with her crotch just about level with his nose and her fat legs sticking out of her blue-denim skirt like sausages. She nervously introduced herself, and Sheen said hello, thank you very much, good night, but she would not go away. It was touchy for about half an hour. The blonde and her friend kept coming back, giggling and interrupting the game, while Sheen restrained himself and said nothing. The girls finally left, and as they did so, he looked up to see the four great buttocks wiggling away. "I have two words for you, girls," he said. "StairMaster."

•

Sheen stood out in the sun in a parking lot, waiting to do one of the last scenes in the film. It was a touching one in which two old friends say goodbye, requiring him to reach for some depth and concentration. Beyond the lot was the Navy shipyard, where the U.S.S. Coral Sea, the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy and numerous other aircraft carriers were docked. They were so big that being among them gave us the feeling of being in midtown Manhattan, those billions of tons of haze-gray, angular steel sitting like an architectural trick upon the gentle, rippling sea.

From the nearest ship came a noise so loud that we had to shout to be heard. Sheen stood in the hot glare, wearing no sunglasses, chewing his cuticles, Kuki Lopez, the first assistant director, marched up and down the lines of sailors who had gathered to watch, shouting, "Clear the actors' sight line, please. Everybody back! Back!"

Sheen did not wait patiently, but he did wait diligently. Something came over him in those lulls between the action, and smoking a Marlboro held between thumb and forefinger, he seemed insulated from his surroundings. (In talking to me about his demeanor on the set, he quoted Marlon Brando: "Just because they say 'Action!' doesn't mean you have to do anything.")

Sheen understood that moviemaking is like combat. Every time the director yelled "Cut!" entire battalions of people and equipment swept across our field of vision. Martin Sheen, his father, had taken Charlie, then ten, to the Philippines during the filming of Apocalypse Now. When Martin had a heart attack and nearly died during the filming, something clicked in Charlie's mind. Ten years later, Charlie returned to the Philippines to film Platoon, and the karmic circle was completed. Those bizarre times and events set his method and demeanor on the set of every subsequent movie.

The director was finally satisfied that he had the shot, despite the screeching and grinding, and no sooner had he said "Print it" than Sheen walked calmly to the waiting Lincoln Continental by the roadside, got in and vanished.

There was an element of loneliness, even fear, in Sheen's situation here. When he went from the bar to the bathroom, he would take with him Kenney or one of the Navy Seals who were working on the film as technical advisors, in case of ambush. Of course, the guys were always joking about it. When good-looking women appeared, someone would say, "Incoming," or "Pleasure units approaching at three o'clock, sir." Boys will be boys, especially when they're playing Navy Seals with real Navy Seals around to egg them on. Coming onto the scene, a Seal might greet the assemblage with, "Is the fun meter pegged out yet?"

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They'd advise Sheen, "Don't sweat the petty things, pet the sweaty things."

But when people got close, Sheen's expression would go flat and his whole body would coil as if to spring into action. I saw it happen more than once, when a girl would get up the nerve to ask for an autograph, then another would follow, and suddenly, the whole crowd would surge forward.

I think more than physical danger, Sheen saw the psychic risk of his situation--how alone all the attention threatened to make him--ultimately. He was probably lucky to have had Martin Sheen as a father and to have seen combat and danger early and to be on guard against them.

•

The morning routine was businesslike: "We don't talk in the morning. We just listen to music," Sheen had warned me. He was there to get the job done. CDs of U2 played in the make-up trailer while Sheen shaved. Then Lynne, an exotic goddess with curly red hair tumbling down her back, pored over his head for half an hour, creating the proper effect for the lens. Sheen sipped cappuccino and flipped through the paper.

Someone asked him if he wanted any breakfast. "See if they can make any pancakes," Sheen said. "But not those whole-wheat ones. No buckwheat or anything like that. I like Aunt Jemima pancakes. Real American food."

At the other end of the trailer, Sheen's stunt double, Eddie Braun, called, "Say, do you want me to have a tattoo?"

Sheen has two tattoos--a dragon on his right shoulder and a kabuki face on the inside of his right forearm, the latter signed by Bo Tin, a famous Japanese tattoo artist who had tattooed the Japanese Mafia. The only Westerners Bo Tin had tattooed before Sheen were Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali.

"Do you have the paints?" Lynne asked Matthew Mungle, the maestro in charge of special make-up--everything from a scar that was on Sheen's cheek to a human head that melts.

"Right here," Mungle said. He was thin and bearded, with a soft smile. He began shaking the little bottles of special tattoo make-up, and then free-handed a replica of Sheen's kabuki-face tattoo in about 20 minutes, signature and all. "Don't scrub it when you shower," he told Braun. "It should last for a few days."

Sheen's make-up finished, we returned to his trailer, where his pancakes were waiting under aluminum foil. He pulled off the foil and there were four of the biggest, fattest buckwheat pancakes that ever graced a greasy griddle. "What is this shit?" he asked. "Jesus, did I not say no buckwheat?"

"You did," Kenney said.

"Brain dead," Sheen said.

But he did not throw them away. And when neither Kenney nor I wanted to eat them, he put them in the freezer rather than waste them. Braun, who had doubled for Sheen's older brother, Emilio Estevez, on Wisdom, said that the whole Sheen family was special. He said that Estevez would call him on the phone the day after a stunt to ask how he was. "Charlie's the same way," Braun told me. "They're both sweethearts."

•

It was the 23rd day of shooting and I was hanging on to the back of a golf cart with one hand, blowing around a curve in the road through the forest. Sheen was driving and Kenney was in the shotgun seat. Early on, the actors had taken a golf cart apart and figured out how to override the throttle governor, so the machines were now modified for pure speed. They weren't allowed on the roads, but there we were, hoping nothing wide and slow came around the blind curves.

Things were getting crazier as the shoot progressed. Bill Paxton had taken me aside and said of the production, "This is the Titanic, man, and I'm shoveling coal in the engine room."

That same day, Lewis Teague had also taken me aside and said of his macho collection of actors, "They drink all night, get three hours' sleep, and then come to work, and they're temperamental to begin with. It makes things difficult." But Teague had strapped himself to a rocket with that group, and he'd hired Navy Seals to train them, and now they were primed and acting like Seals, and it was a woolly ride, "a hair ball," as one of the military men had put it.

The Navy Seals had taken Sheen, Rick Rossovich, Paxton and other actors into the woods for a short training course at the beginning of shooting, but Sheen had told me, "It wasn't that bad compared with the boot camp we went through on Platoon." The Seals had to keep most of what they did secret and were fond of saying, in response to almost any question, "If I tell you that, I'll have to kill you."

Teague had been upset because Rossovich (on his golf cart) had pushed actor Cyril O'Reilly's golf cart into the lake during the filming of a scene of some zany Seal antics. O'Reilly came out soaking wet and pissed. The cart engine was ruined. Everyone thought it was a moronic stunt but then realized it was something that an actual Seal might do, and Teague (who is actually far cleverer than the actors think he is) decided to use it in the film.

Earlier, we had all been sitting at picnic tables under the trees by the golf-course clubhouse, eating lunch. I looked over at Rossovich and saw that he had somehow gotten hold of Michael Biehn's knife, the one he had used in The Abyss, a giant buffed stainless-steel knife, razor sharp with a jagged edge. Rossovich grabbed the hand of the guy next to him, who happened to be a real Navy Seal, and started doing a scene from Aliens in which a crew member stabs a knife into the table between the fingers of another, repeatedly, faster and faster, until we realize that he's not a human, he's an android. Rossovich was not an android, but he did pretty well, right up until he got the knife going super-fast, and Biehn suggested he stop, because what if he hurt the nice, combat-trained, killer Seal?

Sheen didn't take part in the wildness. He was not aloof, but he just wasn't involved. I remember one night at the bar, he had ordered a strawberry daiquiri and got heavily razzed by the macho cast. When the pink drink was delivered by the waitress, it had a mound of whipped cream on top, and Sheen carefully spooned all of it onto a saucer, saying to me, "You can write, 'He wiped the jizz off his manly drink.'"

In an interesting way, Sheen has gone beyond the fight and the fury. Someone asked him how he liked Eight Men Out and he said candidly, "I don't remember too much about it. I was taking too many drugs and drinking too much at the time." So he has been there--he even fathered an illegitimate child five years ago. And while he didn't usually pass judgment on his fellow warriors--he understood from his own past their energetic state of abandon--he was upset with one of them, a married actor, for taking a sea wife on the shoot.

A naval seaman had given me a tour of a ship, explaining that now that women also ship out, when sailors are gone for six months, "the wedding rings come off and people acquire sea wives and sea husbands." The same thing sometimes happens on film locations--people are far from home, alone and lost in a fairy-tale land. But Sheen had learned to believe in defensive living when it came to the Hollywood machine. When the actor was leaving the bar with his sea wife, Sheen called after her, "Leave some for his wife!" then added, sotto voce, "He's in way over his head."

•

We were sitting in the trailer after lunch. Kenney was at the kitchen table, reading A Brief History of Time, while Sheen tried to use the phone. He was cut off three or four times. The fighter planes sounded like rubber tires screeching and smoking in some infernal, airborne drag race of torque and gravity. When no one came to get Sheen for a shot, he decided to turn on the second game of the A's against the Blue Jays. After we'd been watching for half an hour, a Sears commercial came on and Sheen said he had done the voice-over. I expressed my surprise. Why would he, one of the hottest young male talents in the country, do voice-overs?

"It's good cash," he said. "It's a lot of money and it's easy. You get three accounts and you're set. It's not selling out. I don't appear on camera." Twenty minutes later, a Toyota commercial came on and Sheen smiled and sat up a little from his slouch on the couch. "The old man," he said with his sly, James Dean smile, cutting his hazel, glinting eyes toward me. "He does voice-overs for Toyota, Pepsi and Polaroid."

During the baseball game, Sheen tried the phone again and was cut off again. That was when we went outside and smashed it to pieces. When we came back inside, he seemed drained of tension. He sat on the couch cracking pistachios and his knuckles, and we talked about poetry and how the publishing business works and doesn't work. He was interested in getting his book of poetry published. He carried it with him on the shoot and worked on it in spare moments.

After a while, he scooped up the shells and dumped them into a bowl, stretched out on the couch, kicked off his muddy loafers and went to sleep.

The loafers were the only shoes he wore the whole time I was there. In fact, he wore the same black sweat pants and black checked sports coat, too, each day changing only his T-shirt. He traveled with very few clothes--one suit, one pair of jeans, one pair of khaki pants. "I figure, even if I wear the same thing for a week, I'm wearing it only two hours a day because of wardrobe changes," he said. "So that's only--what--fourteen hours? That's not even a whole day."

When Sheen finally came out and did his part of the scene, the fans were waiting for him, and for a few moments, there was a scene that evoked a Beatles concert in the Sixties: hordes of girls going crazy, screaming, rending garments. Kenney, standing nearby, caught Sheen's eye and mimed putting a bullet through the roof of his mouth. Sheen cracked up.

By the end of a long day of shooting, the atmosphere could get pretty silly, with wardrobe and make-up people spraying Super String from a can. Laughter, high, long and tired, echoed around the forest, as the crew ran and played. I heard one of the actors muttering to himself, "Oh, please say that word I long to hear."

"What word is that?" someone asked.

"Wrap," he said.

We escaped back to base camp and found that the Jays and the A's were still playing, so we hunkered down to watch. Word came that a column of fans was on the march through the forest toward the trailer, so Kenney moved his rented black T-bird in order to make a quick getaway as soon as the game ended.

Forty minutes later, we were skimming along the dappled forest road, passing the dispersing crowd of fans, who weren't even looking to see who was in the car. They were in another world.

We were, too, driving home from the set in the black T-bird, Sheen riding shotgun. He had offered to sit with me in back and, in fact, had once insisted on sitting in the back, but it felt wrong. He was the star. Anyway, I wanted him in the front, where I could watch him.

When we'd eaten lunch together, he'd asked permission to smoke and had seemed concerned that I hadn't finished eating, as if it might spoil my meal if he lighted up. Now he asked, "Are you a Zep fan?" before putting on the tape he was holding in his hand. It was The Song Remains the Same, and he rewound to Stairway to Heaven, saying that it had to be "among the all-time top-five greatest live songs."

To our right, the big red sun was going down, and off to the left, two giant swamp-green C-130 airplanes sat with their ramps down, loading. We passed a blonde pleasure unit in a maroon Alfa Romeo, and I saw Sheen's head turn to check her out, just for a moment, then turn back to his concentration on the task at hand--playing drums on his knees to Stairway to Heaven. I thought I understood why Sheen views his life as something of a fire fight. With his father almost dying for real in a make-believe Vietnam movie, Sheen must have learned that fantasy and reality can make a deadly mix, that some games are played for keeps even if they are just games. Then a fighter plane, sideways in a 90-degree bank, appeared out of the mist over the freeway before us and silently crossed from right to left, as big and white as Moby Dick, as we left the hot mist, the green forest, the loud highway behind.

"Sheen has two tattoos--a dragon on his right shoulder and a kabuki face on his right forearm."