Charlie Sheen’s Rebirthday : Family Gathering Starts ‘Hot Shots!’ Lead on Road to Sobriety

Those may be fake boulders that frame the waterfall and surround the cliffside pool at Charlie Sheen’s brand-spanking new $3-million Malibu Hills house, but the star of the new off-the-wall comedy “Hot Shots!” believes that, for the first time in years, his life is real.

At 25, the young actor has, already, had to handle more ups and downs than most people do in a lifetime. Professionally, he has gone from the euphoria of overnight fame following the release of his third film, the 1986 Oscar-winner “Platoon,” to the depths of the following year’s “Three for the Road,” a movie he dismisses as “the worst.”

Personally, Sheen has indulged and fought an addiction to drugs and alcohol--potentially lethal to his career as well as his health and a direct result, the actor believes, of his celebrity.

“I was committing unconscious suicide,” says Sheen, surveying the evidence of his dissipation in various films over the last five years.

After “Three for the Road,” Sheen made “No Man’s Land” for Orion. Then “Eight Men Out,” “Young Guns,” the comedy “Men at Work” (written and directed by brother Emilio Estevez), last fall’s “Navy SEALs” and “Cadence,” a film co-starring his brother Ramon and his father, Martin, who also wrote and directed the project.

Now comes “Hot Shots!” the first film Sheen has made since entering a 32-day drug and alcohol rehabilitation program last August. That was the initial step in his attempt to reclaim the career promise that glowed so brightly after “Platoon” and “Wall Street.”

“I’ve always been a fan of this type of movie,” Sheen says of “Hot Shots!” a send-up of flyboy films like “Top Gun.”

“I enjoyed ‘Airplane!’ and ‘Naked Gun.’ So I liked the genre and I liked the script. I liked the character and I liked the opportunity to do some self-effacing work to let people know I’m not taking myself as seriously as they might think, and I think the film turned out very well.”

Things seem to be going well on other fronts, too. Sheen has recently formed a production company with Howard Kazanjian (“The Empire Strikes Back,” “Return of the Jedi”), that, among other projects, plans to make a film based on John Grisham’s best-selling novel, “The Firm.”

And all’s well on the girlfriend front, too. In March, 1990, a week after breaking up with fiancee Kelly Preston (now engaged to John Travolta), Sheen met ex-porno actress Ginger Lynn Allen, now 28, and began a relationship as controversial as his substance abuse.

“She comes from a background in the adult film industry, and I think people have a problem with that,” he says, defensively. “She hasn’t done it for seven years. Ginger’s made about 15 or 20 legitimate films since, and the crossover is difficult. I guess they (the tabloids), want something to write about. The All-American Kid corrupted.

“She got sober the same day I did, just stopped with me and stayed (sober) for the whole year with me,” Sheen says with obvious gratitude. “She is the first girl I’ve gone with who hasn’t tried to mold me into her image of me.”

To find Sheen these days, you have to first find the remote hilltop where he lives, deal with a long, cliffhanging approach barred by iron gates and then with handymen who tell scheduled visitors that the actor “just went out.”

Of his years of substance abuse, the actor says, “I think I was looking for a cushion, a buffer between the public and who I thought I was.”

But doesn’t his present reclusive lifestyle reflect a continuing passion for building a wall between himself and the world?

“Yeah,” he says, “but it’s a healthier approach, I think.”

It all started on Martin Sheen’s 50th birthday.

“I thought I was going to his birthday party,” the young actor says. “I’d been up all night and I thought I could come in with a shave, open up the gifts and the cake and get out of there in a couple of hours.”

Instead, Sheen encountered what he describes as “like the worst episode of ‘This Is Your Life.’ Suddenly, I saw my ninth-grade history teacher, my yoga teacher from years ago and my publicist. Rob Lowe (a friend since childhood) was there, and some good family friends. I realized this was not a birthday party--there were no cakes or presents in sight.”

Instead it was a confrontation with reality. “They were all assembled in the living room and there was one empty seat between Ramon and Renee (his brothers Ramon and Emilio Estevez are older, sister Renee is two years younger). They went around the room one by one, explaining why I should do this (seek treatment), and that I was pissing too much away.

“The level of truth in that room that day was overwhelming. My first thought was run, run, dive out of the window, get into the car and get to Vegas . . . get to Vegas any way I could.

“Then the phone rang and it was Clint Eastwood. I had just finished making ‘The Rookie’ with him. He knew because of my condition on the film. I was very professional on the set, but I was showing up bloated and unfocused.

“Clint put it in perfect perspective. . . . He said, ‘Hey, man. It’s 30 days and it could add 30 years to your life.’ He said, ‘Just be a man . . . go in there like a man and walk out like a man.’

Even more telling was Lowe’s counsel. “He had just gone through the same thing,” Sheen says. “He said he saw my picture in the paper a week before, a picture taken in Anthony’s Restaurant (in Malibu, co-owned by Sheen) when I tried to fake my way through a photo shoot, and that he didn’t recognize me. He thought it was De Niro in a character. He also said, ‘Every day that you delay seeking help from now on, your addiction is in the hallway doing push-ups, getting stronger.’ ”

After unsuccessfully begging for the weekend to pack, Sheen entered the clinic--and immediately walked out.

“I went AWOL,” he says, pushing a Cincinnati Reds cap back on his head. “I had to have the weekend, I had to go home and pack, and see my girlfriend. When I left the clinic that Friday, there was this nurse who said, ‘You ain’t coming back, you ain’t coming back.’ I said, ‘If I don’t walk through this door Monday morning at 10 o’clock, I’ll give you $50,000 cash. And I meant it--a bet against her dollar.

“At about 8:30 Monday morning I came walking through the door and she handed me the dollar--she lost the bet.”

And, according to Sheen, he’s been clean since.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you it was a piece of cake. It’s not been easy, mind you,” he says.

How could it be? He has only to turn on the VCR to see what he feels the Hollywood star system did to dissipate the natural talent perhaps best employed by filmmaker Oliver Stone in “Platoon.” Sheen believes that film, in a perhaps unconscious allusion to “Platoon’s” promotional tag line (“The first casualty of war is innocence”), was his personal “turning point, the end of innocence.”

“At first,” he says of the origin of his drug and alcohol problem, “it was living a lifestyle I thought was part of suddenly being a celebrity, a movie star, whatever you want to call it. It was about going to parties and accepting all the free drinks and free meals and limos . . . all that stuff. I was like at the epicenter . . . feeding all the appetites. Everything a phone call away.

“ ‘Wall Street’ was when it got pretty thick,” Sheen says of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film in which he co-starred with Michael Douglas. “But I was still able to shut it down. I would get a film like (1989’s) ‘Major League’ and I knew I had to get in shape, get the arm back in shape, and I wouldn’t do anything for three or four months. Then, when the film wrapped, the ball would start rolling again. Then I lost the ability to shut it down, to turn it off. I couldn’t find the button anymore, I couldn’t rationalize not abusing.”

But does the actor, who commands a reputed $3.5 million per film these days, believe that his problems were responsible for the string of failures that followed “Wall Street,” films like “Navy SEALs” and “Eight Men Out”?

Yes and no.

“I’d like to take the responsibility for certain scenes or even entire sequences. . . . I’m trying to be objective and not to pass the buck. I don’t think I can put an entire film’s failure on my inability to perform in certain scenes.” He is clearly embarrassed about his performance in “The Rookie” and in some scenes in “Wall Street,” of which he says: “Ohhhh, I remember the night before that!”

Sheen was born in New York and made his acting debut at age 9 with his father in the acclaimed TV movie “The Execution of Private Slovik.” It was not until the following year, living in the Philippines with his family while his father was making “Apocalypse Now,” that he decided on acting as a career.

Otherwise, his acting experience was basically limited to making about 200 videos and Super-8 movies with pals Rob and Chad Lowe and Sean Penn, junior high school drama and conversations with his father. “I talked to him about what he was actually doing and how he got to certain points in a performance . . . really picking his brain.”

His boy-next-door image notwithstanding, young Sheen was asked to leave Santa Monica High School just weeks before graduation because he was cutting most of his classes.

“I made a deal with my parents that if I didn’t get an acting job, I’d return and get my high school degree and go on to college,” Sheen says.

He got his first film job on his first audition--”in a thing called ‘Grizzly II--The Predator,’ ” Sheen says. “It never came out but it was a chance to get a Screen Actors Guild card and experience.”

Leading roles in “Lucas,” “Red Dawn” and the CBS movie “Silence of the Heart” (about teen suicide) quickly followed. Then came a cameo as a hip hunk in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” which got “all kinds of attention,” Sheen says.

Then there was “Platoon.” “Oliver had seen my work and wanted me for ‘Platoon.’ For him to take that chance on me when nobody knew my work!” Sheen says, still amazed.

Later, Stone was so pleased with Sheen’s dailies that he signed him up then and there in the Philippines for his next film. “He said it’s either going to be ‘Second Life,’ a film which would bring back the Chris Taylor character (Sheen’s in ‘Platoon’) back home,” Sheen says, “or he was going to do an epic fictional tale based on Wall Street. He pulled out a napkin and drew up a rough contract and I signed it right in the middle of the Luzon jungle!”

Fast forward to the hilltop in Malibu.

Physically isolated or not, Sheen believes he is closer to family and friends these days than ever before. “This quest for sobriety--the success of it, actually, has really put me back in touch with my family and with my daughter, Cassandra, (born out of wedlock to his childhood sweetheart) who will be 7 in December.

“I think, for some reason, I had to go through what I did. I think it was all part of some plan that I assume will be revealed to me on Judgment Day, possibly before then.”

And, for all his pleasure with the way “Hot Shots!” turned out, Sheen is looking forward to returning to more serious fare: “It was great to clean up my act and do a light movie, but it didn’t really tap the resources that I’m back in touch with. It didn’t tap how good or intense or focused I think I can be now. I’m really looking forward to doing something that is an interesting story about a real guy doing something heavy.”