So That Happened

by Jon Cryer

  * * *

  After a meeting with Ashton and the writers, we converged again, this time at Chuck’s house. At this time Ashton was sporting his expanding kabbalah beard, but what he also had was a wife I had dated when he was seven years old. I didn’t know if he knew this, so I kept quiet and just tried to get to know him, because you can’t force sparks in a creative partnership. Fortunately, Ashton is incredibly fun and personable. But, Jesus, does he know? was in the back of my mind.

  Afterward, I walked out with him to his car and did my best at a positive-vibe sendoff: “Hey, man, this is gonna be fun! It’ll be an adventure. That’s for sure!”

  He opened the driver’s door, but stopped short of getting in. He turned and came back to me. “Oh, man, I just want to say, Demi told me you guys used to date. Totally cool. Don’t feel weird about it.”

  “Oh, hey! Heh, heh . . . okay, great! It was really nothing!” He was in the car, driving off. “I mean, it was just a little while! We were doing a movie together! You know how it is!”

  * * *

  I had really been despairing for the nation when I heard about people buying tickets to Charlie’s “Violent Torpedo of Truth” tour. That it was a mess didn’t surprise me. But then the bidding war for Charlie’s sitcom services had me shaking my head again. When he eventually made the deal with Lions Gate for Anger Management, I was pretty surprised. Here Warner Bros. made a moral, gutsy move against their own financial interest in firing Charlie, and what’s the response in Hollywood? Hey, everyone, he’s available!

  * * *

  When everybody came back to work in the summer of 2011 for a ninth season of Two and a Half Men, it also felt like we were shooting a pilot all over again for something new. The stakes seemed so high, and you could feel the anticipation. Would it work?

  The first read-through with Ashton, however, quickly dispelled a lot of the worries. For one thing, it was a really crackerjack episode: funny, deeply impure, and in Alan’s bit where he keeps spilling the deceased Charlie Harper’s ashes, admirably disrespectful—in a strange kind of respectful way, mind you—toward all the craziness that had led us to this point. Plus, Ashton’s natural comfort with sitcoms put everybody at ease. Charlie never liked read-throughs, and missed them occasionally—that wasn’t where he shone. Ashton knew how to slam-dunk at a read-through. That felt new and exciting.

  One of the hardest things to get used to was the fact that Ashton was so very punctual and dependable. As he was always at rehearsals on time, there was no need for me to work with Jim Marshall, Sheen’s comically deadpan stand in. And frankly, I missed him.

  The buildup to our first audience show, however, had its own pressures. We knew the coverage of our first show with Ashton would be intense. In rehearsals we worked extra hard to get every beat right. We had one nagging problem, though: My naked-Brit-walking-through-the-living-room memory had made it all the way to this incarnation with Ashton as tech billionaire Walden Schmidt. After Alan offers to dry Walden’s sodden clothes, the forlorn industrialist nonchalantly drops trou and hugs Alan bare-assed. The question was, How were we going to handle having Ashton walk around nude in front of a studio audience?

  It’s more difficult a problem than you think when you factor in the expected laughter from a surprised audience. If we slapped tiny flesh-colored briefs on Ashton—well, ideally Ashton would do that himself—then it wouldn’t come off as outrageous. And yet real nudity was out of the question.

  Out of nowhere, Ashton said, “Well, I do have a huge prosthetic penis in my trailer.”

  We all laughed, and he said, “No, no. I do.”

  Apparently our new family member (heh, heh, member), in his past role as a television prankster, had had a fake man part constructed for a punking in which someone had to run around in public naked. Since public bare-assedness is actually illegal, a prosthetic was created. I won’t bother to speculate why Ashton still had this, and why it was in his trailer at that very moment, but he went to retrieve it. It. Was. Huge. Ashton was willing to wear it on taping night. Warm feelings all around.

  That first Friday in front of the cameras again after what had been a truly bizarre roller-coaster twelve months was really pretty special. Surrounded by friends, colleagues, and crew who had endured everything, and perhaps assumed we wouldn’t return, I stepped back into Alan’s shoes ready to do everything I could to give this show a new lease on life. Would people accept us again?

  They did. And when Ashton unveiled his anatomically correct strap-on—that’s “anatomically correct” as a general biological descriptor, mind you, not pertaining to Ashton specifically (as far as I knew)—I heard a soundstage-wide scream of shock and dirty joy from the fans that told me everything was going to be just fine.

  * * *

  Three years later

  In June of 2014, I got a call from Charlie’s ex-manager, Mark Burg. He told me Charlie had called him up and apologized for everything—Mark had been fired and rehired and fired and rehired by Charlie countless times—and that my former costar had been sober for a while and wanted to make amends to me.

  Hmmmm.

  The years since Charlie’s departure had been kind to both me and the show that he was so certain could not survive. Ratings had remained strong. I’d been awarded another Emmy—this time as lead actor—and even Charlie Harper finally got one. That is to say, Kathy Bates won Outstanding Guest Actress playing Charlie Harper’s ghost.

  My actor’s nightmare no longer haunted me, as both that play in London and my TV show had survived and even flourished despite their respective interruptions.

  I’d also come to a place of peace. The crucible that was the Charlie Sheen shitstorm had seared away many of my petty concerns and given me some much-needed perspective.

  Mark’s offer seemed questionable, but I accepted it anyway, and drove up to his Tuscan-style villa in the Hollywood Hills. When I stepped inside, Charlie was already there, and I could immediately tell he looked better. He’d gained weight, for one thing—he wasn’t that muscular but wraithlike being from his last season on the show.

  The small talk was awkward. Mark and his dog made for helpful diversions, an uncomfortable pause settled in, and then Charlie volunteered, “Hey, man, I’m sorry about the bullshit.”

  “Okay, but you understand ‘I’m sorry about the bullshit’ doesn’t exactly hint at the enormous amount of bullshit that went down.”

  He nodded, took that in, paused for a long while, then said, “I’m really sorry?”

  I recounted the list of things that had pissed me off, and he responded to each one with some variation of apology: “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that.” “You’re right; I have no excuse for that.” “Yeah, that was a bad one.” “Yep, I’m so sorry; I have nothing to say to defend myself.”

  He’d really only torn into me that one time with the “troll” outburst, but while he apologized publicly the next day, the media weren’t interested. But he never called me personally to atone, to say he didn’t mean it. I was still bugged that he’d endangered my job and the jobs of others, irritated at the way he’d treated my friends and spoken ill of Chuck and Ashton. These were the issues I brought up, and I tried to get some explanation from him. “Why now?” I said. “What’s changed for you?”

  “Just some things in my personal life that made me realize I had to change. I stopped drinking alcohol.”

  “Fine, but what was the source of the anger?”

  “Well,” he said, “I was using testosterone. I was using the cream. Three times a day you rub the cream on your thighs, and it’s deceptive, because you feel the same, but suddenly you’re flying into a rage.”

  (So the ad would go, “Side effects of testosterone cream may include: losing your multimillion-dollar sitcom starring role.”)

  I confessed to him that I’d never been more shocked than the day Warner Bros. fired him. Charlie admitted
a great deal of surprise as well. Mark piped in: “You probably shouldn’t have sent Lenny Dykstra over there with a list of demands.” Charlie grimaced.

  “Why did you get so angry at Chuck?” I asked.

  “I just felt like the show was going so well, and every Monday we’d hit it out of the park ratings-wise, and then we’d come in on Tuesday and I’d see all these dour faces on the writers, worried about how the show was going to be this week.”

  Now he seemed to be reaching. No one’s going to say Chuck isn’t occasionally a hard-ass about making the show as great as it can be, but it invariably has led to better scripts. Coming into Two and a Half Men, I’d worked on a number of shows where dud weeks were common. I don’t recall a single dud week on Two and a Half Men. Besides, the vast majority of the twelve years I worked on the show were fun, and for the first eight of those years, working alongside the guy in front of me that day was a great part of why it was fun. Chuck simply didn’t deserve that vicious unloading. I was convinced there was something Charlie wasn’t saying. But he seemed genuinely contrite, and eventually the real reason behind the meeting became clear: He wanted to revive his relationship with Two and a Half Men and give some closure to the fans.

  That amount of bridge repairing, I thought, would require a congressional appropriation and the Army Corps of Engineers. My sentimental, “give a guy a chance” attitude liked the idea of Charlie returning, but my practical side knew it was close to an impossibility.

  But there was supreme irony in Charlie’s wistfulness that day, in the sense that he knew he’d lost something. That’s because the demands he was making in the last days—Chuck off the show, Bruce Rosenblum off the lot, Don Reo taking over as showrunner—all eventually happened of their own accord. Chuck stopped being the day-to-day maestro, falling back into a plot-approval position while he tended to his burgeoning sitcom empire (The Big Bang Theory, Mike and Molly, Mom). Bruce left to run another company. And Charlie’s buddy Don Reo stepped in to oversee Two and a Half Men.

  If Charlie had just kept his fucking mouth shut, he’d have gotten everything he wanted.

  As for whether Charlie’s last wish about the show came true—returning to it in any capacity—publishing schedules prevent me from seeing into the future at this writing to be able to acknowledge whether that happened or not.

  But if Charlie Sheen didn’t come back, are you sad?

  And if he did, was it everything you wanted?

  And if he relapsed, huffed a bunch of glue, hijacked a stretch limo, freed a bunch of zoo animals, and led them with a caravan of prostitutes to Vegas, is it on video?

  Coda

  As I said, narratives are tricky. Especially since they’re mostly in our heads. We weave our lives’ events into a story because it allows our brains to grasp them, infuse them with meaning, and then gives us a tale that we can relate to others. Like a celebrity memoir. But let’s face it: It often seems to me that the reality is that we simply keep on living and a lot of crazy shit just happens all at once. That would explain a fair amount of what’s in this book. Certainly the Carol Channing incident.

  And if the act of gathering all this stuff together and presenting it to you has given you some insight into life, love, comedy, entertainment in general, sex, Puerto Rican girls, contract law, Courteney Cox, children’s multivitamins, male prostitutes, Mary Poppins, and fake bird shit, well, then God bless you. It all seems kind of random to me.

  But if the idea that life must have a narrative is something you simply can’t enjoy this book without, there is hope. In 2003 a British philosopher from Oxford University named Nick Bostrom (yes, they still pay people to be philosophers in England) published a paper that made a shockingly plausible case that the universe we live in is, more likely than not, a numerical computer simulation created by an ultra-advanced “posthuman” civilization. I know, if it’s true, these “ultra-advanced” folks totally stole it from The Matrix. But bear with me, people; I swear there is a reason I’m telling you this.

  I won’t bore you with the details, but in a nutshell, he bases this on some not-at-all-crazy assumptions, a few convincing calculations of probability, and one somewhat iffy postulate.

  The assumptions are: 1) that computer technology is advancing at such a pace that it is inevitable that at some point our descendants will have the computing power to simulate an entire universe, at least as it is perceived by a single consciousness (okay, I buy that); 2) that beings with that power will almost definitely use it (shyeah, wouldn’t you? I’d also build an orgasmatron); 3) that the most popular simulations we humans of today run are “ancestor” simulations, or replications of life in our distant past (hello, Assassin’s Creed); 4) that the number of simulated universes will vastly outnumber the total of unsimulated ones (that being one, the real one, not the one we think we are in) and—oh shit, I’m boring you with the details; well, just let me finish; I’ll be done in a sec—and here’s the iffy part: that in order for all this to work, consciousness needs to be “substrate independent,” or able to exist based either on biological structures (like our brains) or some other— Oh, fuck, I’m already confused, and I went to nerd school.

  The freakiest thing about this idea is that it is being taken seriously by physicists and mathematicians, not just because they are probably geeks and it sounds gnarly, but because it would actually explain the many aspects of our known universe that currently remain inexplicable! Namely, the fact that mathematics appears to be the irreducible language of the universe and, of course, the Fermi paradox, which asks— Oops, damn you, nerd school, damn you! Sorry.

  Bottom line: This whole thing, my whole life, this whole universe, Los Angeles, my dogs, Justine Bateman, everything, may very well be a huge, very intense, very realistic video game. Which would sort of make sense to me. I figure I spent my youth wanting so badly to be a part of the movies and TV I loved that I ended up living a game where I got to experience all of it—this despite the fact that I was such a dork to begin with. And, like any self-respecting dork with a video game, I guess I, well, won it.

  On September 27, 2011, that kid who stood on the walk of fame wondering when Mary Tyler Moore would show up to clean her star got one of his own. He was inducted by none other than one of his boyhood comedic heroes, Carl Reiner. And yes, he made me sing “Jingle Bell Rock” again.

  My mother, father, and stepmother were in attendance, as were Ashton and my remaining castmates, my friends, my agents, my managers, my lawyer, Richard Schenkman, Chuck Lorre, the writers of Two and a Half Men, several hundred tourists, and a bunch of waitresses from Hooters (I had scored a primo location for my star, mere feet from the beloved buffalo wingery).

  I went home to a boisterous party at my house in a part of Los Angeles where I love to live, full of the amazing friends I’ve acquired in thirty years of performing. We talked about a million things, some of which I’ve just told you, and reflected on how even the very worst of a life spent in movies and TV is still pretty great. We watched the relaunch of Two and a Half Men as it played to the largest audience it had ever garnered, and I was embraced by my wonderful sisters, my beautiful, hilarious children, not to mention my wife, who fills my soul with love and trust, just happens to be the most stunning woman I’ve ever laid eyes on, and is also a maniac in the sack.

  See, it all seems a little far-fetched.

  Like if it was in a book, you might not believe it.

  Appendix

  Robert Altman’s Famous Mock Bird Shit Recipe

  INGREDIENTS

  2 quarts sour cream

  1 large mixing bowl

  4 tbsp. ground black pepper

  2 oz. black rubber bands

  Add sour cream to mixing bowl.

  Mix in ground black pepper.

  Finely mince black rubber bands until pieces are roughly ⅛ inch long.

  Add rubber bands to mix.

 
Stir vigorously.

  Take palette knife, scoop up generous dollops and drizzle eager young actors with Mock Bird Shit. They will be grateful. Trust me.

  Acknowledgments

  The word “collaborator” acquired a negative connotation during World War II, when it signified allegiance with the Nazi-led Vichy government in occupied France. “Collaborators” earned the hatred of millions of Frenchmen as they worked with the Nazis to facilitate crushing the French Resistance, enforcing draconian Nazi edicts, as well as exposing Jews and turning them in to local authorities.

  Well, Robert Abele was such a wonderful collaborator during the writing of this book, that he almost completely rehabilitated the term. I say “almost” due to his bizarre penchant for turning in Jews to bewildered clerks at the West Hollywood Department of Motor Vehicles.

  That quirk aside, his masterful writing, artful editing of my work, extensive interviewing, tireless transcription, copious research, and generally fantastic attitude made him absolutely indispensable in the writing of this tome. To say that I couldn’t have done it without him would be like George Steinbrenner saying he couldn’t have won the World Series without the Yankees. Technically true, but just saying it would make me a gigantic asshole. Robert also maintained a nearly inexhaustible supply of Fresca at his workplace, which spurred my creativity to such an extent that it might as well have been grapefruit-flavored peyote.

  So, many thanks to Robert and his lovely wife, Margy, who we were both trying to impress throughout this process. Also much gratitude to Jennifer Schuster, my editor at Penguin, who was a deep well of valuable guidance.

  Max Searle and Matt Ross are two writers from Two and a Half Men who contributed some very funny ideas and Jeff Greenstein provided immensely helpful feedback. Richard Schenkman also reminded me of some important tidbits that made their way into this memoir and David Quinn was my source for all facts Stagedoorian. David Quinn also insisted that I mention that he ended up being one of the founders of Allrecipes.com and is now wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. There, I said it.