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hugging me, telling me how much he missed<br />
me,” explains Dykstra. “I could tell he was lit<br />
up but in good spirits.”<br />
Over just a few frenzied months that spring,<br />
before being taken into custody in June,<br />
Dykstra found himself operating as a Thomas<br />
Cromwell-style fixer in the erratic Beverly<br />
Hills court of King Charles. When the actor<br />
ended up in an embarrassing cash crunch<br />
while attempting to purchase film producer<br />
Mike Medavoy’s Mulholland Estate house<br />
for nearly $7 million, Dykstra claims to have<br />
secured a hard-money lender at the last minute.<br />
After Sheen went on Alex Jones’ Infowars<br />
radio show and disparaged his Two and a Half<br />
Men showrunner Chuck Lorre as “Chaim<br />
Levine,” Dykstra begged him to apologize.<br />
Sheen didn’t, and Warner Bros. Television fired<br />
him soon after.<br />
Despite his best intentions, Dykstra<br />
says most of his efforts to act as the star’s<br />
3<br />
unofficial manager were met with resistance.<br />
He says Sheen, despite his urging, snubbed<br />
a $2 million cameo on the Australian iteration<br />
of Big Brother and could not be persuaded<br />
to perform his infamous “Violent Torpedo<br />
of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option” speaking<br />
spectacle as a Las Vegas residency. “He turns<br />
it down to go play a bunch of fucking rinkydink<br />
cities. It was crazy.”<br />
Dykstra also cooked up a series of licensing<br />
deals, including a vaping product called Nico-<br />
Sheen and a caffeinated liquor, Sheen Vodka,<br />
which were to be hawked on an umbrella web<br />
portal titled Planet Sheen. He says that Sheen’s<br />
personal manager at the time, Mark Burg,<br />
and former business manager, Barry Klarberg,<br />
kiboshed the whole thing.<br />
“Lenny was a friend of Charlie’s who tried to<br />
get more involved in his life, and I don’t think<br />
he ever wanted that,” explains Burg. Klarberg<br />
did not respond to requests for comment.<br />
In a March 21 email to Dykstra reviewed by<br />
THR, the actor pulled the plug on Planet<br />
Sheen: “<strong>The</strong> pressure I’m under from my business<br />
team to NOT pursue this with you, is<br />
tsunami-esque.”<br />
Dykstra’s tussles with Sheen’s circle continued<br />
after he returned from serving out<br />
his three-year stint. He asserts that Burg,<br />
Klarberg and Sheen’s then-attorney Marty<br />
Singer put the brakes on Dykstra’s most<br />
audacious gambit of all: a complex $85 million<br />
play to sell the note on what remained<br />
of the actor’s Warner Bros. financial package<br />
to solve Sheen’s cash crunch. He insists it<br />
was sabotaged late in the game when they<br />
realized what the document-review process<br />
might expose. Before he could bring anyone<br />
in on the details, “Marty put an NDA together<br />
that was so vicious, so stacked, that no one<br />
would sign it,” explains Dykstra, still fuming.<br />
1 Sheen and his ex-fiancee, porn star Scottine Rossi,<br />
in 2014. 2 <strong>The</strong> actor bought this estate from Medavoy<br />
in 2011. 3 Dykstra was arraigned June 6, 2011, at the<br />
San Fernando Courthouse on felony charges, including<br />
grand theft auto and possession of a controlled<br />
substance. 4 Dykstra played center field and hit leadoff<br />
for the world champion Mets.<br />
4<br />
“I finally get one [potential investor] to sign<br />
it and what do they send him? Dick. Nothing<br />
relevant.”<br />
Singer disputes the claim as “absurd and<br />
ridiculous. <strong>The</strong> NDAs were appropriate,” adding,<br />
“As far as I understand it, Lenny likely<br />
had an NDA, too, and I don’t believe he’s living<br />
up to it.” Dykstra responds that he doesn’t<br />
“give a shit” about breaking its terms “because<br />
I was saving Charlie’s fucking life.”<br />
All of this time, Sheen’s drug use was worsening.<br />
During the manically loquacious interview<br />
spree in early 2011 that bequeathed pop<br />
culture the catchphrase “Winning!” Dykstra<br />
claims the actor was high on OxyContin:<br />
“When [the pills] are at their peak, it’s a euphoria,<br />
where you’re smart and you’re creative<br />
and you’re quick and you’re invincible.” But by<br />
summer 2014, Sheen had locked himself in a<br />
crack den hidden in his mansion for nine days.<br />
Sheen warned<br />
Dykstra to<br />
“watch your<br />
front side,<br />
watch your<br />
backside,<br />
watch both<br />
sides.”<br />
“It was right out of a mystery spy thriller, with<br />
a sliding bookcase,” says Dykstra. “I walked<br />
in and Charlie was standing there with a glass<br />
dick — a crack pipe — in one hand and his<br />
phone in the other. I took one look around,<br />
there’s all this stuff, cool paintings and Babe<br />
Ruth’s ring, and I said, ‘Charlie, I have to<br />
admit, if you’re going to smoke crack, this has<br />
got to be the best crack den on the planet!’ That<br />
broke the ice.”<br />
By Dykstra’s account, Sheen soon confessed<br />
to him that he had HIV, which<br />
he believed he’d contracted from a transsexual<br />
partner, and that he was being extorted<br />
for millions over the secret. Dykstra urged<br />
the star to go public about his health,<br />
as Sheen’s parents, Martin and Janet, had<br />
already been urging. “I said, ‘You can’t live<br />
like this anymore — this isn’t even living.’ ”<br />
Dykstra contends that he was crushed<br />
by Sheen’s last-minute decision to pull out<br />
of a news conference he’d helped arrange<br />
that November for his friend to get out in<br />
front of the diagnosis — a full year before<br />
the National Enquirer would finally force<br />
the issue. It was to be held at Sheen’s parents’<br />
house, with <strong>Hollywood</strong> publicist Larry<br />
Winokur brought in by Dykstra to orchestrate<br />
the crisis management. Winokur,<br />
whose casting-director wife had hired Sheen<br />
on Major League and Lucas, confirms Dykstra<br />
and Sheen reached out to him about the plan,<br />
noting the sincerity with which Dykstra<br />
approached the endeavor. “Lenny played team<br />
sports very successfully, and if you’re on<br />
Lenny’s team, I think he’d give you the shirt<br />
off his back,” he says.<br />
By the end of that year, Dykstra had come<br />
to believe Sheen was suicidal. Dykstra was<br />
reduced to attempting to rein in his buddy<br />
via desperate, all-caps-laden text messages.<br />
“Charlie, you are a fucking winner!” Dykstra<br />
typed during an exchange on the evening of<br />
Dec. 21. “Do not quit on me bro! I KNOW YOU<br />
ARE NOT A PUSSY!” Sheen replied, “I’m too<br />
tired bro going away now where no one can<br />
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER<br />
67<br />
FEBRUARY 7, <strong>2018</strong>