The call came at midnight: Charlie Sheen was ready to see me.

I’d been waiting for that call since I arrived in Los Angeles six weeks earlier, waging a campaign with the addled star of CBS’s Two and a Half Men that bordered on stalking. I had met with his manager and publicist, interviewed his neighbors, joined his friends to watch baseball, and spoken to his lawyers and a number of his lovers.

Most of them assured me that if Charlie talked to anyone it would be me. Then, after being hospitalized on January 27, following a 36-hour marathon of vodka, cocaine, and porn stars, Sheen launched a crusade against CBS and Warner Bros., the producers of his TV show, that would end with their firing him and canceling the remainder of the season. As he went viral on radio call-in programs, national TV, and TMZ.com, he presented the world with a pure product of Hollywood: son of a movie star, raised on location, star and addict by 23, seemingly washed up at 33, spiraling through box-office flops, rehabs, and relapses, only to score a comeback at 40 and then lose it after a world-class bender. Ranting at his perceived enemies—from the creator of his hit show to Alcoholics Anonymous—he was a crazy, chain-smoking, damn-the-consequences dervish, claiming to be fueled by “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA,” waving a sword at the “clowns” and “trolls” who had supposedly enslaved him.

Through it all, I continued to try to reach him. I even sent him a box of Davidoff cigars, just as his character, Bud Fox, had done in Wall Street in order to grease open the door to Gordon Gekko’s office. I got little for my efforts until the midnight call. It wasn’t from Sheen, who had by then provoked his publicist into resigning and gone undercover, but from rare-watch dealer Robert Maron, his longtime friend. Charlie wanted to talk, Maron said, but he wanted assurances that I wasn’t out to screw him. “Call me at 10 tomorrow morning,” he concluded confidently. ...