Considering that the lion’s share of her memoir, The Real Girl Next Door, is about her life with ex-husband Charlie Sheen, Denise Richards really could’ve raked his ass over the coals for what he put her through. But unfortunately for us—and her publisher—she chose to take the high road, never divulging the details of his crazy free-basing antics and penchant for prostitutes (these issues are vaguely referred to in blanket terms like “addiction” or “deep dark revelations”). Luckily, though, Sheen proves to be a such bountiful source of eccentricities that Richards does manage to disclose some weirdo facts worth mentioning here, like his bachelor pad of hyper-paranoia.
After a rather conventional (albeit quick) courtship that included roses, fancy dinners, little boxes from Tiffany and a nooner in Sheen’s dressing room on the set of Spin City, Sheen and Richards got married in the Catholic church—complete with pre-cana classes. Richards then moved into his bachelor pad where she “encountered some strange features” including:
His bedroom door…was bulletproof. A fire pole was in the closet (which one of our cats fell through, but he was okay) in case a quick escape to the ground floor was necessary. And the house had a panic room.
Their marriage was rosy for the first year but began “crumbling fast” after the birth of their first daughter Sam. Richards—who actually described every aspect of her kid’s nursery down to the number of the Benjamin Moore paint she picked for the walls—claims that the details aren’t important. She doesn’t get into what Charlie was doing that made her flee, just saying that it was important that she get out of there. She does, however, admit that the “winning, tiger blood” Sheen was “not the man [she] married; [but the] man [she] divorced.”
Richards also opens up abut her infamous trip to New York with Sheen in October 2010, saying she knew immediately, upon arriving at dinner, that she was the only woman in the room who was not a hooker. Shortly before Sheen was hospitalized in January—after an epic bender—she sat her girls down and tried to explain addiction to them, after reading them a children’s book about it. A few days later she visited Sheen to try to talk some sense into him, or was perhaps part of some kind of intervention (she’s not very clear about the terms of the visit), which is when he told her of his plan to have a “porn family” with four young women moving in with him. Their relationship remains strained, but seems dedicated to keeping him in their daughters’ lives.