She joked about her “redneck” ex-husband and life as a woman in the Deep South: “All of us lost our cherished virtue in the back of a pickup truck holding on to a gun rack looking at a picture of a buck feeding out of a stream.” Johnny Carson declared the five-minute set “wonderful stuff. In that star-making appearance, which aired May 14, 1987, Butler emerged not with her familiar blond hair but as a curly-headed brunette. “She just needs one more little nudge to get back on her feet.” “She still needs a little more help,” he says. Strickler since has pushed the target up to $20,000. The campaign raised $12,583 from 246 donors - enough to keep the wolves at bay for a little longer. “And I said, ‘I don’t know - what’s the cutoff line between needing something and being absolutely greedy?’ ” They decided on a goal of $15,000. Strickler asked Butler how much she wanted to raise. “The way he put it was, ‘You can’t live your life based on being afraid of what haters will do.’ “ “He talked me into it,” she says of Strickler’s urging. It took Butler a lot of convincing to submit herself to a crowdfunding campaign - not just as a matter of pride but also, she feared, the satisfaction it would give the enemies she’d made along the way. “It literally saved me.”įlash forward to 2021, however, and amid the production slowdown caused by COVID-19, the specter of homelessness was looking to be more and more inevitable. “If it wasn’t for Charlie, there’s no way I would have been on that show,” she says. She ended up being on the show for two years. Sheen lobbied hard to get Butler a part as a cocktail waitress on his sitcom Anger Management - against the producers’ wishes, she suspects. The two had been acquaintances since the Grace Under Fire days. She credits Charlie Sheen with saving her life in 2012. “But once that gets out there, it just goes everywhere.” “I have no idea why she did that,” says Butler.
Contrary to an Entertainment Tonight segment that aired in 2011, however, she never lived “in a homeless shelter.” She insists she always had a roof over her head and that an ET producer, who paid her for the appearance, fabricated the homelessness detail for ratings. After failing to keep up with mortgage payments, she literally lost the farm. The show should have been pulled sooner than it was.”Ī few years after that, Butler fled Hollywood for Georgia, where she bought a bucolic property she’d spotted on the internet. “At the bloody bitter end, I really was difficult,” Butler concedes. (She got hooked on the painkiller after being prescribed it for sciatica.) By her own admission, the drug abuse made her an erratic nightmare on set, causing co-stars to quit and the show’s abrupt cancellation in its fifth season, after just 14 of a planned 25 episodes were shot. Later, the pressures of starring on the hit Chuck Lorre sitcom Grace, based on her own life (except the parenting thing - Butler never had children), led to a Vicodin addiction. When she was discovered doing stand-up in New York City during the mid-1980s, she already had overcome alcoholism and an abusive marriage - the result of a self-fulfilling cycle of violence, as her father was an abusive alcoholic, too. Chris Noth Accused of Sexual Assault by Two Womenīutler is no stranger to hard times.
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