Charlie Sheen leaves a court in June last year

Los Angeles, Jan. 16: Charlie Sheen, the highest-paid actor on television, earned the nickname Good Time Charlie with his gift for making high-spirited friends. Last weekend, they included a posse of porn stars in Las Vegas.

However, the bosses of the hit comedy Two and a Half Men, who pay him $1.8 million for each 22-minute episode, are worried that Sheen’s sociability — and its attendant distractions — may disrupt their filming schedule.

They have decided to employ a male bodyguard-cum-nanny, known in Hollywood as a “manny”, whose job will be to protect Sheen from himself. The manny will also act as a “human alarm clock” to get the 45-year-old actor to work on time.

The CBS channel executives have become increasingly concerned about Sheen’s hard-living ways since an assault on his third wife, Brooke Mueller, 33, on Christmas Day 2009 had him sentenced to 30 days in rehab, 30 days of probation and 36 hours of anger management classes.

Last weekend, Sheen made the gossip columns again after he reportedly entertained a parade of women who were visiting the Adult Entertainment Expo in the Vegas hotel where he happened to be staying in a $ 40,000-a-night suite.

One witness claimed that the suite was a “revolving door of almost-naked porn stars” on a showbiz website.

“After he started the evening with a bottle of vodka in the bar, he returned to the suite with a girl on each arm and did not leave for the next 48 hours,” the witness said. “The suite has its own bar, and that was stripped and refilled by nervous hotel staff every few hours. Charlie was in there partying with maybe 10 girls.”

His guests included Michelle “Bombshell” McGee, an exotic dancer with a taste for tattoos and Nazi memorabilia, who claimed to have had an affair with Sandra Bullock’s then husband, Jesse James, last year.

On Tuesday, Sheen, the son of actor Martin Sheen, returned to the Warner Bros studios in Burbank, California, by a private jet barely an hour before filming was due to resume. The following day, he complained of earache and took the morning off.

At CBS, where Two and a Half Men is a $100m-a-year business, executives admit they are watching Sheen with shredded nerves.

Sheen will have a veto over the choice of the manny, but the executive said he must be “invisible, cool and a very manly manny. Someone who can talk about baseball and girls, someone Charlie might choose as a friend. But we shall pick up the tab”.

CBS is also considering suspending production on the sitcom to give Sheen time to “get everything out of his system”.

Heidi Fleiss, the former Los Angeles madam who supplied him with prostitutes in the 1990s, said her former client does not need monitoring: “People should leave him alone. He is the highest-paid actor on TV and always delivers a great performance, and that is all that counts.”