Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  But once he became a teenager, he stood out for being just a little bit eccentric. For instance, he’d head out to spend the afternoon at a friend’s house and show up in his bedroom slippers, probably because so much was going on in his head that he forgot to change into shoes.

  He often felt like an outcast, though he had learned at an early age to keep his mouth shut about it. “I kept that part of myself to myself,” he said. “I never wanted to let anybody get at it. I figured they’d steal it if they knew what I thought about certain things. It wasn’t the same thing as being embarrassed about it, so much as wanting to keep it and sort of work it out for myself.”

  He found that the only way to do that was to write about it.

  In 1959, David got hold of an old mimeograph machine, and the two boys decided to publish a local newsletter. Selling it for a nickel, they wrote and distributed Dave’s Rag to their neighbors in West Durham. Dave wrote news stories about people in the neighborhood while Steve wrote reviews of his favorite TV shows and movies as well as a few short stories. The response was favorable, with most neighbors buying a few copies, but after a few months, Dave’s interest waned.

  Steve wasn’t too disappointed, for that meant there would be more time for writing his own stories and reading. In West Durham, Steve began what would become a lifelong habit of taking long afternoon walks while his nose was stuck in a book. Both Ruth and Dave shared his love of reading—it wasn’t unusual to see the family sitting around the dinner table, each reading a paperback—but Steve devoured more books than his brother and mother combined. He got lost in the stories, but he was also starting to note how each author told the story and how he built suspense and made Steve care—or not care—about the characters. He learned something with each book he read, and he simply couldn’t get enough.

  He also started to write as much as he read. Every free moment when he wasn’t in school or helping his mother with some of the chores, he was writing or reading.

  When Ruth bought him a behemoth, secondhand Underwood typewriter for $35, he knew he had everything he needed to start on his path as a writer, and he began to submit his stories to the pulp thriller and mystery magazines he’d been reading for years. He wrote after school and on weekends, and during summer vacations he rarely left his attic bedroom. “I’d be upstairs during the summer pounding away in my underpants, streaming with sweat,” he said. He typed so much that the letter M broke off, and he had to write in the missing letters by hand on each manuscript page.

  The more he wrote, the better he felt. He had a way to deal with the images and thoughts that he knew his family and society wouldn’t understand. His stories were full of blood and gore and inhumane impulses—just like the stories he loved to read—but writing them, getting them out, was better than keeping them inside.

  “As a child, Stephen King saw and felt too much for his age,” said George Beahm, author of several books on King and his work. “Consider how sensitive children generally are: they don’t have a way to edit, to filter, to take a critical stance on experience around them. I would say that the reason why these images come out so powerfully in his fiction is because as a child he had no way to filter. Everything just came in, and it affected him deeply.”

  His childhood friend Chris Chesley believes that Steve’s sense of isolation had as large an effect on his writing as the movies he saw, the books he read, and the murderous impulses he often felt. “His mother worked and his brother was older and off with his friends, so Steve spent a lot of time by himself,” said Chesley. “In that respect, he was different from many of us who knew him because he was more isolated than we were.”

  Even though he had just started to submit stories to the pulp magazines of the day, Steve was calmly convinced of his talent and future success even at the age of fourteen. Chesley would sit with Steve in his friend’s bedroom, reading, writing, and smoking. They’d take turns at the typewriter, one reading a book while the other cranked out a couple of pages. One day, Chesley remembered, Steve finished his stint at the typewriter and glanced over at him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  “You know what I’m gonna do the first time I hit it big, Chris? I’m gonna get myself a great big Cadillac!” Steve would laugh, light another cigarette, and return to the typewriter, even though it was Chris’s turn.

  Steve encountered a relative in Durham who reminded him of the way Granny Spansky had kept him spellbound for hours, though while his grandmother had captivated him because she reminded him of a fairy-tale witch, Uncle Clayton’s stories were what mesmerized young Steve. “Some of the best yarns in those days were spun by my uncle Clayton, a great old character who had never lost his childlike sense of wonder,” he said. “Uncle Clayt would cock his hunting cap back on his mane of white hair, roll a Bugler cigarette with one liver-spotted hand, light up with a Diamond match he’d scratch on the side of his boot, and launch into great stories, not only about ghosts but about local legends and scandals, family goings-on, the exploits of Paul Bunyan, everything under the sun. I’d listen spellbound to that slow down-east drawl of his and I’d be in another world.”

  Uncle Clayton, who wasn’t really a relative, but a family friend, had a few other talents that kept Steve fascinated. The old man was able to track a bee from a flower to the hive—a skill called lining—and he knew how to dowse for water by using a Y-shaped piece of wood to locate a good place to dig for a well.

  Steve had already started to file away the stories of these eclectic, eccentric relatives. He knew he might use them one day.

  Writing was not only helping Steve to survive a childhood riddled with instability and poverty, but he was also beginning to use his skill to define himself and who he was. By the time Steve was fourteen, a few key facts had already cemented themselves in his young mind: Writing allowed him to forget the physical and emotional discomforts in his life, and it was good enough for someone to pay him for it. Yeah, it was his mother, but at least it was a start. The connection between writing and financial self-sufficiency had been made. He also knew that judging from the crowds at the movie theater and the popularity of books of scary tales, other people enjoyed being scared just as much as he did.

  Rural Maine was filled with stories, and death was everywhere. And so, the general shape of Stephen King’s life and creative gifts were cast.

  2

  HEAD DOWN

  Even though Ruth thought her youngest son was a bit too intrigued by horror stories and movies, she herself enjoyed a really frightening story or movie. However, she despised what she called an Alfred Hitchcock ending, where, after getting a viewer sucked into the lives of the characters up on the silver screen, Hitch chose an ending that was deliberately murky and unclear. Young Steve filed that opinion away.

  One day Steve asked his mother if she had ever seen a dead body. She nodded, then told him two stories.

  The first time, she was standing outside the Graymore Hotel in Portland when a sailor jumped off the roof twelve stories above the street. “He hit the sidewalk and splattered,” she said.

  The other time was while growing up in Scarborough. One day she went to the beach and saw a crowd of people standing on the shore and several boats attempting to go out to sea. A woman had been swimming, and a riptide had drawn her out to where she couldn’t swim back on her own. The boats were unable to reach her since the current was too strong. Ruth said, “People stood on the beach and listened to that woman scream for hours before she finally drowned.” It sounded like a story Steve would read in one of his E.C. comics, and it stuck with him for years.

  Spurred on by his mother, Steve continued to write whenever he had a free moment. Though he had already begun to submit some of his stories to magazines, his work would be greeted by form rejection slips. So he decided to take matters into his own hand, and when he was fourteen, he wrote a sixteen-page novelization of the movie The Pit and the Pendulum, which had come out in 1961, starring Vincent Price and Barbara Steele based
on the Edgar Allan Poe story. Steve typed up the story—replete with misspelled words—and added his own touches, remembering his mother’s advice to make up his own story, so much so that it didn’t come close to resembling the movie. He ran it off on an ancient copy machine, brought the copies to school, and hawked it to his classmates for a quarter apiece, since his mom had established that as the going rate. By the end of the day, he had a pocketful of quarters. He was suspended from school not because of plagiarism, but because his teachers and the principal thought he shouldn’t be reading about horror, let alone writing about it.

  He apologized effusively to his teachers, the principal, his mother, and to the students who’d plunked down a quarter to read his writing. He wanted everyone to like him, and Ruth thought that his desire to please was hardwired into his system. One of his mother’s favorite lines was “Stevie, if you were a girl, you’d always be pregnant.”

  But in Steve’s mind, he wanted to please his mother in particular because he knew how hard her life was. They ate a lot of lobster while Steve was growing up—back then it was considered to be poor man’s food. A family would often keep a pot of stew on the stove for several days, reheating it when necessary and adding more lobster meat, potatoes, onions, and carrots when the pot ran low. Though it provided necessary sustenance, many families were embarrassed at having to rely on it.

  “If the minister visited, she took it off the stove and put it behind the door, as if he wouldn’t be able to smell it,” said Steve, “but the smell was all through the house and got in your clothes, your hair.”

  Nineteen-sixty marked a huge leap into the modern world for Steve as he moved from the one-room schoolhouse to a new building where nothing was a hand-me-down, from the desks and chairs to the books. Durham Elementary was for grades one through eight and opened to much fanfare in a town that had previously had two run-down one-room schoolhouses. Steve joined its first class of seventh graders.

  On the first day of school, the kids were most excited about having flush toilets and running water indoors. For many students, it was the first time they rode a bus to school.

  Lew Purinton first met Steve in the seventh grade when Durham Elementary opened. Since they lived on opposite ends of town, they had attended different one-room schools.

  Steve was hard to miss. “He was the biggest kid in the class,” said Purinton. “I remember seeing him walking down the aisle between the desks, and I asked him how old he was, since he looked so much bigger than the rest of us. He looked down at me and said, ‘I’m old enough to know better, but I’m too young to care.’ ”

  With that acerbic remark, Purinton knew he had a new friend. They were in the same class of twenty-five students, and soon they began to hang out outside of school.

  Purinton visited Steve at his house, which he remembers was an old farmhouse much different from his own home. “It was obvious that they didn’t have money, that they were struggling,” he said. “The house wasn’t neat and clean.”

  However, the thing that stood out in his mind was Steve’s tiny bedroom, where literally hundreds of paperback books were stacked around the edges of the room and even at the end of Steve’s bed, with no bookshelf in sight. Most of the books were science fiction and horror.

  When Lew asked his friend about them, Steve said he’d read every one of them. Scattered through the piles of books were numerous volumes by H. P. Lovecraft, a horror writer from the early twentieth century widely considered to be the genre’s successor to Edgar Allan Poe.

  Steve was thirteen when he first discovered Lovecraft, which he later maintained was an ideal age to start reading his work. “Lovecraft is the perfect fiction for people who are living in a state of sort of total sexual doubt, because the stories almost seem to me sort of Jungian in their imagery,” he later said. “They’re all about gigantic disembodied vaginas and things that have teeth.”

  With Lovecraft and his other favorite authors around, Steve viewed his room as a sanctuary away from the pressures of school and the need to fit in as an unathletic kid with bad eyes and little coordination and no success with girls. He wasn’t popular, yet he wasn’t totally stigmatized such as two girls who lived in his neighborhood.

  One was a girl whose mother entered every single sweepstakes and contest that came down the pike. She won prizes regularly, but they tended toward the unusual: enough pencils or tuna fish to last for a year. The most expensive and prestigious prize she won was Jack Benny’s old Maxwell car, though she never drove it and let it sit beside the house to slowly rust and rot into the ground.

  Even though she had enough money to buy postage stamps to enter all the contests and sweepstakes, she apparently had little left over for her kids. The children were given one set of clothes that had to last from September through June. Obviously, they were an easy target of ridicule for the other kids.

  Sophomore year, the girl broke ranks and wore a completely different outfit after returning from Christmas vacation. Her usual outfit—black skirt, white blouse—was swapped out for a woolen sweater and a skirt that was in style. She’d even permed her hair. “But everybody made more fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mold,” said Steve.

  He had taken to doing odd jobs for neighbors. A couple of times, he was hired to dig a grave at the local cemetery. His friend Brian Hall’s father oversaw the graveyard and hired the boys to do the job, which paid twenty-five bucks, a fortune to a teenage boy in the early sixties.

  Another time, he was hired by the mother of the other outcast girl, who tried to make herself as small as possible whenever she had to walk down the halls of high school. The family lived in a trailer near Steve’s house in West Durham. When Steve went into the trailer to do an odd job for the mother, he was dumbfounded by the enormous crucifix that towered over the living room. The Jesus figure was particularly realistic, with blood dripping from the hands and feet and an anguished look on his face.

  The girl’s mother told Steve that Jesus was her personal savior, then asked him if he’d been saved. He said he hadn’t and left the house as quickly as possible.

  When he started to write Carrie, the memory of these two outcasts inspired his portrayal of the main character. He later discovered that both girls had died by the time he began writing the story; the girl with one outfit for the entire year shot herself in the stomach shortly after giving birth to a child, while the other, an epileptic, had moved out of the trailer after graduating from Lisbon High, but had suffered a seizure in her apartment and died alone.

  From the time he was ten years old, though Steve loved to play sports, he wasn’t athletic. At his new school, the students spent recess and lunchtime out on the playground playing games.

  Baseball was a popular choice for these informal recreation times, and Steve loved to play baseball, but when it came time to pick sides, he was inevitably one of the last kids picked.

  However, he was actively recruited for football because of his size. “I had to play football, because if you were big and didn’t play football, that meant you were a fucking faggot,” he said. “All I was good for in football was left tackle.” Though he had a few good friends he hung out with, that didn’t stop him from feeling different from the other kids at school.

  He was also unofficially banned from joining the Boy Scouts since he didn’t have a father to help the boys out.

  If Steve was bothered by being excluded—first the ball field, then Boy Scouts—he didn’t show it. One day in the fall of 1960, he’d made an important discovery in the attic above his Aunt Ethelyn and Uncle Oren’s garage. The musty space had long been a catchall for old stuff that various family members no longer had any immediate use for but, being frugal Mainers, wouldn’t throw away. After all, you never knew when somebody might be able to put something to good use.

  The children in the family—including Steve and his brother, David—were discouraged from going into the attic. The wooden planks of the floor had never permanently been attache
d to the beams, and in a few places there were gaps.

  Nevertheless, one day Steve decided to go exploring and got the biggest surprise of his life so far. His mother had stowed away most of the artifacts from her illfated marriage to Steve’s father in the attic years earlier after it was clear that Don had gone AWOL for good. Steve discovered that his long-gone father had a penchant for the same kinds of pulp paperbacks—mysteries and horror—that he devoured.

  What was even more shocking was that in another box, young Steve found a stack of rejection slips from magazines with hastily scribbled notes of encouragement asking Don to try again.

  His father had been an aspiring writer too!

  Steve continued to dig through the other boxes, but didn’t find any of his father’s manuscripts or published stories. He ran downstairs to confront his mother, accusing her of hiding the truth about his father from him. Ruth calmed him down and explained.

  “My mother told me that he wrote lots of really good stories, that he sent them off to magazines, and he got letters back saying, ‘Please send us more.’ But he was kind of lazy about it and never really did very much,” Steve said.

  Then she delivered the one-two punch that would remain with Steve all his life. “Steve,” she said, kind of laughing, “your father didn’t have any persistence. That’s why he left the marriage.”

  Steve saw what his father’s laziness had done to his mother and his family, and he swore he would never be like that.

  But he was also intrigued by what he shared with his father. Maybe writing—and getting published, Steve’s dream—would be a way to connect with the father he’d never known.