Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  “I married her for her body, though she said I married her for her typewriter,” he later said. Indeed, her Olivetti was a vast improvement over the ancient Underwood that he’d been banging away on since the late fifties. But the typewriter was a nice added attraction. “Hers had a rather square typeface, a Nazi-salute kind of typeface.”

  Steve and Tabby were married on January 2, 1971, in Old Town, where Tabby grew up. Steve paid $15.95 for two matching wedding rings from Day’s Jewelers in Bangor. The ceremony was at the Catholic church—Tabby’s religion—while the reception was held at the Methodist church, the denomination of Steve’s youth.

  Though Steve had looked for other jobs, they were scarce so he was still working at the laundry at the time of their wedding. They specifically set the date so there would be no conflict with Steve’s schedule at the New Franklin Laundry. “We got married on a Saturday because the place was closed on Saturday afternoons,” he said. “Everyone wished me well, but I still was docked for not being in that Saturday evening.”

  Tabby graduated from the University of Maine in June 1971 with a degree in history. It had been a long, hard slog, as she had continued to attend classes while pregnant, and then while dealing with a newborn.

  Once she graduated from college, she encountered the same problems that Steve did: she couldn’t find a job that fit her qualifications, and for the rest she was vastly overqualified. She applied for a job at Dunkin’ Donuts. At first the manager didn’t want to hire her because of her bachelor’s degree, but he eventually took her on.

  In time, Steve and Tabby viewed the smell of doughnuts the same way they viewed lobster. “It was a nice aroma at first, you know, all fresh and sugary,” said Steve, “but it got pretty goddamned cloying after a while. I haven’t been able to look a doughnut in the face ever since.”

  Tabby only intended to work as long as it took them to get caught up on the bills. “As soon as we were paid up, I’d stop working because otherwise it was Steve working the day shift, me working the night, not seeing Naomi, not seeing each other, it wasn’t good,” she said.

  “I think that my wife and I had a lot of traditional values from the start,” Steve said. “We were old fogyish by the standards of a lot of our friends. We had our kids, and we were raising them in this traditional family home life.”

  King realized that his dream of becoming a full-time writer wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so when a teaching position opened up at Hampden Academy—the school where he had student-taught in his senior year of college—starting in the fall of 1971, he accepted the job at a starting salary of $6,400, a step up from the job at the laundry.

  At the time, Tabby, Steve, and Naomi were living in a rented trailer off Route 2 in Hermon, about seven miles from the school. Steve commuted in a 1965 Buick Special. Before he turned the key in the morning, he crossed his fingers that the car would start; the car was held together with little more than chicken wire and duct tape.

  As a high school English teacher, he was finally putting his college education to good use, though he quickly discovered that teaching wasn’t what he had expected. “I thought by teaching school I was insuring myself a middle-class life, I didn’t think it meant poverty,” he said. “Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your ears, draining all the juice out of you. You come home, you have papers to correct, and you don’t feel like writing. We were planning to have a car, we were supposed to have a real life, and we were worse off than when I was in the laundry.”

  He tempered the frustrations of the job by watching how the students acted. He came away with a lot of stories and ideas from studying them and by tormenting them in class, albeit always in a fun way.

  He occasionally threatened students who offered little during a class discussion with a novel punishment. “When I was a student teacher, my supervisor had a surefire cure for the Class of the Living Dead,” he said to his students.” ‘Does anyone have any idea why Willy Loman’s depression seems so deep in Death of a Salesman?’ she’d ask. ‘If no one answers in fifteen seconds, I’ll take off a shoe. If no one answers in thirty seconds, I’ll take off another shoe.’ And so on. By the time she began to unzip her dress, someone usually came up with an opinion on Willy Loman’s depression.”

  In between teaching, correcting papers, and spending time with Tabby and his daughter, Steve continued to summon up the time and focus to crank away at a couple of novels, but discovered that writing short stories was more lucrative and certain, at least in the short run. He was still in touch with Bill Thompson at Doubleday, but after extensively revising two novels that were still rejected, he decided to concentrate on writing short stories for the men’s magazines, which he could crank out in a few hours and sell for at least a couple of hundred dollars.

  Besides Cavalier and Adam, he also wrote for magazines with the titles Dude, Gent, Juggs, Swank, and Gallery. When he told his mother that he was selling his stories regularly, she was thrilled and understandably wanted to see them in print. Even though the stories were mysteries and not the pornography that appeared elsewhere in the magazines, he still didn’t want her to know which magazines they had appeared in. So Tabby would make copies of the printed stories but first block out the ads for X-rated films, lotions, and sex toys that filled the margins of the pages where his stories appeared.

  In fact, the editors thought so highly of his work that they asked him to try writing some of the porn stories; after all, they paid better than the horror stories. He made a valiant attempt, but writing about sex just wasn’t in his emotional toolbox. He wrote about fifty pages before giving up. “The words were there, but I couldn’t handle it. It was so weird, I just collapsed laughing,” he said. “I got as far as twins having sex in a birdbath.”

  He said that it wasn’t due to being uncomfortable with sex, but rather from a discomfort in writing about sex outside of a monogamous relationship. “Without such strong relationships to build on, it’s tough to create sexual scenes that have credibility and impact or advance the plot, and I’d just be dragging sex in arbitrarily and perfunctorily,” he said. “You know, like it’s been two chapters without a fuck scene, so I better slap one together.”

  Steve’s decision to concentrate on writing short fiction was right on the mark. In 1972, Cavalier published four of his stories: “Suffer the Little Children,” “The Fifth Quarter,” “Battleground,” and “The Mangler.” It was sure money and regular bylines, and once Nye Willden had told him that readers were actually starting to ask for his stories, Steve was thrilled. He hadn’t completely abandoned his dream of writing a novel that a publisher would want to buy, and he still occasionally corresponded with Bill Thompson, but Steve had nothing to send to him, and he was gun-shy after his extensive revisions were in vain.

  Steve had written “The Fifth Quarter,” about a common criminal who wants to avenge the death of a friend during a botched robbery, under the pseudonym of John Swithen. He chose another name because this story was different from the others he’d written for the magazine. It was more a hard-boiled crime story than a supernatural horror story, and he used the pulp writers from the fifties as his model. “They used a lot of different names back then because they poured that stuff out,” he explained. “This was my time to pour the stuff out too, so I used the John Swithen name, but I never used it again because I didn’t really like it.”

  When school let out for the summer, Steve returned to working full-time at the New Franklin Laundry, and though it was a hot, thankless, exhausting job, it had an upside. As was the case when he worked in the Worumbo Mills right after high school, the laundry environment and its workers would occasionally offer up an idea for a story.

  At the laundry, one of King’s coworkers was missing his hands and forearms and had to wear prosthetic devices with a hook on the end. He’d been working there for almost three decades and had one day been working on the ironing and folding machine. The employees had nicknamed the machine the Mangler, becaus
e that’s what happened if anyone got too close. On this unfortunate day, the guy’s tie was accidentally pulled into the machine. He went to pull it out and his left hand was sucked into the machine. Instinctively he tried to pull his arm with his other hand and that got pulled in as well.

  When Steve worked there in the early seventies, the guy with the hooks introduced himself to new employees by first running hot and cold water over the hooks and then sneaking up on an unsuspecting coworker and setting the hooks on the back of his neck. After Steve had observed this prank more than a few times and been an unwilling participant on the business end of the hooks himself, he thought it would make a good story. “The Mangler” was the result.

  One day in the summer of 1972, one of Steve’s friends, Flip Thompson, stopped by the Kings’ trailer in Hermon for a visit. He read some of the stories Steve was writing and some of the published ones from the men’s magazines and started to chew him out. In the early seventies, women’s liberation was in full swing, and any enlightened man who expected to win over the modern woman was supposed to be sensitive to women’s issues.

  Flip asked why Steve continued to write this macho crap for the titty magazines.

  “Because the stories don’t sell too well to Cosmopolitan” was Steve’s retort.

  Flip accused Steve of not having any feminine sensibility at all, and Steve replied that he could write with that in mind if he wanted to, but that’s not what Cavalier and the other magazines buying his stories were looking for.

  “If you’re a writer and a realist about what you’re doing, you can do nearly anything you want,” Flip countered. “In fact, the more of a pragmatist and carpetbagger you are, the better you can do it.”

  He bet Steve ten bucks that he couldn’t write a story from a woman’s point of view, and they shook on it. Steve had been kicking around an idea that he thought might work for Cavalier, about an outcast girl with supernatural powers who strikes back at the kids who have teased her for most of her life. He thought back to his school days and his outcast classmates: one girl who had only one outfit to wear for the entire school year, and the other who had grown up with a life-size crucifix in her house.

  Since he’d gone back to work at the New Franklin Laundry, he’d noticed an older female employee who was a religious fanatic, and he thought he might use her to develop the mother of the outcast girl in the story.

  He had the germ of his story. Now he just had to sit down and write it.

  He set the first scene in a girls’ locker room. He wrote the first few pages about a high school girl who started menstruating while she was in the shower and started screaming because she thought she was bleeding to death. She didn’t know the facts of life because her ultrareligious parents didn’t believe in discussing sex with their children.

  Her classmates responded by throwing tampons at her, and that’s when he ran into a brick wall. How did the girls get all those tampons? Weren’t they in coin-operated machines? He didn’t know. After all, he’d only been in a girls’ locker room once before when he worked alongside his brother, David, at his a part-time summer job as a janitor at Brunswick High School.

  So he asked Tabby about the coin-op machines. She laughed and told him they were free.

  “It was a tough story,” he said. “It was about girls and it was about girls’ locker rooms and it was about menstruation, a lot of things that I didn’t know anything about. The iceberg was a lot bigger. It was women! It was girls! Women are bad enough! Girls are even more mysterious.”

  He continued to slog away on the story, but after he’d written fifteen single-spaced pages, he gave up and tossed it in the trash. Not only was he having problems with the female part of the story—maybe Flip was right after all—but the story also couldn’t be contained in only three thousand words, the limit of his stories for Cavalier. He’d only sold one story to the magazine that was longer.

  “A short story is like a stick of dynamite with a tiny fuse,” he explained. “You light it and that’s the end. It suddenly occurred to me that I wanted a longer fuse. I wanted the reader to see that this girl was really being put upon, that what she did was not really evil and not even revenge, but it was the way you strike out at somebody when you’re badly hurt.”

  After he threw away the pages, he needed to relax. Back then, Steve’s idea of heaven—besides spending all day at the typewriter—was taking a bath while he smoked a cigarette, drank a beer, and listened to a Red Sox game on the transistor radio propped up on the sink. That was how Tabby found him when she entered the bathroom, snapped off the radio, and wagged the crumpled pages in his face. “You ought to go on with this,” she said, “it’s good.”

  “But I don’t know anything about girls,” he protested.

  “I’ll help you.”

  Perhaps Flip was right, but he didn’t realize Steve had another source to help him understand the female psyche.

  Tabby also told him that the story deserved more than three thousand words, and that it could be a full-fledged novel. Back in college, Steve was attracted to Tabby partly because she was his ideal first reader. “She’s an avid reader and a terrific critic,” he said. “She’ll say, ‘This part doesn’t work,’ she’ll say why, and then she’ll suggest a few different ways to fix it.”

  So he uncrumpled the pages and returned to the story. He got stuck when he got to the prom scene once Carrie had unleashed her telekinesis. “I really wanted to reap destruction on these people but couldn’t think of how it was going to happen,” he said. “Tabby suggested using the amplifiers and electrical equipment from the rock band.”

  He also drew on his own experience teaching high school students. “There’s a little bit of Carrie White in me,” he admitted. “I’ve seen high school society from two perspectives, as has any high school teacher. You see it once from the classroom where the rubber bands fly around, and you see it again from behind the desk.”

  He followed Tabby’s advice, expanded the story, and in only three months he wrote what turned out to be a seventy-thousand-word manuscript. He was encouraged by his progress and how the novel had turned out, but not all was well. Not only did he have to work in the laundry Monday through Friday, handling restaurant tablecloths loaded with bits of lobster and clam and bloody bed linens from hospitals, infested with maggots, but the family had also moved around a lot. Since Naomi was born, the family had lived in two apartments in Bangor—one on Pond Street and another on Grove Street—and in a trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon.

  Though Steve enjoyed teaching and looked forward to returning to the classroom in September, he was beginning to have nightmares that he’d get stuck as an English teacher with a bunch of manuscripts tucked away in his desk drawer or hall closet. “There were times when I was writing Carrie when I felt depressed and really down,” he said.

  After he finished the manuscript, he thought about sending it to Bill Thompson, but refrained. After all, Doubleday had already rejected two of Steve’s novels, why should this one be any different? So he stuck it in a drawer instead and started to think about an idea for his next novel.

  In the freshman English classes he taught at Hampden Academy, Steve was teaching Dracula along with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Of course, he loved talking about vampires with his students, but he also explored Wilder’s descriptions of how people interact with each other in a small town and how a town doesn’t usually change. Being from a small town, Steve could readily associate with the characters.

  After a long day in the classroom, but before he retreated to the laundry room that served as his office in the trailer, he discussed the two works with Tabby at dinner.

  “Can you imagine if Dracula came to Hermon?” she asked.

  Steve’s brain shifted into overdrive and he came up with the idea for a novel about a small Maine town that is invaded by vampires with the working title Second Coming.

  He loved writing the novels, but again knew that the short fiction he sold to the men’s magaz
ines was his bread and butter. And so he continued to send stories to Nye Willden. And at the time, he needed more sure things, because Tabby was pregnant again. The Kings’ second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, was born on June 4, 1972.

  Tabby named him after Joe Hillstrom, better known as Joe Hill, a union organizer and songwriter from the early twentieth century. Hill was executed in 1915 for a murder he may or may not have committed and inspired several writers to pen songs and poems about his life. One of the poems, written by poet Alfred Hayes in 1930, was turned into the song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” by Depression-era songwriter Earl Robinson, which sixties icon Joan Baez then sang at Woodstock.

  Steve returned to Hampden Academy to teach in the fall of 1972. He was a good teacher, but others often noticed that his attention was elsewhere.

  “King was a promising teacher,” said Robert Rowe, the principal at Hampden. “It was hard to catch him without a book under his arm, and if he had any spare time, he’d be reading a book. But he always took the time to write.”

  Brenda Willey had King as a teacher at Hampden. “He was a good teacher who had seven classes a day and a study hall,” she said. “He told us that he liked to write, and I think he wanted us to write. He was fun and had a pretty good sense of humor.”

  During the fall he taught all day, came home and marked papers, then prepared lessons before retiring to the trailer’s laundry room to write. For at least several hours a night he sat in the cramped space banging out stories.

  One day, Steve and Tabby gathered up the kids and headed down to Durham to visit his family. Naomi had a history of developing ear infections, and on the drive back north, she was showing clear signs of getting sick, howling and crying the entire time. From past experience, Steve knew they needed amoxicillin—what they called the pink stuff—but it was expensive, and on that day they were flat broke. Steve felt his rage and helplessness float up into his throat like bile.