Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  When they got back to Hermon, Tabby unloaded the car and gathered up the kids while Steve checked the mailbox to find a letter and a check for $500 for a story he’d mailed off to Cavalier a few weeks earlier. When Tabby reached the door with two squawling kids, he told her not to worry, that they could get the pink stuff.

  “There were other, much bigger checks that came along later,” he said years later, “but that was the best. To be able to say to my wife, ‘We can take care of this. And the reason we can take care of it is because we wrote our way out.’ ”

  Despite the occasional checks that seemed to fall from the sky like pennies from heaven, there was never enough money for the first few years of their married life. Every few months, they’d call the phone company to disconnect the phone because they just didn’t have enough money left at the end of each month to pay the bill. He knew that many spouses wouldn’t be as understanding as Tabby. “It was a time when she might have been expected to say, ‘Why don’t you quit spending three hours a night in the laundry room, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer we can’t afford? Why don’t you get an actual job?’ ”

  Things were so bad that if she’d asked him to take on a second job at night, he would have done it. At the time, the prospect of a part-time job was a real possibility for Steve. The debate club at Hampden needed a new faculty adviser, and Steve’s name was offered as a candidate. The job paid $300 over the school year, a good chunk of money that would definitely help—but it would require him to work evenings.

  When he told Tabby about the debate club adviser job, she asked him if the additional work would leave him time to write, and he replied that he would have a lot less.

  “Well then,” she said, “you can’t take it.”

  He was grateful for his wife’s blessing, but Steve still felt as if he were walking a tightrope. The stress from working a job he didn’t like and never having enough money to pay the bills was building. The only two things that helped were writing and, increasingly, drinking.

  “I started drinking far too much and frittering money away on poker and bumper pool. You know the scene: it’s Friday night and you cash your paycheck in the bar and start knocking them down, and before you know what’s happened, you’ve pissed away half the food budget for that week. There was never a time for me when the goal wasn’t to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that always seemed to me like kissing your sister. To this day I can’t imagine why anyone wants to be a social drinker.

  “I saw myself at fifty, my hair graying, my jowls thickening, a network of whiskey-ruptured capillaries spiderwebbing across my nose—drinker’s tattoos, we call them in Maine—with a dusty trunkful of unpublished novels rotting in the basement, teaching high school English for the rest of my life and getting off what few literary rocks I had left by advising the student newspaper or maybe by teaching a creative-writing course.”

  He obviously loved his family. “On the one hand, I wanted nothing more than to provide for them and protect them, but at the same time, I was also experiencing a range of nasty emotions from resentment to anger to occasional outright hate. It was a vicious circle: the more miserable and inadequate I felt about what I saw as my failure as a writer, the more I’d try to escape into the bottle, which would only exacerbate the domestic stress and make me even more depressed. Tabby was steamed about the booze, of course, but she told me she understood.”

  “I was more angry at the five bucks that went out every week for the carton of cigarettes than I was anything else,” she said. “It was the literal burning of money that drove me nuts.”

  “The only thing that kept our heads above water were these stories for men’s magazines,” he admitted. “I’ve autographed a few of those over the years, and it always gives me a cold shudder to think about where I was when I wrote those stories. My underwear had holes in it in those days.”

  One day, Steve came home from work and Tabby was standing at the door with her hand out. “Give me your wallet,” she said. He handed it over and she emptied the wallet of all the credit cards, the gas cards, the store cards. Then she took an enormous pair of scissors and cut them in half.

  “But we’re paying our bills,” Steve protested.

  She said, “No, we’re paying the interest. We can’t afford to anymore, we’ve got to pay as we go.”

  Tabitha listened to a fair amount of her husband’s pissing and moaning and finally told him it was time to stop. “She said to save my self-pity and turn my energy to the typewriter,” he said. “I did because she was right and my anger played much better when channeled into about a dozen stories.”

  George MacLeod, his old college roommate, would occasionally visit when Steve and Tabby were living in Bangor. “It was a crap apartment, the kids would be running all over the place, and there would be Steve over in the corner typing away,” MacLeod said. “The noise just didn’t bother him. He could be in the middle of a crowded room and throw a cloak over himself and disappear into his safe cocoon world of fiction and connect with the story line and the characters. Mentally, his fingers were on the keyboard all the time.”

  Steve was still focused on cranking out short stories for the men’s magazines since they were almost certain to bring in a couple of hundred bucks or more, though of course he still thought about his novels, those he had already written, those in progress, and those for which ideas were still swimming around in his mind. Though he and Bill Thompson at Doubleday still kept in touch, it had been months since the editor had heard from him, so Bill decided to contact Steve. He asked why Steve hadn’t sent him anything lately, adding that he didn’t want to discover that Steve had signed up with another publishing house.

  Figuring he had nothing to lose, Steve dug the manuscript for Carrie out of the drawer and sent it to Bill, though Steve held out little hope that this book would turn the tide. Indeed, he thought that of all of his novels, Carrie was the least marketable.

  “As I worked on it, I kept saying to myself this is all very fine, but nobody is going to want to read a make-believe story about this little girl in a Maine town,” he said. “It’s downbeat, it’s depressing, and it’s fantasy.”

  When Thompson read it, however, he liked it and thought that this time he could really sell it. But as before, it needed some tweaking. Though he was reluctant to ask Steve for another rewrite, he knew this one had the best chance of all to fly. He promised his unpublished author that if he made the changes, he would do everything in his power to get the book published.

  After all, ghost stories and horror were hot. The Exorcist was published in hardcover in June 1971 with the hotly anticipated movie based on the book due out in December of 1973, and The Other, a movie about identical twin brothers, one good and one evil, had come out in 1972 to top box office. And Rosemary’s Baby was still being talked about since first appearing on movie screens in 1968. Publishers and movie producers were clamoring for the next big thing in horror, and Bill Thompson had an inkling that Carrie would strike gold. The novels Steve had previously sent to Bill didn’t fall into the category of horror. Carrie did.

  Despite his doubts, Steve dutifully revised the manuscript and sent it back to Bill within a few weeks and promptly forgot about it to return to writing a few stories he could send to Nye Willden at Cavalier for some quick cash. He also resumed work on Second Coming, which he had renamed Salem’s Lot in the meantime.

  On this cold, gray late-winter day in March of 1973, Steve’s foul mood reflected the weather. He was back in the classroom, teaching reluctant students, and the Kings were once again without a phone.

  An announcement came over the PA system, telling Steve that his wife was on the phone—she used a neighbor’s phone if there was an emergency—and could he please come to the office. He rushed over with two thoughts in his head: either one of the kids was really sick or Doubleday wanted to buy Carrie.

  When he picked up the phone, Tabby told him that Bill Thompson had se
nt a telegram to say the book would be published and offering an advance of $2,500. The couple were ecstatic.

  Bill later told Steve that not only did he love the novel, but once it started to make the rounds of the office, it all but caught fire, specifically because of the opening scene in which Carrie gets her period for the first time in the locker room and is pelted with tampons. Female editors made copies of the manuscript and handed them out to secretaries at the company, who then snuck them to friends.

  The manuscript required little in the way of changes or revision, but Steve wanted to make one crucial change. When he wrote Carrie, he set it in Massachusetts, in the towns of Boxford and Andover, because he never imagined it would see print. When Bill accepted it, Steve said he wanted to change the setting to Maine.

  Once Carrie sold, Steve bought a blue Pinto, the Kings’ first new car, for just over $2,000 and they moved to a four-room apartment at 14 Sanford Street in Bangor for $90 a month.

  Best of all, the stress Steve had felt because he thought he was failing at his primary role as breadwinner of the family had disappeared. “I don’t know what would have happened to my marriage and my sanity if Doubleday didn’t accept Carrie,” he said.

  Once they had moved into their new apartment, they ordered another phone. Which turned out to be a good thing.

  After Doubleday bought the hardcover rights, Bill Thompson had told Steve that the publisher planned to sell the paperback rights, and that they could expect $5,000 or $10,000 dollars from the sale, which would evenly be split between publisher and author as spelled out in the contract.

  Though Steve was tempted to quit his teaching job to write full-time after the hardcover rights sold, he knew he couldn’t afford it. He was resigned to teaching freshman English to sullen teenagers for a third year starting in the fall.

  But on Mother’s Day in 1973, all that changed. Tabby had taken the kids to visit her family in Old Town while Steve spent the afternoon in the apartment relishing the time alone to tinker with Salem’s Lot.

  The phone rang. Bill Thompson was on the other end, and Steve thought it was an odd thing for him to call on a Sunday. He asked if Steve was sitting down.

  “Should I be?”

  Thompson then told him that the paperback rights to Carrie had been sold to New American Library.

  “For how much?”

  “Four hundred thousand.”

  Steve thought he’d said $40,000, which was still a hell lot more money than he’d ever seen before.

  “Forty thousand is great!”

  That’s when Thompson corrected him. “No, Steve, four hundred thousand. Six figures.”

  Half of that—$200,000—would be Steve’s.

  Steve hadn’t heeded his editor’s advice to sit down. The phone was attached to the wall in the kitchen, and when the numbers sank in, he suddenly lost all the strength in his legs. “I just kinda slid down the wall until the shirttail came out of my pants and my butt was on the linoleum,” he said. They continued talking for about twenty minutes, but when they hung up, Steve couldn’t remember a word of the conversation except for the $400,000 part.

  He couldn’t wait for Tabby to get home. He paced back and forth across the kitchen floor for a while until he suddenly decided he wanted to buy Tabby a present. Of course, a litany of worries immediately began to overwhelm his overactive imagination.

  “As I crossed the street, I thought that was the time when a drunk would come along in a car and he would kill me, and things would be put back in perspective,” he said. He made a beeline to LaVerdiere’s drugstore a couple of blocks away and spent $29 on a hairdryer for his wife, who had stuck by his side and believed in his writing even when he didn’t. “I scuttled across those streets, looking both ways.”

  When she came home with the kids a few hours later, Steve handed her the hairdryer with a big grin on his face. She got angry, saying they couldn’t afford it. He told her they could and then explained why. Then they both started crying.

  Thompson later told Steve that NAL’s first offer for the paperback rights was $200,000, which caught everyone at Doubleday off guard. According to Thompson, Bob Bankford, the publisher’s subsidiary rights manager in charge of selling paperback rights, was a great poker player, and when NAL’s initial offer came in, he hesitated, then drawled that they were expecting a bit more. The publisher then raised the offer.

  The money bought Steve his freedom. Now he could definitely quit teaching and do what he was born to do: write novels.

  Best of all, Bill Thompson was now clamoring for Steve’s next novel. He turned his full attention to finishing Salem’s Lot.

  Steve and Tabby could hardly believe their luck. “It was like someone opened a prison door,” he said. “Our lives changed so quickly that for more than a year afterward, we walked around with big, sappy grins on our faces, barely daring to believe that we were out of that trap for good.”

  Before the paperback rights sold, Steve had only bought one hardcover book in his life: William Manchester’s Death of a President, which he bought as a gift. Now he could buy hardcovers with a vengeance, as many as he wanted.

  At the time, his mother was working at Pineland Training Center, a home for the mentally retarded in New Gloucester, Maine, twenty miles north of Portland. “She served meals, cleaned up shit, and wore a green uniform,” said Steve. He went to Pineland to tell her about the paperback sale. “She was pulling a truck of dishes,” he remembered. “She looked so strung out; she’d lost forty pounds and was dying of cancer but it hadn’t even been diagnosed. I said, ‘Mom, you’re done,’ and that was her last day working. I didn’t have the paperback money yet, but I borrowed from a bank and she went to live with my brother in Mexico, Maine.”

  News of such a large paperback sale for a novel by a first-time author meant that it didn’t take long for Hollywood to come sniffing around. The movie rights sold to Twentieth Century–Fox, which were then passed to United Artists.

  Despite the sudden influx of more money than he’d ever hoped to see in his lifetime, Steve discovered it was difficult to spend the money. Tabby said he was being ridiculous; after all those years of poverty, he was a success and he should spend some of it and have some fun with it.

  “Tabby and I argued more about money after Carrie than we ever had before,” he said. “She wanted to get a house and I would say no, I don’t feel secure. She got very exasperated with me.”

  After years of scraping by, and after so many false starts with revised novels that didn’t sell, he didn’t entirely trust what was happening. “My idea was the success would never happen again, so I should trickle the money out,” he said. “Maybe the kids would be eating Cheerios and peanut butter for dinner, but that’s okay, let ’em! I’ll be writing.”

  With only a month left to teach, he finished out the school year at Hampden, and after spending the first few years of married life living in and around Bangor, he and Tabby decided to move to southern Maine, so they could be closer to Steve’s mother. They rented a house on Sebago Lake in North Windham, about sixteen miles northwest of Portland and 130 miles from Bangor, and moved at the end of the summer of 1973.

  Steve called on his college buddy George MacLeod to help out, who was surprised to learn that Steve literally didn’t know how to move, even though he’d moved from one ramshackle apartment to another several times over.

  MacLeod borrowed a friend’s old panel truck, an International Travelall, hooked up a trailer behind it, and loaded up all of Steve’s stuff. MacLeod drove with the Kings loaded into the front, and he couldn’t help thinking he was in a Maine version of The Beverly Hillbillies. “We headed down Interstate 95 and delivered the meager stuff he had into this palatial house in the pouring rain,” said MacLeod. “It was a huge estate and it was totally empty.”

  Once they moved in, Steve settled into a routine of writing several hours a day while visiting his mother in between.

  He finished writing Salem’s Lot and sent it to Bi
ll Thompson, along with Roadwork, another novel he had written during college about a man who is forced from his home when the city decides to build a new highway running through his house and his workplace, a laundry. When Steve asked his editor which one he wanted to publish first, Bill told him he wouldn’t like the answer. “He said that Roadwork was a more honestly dealt novel, a novelist’s novel, but that he wanted to do Salem’s Lot because he thought it would have greater commercial success,” said Steve. Bill warned that Steve would get stereotyped as a horror writer. “Like Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley? I didn’t care. They did type me as a horror writer, but I’ve been able to do all sorts of things within that framework.”

  But first, as usual, Bill asked Steve to make a few changes. “He suggested that I rewrite the book a little bit in the beginning to try and keep the reader in the dark for a certain period of time, and I told him that anybody who reads this sort of thing is going to know that it’s vampires from the first,” said Steve.

  His editor politely disagreed. “You’re not writing for an audience of forty thousand people,” he said. “We want to break you out so you’ll appeal to an audience of millions of people, and they don’t read Weird Tales.” Steve made the changes and later agreed that Thompson was on the mark.

  He also asked Steve to rewrite one of the scenes where Jimmy Cody, the local doctor, is eaten alive by a horde of rats. “I had them swarming all over him like a writhing, furry carpet, biting and chewing, and when he tries to scream a warning to his companion upstairs, one of them scurries into his open mouth and squirms as it gnaws out his tongue,” Steve said. “I loved the scene, but Bill made it clear that no way would Doubleday publish something like that, and I came around eventually and impaled poor Jimmy on knives. But, shit, that just wasn’t the same.”

  While Steve was writing Salem’s Lot, he visualized Ben Mears as the actor Ben Gazzara, though in his writing he left the physical characteristics deliberately vague. “I don’t usually describe the characters that I write about because I don’t think I have to,” he said. “If they seem like real people to the readers, they’ll put their own faces on them. All I really said about Ben Mears is that his hair was black and sort of greasy. Then somebody told me that Gazzara was too old for the role Steve envisioned for Ben Mears, and I saw him in some gangster picture a while later and thought, by God, he is too old.”