by Lisa Rogak
Bill Thompson made an offer for Salem’s Lot before Carrie had even been published and signed Steve to a multibook contract. In the meantime, Ruth’s condition was worsening and she didn’t have much time left. Steve felt cheated. After all his mother had done for him, supporting his writing, going without food so he could have a little pocket money in college, and now she wouldn’t live long enough to see his first published book, though she had seen the galleys for Carrie, which Steve had read to her.
On December 18, 1973, Ruth King died of uterine cancer, and something right out of the books Steve had grown up with happened that night. “The night my mother died of cancer—practically the same minute—my son had a terrible choking fit in his bed at home,” he said. “He was turning blue when Tabby finally forced out the obstruction.” Steve had never had a fear of choking before, but resigned, he added it to the list.
5
RIDING THE BULLET
Carrie was published in April 1974 in hardcover with a cover price of $5.95. Steve was thrilled that his first novel was finally available in bookstores, but his satisfaction was greatly tempered by his mother’s death. Novels on the New York Times bestseller list that month were Jaws, by Peter Benchley, and The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders. But Carrie wasn’t one of them. The book’s first printing was thirty thousand copies, but only thirteen thousand sold.
Though Steve was already a heavy drinker, the depression that set in after his mother’s death caused him to drink even more. He also plunged into his writing: shortly after his mother died, he wrote “The Woman in the Room,” the story of a grown son who helps his terminally ill mother end her life.
Tabby and Steve thought they needed a change of scenery and decided to move to another part of the country, at least temporarily. After all, they could afford to live almost anywhere now. They got a copy of the Rand McNally Road Atlas and opened it to a map of the United States. Steve closed his eyes and stabbed his finger on the page; it landed in Colorado.
With the movie rights to Carrie sold and a multibook contract from Doubleday, Steve finally loosened up enough to spend a little bit of his windfall and bought a brand-new red, white, and blue Cadillac convertible. But he felt uncomfortable when he visited his friends back in Durham and instead took a rusty 1964 Dodge Dart for his trips home.
In August 1974, the family climbed into their new Cadillac and drove to Boulder, Colorado. They rented a house at 330 South Forty-second Street, and Steve set out to find ideas for new books and stories.
In Boulder, Steve had a hard time focusing on work. He started one story after another, but nothing clicked. Thinking a few days off might help, he asked a couple of neighbors where he and Tabby could spend a quiet weekend. They recommended the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park.
The night before Halloween, Steve and Tabby left Naomi and Joe with a babysitter and headed for Estes Park, about forty miles away. It didn’t take long for Steve’s imagination to go into overdrive. On the way to the hotel, they passed a sign that read ROAD MAY BE CLOSED AFTER OCTOBER. His antenna perked up. When he and Tabby entered the hotel, he noticed that three nuns were leaving, as if the place were about to become godless, and when he and Tabby checked in, they learned it was the last day of the season before the hotel closed for the winter.
As the bellman was showing them to their room, number 217, they passed a fire extinguisher with a long hose coiled up tightly hanging on a wall. Immediately Steve thought, “That could be a snake.”
Further adding to his glee, they discovered they were the only guests in the hotel that night. At dinner, the orchestra played even though they were the sole diners. All the other tables in the restaurant had the chairs turned upside down and placed on top. It was windy and a shutter outside had loosened and banged against the window, a regular thumping rhythm that didn’t let up the whole night.
After dinner, Steve’s excitement continued to build once they returned to their room. “I almost drowned in the bathtub that should have had scratch marks on the side, it was so deep,” he said.
A few weeks before their trip to Estes Park, Steve had been playing around with the idea for a story about a child with ESP at an amusement park. But once he saw all the marvelous props and the spooky setting at the hotel, the idea came to him in a flash, and he changed the story’s location from the park to the Stanley. “By the time I went to bed that night I had the whole book in my mind,” he said. He immediately began writing the story of a little boy with ESP who is acutely sensitive to the evil in the haunted Overlook Hotel and has to deal with his alcoholic father, who wants to kill him.
Admittedly, the money helped ease their lifestyle considerably, but Steve was still surprised at the anger and rage he felt, particularly toward his kids. It especially surfaced while they were living in Colorado; it was the first time he had lived outside his native Maine, and away from familiar territory he felt unsettled. “I felt very hostile to my kids there,” he said. “I wanted to grab them and hit them. Even though I didn’t do it, I felt guilty feelings because of my brutal impulses.”
After he became a father, Steve discovered that when it came to the rule-book on fatherhood, he had to make it up as he went along. The fifties sitcoms Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver were his role models: “I thought I’d come in the door at night and yell, ‘Honey, I’m home!’ and the kids would sit around the table and eat their peas and share their interesting little adventures. I wasn’t prepared for the realities of fatherhood.”
Naomi was born when Steve was twenty-two, and Joe came along a couple of years later. Without planning on it, he began to write several books about fatherhood so that he could at least understand it better. “I had feelings of anger about my kids that I never expected,” he admitted.
One day when Joe was three years old, the boy got hold of one of Steve’s manuscripts and thought he’d write like Daddy. So he took his crayons and drew little cartoons all over one of Steve’s novels-in-progress. When Steve saw it, he thought, “The little son of a bitch, I could kill him.”
Steve’s mother’s words echoed in his ears while he worked on the story that would become The Shining. Just as she had told him to say something three times in a row to prevent it from happening, Steve held a hope that if he wrote about something bad—particularly a rage that dwelled deep inside him—he’d never feel compelled to act it out.
“I never wrote anything about children out of a sense of sadism or anger or anything; it was more like, if I write this, it won’t happen, like I’m trying to keep the hex off,” he explained.
But he was surprised that the rage remained, because although sudden financial success had already smoothed over a lot of things, it didn’t necessarily eradicate the demons that had lived within him for most of his life: the shame over his father’s leaving.
He wrote most of The Shining blazingly fast, but when it came time to write one particular scene, he hit a brick wall. Try as he might, he was petrified of writing a scene where a long-dead woman in a bathtub suddenly sits up and heads straight for the boy. “I didn’t want to have to face that unspeakable thing in the tub any more than the boy did,” he said. For several nights before he wrote the scene, he had a nightmare about a nuclear explosion. “The mushroom cloud turned into a huge red bird that was coming for me, but when I finished with the scene, it was gone.”
On the surface, he knew he was writing The Shining to keep his violent urges toward his kids at bay. However, even though he didn’t realize it at the time, he was also writing about his drinking and alcoholism, which by the midseventies had become crucial to his daily life.
“I had written The Shining without realizing that I was writing about myself,” he said. “I’ve never been the most self-analytical person in the world. People often ask me to parse out meaning from my stories, to relate them back to my life. While I’ve never denied that they … have some relationship to my life, I’m always puzzled to realize years later that in some ways I was delineating my o
wn problems, and performing a kind of self-psychoanalysis.”
At one point, The Shining became too close for comfort and he took a break from it to start work on another novel that was sparked by the Patricia Hearst kidnapping. “I was convinced that the only way anybody ever could really understand the whole Hearst case was to lie about it,” he said. His working title was The House on Value Street, and as was usual with Steve, the story unwittingly grew when another news item crossed his path: he’d heard about a chemical spill in Utah that killed some livestock and that inspired a Midwestern preacher to spread the word that the world was about to end as a result.
He had already been working on the novel, which would become The Stand, on and off for a couple of years alongside his other projects when he was suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, and it looked like he might not continue. One day he was browsing in a bookstore when he picked up a new book called Survivors, written by Welsh author Terry Nation, who had also written Doctor Who. “It was about a virus decimating the world and the survivors that were left, and I thought, ‘Great, this guy has just written my book,’ ” he said.
He returned to finish writing The Shining, then completed The Stand despite the competing book. “I felt like my blood was really flowing out of my stomach, and if I didn’t finish the book and stanch the flow, I’d just die,” he said.
The family lived in Boulder for about a year before returning home to Maine in the summer of 1975, where they bought their first house for $150,000 on Kansas Road in Bridgton, a town about forty miles from Portland. “We didn’t feel comfortable in Colorado,” Steve said. When he looked back on the books he wrote in Colorado—The Shining and The Stand—he saw that the characters still carried the sensibility of the working-class people that he grew up with. “We were in Colorado, but I really took my Maine with me,” he said. “You carry your place with you wherever you go.”
Salem’s Lot was published in hardcover in October 1975; the paperback rights sold for $500,000. Again, Stephen got half. His first two novels had made him almost half a million dollars, which was phenomenal for a new writer, and there was the promise of more money from the sale of the movie rights. However, Doubleday published only twenty thousand copies of Salem’s Lot, since the thirteen-thousand-copy sell-through on Carrie had not met the publisher’s projections. To help boost sales, just before the book went to the printer the sales department decided to lower the price of the book by a dollar, changing the price on the dust jackets to $7.95 from $8.95. Salem’s Lot did not hit any bestseller lists, but Steve didn’t really care. He was a full-time novelist and no longer had to worry about providing for his family. He was living his dream.
In the winter of 1976, Steve went to a publishing party in New York where he met an agent who primarily worked with fantasy and horror writers. Kirby McCauley, who had recently moved to New York from the Midwest, had read only one of King’s two books when they met, Salem’s Lot, but after chatting with Steve discovered they shared many of the same interests in obscure authors from the 1940s and ‘50s. As they spoke about such authors as Frank Belknap Long and Clifford Simak, McCauley saw out of the corner of his eye that most of the other writers were queuing up to talk with author James Baldwin, who was holding court in a corner of the room. But Steve was happy to stay with McCauley, and he was impressed when the agent mentioned some of his other clients, including Frank Herbert, Piers Anthony, Robert Silverberg, and Peter Straub. When Steve told him he didn’t have an agent, McCauley told Steve to keep him in mind.
“One of the jobs of an agent is to look ahead at what’s down the road so the writer’s career is protected,” he told King. At the time, a long-term career wasn’t even on Steve’s radar, since his sole purpose up to that point was to write as many books and stories as he could churn out. However, Steve filed it away for the future.
Once the family was back in Maine, Steve was just as productive as ever, and he was grateful that the books continued to sell and that readers were clamoring for more of his work. “Money makes you a little saner,” he said. “You don’t have to do things you don’t want to do.”
He bought himself a Wang word processor so he wouldn’t have to retype his manuscripts, which would give him more time to create stories. He gave Tabby’s gray Olivetti typewriter—the machine he wrote Carrie and Salem’s Lot on—to Naomi, who was exhibiting an interest in writing stories. As he was beginning to enjoy his success, a few nagging, little health problems started to surface, even though he was just shy of thirty years old.
He took medication for high blood pressure, and he occasionally complained of insomnia. Plus, he began to experience migraine headaches, which he referred to as a “work symptom.” And he was still drinking heavily.
In November, Carrie, the first movie based on one of Steve’s books, was released. Brian De Palma, who had directed a few low-budget thrillers, was the director, and Paul Monash produced the film. The production designer was Jim Fish, who was married to actress Sissy Spacek. She was invited to audition for the roles of Sue Snell and Chris Hargensen, but De Palma thought she’d be better cast as Carrie and asked her to read for the part.
The film was a box-office smash. Carrie was made for less than $2 million dollars but ended up grossing $30 million in the United States alone. And it exposed Steve to an entirely new audience. “Carrie the movie put King on the map in a way that a book just won’t,” said George Beahm, author of several books on King. “It got people who don’t normally go into bookstores through the doors.” Once there, they bought Carrie and Salem’s Lot, and they knew to buy The Shining when it was published two short months later.
Steve loved how Brian De Palma interpreted the book into film. “He handled the material deftly and artistically and got a fine performance out of Sissy Spacek,” Steve said. “In many ways, the movie is more stylish than my book, which I still think is a gripping read but is impeded by a certain heaviness, a Sturm und Drang quality that’s absent from the film.”
Some things had to be changed in the movie. In the book, as she wandered back home in shock after the prom, Carrie blew up a few gas stations, which sent the entire town into flames. De Palma struck it from the movie because the special effects would cost too much.
More good news followed in January when Sissy Spacek was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Piper Laurie, who played Carrie’s mother, received a nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
The movie sold more of Steve’s books and attracted a larger audience who wanted to know more about his motivations as well as his background. “A question started to appear in their eyes, sort of like, ‘Where are all the bodies buried, Steve?’ ” he recalled. “Or else they’d casually ask me about my childhood and if I was ever beaten or burned with cigarettes. And I’d say, ‘Really, I’m just like you are,’ and they’d step back.”
Whenever interviewers broached the question, he’d crack a joke and then begin his rote explanation: “Basically, all I’m doing is saying things that other people are afraid to say. The job’s not much different than being a comedy writer. What’s the one thing that nobody wants to talk about, the literary equivalent of taking a fork and scraping it across a blackboard, or making somebody bite on a lemon? And when I find those things, generally the reaction from readers or moviegoers is ‘Thank you for saying that, for articulating that thought.’ ”
High sales and increasing name recognition gave Steve the confidence to ask Doubleday to publish books that had been rejected before Carrie was released. Stephen was keen to have Getting It On, the first novel he wrote back in college, published. The story was about a student who takes over a school and holds his classmates hostage, but Doubleday didn’t want to saturate the market with his name.
He had several first drafts of completed novels and others he had written before he had written Carrie. While some writers may have considered these novels to be just apprenticeship books, learning opportunities and unpublishable, Steve w
anted them to be given a chance to see the light of day as finished books. Back then, editors and publishers didn’t want to publish more than one book a year by one author, believing that each new book would cut into the sales of the others. But Steve was annoyed with the publishing industry’s attitude of “We do it this way because this is the way it’s always been done.”
So instead of sending it to Doubleday, Steve sent Getting It On to Elaine Koster, his editor at his paperback publisher, New American Library. The single-book credo wasn’t an issue because, from the start, Steve maintained, he wanted the book to be published under a pseudonym, to see if it could find an audience on its own without the growing star attraction of his name.
“I was emphatic about not wanting the book to be publicized,” he said. “I wanted it to go out there and either find an audience or just disappear quietly. The idea was not to just publish a book that I thought was good, but to honestly try to create another name that wouldn’t be associated with my name, like having a Swiss bank account.”
The pen name he originally chose for the book was Guy Pillsbury, the name of his late grandfather. Koster passed the manuscript around to other editors and the marketing department for their opinions, but word soon traveled that King was the author. He was so incensed that he took back the book and decided to make a few changes so the same thing wouldn’t happen again.
First, he changed the title to Rage, then he looked around his office for inspiration for his pen name. He spotted a book by Richard Stark on the shelf—the pseudonym of mystery writer Donald Westlake, whose work Steve greatly admired—and a record by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, one of his favorite bands, was playing on his stereo.