Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  Richard Bachman it would be.

  Koster accepted the novel with the caveat that no one at the publisher would know who the real author was.

  The Shining, published in January 1977 with a first printing of fifty thousand hardcover copies, was Steve’s first hardback bestseller. He was in a whole new league. Book reviewers from the New York Times to Cosmopolitan lauded King’s ability to hook the reader into one of the first novels to really explore in depth the actions of an abusive parent.

  He based the title on a song by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band called “Instant Karma,” with a refrain that went “We all shine on.” But he had to change the title to The Shining after the publisher said that shine was a negative term for African-American.

  But it was too scary for others. Because of the book’s visibility and popularity, it was the first of King’s books to be banned from school libraries, most often instigated by parents, and some teachers, for portraying a father as being truly evil. A few school librarians called Steve—this was at a time when he was still answering his own phone—and asked for his opinion.

  He replied that it was okay if some parents felt that way, since they’re the ones who paid the taxes for the library, and since the school was legally responsible for the kids during school hours, they were within their rights to remove the book. He then added a caveat: “But I think that every kid in the school should know it’s been banned and should immediately get to the nearest bookstore or public library to find out what it was that their parents didn’t want them to know. Those are the things kids really ought to know, what people don’t want them to know.”

  Readers and reviewers criticized the murderous Jack Torrance and questioned why Steve felt compelled to write about such things. He explained his motivation for writing the book by describing the impulses that dwell inside every human being, giving the example of a typical headline from the National Enquirer or the Weekly World News in the late seventies: “Baby Nailed to Wall.” “You could say you never did that to your kids even though you had the impulse a couple of times, and that’s where the horror is born,” he said matter-of-factly. “Not in the fact that somebody nailed a baby to the wall, but that you can remember times when you felt like knocking your kid’s head right off his shoulders because he wouldn’t shut up.”

  Though Steve was notorious for telling interviewers that he just wrote his stories, he didn’t stop to analyze them, The Shining was one of the first stories where he came right out and said the main character Jack Torrance was tormented by his father, though he stopped short of adding that he’d suffered the same fate.

  “People ask if the book is a ghost story or is it just in this guy’s mind. Of course it’s a ghost story, because Jack Torrance himself is a haunted house. He’s haunted by his father. It pops up again, and again, and again.”

  However, Steve failed to mention anything about the theme of alcoholism in the book, as he wasn’t ready to admit—to himself or others—that he shared something else in common with Jack Torrance.

  As expected, Hollywood came knocking, especially given the success of the movie Carrie, which had been released two months earlier.

  Despite his runaway success and his now having enough money to live on for the rest of his life, Steve continued to write stories for the men’s magazines, which had helped him buy medicine for his kids when he and Tabby were living in virtual poverty just a few short years earlier. Partly it was a way to thank the magazines and editors that had helped give him his start, but he also appreciated that the magazines provided an outlet for the stories that continued to pour from him.

  Since his first publication in Cavalier in October 1970, Steve had continued to submit stories to his editor Nye Willden. Since the first story, “Graveyard Shift,” had been published, almost a dozen of King’s stories had appeared in the magazine. One day, Willden thought it might be a great idea to have a short-story contest in Cavalier. Steve would write the first half of a horror story and readers would be invited to finish the story, with prizes awarded to those who finished the story the best, according to King.

  Willden found a facial close-up photograph of a strange, insane-looking cat, and he thought the image would spark a great first half-story from Steve, who loved the idea, and the editor sent him a copy of the photo.

  A couple of weeks later, back came a manuscript entitled “The Cat from Hell,” with a note: “There was no way I could write just a half of a story,” Steve wrote, “so I wrote a complete story. Cut it where you wish for your contestants and maybe, after you award the winner you might want to publish my complete story to show what I did to it.”

  The first five hundred words of “The Cat from Hell” appeared in the March 1977 issue of Cavalier, with Steve’s full-length version appearing in the June issue along with those of some of the winners and runners-up.

  After the success of The Shining, Doubleday wanted another novel from King to be published the following year. But King had already started to work on The Stand, and he knew it wouldn’t be ready in time. So instead he offered Doubleday a short-story collection of the pieces he had sold to Cavalier and other men’s magazines over the last seven years and called it Night Shift. The book contained the stories “The Mangler,” “Battleground,” “Trucks,” and “Children of the Corn,” among others.

  He would have offered Doubleday one of the Richard Bachman novels, except that King felt his pseudonymous books were of a different flavor, and besides, he had already promised his earlier novels—The Long Walk, Rage, and Roadwork—to New American Library, the publisher of his paperback novels and the Bachman books.

  Doubleday agreed to the short-story collection, though the publisher believed interest in such a book would be limited, and so in February 1978 fifteen thousand copies of Night Shift were published. The first printing was less than that for Salem’s Lot.

  To everyone’s surprise, Night Shift went into a second printing shortly after publication, and Doubleday was caught off guard by the demand. They had to raid the stash of books they supplied to the book clubs—including their own in-house book club, the Literary Guild—and sent books made with cheaper paper out into the marketplace to satisfy bookstore and distributor demand.

  Though Steve loved his work and was thrilled whenever he saw a book with his name on it on a bookstore shelf, he realized he was starting to burn out a little, and he started talking about taking a break.

  “I keep telling myself I’ll take it easy for a while after I finish a book, but after a few days I think it would be fun to work up one of the ideas I’ve stowed away while I worked on the previous book,” he said. “Sure, writing is fun. After all, you’re entertaining yourself too, you know.”

  But he had an added incentive to cut back on his workload, because on February 21, 1977, a third child was born to Steve and Tabby: Owen Phillip King.

  From the beginning, they suspected that their third child was not going to be as smooth sailing as the first two. Owen’s head at birth was extremely large in proportion to his body, and Steve and Tabby thought he might have hydrocephalus, a congenital condition where fluid builds up in brain tissue to create pressure that can lead to hemorrhage, coma, and brain damage.

  Over several weeks, they brought Owen to the hospital for a battery of medical tests. Though the tests proved inconclusive, Steve’s fear over having one of his children die obsessed him.

  “I always wondered how parents coped with a handicapped child,” he said. “It was stunning to discover that I not only loved Owen in spite of his big, mushroom-shaped head, but because of it. It’s a shock to look back at our home movies and see what an odd little duck of a baby he was, this long, skinny, pale person, with his little face under his bumper of a forehead. He wasn’t hydrocephalic, just a kid with a monster head, but we went through a terrifying period in which we feared for both Owen’s death and his life.”

  Despite now being able to publish two novels a year—one under his real name with D
oubleday and one with NAL under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman—Steve was becoming increasingly perturbed at Doubleday, his hardcover publisher, particularly at the way the publisher’s executives were treating their number one author. Other top authors at the publisher were Alex Haley, author of Roots, and Leon Uris, who wrote Trinity, who both seemed to be given more respect.

  “Every time he came to New York to meet with me or go over manuscripts, some of the top brass would walk by and they never once recognized him. I would have to introduce him all over again,” said Bill Thompson.

  In September of 1978, The Stand was published with a first printing of thirty-five thousand copies. Steve considered the book to be his first masterpiece, an apocalyptic novel about a superflu that kills most of the population. The survivors are then engaged in a battle of good against evil. He viewed it as his version of Lord of the Rings set in the American landscape. He pegged good guy Stu Redman against Randall Flagg—standin for the devil—and tossed the sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder into the mix to see which side he would pick.

  “I wrote the line ‘A dark man with no face,’ and then combined it with that grisly little motto, ‘Once in every generation a plague will fall among them,’ and that was that,” he said. “I spent the next two years writing an apparently endless book called The Stand. It got to the point where I began describing it to friends as my own little Vietnam, because I kept telling myself that in another hundred pages or so I would begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

  “To a large extent, Harold Lauder is based on me. With any character that a writer creates, you try to look at people and get a feel for them and understand the way they think. But Harold is a terrible loner, and he is somebody who feels totally rejected by everybody around him, and he feels fat and ugly and unpleasant most of the time.”

  Steve also said that the destructive side of his personality had a particularly good time when he was writing The Stand. “I love to burn things up, at least on paper, and I don’t think arson would be half as much fun in real life as it is in fiction,” he said, citing one of his favorite scenes, when the Trashcan Man set the tanks at an oil refinery on fire. “I love fire, I love destruction. It’s great, it’s black, and it’s exciting. The Stand was particularly fulfilling because there I got a chance to scrub the whole human race and, man, it was fun! Much of the compulsive, driven feeling I had while I worked on The Stand came from the vicarious thrill of imagining an entire entrenched social order destroyed in one stroke. That’s the mad-bomber side of my character, I suppose.”

  Steve noted, “Although many people still regard The Stand as an anthology of the AIDS epidemic, the disease had not even been identified when the book was first published. When the AIDS thing started to happen, I couldn’t believe how much it was like The Stand. It was almost as though I’d invented it myself.”

  When King first handed in the manuscript for The Stand, at twelve hundred pages and weighing in at twelve and a half pounds, Doubleday said it was too long. Doubleday’s press at that time could only bind a book that was so thick—around eight hundred pages—and that was it. They told Steve they needed to cut four hundred pages, saying he could do it or they could do it.

  He said he would do it, though he was becoming increasingly incensed at his publisher. Given the millions of dollars his books had generated for Doubleday, he felt he had the right to call his own shots. But they insisted on cutting the book by one-third, or else they refused to publish the book. To make matters worse, because of the first contract he had signed, which doled out money in small yearly increments, he wasn’t even seeing his share of the profits. The original contract specified that the publisher would invest the author’s royalty income, paying him up to $50,000 a year. Most authors, then and now, came nowhere near generating that amount of income each year. But Steve did. And he asked Doubleday to alter the clause. They refused, even though he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the movie rights as well as the foreign editions. He felt Doubleday was deliberately ripping him off. He was reaching his limit with the publisher who had thrilled him in 1973 when they told him they would publish Carrie. Based on the income the publisher was generating just on the paperback sales of his books, King felt he not only deserved more respect but more money. The Stand was the last book that King contractually owed the publisher, so he threw a deal on the table.

  Doubleday would get his next three novels if they paid an advance of $3.5 million.

  Thompson, always an advocate for his star author, pressed his bosses to meet Steve’s demand, but they refused. The publisher offered $3 million.

  Steve thought back to the literary agent Kirby McCauley, whom he’d met the previous year, and asked him what he should do. McCauley suggested they turn to the most logical publisher next, one who was familiar with the revenue his books could generate: his paperback publisher, New American Library. They met Steve’s demand, and even though they only published paperbacks, NAL became Steve’s publisher, selling the hardcover rights to Viking.

  Steve severed his relationship with Doubleday, hired McCauley to be his literary agent, and Thompson ended up a casualty of the cross fire. “When I left Doubleday, they canned him,” said Steve. “It was almost like a taunt: we’ll kill the messenger that brought the bad news.”

  Steve thought the instant change of publishers and news of the million-dollar deal would float all boats, including his first Richard Bachman book, Rage, published in mass-market paperback in September of 1977 by NAL. While it was a great story, King forgot that his name wasn’t on it, but his pseudonym.

  The book disappeared without a trace a month or two later. After all, the world was not looking for a Richard Bachman book, but it was looking for a Stephen King book. While he was obviously pleased that some of his early work was appearing in print, because his name wasn’t on the cover, obviously the sales didn’t come close to those of The Shining. Steve was clearly frustrated, even though he had made it clear that he wanted Rage to sink or swim on its own.

  In the aftermath of the Doubleday difficulties, Steve and Tabby thought it was time for a change of scenery. “I thought that people would get tired of everything being set in Maine,” he said. “England was the land of the ghost story, so I thought I’d go over there and write a ghost story. So we took the kids and put them in school for a year abroad.” They rented a house with the name of Mourlands at 87 Aldershot Road, Fleet, in Hampshire. Author George Beahm said that the Kings had advertised for a home as follows: “Wanted, a draughty Victorian house in the country with dark attic and creaking floorboards, preferably haunted.”

  Almost immediately, Steve discovered the move was a big mistake: his work suffered: “I was totally flat while overseas. It was like my umbilical cord had been cut.”

  One good thing that came out of the trip was that he met Peter Straub, an American writer who lived in London at the time. Straub had written several well-received novels including Julia, Under Venus, and If You Could See Me Now, and his novel Ghost Story was just about to be published when he and King met. One night the writers and their wives, Tabby and Susie, got together for dinner at the Straubs’ house on Hillfield Avenue in London, and the men stayed up drinking and gabbing long after their wives had gone to bed. “We ought to write a book together,” said Steve, and Peter immediately agreed. However, when they compared their schedules, they discovered that both writers were so booked up that the first chance they would have to start was four years into the future. They shook hands on the deal and wrote the date into their appointment books.

  During the year they lived in the U.K., the Kings couldn’t get warm. The rented house they were living in was cold and damp, and they could never heat it properly. After Steve and Tabby moved back to the United States, Susie Straub wrote in a letter, “It really does take time to get used to the English notion of heating, I swear to you, they don’t like being warm.”

  The Kings had intended to stay a full year in England, but afte
r only three months, they decided to return home in mid-December and purchased a new lakefront home in Center Lovell, Maine, where the majority of residents only lived in town for the summer.

  In 1978, Steve was on a roll, cranking out novels and short stories, though with the success of The Stand, he was getting a quick lesson in what it meant to be a celebrity author in America.

  Some fans were starting to follow him into the men’s room at restaurants and pushing books under the stall for him to sign, though he admitted that people at home in Maine basically left him alone. “It’s different in Maine, you know the people you sign for, but I go some places and people can’t even believe that I exist,” he said. “There’s no way to explain it, you feel like a freak.”

  Although by 1978 Steve had made enough money from his first three novels, a collection of short stories, and selling the movie rights to two books to make for a comfortable future, it didn’t mean that he was just going to throw it around. He couldn’t escape the frugality of his childhood. And even more than before, he didn’t like to feel he was being taken advantage of.

  His high school classmate Pete Higgins remembers one evening they went out barhopping. “Though he had his Cadillac by that point, he was still driving his old Dodge Dart around,” said Higgins. Together they hit a dive bar in Lisbon, sat down, and ordered a couple of beers. The waitress told them if they wanted to get on the dance floor, they’d have to pay a cover charge of a couple bucks. They had no intention of dancing, but it was the principle of the thing, Steve thought. So they finished their beers and headed for a bar in Lewiston, a twenty-minute drive away.

  “The cover charge there was five dollars,” said Higgins. “I looked at him and he looked at me and he said, ‘I’m not paying that,’ and I said, ‘Neither am I.’ So we left and ended up at another place with no cover charge. We sat down and we had a good night talking about old times and sipping down a few. But the point was he was into some money at this point and could have easily paid the cover charge for everyone in the room. But he refused.”