Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  To promote his book, King went out on his first major book tour that fall, hitting seven cities in six days. When it was over, he said, “It feels like you’ve been in a pillow fight where all the pillows have been treated with low-grade poison gas.” Stephen King was quickly becoming a household name, five short years after his first novel was published. He often felt overwhelmed, but was happy. This is what he had worked so hard for, this is what he wanted, he thought.

  Next up he’d hit television for the first time. Salem’s Lot was a four-hour miniseries that aired on CBS in two parts on November 17 and 24, 1979. Steve could have chosen to be involved with the picture, but decided to concentrate on writing books. Possibly he opted out because he sensed that the story would have a hard time getting past the network censors, or else he anticipated that he’d be frustrated by their cuts. Producer Richard Kobritz said the crew worked at a breakneck pace because another miniseries dropped out of the fall schedule shortly after filming finished, and they had eight weeks to prepare the film for air.

  “We worked seven days a week just to edit the thing and then dub it and add the score,” said Kobritz. “Steve never came to the set of either picture, so we sent a videotape of a rough cut so he could get an idea what we did. I think he enjoyed not being involved and looking at it as a finished product.”

  Kobritz said that one of the biggest challenges he faced was how to cast the lead vampire, and the lead role of Richard Straker. Earlier that same year, two vampire movies were box-office hits, and both the stars were handsome, sexy, and eloquent middle-aged men: George Hamilton starred in the comedy Love at First Bite, released in April, while Frank Langella played the lead in Dracula, a near-faithful adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, which appeared in July.

  To make Kurt Barlow, the vampire character in Salem’s Lot, stand out, Kobritz decided that Barlow would not speak a word in the entire movie and that all of his dialogue would go to Straker, his human go-between, played by James Mason. He also tried to delay the vampire’s first appearance as long as possible to draw people into the story; Kobritz said that the vampire first appeared almost halfway into the movie, at the 90-minute mark. The entire uncut version is 184 minutes without commercials.

  Before the airdate, the miniseries was previewed at a large theater in Beverly Hills, and Kobritz’s hunch was correct. “The first time the vampire appeared, the audience started screaming, and again when the little boy who was dead and buried pops out of the coffin,” he said. When the vampire was staked in the heart, the network censors dealt with the violence by darkening the image on the screen. The following year, the miniseries was repeated during a mayoral election in Los Angeles, so the movie was cut into occasionally for news updates and election news. “The network received a record number of calls to complain about the interruptions,” Kobritz said.

  Salem’s Lot was nominated for three Emmys and nominated for an Edgar for best television feature or miniseries. Best of all, Steve was happy with the way the miniseries turned out.

  As a result of his increasing visibility, Steve was also getting well acquainted with the part of the life that many bestselling authors loved, and some, such as him, loathed: the media interviews, publicity, and kissing up to reporters, all to sell books.

  “As a kid, I didn’t talk much, I wrote,” he said. “A day of interviews with reporters is hard for me because, generally speaking, I’m not a very good talker. I’m not used to externalizing my thoughts other than on paper, which is typical of writers. When someone tries to make a thing out of being a writer, that’s bad enough. What’s even worse is if people call you an author and you let them do that.”

  Yet, there was a definite upside. He said it felt beyond surreal when he was in New York for a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria with the producers of The Shining to discuss who would make a better lead, Jack Nicholson or Robert De Niro.

  Getting back to Maine was a reality check—and a relief.

  “I come back home and pick up the toys and see if the kids are brushing in the back of their mouths, and I’m smoking too many cigarettes and chewing aspirin alone in this office, and the glamour people aren’t here,” he said. “There is a curious loneliness to my life. I have to produce day after day and deal with my doubts that what I’m producing is trivial and maybe not even that good. So, in a way, when I go to New York City, I feel like I’ve earned it.”

  Plus, the nice thing about Maine was that for the most part people left him alone. Back home, he didn’t have books thrust in his face constantly and people sucking up to him. And while he tried to write every day when he was traveling, no matter how busy he was, the ideas just didn’t come to him the same way they did back in Maine, especially in rural Maine. “It really does feel as though reality is thinner in the country. There is a sense of the infinite that’s very, very close, and I just try to convey some of that in my fiction,” he said.

  He was also getting a little tired of moving around so much; he was uneasy with it, the constant relocation was beginning to remind him of his peripatetic childhood. He wanted to find one place and settle down, preferably never to move again.

  Once Steve finished up his teaching responsibilities at the university, the Kings spent a few months at their lake house in Center Lovell before figuring out their next move.

  He and Tabby had batted around the idea of living elsewhere, maybe somewhere a little more glamorous than Maine, but they had found that Colorado didn’t fit and neither did Great Britain. They were native Mainers, they still lived like it, and it’s where they felt most comfortable. So they decided to buy another house instead of living year-round at the summer house in Center Lovell, which was in an area mostly populated by summer people and therefore virtually deserted nine months out of the year. Tabby wanted Naomi, Owen, and Joe to live near other kids, where they could run out the door and play kickball or tag by just crossing the front lawn.

  The choice came down to Bangor or Portland.

  “Tabby wanted to go to Portland and I wanted to go to Bangor because it was a hard-ass working-class town—there’s no such thing as nouvelle cuisine once you are north of Freeport,” Steve said. He also thought an important story was hidden somewhere in the city that he didn’t yet know about. He had an idea about bringing together everything he’d ever learned about monsters, and he knew he wouldn’t find it in Portland because it was the same kind of place as Boulder, filled mostly with white-collar types.

  So once they chose Bangor, they started to look for a house where they could feel at home. It didn’t take long to find it.

  As many a craggy-faced, old Yankee has said when asked for directions from an out-of-towner, when it comes to Bangor, Maine, “You can’t get they-ah from he-yah.”

  Well, you can, but it’s going to take a lot longer than you think. Bangor, an old, stagnant mill town, is an oasis unto itself. Many visitors think that those who live there either feel trapped, almost as if there were nowhere to go because anywhere else is so far away, or else it’s a perfect hideaway for the reclusive.

  Stephen King undoubtedly fits into the latter category. Once you enter Maine on I-95, it’s an hour to Portland, the largest city in the state, and then another hour on into Augusta, the state capital. The drive so far is interesting, not boring, punctuated by smallish cities and invitations to nearby shoreline attractions. Between Augusta and Bangor, however, the story changes, and rapidly.

  The view for the last eighty miles is not much more than trees, an occasional fellow motorist, and moose-crossing signs.

  As Steve himself has put it, you either want to get to Bangor so badly that you’ll withstand the trip there or you’ll stay far away. If you fly, there are only two daily flights, from Boston. And if you want to fly from Portland to Bangor, you really can’t get there from here, because there are no direct flights between the two cities.

  “One of the reasons that I live in Bangor is because if somebody wants to get to me, they have to be really dedicated,” Steve s
aid. “They have to really want to come here. It isn’t like I lived in New York or L.A. and somebody could pull my chain whenever they wanted to. So I stay here because there are no distractions whatsoever.”

  Bangor, long referred to as the Queen City, was once a thriving lumber town, its primary commodity white pine from the forests that surround it for hundreds of miles in every direction. The city hit its industrial peak in 1872, when twenty-two hundred ships entered the harbor that year, carrying out almost 250 million board feet of lumber for export worldwide. During that time Bangor was referred to as the Lumber Capital of the World, but as people began to migrate west and harvest the rich stands of forests in the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains, there was less call for the hearty white pine of down-east Maine. In 1870 the population of Bangor was 18,289, which dropped to 16,857 only a decade later. It has rebounded since then. In 2000, the population was recorded at 31,473.

  In 1980 the Kings bought the William Arnold House at 47 West Broadway, the only Italianate-style villa, built between 1854 and 1856, in Bangor. The square tower on the right that faces the street was original to the house; the octagonal tower on the left side was added sometime in the late 1880s. The mansion contains twenty-four rooms and sits on seven acres.

  When she was in her teens, Tabby would stand outside the house while on a walk with a girlfriend and imagine the house was hers. But for a girl from Old Town, one of eight children whose family ran the general store, she knew it would remain a dream. But when Steve and Tabby started to look for a house in Bangor and discovered the red house with the two oddly shaped towers was for sale, they jumped at it.

  “I thought it was destiny,” said Tabby.

  Once the house was theirs, the Kings got busy turning it into their dream house. It took a small team of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and wrought-iron artists three years to renovate the house from top to bottom, and from the front of the property line to the back.

  For the kitchen, six smaller rooms were combined to create a massive open space with a custom-made counter a bit taller than the norm so Steve could chop vegetables and knead bread without strain. There’s a brick oven made from Royal River bricks, which were kiln-fired near Durham. A mammoth sink is the color of fresh blood, with massive butcher-block counters, and an electric dumbwaiter sends soiled towels and kitchen linen up to the second-floor laundry.

  Steve, still grateful that Tabby stood by him during the scathingly tough years of the early seventies when most spouses would have been long gone, asked what she wanted more than anything else in the world.

  She had learned how to swim a few years earlier, and she said all she wanted was a pool.

  “Consider it done,” said Steve, and a forty-seven-foot-long pool, twelve feet at its deepest end, was built in the barn that was perpendicularly attached to the house out back. During the renovation, the tiny square windows that had lit the inside of the horse stalls stayed, and a new, larger stained-glass window—with an image of a flying bat—was added to a room overlooking the pool that serves as Steve’s office in the barn, accessible through a hidden passageway. From the inside of his office, there appears to be no way out; the door is actually a thick chunk of the bookcase that leads out. The boy who had grown up with no indoor plumbing now had a forty-seven-foot indoor swimming pool.

  In true Stephen King style there are bats outside and inside the house—both real and fake. He leaves Tabby to take care of the real ones. “We get bats in the house because it’s an old house,” she said. “I’m the one who is in charge of bat control. I capture the bat and put it out while he just screams.”

  Then there’s the fence. Yes, that fence.

  Architectural blacksmith Terry Steel designed and built the elaborate wrought-iron fence around the house. “It was important for the fence and gates to work with the architecture of the house, to be graceful and attractive, and yet to reflect the personalities of the occupants as well,” Steel said. “While Steve wanted bats for the fence, Tabby wanted spiders and webs.” The Kings also wanted the fence to convey an even more important message: “Look all you want, but don’t even think of trespassing.”

  When Steel met with the Kings at their house for design consultations, he saw numerous Superman and Batman comic books scattered around the house. He decided to use the bat symbol from Batman for the shape of his bat. “I wanted superhero characters, not demonic characters,” Steel explained.

  From start to finish, the fence was eighteen months in the making, and in the end it contained 270 lineal feet of hand-forged iron that weighed in at just over eleven thousand pounds. In addition to the bats, spiders, and webs requested by the occupants, Steel threw in a couple of goat heads as well.

  Once the family had moved into the house, besides the secret passageways Steve and Tabby noticed another unexpected feature of the house: a resident ghost. While Steve said he’s never seen the presence—apparently that of a General Webber, who died in the house a hundred years before the Kings moved in—he does say that occasionally when he’s writing late at night after everyone else has gone to bed, he starts to feel spooked and gets the sense that he isn’t the only one in the room.

  Tabby, however, has noticed the ghost’s presence in sudden sounds that aren’t just the noises an old house makes, and in a strong cigar smell she’ll suddenly encounter when walking through the house.

  A few other spooky things have been noted about the house on West Broadway. It was the third place in a row the Kings lived where someone had killed himself. When Tabby went shopping for furniture for the house, she bought a bedroom set from a used-furniture store, and when the shopkeeper wrote up the order, he told her it was the third time that he’d sold the same exact set; the first two times, the husbands had died in the bed and the widows couldn’t bear to have the furniture around. When she told Steve the story, he wasn’t bothered by it, figuring the third time’s a charm. And it has been … so far.

  Though Steve has never seen General Webber, he did witness a strange apparition in another old house on Grove Street in Bangor where a political fund-raiser for former U.S. senator George Mitchell was held, shortly after the Kings moved into the West Broadway mansion.

  Steve had put his and Tabby’s coats in an upstairs bedroom on a bed designated for that purpose. They stayed for about a half hour before deciding to go for dinner at Sing’s Polynesian Restaurant, their favorite Chinese joint. He went back upstairs for the coats—the stack on the bed had grown exponentially in the short time they were there—and started to paw through the pile. Just then, out of his peripheral vision, he saw a man in a chair across the room sitting with his hands crossed.

  “He wore glasses and a blue pinstripe suit, and he was bald,” said Steve, who immediately became nervous because he thought the man thought Steve was rummaging through the coats to steal something. “I started to say something to him about how hard it was to find your coat at these things, and suddenly there was nobody there. The chair was empty.”

  While Steve believed in ghosts, he had his limits: “I would not participate in a séance under any circumstances, not even if my wife died and a medium said she had a message from her.” He also believes in psychics and ESP: “We have enough documentation so that anyone that doubts the psychic experience is on the level with a person who continues to smoke two or three packs of cigarettes a day and denies that there is a link between smoking and lung cancer.”

  When Stanley Kubrick first expressed interest in directing The Shining, Steve didn’t believe it.

  “I was standing in the bathroom in my underwear, shaving, and my wife comes in and her eyes are bugging out. I thought one of the kids must be choking in the kitchen. She said, ‘Stanley Kubrick is on the phone!’ I didn’t even take the shaving cream off my face.”

  Steve had already heard a story about the legendary director that made the rounds of Hollywood. At the time, Kubrick was actively searching for a book to turn into a movie, and his secretary became accustomed to hearing
a loud thump from inside his office every half hour or so. Kubrick would pick up a book and start to read, but after forty or fifty pages he’d give up and throw it against the wall before picking up the next, only to repeat himself a short time later. One morning the thumps ceased, and the secretary contacted him on the intercom. When he didn’t respond, she rushed into the room because she thought he’d had a heart attack. She found him reading The Shining. He held it up and said, “This is the book.”

  Kubrick was known for his perfectionistic ways in his previous vocation as a photographer for Look magazine. He brought his obsessive tendencies with him when he first started to direct movies in the 1960s, including A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Dr. Strangelove. He was adamant that he control every aspect of his later films and would often shoot hundreds of takes of one scene before moving on to the next.

  With a budget of $22 million and Kubrick writing the screenplay with novelist Diane Johnson, Steve expected the movie would turn out to be as good as Carrie and Salem’s Lot. While The Shining would eventually gross over $64 million, he was greatly disappointed at Kubrick’s execution of his story: “It’s a Cadillac with no engine in it. You can’t do anything with it except admire it as sculpture.”

  His primary issue was with the casting of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. He preferred Michael Moriarty—today best known for his role as Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone on Law & Order in the early nineties, but who also played a major role in the 1978 film Who’ll Stop the Rain—or Jon Voight, who appeared in such major seventies films as Coming Home, Deliverance, and Catch-22. “Nicholson was too dark right from the outset of the film,” said Steve. “The horror in the novel came from the fact that Jack Torrance is a nice guy, not someone who’s just flown out from the cuckoo’s nest. There was no moral struggle at all.”

  Parts of the film were shot at the Timberline Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon. Kubrick changed the all-important room number from 217 in the book to 237 in the film. The Timberline had a room 217 and the owners thought that guests would refrain from booking the room after the movie came out, but there was no room number 237, so Kubrick changed it.