Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  After The Shining was released, the questions about Steve’s background increased exponentially. “People always want to know what happened in my childhood,” he complained. “They have to find some way of differentiating, they think there has to be some reason why I’m writing all of these terrible things. But I think of myself as a fairly cheerful person. My memories are that my childhood was quite happy, in a solitary way.”

  He tried to put his disappointment over The Shining behind him as he worked on more novels, stories, and screenplays. In September 1980, Firestarter was published, the first of King’s books to be published in a limited edition, which he would later come to rue for their preciousness and unaffordability. Limited-edition books are typically produced by small publishers in print runs as small as a hundred copies, and they are usually designed in graphically beautiful formats. They are more expensive than their mass-produced counterparts, and in many cases after publication their prices can rise, sometimes several times over, as they are bought and sold by fans of the author. Firestarter is a novel about Charlie McGee, a girl who is pyrokinetic, or can start fires merely by wishing it, and the novel did nothing to reduce the questions from readers and reporters who wanted to know what had happened to Steve when he was growing up. Whereas before he would politely explain to the curious that he led a pretty normal childhood and wasn’t beaten by his mother or locked in a closet, this time he started to deflect the questions by talking about his own kids and his experiences being a parent, in the hopes of coming across as the regular guy that he perceived himself to be.

  “To me the real purpose of having kids has nothing to do with perpetuating the race or the survival imperative, rather, it’s a way to finish off your own childhood,” he explained. “By having children you’re able to reexperience everything you experienced as a child, only from a more mature perspective.” Only at that point, he felt, could he finally leave his childhood behind.

  “Charlie McGee was very consciously patterned on my daughter, because I know how she looks, I know how she walks, I know what makes her mad. I was able to use that, but only to a certain degree. Beyond that, if you tie yourself to your own children, you limit your range. So I took Naomi, used her as the frame, and then went where I wanted.”

  He was also coming under fire by critics for using brand names in his work, such as when the character Royal Snow drinks a Pepsi in Salem’s Lot and Miss Macaferty drove a Volkswagen in Carrie. He defended it, saying, “Every time I did it, I felt like I nailed it dead square. Sometimes the brand name is the perfect word, it will crystallize a scene for me.”

  Reporters quickly learned that one way to break the ice with King was to start talking about his beloved Red Sox and his obsessive devotion to the team. Fans were fascinated to learn the details of King’s dedication, such as that he stops shaving in the fall after the last game of the World Series and doesn’t take a razor to his face until spring training starts. “A part of me dies when the World Series is over,” he said.

  He explained away his undying loyalty to the Red Sox by way of his race: “I’m a white guy. I don’t want to sound like a racist, but Boston has always had a white team. The Red Sox give klutzy white guys something to root for. It shows that maybe white guys can do something in sports.” Despite some obvious racial changes to the team in recent years, Steve has remained a steadfast fan.

  Though most fans were content to read about the details of his life and enjoy his books, Steve was starting to see that fans could be just as obsessive about him as he was about baseball, and in some cases, a lot more so.

  “Sometimes I look in their eyes, and it’s like looking into vacant houses,” he said. “They don’t know why they want autographs, they just want them. Then I realize, not only is this house vacant but it’s haunted.”

  He described one occasion when he was late for an appointment and ran into a fan begging for his autograph, yelling that he was Steve’s biggest fan and had read all his books. Steve apologized and got in the car, and the fan suddenly switched gears and called him a stupid son of a bitch. “The aggregate weight of fanship is overwhelming. They want stuff from you. They want boxes of it,” he said. “The line is so thin between I love you and I hate you. They love you, but part of them wants to see you fall as far as you can.”

  Perhaps how far a fan could go hit home for King on December 8, 1980, when John Lennon was assassinated. When he heard the news, Steve thought back to May of that year when he had been in New York on a promotional tour for The Shining. As he was leaving Rockefeller Center after a TV interview, a fan who introduced himself as his number one fan rushed up to him and asked for an autograph. King signed a slip of paper, then the fan handed his Polaroid camera to a bystander and asked him to take shot of them together. Then the fan asked for an autograph on the photo too, giving Steve a special marker to write on the photograph. “The fan had obviously done this often,” said Steve, with a vague recollection that he had scrawled on that photograph, “Best wishes to Mark Chapman from Stephen King.” But later on, Steve realized it couldn’t have been him.

  “I could never have met Chapman, the dates just don’t fit,” he said, explaining after doing a little digging that Chapman was in Hawaii when King was in New York in late May. At the time, however, he did have an overly obsessive fan “who was always making me sign things,” he recalled. “And he had little round glasses, like the ones Lennon used to wear.”

  From this maelstrom of fan obsession, an idea began to bubble up. Something that the-man-who-could-have-been-Chapman had said started to swirl around in Steve’s mind: “I’m your number one fan.”

  Tabby was starting to worry: “It makes me nervous, I worry about his security. There’s always the possibility that someone might try to do to him what was done to John Lennon. He’s very well-known, and there are real crazy people out there.”

  Sometimes she felt she was a prisoner of his success.

  Steve told her she had nothing to worry about.

  7

  DIFFERENT SEASONS

  Spurred on by her husband’s success, Tabby’s urge to write had returned with a vengeance. However, with three children to care for, ranging from four to eleven, she found it hard to carve out time for herself. She’d start stories and never finish them and complain to Steve about the lack of time. After hearing Tabby grumble once too often, Steve presented her with a brand-new typewriter and told her to rent an office outside the house where she could work without interruption. After they moved to the West Broadway house, she began going to an office regularly and worked on the story that would turn out to be Small World, her first published novel.

  Tabby was never shy about admitting that she was riding on her husband’s coattails, at least in terms of getting a quick look from an editor, whereas the manuscripts of other first novelists would end up in a publisher’s slush pile, lucky to get read at all. “Being Steve’s wife helped, either in providing me with a decent agent, or perhaps some publisher thought they would make sales on the novelty,” she said. Steve passed Small World to his editor, George Walsh, at Viking, who later told Tabby that he grudgingly decided to read it as a favor to her husband and that he wasn’t expecting it to be anything more than a first good effort, albeit unpublishable. But he liked it, accepted it, and scheduled it for publication in 1981.

  Though Steve was indeed proud of his wife, he did admit that he felt a tiny bit threatened when Tabby returned to the writing she had all but neglected since college.

  “I felt jealous as hell,” he said. “My reaction was like a kid’s. I felt like saying, ‘Hey, these are my toys, you can’t play with them.’ But that soon changed to pride when I read the final manuscript and found that she had turned out a damned fine piece of work.”

  As usual, Tabby had a more prosaic view: “I think we’re both willing to say that I put ten years into helping him advance in every way that I could, from socializing to reading the manuscripts and making suggestions, as he did with mine. It was
quite a trick to write when the children were small. Fortunately, they got used to being ignored. Kids need a modicum of being ignored, just as they need a soupçon of boredom. Being ignored is how you find out you’re small potatoes, and boredom often leads to actual thought, exploration, and discovery.”

  That it was now her turn to shine had as much to do with her approach toward writing as with raising the kids. Whereas Steve could write in the middle of a tornado and would go through withdrawal if he couldn’t write, Tabby was never that obsessed. “For me, the problem has always been getting started,” she said. “I am one of the world’s greatest avoiders. But once I start, I’m hard to turn off.”

  Along with differing in their drives, their work styles varied as well. Tabby loved nothing more than to bury herself in the research before writing a word. “I have my compulsions, but they’re not in the direction of working every day,” she said. “They’re more in the direction of researching the living crap out of it and then entering the story.”

  Steve, on the other hand, loathed research. “If I read a few case histories, I tend to get a kind of feel for it,” he said. “I’ll sit down and write the book and do the research after, because when I’m writing a book, my attitude is ‘Don’t confuse me with facts. Just let me go ahead and get on with the work.’ ”

  Tabby was an inveterate outliner, but Steve rarely sketched out anything in advance. “I start with an idea and I know where I’m going, but I don’t outline,” he said. “I usually have an idea of what’s going to happen ten pages ahead, but I never write any of it down because that sort of closes you off from an interesting side trip that might come along. Theodore Sturgeon told me once that he thinks the only time the reader doesn’t know what’s going to happen next is when the writer didn’t know what was going to happen. That’s the situation I’ve always written in. I’m never sure where the story’s going or what’s going to happen with it.”

  In the original Doubleday hardcover edition of The Stand, Harold Lauder left a chocolate fingerprint on a diary after eating a PayDay candy bar. However, PayDays didn’t contain any chocolate back then, and many fans sent Steve irate letters and PayDay bars to prove it. In the subsequent paperback editions he changed the candy bar to a Milky Way, but later on, PayDays did come in chocolate. Fans write to him in droves after each new book is published to point out errors, and he always fixes them. Some suspect he deliberately inserts an error to make sure fans are paying attention.

  After Steve’s first editor, Bill Thompson, left Doubleday, he took a job at a small publisher called Everest House. He asked Steve to write a book that would be partially a memoir of King’s early horror influences and partially a history of Americans’ fascination with the horror genre. Steve loved the idea and began working on Danse Macabre, his first nonfiction book.

  As he started to write the book, an idea that he had kicked around for years—and had successfully ignored—was knocking on the door again. In the summer of 1981, Steve realized he finally had to face it head-on and start writing.

  “I had to write about the troll under the bridge or leave him—IT—forever,” he said. “I remember sitting on the porch, smoking, asking myself if I had really gotten old enough to be afraid to try, to just jump in and drive fast. I got up off the porch, went into my study, cranked up some rock and roll, and started to write the book. I knew it would be long, but I didn’t know how long.”

  Cujo was published a few months after Steve started writing IT.

  He got the idea for Cujo by continuing his habit of connecting two seemingly unrelated subjects. With Carrie, it was “adolescent cruelty and telekinesis.”

  With Cujo, it was two incidents a couple of weeks apart. While bringing his motorcycle in for service to a mechanic located on a remote back road, his bike gave out in the yard. He called out, but instead of a human, a mammoth Saint Bernard galloped out of the garage heading straight toward him, growling all the way. The mechanic followed, but the dog continued to charge. When the dog lunged at King, the mechanic hit the dog on the butt with a massive socket wrench.

  “He must not like your face,” he said, then asked Steve about the motorcycle.

  Even though they were now flush, Steve and Tabby were still driving the Ford Pinto they had bought new with the $2,500 advance from Carrie, even though the car had been plagued with problems from the beginning. A couple of weeks after Steve’s run-in with the Saint Bernard, the car acted up and Steve’s wild imagination thought back to what if Tabby had driven the car to the mechanic and the dog had lunged toward her? And what if there no humans were around? Worse yet, what if the dog was rabid?

  Steve didn’t come up with the idea of making the dog the main character until later. At first, he was just chewing on the idea of a mother and son who were confined to a small space. One angle that he started to pursue was that the mother would be rabid, and the suspense in the book would revolve around her fighting herself not to injure her son as the rabies engulfed her.

  However, Steve had to backtrack a bit after he did a bit of research about rabies and discovered that the gestation period took a bit longer. “Then the game became to see if I could put them in a place where nobody will find them for the length of time that it takes for them to work out their problem.”

  Steve was off and running, and before he knew it, he had churned out close to a hundred pages of the story with his motto of never let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. This shows how a story starts as a seed in Stephen King’s mind: “You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it makes a story,” he explained. “But you never know when it’s going to happen.”

  Cujo was an experiment for King, the first book he had written where the story was told all within the confines of a single chapter. It didn’t start out that way; he had initially envisioned the story in terms of traditional chapters. But as the story developed, along with the sense of horror, he altered his approach: “I love Cujo because it does what I want a book to do. It feels like a brick thrown through somebody’s window, like a really invasive piece of work. It feels anarchic, like a punk-rock record: it’s short and it’s mean.”

  Readers gave him an earful about it, and he received letters by the truck-load that criticized him for letting a child die in a book, albeit one who was innocent and simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, unlike the dozens of teenagers who were killed in Carrie, who seemingly deserved it because of their actions.

  But the characters in Cujo felt as if they were light-years away from Steve’s own existence for another reason: the subplot showed a woman having an affair and what happened when her husband found out. Just as Steve had procrastinated about writing the difficult scene of the woman in the bathtub in The Shining, Steve put off writing a scene in Cujo.

  “The hardest scene I ever had to write in my life was when the husband goes home and confronts her,” he said. “I’ve never faced that situation, not even with a girlfriend, but I wanted to work it out in a way that would be fair to both of them, and I didn’t want to turn one of them into a villain.” He wrestled with the characters, the dialogue, the action. “It was easy enough to react to the man because I know how I’d feel. It was tougher to react sympathetically to the woman.”

  It took him two days to hammer it out when he would normally have banged out a scene of similar length in ninety minutes. “It was a lot of sitting and looking at the typewriter and looking at the page,” he remembered. “But it wasn’t where I’m trying to frame a sentence, it was more like, ‘Why did she do that?’ And the answers are not perfect in the book as to why she did that. But what’s there is honest enough.”

  Six years of cocaine and alcohol addiction was taking its toll. He was such a heavy user that to continue his late-night marathon writing sessions, he was snorting coke through the night, having occasionally to remove the blood-soaked cotton balls he stuck up both nostrils to keep the blood from dripping onto his shirt and the typewriter.

  He
would later admit that when he did the revisions for Cujo in early 1981, he had no recollection of doing so.

  With his growing success and international acclaim, Steve was still sending his short stories to magazines because they all knew that running his name on the cover would give them the boost so many of them desperately needed. Sometimes it even meant the difference between continuing to publish or shutting the doors. When Cujo was scheduled for publication, Steve contacted Otto Penzler, a mystery editor and publisher who was running a small publishing company called Mysterious Press, and offered to let him print a limited edition of Cujo. He accepted Steve’s generous offer and printed 750 copies with a cover price of $65 in 1981.

  “The income from that one book covered the printing bill for Cujo as well as our previous book, and there was enough money left over to have another book printed,” said Penzler. “I probably would have gone out of business if it hadn’t been for Cujo.” He’d heard similar stories from several other small presses, all of whom had no money and were constantly struggling. When Steve offered the limited-edition rights to a book, they were soon not just back on their feet but prospering and growing. Penzler’s press became partners with Warner Books in 1984, who bought him out five years later.

  Steve and Tabby also made a new friend and kindred spirit. Penzler ran the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, and the Kings would often visit the store together to buy books and ask Penzler’s advice on what to read next. He found their respective tastes a bit curious. “I always thought it a bit bizarre that she tended to like really tough, violent, serial-killer books while he liked P. D. James,” Penzler said.

  One of the unexpected benefits of working at home was that Steve was able to spend a lot of time playing and reading with his kids.