Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  When he heard that the average father spends an average of twenty-two minutes with each of his kids in a week, Steve thought that was pathetic. “Mine are in my hip pocket all the time,” he said. “And I like it that way.”

  It almost sounded as if he were in his second childhood, or perhaps the first real one that he’d had, where now he had the control and power, not to mention the money, that he lacked as a kid. “It’s like being in a time machine. If you don’t have kids, there are a lot of things you never have a chance to reexperience: taking kids to Disney pictures, and watching Bambi and saying, ‘Jeez, what schlocky shit this is.’ And then you start to cry, because it pushes the old buttons.”

  Joe, nine years old at the time, was turning into a miniature version of his father. They loved to go to horror movies together, and Joe said that when he grew up, he wanted to be a writer like his dad. Said Tabby, “The kid can write a story, he’s really got the bones down.” Owen, five years younger, wasn’t far behind. The walls of his room were plastered with superhero and space-adventure posters while a toy Loch Ness monster presided over his bed. Even at his tender age, like his brother, he also seemed to have a natural affinity for horror movies, the gorier the better. “You know what parts I like best? The bl-o-o-d-y parts!”

  While their parents clearly benefited from the sheer abundance of time they were able to spend together as a family, it was impossible to avoid thinking about the downside for too long, specifically their father’s fame and notoriety.

  “They’re going to realize someday that there are people who will want their acquaintance only because their father’s famous,” said Tabby in 1982. “They haven’t gotten to the hard part, the moment they have to decide whether they’re going to rebel against us or imitate us. We all come up against this, but it’s a little more difficult when your parents are well-known. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.”

  It wasn’t likely that Steve’s fame was going to diminish anytime soon. In August 1981, he made publishing history as the first writer to have three titles on the Publishers Weekly list simultaneously: Firestarter in hardcover, and The Dead Zone and The Shining in paperback.

  The pressure was continuing to build around him, not only from his fans, but from his publisher. Michael Pietsch today is the publisher at Little, Brown and the editor for James Patterson’s books. With his words about Patterson, Pietsch could have been speaking about King’s early blockbuster years.

  Pietsch said that the hardest part of editing a star author is the pressure that comes from the publishing and business side: “When an author gets to a very high level of success, they become part of the company’s financial planning, basically, for the budgeting part of the month-by-month planning. So the time pressures can become much more urgent because those books are really counted on to be published at a particular moment as part of the company’s highest-level strategy.”

  King knew he was extraordinarily fortunate to have built a successful career in such a short time. In 1982, he decided to extend a helping hand to struggling artists and writers by letting them use the star power of his name. He supplied blurbs to novelists for the covers of their books and granted film rights to his short stories to amateur filmmakers in exchange for a dollar, as long as they were not shown for profit in movie theaters and he received a copy of the final film. He referred to the movies as Dollar Babies, and the first, The Boogeyman, was directed by Jeffrey C. Schiro and released in 1982, based on a short story that appeared in Night Shift.

  In addition to Mysterious Press, Steve was also helping a few other small publishers keep their heads above water. Donald M. Grant was running a small press called Donald M. Grant, Publisher, when he read Steve’s story “The Gunslinger” in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in October 1978. He told Steve he wanted to turn the story into a limited-edition book. King agreed, but first he wanted to polish the story and convert it into chapters of a novel as he had originally intended. The book appeared four years later with a printing of ten thousand with a limited edition of one thousand signed copies, and they all sold out quickly. Everyone was pleased with the final product, and no one thought anything more of it. Though Steve knew he wanted The Gunslinger to be the first of seven books in a projected series, he had enough on his plate and knew he couldn’t return to Roland Deschain’s world anytime soon.

  Plus, it was very different from his bestsellers. “I didn’t think anybody would want to read it,” he said. “It was more like a Tolkien fantasy of some other world. And it wasn’t complete. There was all this stuff to be resolved, including what is this tower and why does this guy need to get there?”

  In May of 1982, The Running Man, the fourth book written under the Bachman pseudonym, was published and met with the same fate as the previous three: published to little fanfare, it disappeared from paperback racks within two months.

  That fall, the movie Creepshow came out. The legendary horror director George Romero, one of King’s childhood heroes, who directed The Night of the Living Dead, teamed up with Steve. The movie consisted of five of his short stories: “The Crate,” “Father’s Day,” “Something to Tide You Over,” “They’re Creeping Up on You,” and “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” which featured King in the leading role. The movie paid homage to the beloved E.C. Comics of his youth.

  The pair first met in the summer of 1979, when Romero headed to Maine with producer Richard Rubinstein to discuss The Stand with Steve, to which they held the rights. Steve was eager to start on the film version of The Stand, but all three agreed to first prove themselves with a smaller low-budget project first, which they could then present to the studio as a success and therefore justify the cost for the big-budget The Stand. However, once they started brainstorming and decided the cast needed well-known actors such as Leslie Nielsen, Adrienne Barbeau, and Ted Danson, the budget ballooned from less than $2 million to more than $8 million.

  Romero and King found in each other kindred spirits. “I think we automatically got along because we’re both guys who live somewhere in the middle, avoiding New York and L.A.,” said Romero, who started out in the business directing commercials but went on to direct the classic cult horror movie Night of the Living Dead in 1968. “We can both sit and giggle at the most gruesome sights, probably because neither of us can conceal his delight—and his amazement—in the fact that he’s not the victim himself. I think we both really do toss out our nightmares for the consumption of others.”

  And both the writer and the director—seven years older than Steve—have loved horror movies since childhood. “If you love horror movies, you have to have a love of pure shit,” said Steve. “You turn into the kind of person who would watch Attack of the Crab Monsters four times.”

  Though King always liked to see how a director and actors interpreted his stories, he wasn’t crazy about being a part of the process in his starring role as Jordy Verrill, least of all the time he had to spend in makeup and wardrobe. Near the end of filming his segment, he had to spend six hours a day having a green AstroTurf-like substance applied to his body.

  In one of the scenes, Steve sticks out his tongue and it’s covered with fungus, but first the designer Tom Savini had to make a mold of his tongue. “He slathered this stuff onto my tongue with a stick, and I had to sit there for ten minutes with my tongue out and about ten pounds hanging off it,” Steve said. Savini got a perfect cast of the tongue, from which he made four green latex tongues, as thin as surgeon’s gloves, that King rolled onto his tongue. Perhaps because of the arduous process, Steve decided to have a little fun with it.

  One day he was wandering through a nearby shopping mall between takes and took one of the tongues with him. When a salesgirl asked if he needed any help, he stuck out his tongue. She screamed and called mall security. Steve laughed and explained it was just a prop. “It was worth it, it was so funny.”

  He liked being on the set, though it was tedious at times. Working cooperatively with other people
was light-years away from how he normally spent his working time, by himself in front of a computer. “It isn’t that I didn’t have fun playing Jordy, but I really think of it as work,” he said. “You just try to do it, and you know when you’re doing a good job and you know when you’re doing a bad job.”

  At first, not surprisingly, he was doing a poor job of acting compared to the work of the other actors in the Creepshow stories, including Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson, and Leslie Nielsen. Romero helped Steve get up to speed. “He wanted a caricature of a dirt farmer, not a real one, and I had a little trouble giving it to him,” Steve said. After one particularly bad take, Romero pulled him aside and told him to think back to the Roadrunner cartoons. “You know how Wile E. Coyote looks when he falls off a cliff?” Romero asked. Of course, said Steve, and George told him that’s how he wanted him to act. From that point on, Steve nailed the part.

  Steve wasn’t the only member of the family with a starring role in the film. Romero noticed that Joe resembled the sketch of the boy in the promotional poster for the movie, and he asked Steve if he could try him out for the role of Billy, the child of an abusive father who appeared in the prologue and epilogue reading a comic book. Steve said okay, Joe tested for the role, and Romero cast the boy, who was nine at the time.

  At first, it was a bit unnerving. “He did get freaked out for a while,” said Steve. “For a little boy to be in his pajamas with a whole bunch of people around his bed on a movie set with all the lights and everything was pretty unsettling. But he got to the point where it was either freak out or go to work, so he went to work.”

  The benefits of being on a set of a horror film were definitely attractive to a little boy. Taking after his dad, Joe had long exhibited a love of creepy things, and people on the set let him play with whatever was at hand. The nine-year-old boy had a field day. “There were all these cool rubber monster parts lying around,” Joe said years later. “For a little kid, it was a blast.”

  One day not long after shooting began, Steve asked his son what he thought of the experience so far.

  Joe blithely told him that he had worms crawling out of him in one scene while they hammered a nail into his head in another. Watching the two converse from afar, the scene could have been nothing more than a cozy little father-and-son powwow. They could have been discussing a Little League game.

  After another day of shooting, Steve and Joe headed back to the motel where they were staying and stopped to pick up dinner on the way. Joe still had his movie makeup on—complete with bruises, cuts, and scabs—when they went through the McDonald’s drive-through window. Steve had a full beard at the time and admittedly looked pretty rough. The girl at the drive-through took one look and called the cops, then stalled Steve for a few minutes. “The next thing you know,” said Steve, “the cops have us in the back of the cruiser and Joe’s eating his fries saying, ‘It’s just a movie,’ and I’m going, ‘That’s right, just a movie, officers.’ ”

  In August 1982, Different Seasons, King’s first book of short stories to be published since Night Shift four years earlier, came out. One of the stories in it was “The Body.” His old college buddy and roommate George MacLeod bought the book and read it, just as he had bought and read all of Steve’s other books. When he got to “The Body,” he smiled when he saw Steve had dedicated the story to him. But as he started to read, he froze.

  One day back in college at the apartment on North Main Street in Orono, Steve asked what MacLeod was working on, and he told him the plot and details of a short story based on an incident from his own childhood. He and a few of his friends had heard of a dead body near the railroad tracks, and they went off to find it. Though he described the story in great detail and knew exactly how it would end, he never finished writing it.

  “He stole it from me,” said MacLeod. “I recognized that story as being literature, and Steve recognized it too, though not on a conscious level. He later told me he had borrowed my story to write his. All of those anecdotes were lifted right out of my story, and essentially the difference is that he had a dead body in his and I had a dead dog in mine. Other than that they were pretty much the same.”

  In interviews, King has described “The Body” as his coming-of-age story. “A lot of ‘The Body’ is true, but most of it is lies,” he said. “As a writer, you tell things the way they should have turned out, not the way they did.”

  MacLeod has admitted that Steve always has his ear tuned for a good story, whether it comes from a book, a movie, or a friend’s story. “If he’s near something, he will absorb it like a sponge,” said MacLeod. “He’s Velcro when it comes to popular culture, he picks it all up. It’s his strength, and naturally it’s his weakness, too.”

  Sandy Phippen, author of numerous novels and short stories and a friend of both, witnessed the whole thing: “Steve published it as his own story, and of course, what do you say about that? But Shakespeare did the same thing; I mean, the story belongs to him who tells it best.” Phippen added that it wasn’t the first time he’d heard of King borrowing another writer’s story, whether spoken or already published.

  “I don’t know if I’d call it plagiarism,” Phippen said, but he did hear about an author who had a good track record of selling books, and several of her stories were packaged in one of the Twilight Zone anthologies from Rod Serling. One was about a car that was inherently evil and killed anyone that came in its path, the exact plot of Steve’s novel Christine, which would be published in 1983. Phippen would later mention the story to a friend who was a cousin of Serling’s, and Phippen asked if they knew about this. The cousin replied that they did indeed know about it, but that they chose to let sleeping dogs lie.

  MacLeod still felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. He let it slide until a few years later when he saw a TV commercial for Stand by Me, the movie based on “The Body.”

  According to Phippen, MacLeod got in touch with Steve, who asked him what he wanted. MacLeod told him that he wanted his name on the movie and some money. Steve didn’t agree, and that was the end of their friendship.

  It wasn’t the first time that a relationship with an old friend was severed because he expected Steve to bring him along on his coattails, at least a little bit. Steve’s childhood friend Chris Chesley also prided himself as a writer, and though Steve had read some of the work Chesley had written as an adult, he declined to pass it along to an editor or agent who could help. Supposedly Chesley became irate and refused any further contact with Steve.

  Steve not only attracted a number of overzealous fans but also women who wanted only one thing from him.

  “There are a lot of women who want to fuck fame or power or whatever it is,” he said. “Sometimes, the idea of an anonymous fuck is appealing when some gal comes up at a bookstore signing and asks me to go to her place when I’m leaving the next morning. And I’m tempted to say, ‘Yeah, let’s pour Wesson oil over each other and really screw our eyes out.’ ”

  But he says he would never risk his marriage for a one-night stand. “Besides, sexually, I’m not terribly adventurous, there are no orgies in my life,” he admitted. “My marriage is too important to me, and anyway, so much of my energy goes into my writing that I don’t really need to fool around.”

  He added that Tabby was not someone he was about to screw around on. “I don’t necessarily believe in marriage,” he said cryptically, “but I believe in monogamy. She’s a rose with thorns, and I’ve pricked myself on them many times in the past, so I wouldn’t dare cheat on her!”

  “Infidelity is a shooting offense,” Tabby concurred.

  While he had addressed some of his greatest fears in his work so far, he said he hadn’t yet dealt with one sexual fear: “I’d like to write a story about the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth, where you were making love to a woman and it just slammed shut and cut your penis off.”

  Instead of writing about this he put the finishing touches on another book, this time about a Gypsy curse. At
the time he was writing Thinner, he was unsure whether to publish it as a King or a Bachman book. Though his earlier Bachman books were edgier and rougher around the edges since they were written in his pre-Carrie days, Thinner was different.

  The idea for the book arose when he was in the doctor’s office for his annual exam, and the news wasn’t good. He knew he had gained some weight, and when he entered the exam room, the first thing the doctor asked him to do was step on the scale. “I remember being pissed off because he wouldn’t let me take off my clothes and take a shit before I got up on the goddamn scales.” After the physical exam, the doc handed him the bad news: he was overweight, his cholesterol levels were through the roof, and he needed to lose weight and stop smoking.

  King’s reaction—possibly because the whole world loved him, he could write a laundry list and it would end up on the New York Times bestseller list, and no one dared to say boo to him except for Tabby—was absolute rage. He left the doctor’s office and hibernated, fumed, for a few days: “I thought about how shitty the doctor was to make me do all these terrible things to save my life.”

  After his funk ended, he decided to follow his doctor’s advice and lose the weight and stop smoking, or at least cut back. He started to lose a few pounds, and while part of him was happy about it, he was surprised to discover that another part of him was in distress: “Once the weight actually started to come off, I began to realize that I was attached to it somehow, that I didn’t really wanted to lose it. Then I began to think about what would happen if somebody started to lose weight and couldn’t stop.”

  Another random experience or stray comment, another book. Just another day in the life of Stephen King.

  “I really don’t prepare for my novels in any kind of conscious way,” he said. “Some of the books have germinated for a long time, the ideas just won’t sink. My mind is like this very deep pool: some things sink and others keep bobbing up. Over time I begin to see them in a different way. Sooner or later everything comes up, and I use everything.”