Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  When Steve had signed his first contract with Doubleday back in 1974, the contract contained a clause on the company’s Author Investment Plan, allowing the publisher to hold on to all but $50,000 of the money due to the writer per year, while investing the rest. Of course, most writers didn’t earn that much money in a year back then, or even now, but King’s books were selling so well that he and his accountants knew the publisher was making money hand over fist.

  This still held true even though Steve had switched publishers in 1977. By the end of 1982, millions of dollars had accrued in the AIP fund, but Steve was still receiving a paltry $50,000 per year. King asked Doubleday to cancel the agreement and remit all the money he was owed. But according to the contract he’d signed nearly a decade ago, the publisher was not legally obligated to do anything.

  When King threatened to sue, McCauley had another idea. He suggested that King give Doubleday a novel to publish in exchange for releasing the funds. Since all the Bachman books were already spoken for by NAL, only one remained: Pet Sematary. Though Steve was angry with his old publisher, he agreed to give them the one novel he’d written that he had never wanted to see in print.

  “I couldn’t ever imagine ever publishing Pet Sematary, it was so awful,” he said. “But the fans loved it. You can’t gross out the American public, or the British public for that matter, because they loved it too.”

  Since his first bestseller in 1977, The Shining, a little voice in the back of Steve’s head had always whispered that perhaps Donald King, the father he’d never known, would come forward, admit the errors of his ways, and want to be a part of his son’s life.

  Steve kept writing his stories and never forgot that his father might one day show up, much as his mother had held out hope, although it had all but disappeared by the end of her life.

  What would Steve do if Donald King ever showed up? He had numerous ideas about how he’d react, each of which could serve as the germ for a new novel or story.

  1. See what I’ve been able to accomplish on my own even after you ditched us?

  2. Maybe Steve’s writing would cause his father to come back and beg his forgiveness and Steve would accept him back into his life.

  3. Or maybe Donald come back after his son had become a household name, beg to be part of his life, and his son would refuse.

  The questions came fast and furious once people discovered the common ground between many of Steve’s stories and his early abandonment. In the end, Steve would never know if his father knew that Stephen King was his son.

  “There are a lot of fathers in my stories, and some are abusive and some try to be loving and supportive, which is what I had always hoped that I would be myself, as a dad,” Steve said. “But my father was just an absence. And you don’t miss what’s not there. Maybe in some sort of imaginative way I’m searching for him or maybe that’s just a lot of horseshit, I don’t know. There does seem to be a target that this stuff pours out toward. I am always interested in the idea that a lot of fiction writers write for their fathers because their fathers are gone.”

  Indeed, after reading just a couple of his early books, from Salem’s Lot to The Shining, it’s easy to see why a reader would think Steve assumes that buried deep within every man who appears normal on the outside, there’s an absolute monster and murderer scratching to come out.

  Steve agrees up to a point: “I don’t think it’s in every man, but I think it’s in most. I think that men are wired to perform acts of violence, and I think that we’re still very primitive creatures with a real tendency toward violence.”

  Michael Collings, an acquaintance of King’s and a scholar who has written several books analyzing King’s work, believes the issue of an abandoned child permeates every word he writes: “The issue of his father’s abandonment is in everything, but it’s never in any one thing completely,” he says. “Very rarely is there a functioning father in his stories. If there is one, he’s like Jack Torrance, who’s out to get the kid. In every one of his stories is the sense that somehow the father, and occasionally even the mother, has abrogated the crucial role. That’s the one thing that’s consistent throughout his work.”

  Steve has admitted that he has thought about trying to find out what happened to Donald, but he always hesitated: “Something always holds me back, like the old saw about letting sleeping dogs lie. To tell the truth, I don’t know how I’d react if I did find him and we came face-to-face. But even if I ever did decide to launch an investigation, I don’t think anything would come of it, because I’m pretty sure my father’s dead.”

  Maybe Steve already knew from the few ties that still remained to his father’s family, and he didn’t want to get the media all hot and bothered over the issue. After all, it would call attention to Steve, and not his books, which is where he preferred that the focus remain.

  While he was constantly aware of his past, he was also prescient about his legacy. Even in the early eighties, Steve had a sense of how his work would be regarded by future generations, and he was sanguine about all of the critical and negative reviews that had appeared over the first decade of his life as a published author:

  “After a while, if you live long enough, by the time you’re so old that you’ve begun to parody yourself, and you and your contemporaries have all had your strokes and your heart attacks, then people start reviewing you well, mostly because you’ve survived the demolition derby. That’s when you get good reviews, after you’ve done your important work.”

  Part of the issue may have been that he was cranking out a few more books than people knew about, under his Bachman pseudonym, in addition to writing articles and short stories, and traveling to promote the books that were just published. Be careful what you wish for, because the more he wrote, the more his publisher wanted, which meant that the quality had to suffer somewhere along the way. In his case, it came from accelerated publication schedules.

  His habitually wrote three drafts for every book. For the first two drafts, he still followed what his editor John Gould at the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise had told him way back in high school: “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story, and when you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” Steve’s third draft came after he’d received comments from his editor and incorporated those he wanted to keep along with a final polish of the other changes he’d implemented. “As the successes have mushroomed, it’s been tougher to get my editors to give me time for the third draft,” he said. “I’m really afraid that one will say a manuscript is great just because it fits the publication schedule. Every year I’m on a faster and faster track. I’m supposed to read the proofs in five days, and what if a bunch of dumb errors go through? We’ll fuck up real good one of these days and then people can say, ‘Steve King writes for money,’ and at that point they’ll be right.”

  Christine came out in April of 1983 and hit the top of the bestseller lists the first week it was published. Because it had long been regarded as a forgettable American car, Steve had chosen a 1958 Plymouth Fury to serve as the car that was inherently evil from the time it was still on the assembly line. “They were the most mundane fifties car that I could remember,” he said. “I didn’t want a car that already had a legend attached to it, like the Thunderbird or the Ford Galaxie. Nobody ever talked about Plymouth cars anymore.”

  Richard Kobritz had produced Salem’s Lot the TV miniseries back in 1979, and he had also bought the film rights to Christine. The film would be released to theaters in December 1983.

  As was the case with Salem’s Lot, King had no control over the production nor did he write the screenplay. In December 1982, Kobritz received a script from screenwriter Bill Phillips—his sole credit was for Summer Solstice, a made-for-TV movie that was silent-film star Myrna Loy’s last starring role—and the green light to start production came the following April. John Carpenter, who had directed some of King’s favorite movies including Halloween and The Fog, finished
shooting the picture two months later.

  The challenges Kobritz faced as producer of Christine were different from those on Salem’s Lot, though there were some similarities. “The hard part of doing a horror movie is that a lot of the suspense is in the imagination of the reader and in the author’s description,” said Kobritz. “The light that comes through at the bottom of the door, the vibration that the person feels on the other side, and what’s behind it in visual terms without making it corny or repetitive has always been the problem. It’s not expressed in dialogue, it’s expressed in mood, in lighting, and occasionally in special effects. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

  Kobritz, Carpenter, and Phillips faced a specific problem with Christine. “We were working on the script when I asked if the car was born bad or did it become evil later in life, and none of us had an answer,” said Kobritz. “I called Steve and asked him. He said he didn’t know and that we could do whatever we wanted, so we elected to make the car inherently evil. That’s why the car killed a man on the assembly line, which wasn’t in the book. But it did show you that the car was born bad.”

  Kobritz bought twenty-four different 1958 two-door Plymouth Furies, Belvederes, and Savoys—other Plymouth models with similar body styles—and had them shipped to Santa Clarita, California, where most of the movie was filmed. In 1958, just 5,303 Furies came off the assembly line. The techs on the film cannibalized parts of each the twenty-four so they ended up with seventeen working cars, each earmarked for a specific purpose in the script: one was the burning car, one was retooled with a rubberized front hood, and so on. After filming was complete, only two cars were left: one was donated to a public radio station in Santa Cruz, California, for their annual auction, while the other was awarded to the winner of a contest at a new cable channel called MTV.

  When Steve saw the rough cuts of Christine, he told Kobritz he was happy with the way they told the story. The Dead Zone movie had come out a couple months earlier, and Steve was pleased with that one as well.

  “I thought Christopher Walken was about as right for Johnny as any mainstream Hollywood actor I could think of,” Steve said.

  Despite his hands-off approach to the film, he had retained approval for casting, and his first choice was Bill Murray. Dino De Laurentiis, an Italian producer who was involved with such hits from the seventies as Serpico, Lipstick, and King Kong, was producing the film and thought Murray would work for the starring role too, but the actor had a prior commitment. Then DeLaurentiis suggested Christopher Walken, and Steve thought he was a great choice for the role.

  Of his two movies released in 1983, he was batting a thousand, but he was still hedging his bets. After all, he still was skittish about dealing with Hollywood after The Shining. For the most part, critics reviewed The Dead Zone favorably. Critic Roger Ebert wrote that the movie “does what only a good supernatural thriller can do: it makes us forget it is supernatural.”

  Although he was talking with Hollywood on the phone and doing deals with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, Steve still preferred to hang out with his old friends. He was grateful for his success and was only half-joking when he said he was glad that he had escaped the path he’d feared he would follow for the rest of his life.

  He’d joke with his friend Sandy Phippen, who taught English to high school students, that Phippen’s life was his worst nightmare. In addition to working as a teacher, Phippen was also the book editor for Maine Life magazine. He was four years ahead of Steve at the University of Maine, so their paths never crossed until they’d both been out in the world for some time.

  In the early eighties, Steve started making money hand over fist with movie options, paperback deals, foreign deals, audio deals, royalties, and book advances. Steve had loosened up about spending the money by this time, but his first big splurge after buying the Bangor house and a couple of cars was a couple hundred bucks for a really good guitar, which was something he’d always wanted but could never afford. After he bought it, he left the price tag on to remind him how much it cost.

  However, when it came to spending money on other people and helping them out, he never hesitated. “He and Tabby were always very generous with everybody,” said Phippen. “They’d pay for a new set of tires on a friend’s car, they’d cover the rent, you could ask them for anything. Once I needed to borrow a couple hundred dollars, and I saw that Tabby was having a book signing in Bangor. So I drove to the bookstore and stood in line, and when she signed the book, I told her I needed some money. She took out her purse and wrote me a check just like that.”

  Steve didn’t change his lifestyle one bit, at least not around Bangor. In fact, he was often out and about so much that it became a game with some people: how many times did you spot Stephen King this week? “I’d go shopping, and there he was,” said Phippen. “Or I’d go to a movie and he’d be there. He used to ride the city bus all around Bangor, reading books in the back of the bus. Some of my students would tell me, ‘Stephen King was on the bus this morning.’ He was the local famous person.”

  In the meantime, Tabby’s notoriety was growing as well, as her second novel, Caretakers, was published in the fall of 1983. The story was set in Maine and explored a secret love affair between a man and a woman who belonged to different social classes. Of course, one of the first questions interviewers asked was about her famous husband, and sometimes they’d accidentally snag an interview with him when he wandered into the room. The obvious question was if he felt jealous.

  “We work on entirely separate tracks, so it isn’t much of a problem,” he’d say. “Every now and then she’ll accuse me of stealing one of her ideas.”

  While her novels revolved around personal stories that didn’t involve horror, Tabby admitted that she drew on the raw stuff inside the same way her husband did: “Every character I have ever imagined was rooted in some aspect of myself, including the nasty ones. I’m not saying that I’m a rapist or an alcoholic, but it’s my job to imagine what it would be like to be such a person.”

  Another obvious question was if she wanted to be as famous as her husband. Her answer was always an unequivocal no.

  “Steve published before I did because he’s better than I am and more driven and because I was busy having babies,” she explained. “He’s intensely ambitious and has always had a fantastic sense of priorities. I’m conflicted about ambition, am easily distracted, and don’t write anything like he does.”

  She was also reluctant to pursue her writing more than she did because she feared how the attention would affect her life: “I resist the star-maker machinery because I witness the almost total loss of privacy my husband has had to suffer. I grant interviews, but always with reservations that have deepened over the years. People are inevitably disappointed when they learn that someone they thought they knew and loved is merely another flawed human being.”

  Her feminist viewpoint was still as strong as it was back in college. “The wife of a successful man is still essentially seen as chattel,” she noted. “One of the reasons I rarely give interviews has to do with this assumption that I’ve taken up his fucking hobby. If I asked if it was okay with him if I wrote a book, it would be as unnatural as if I asked him if it was okay to have breakfast.”

  When Steve traveled for meetings with his editors or to go on promotional tours, he liked to fly out of Logan Airport in Boston, partly because when he was heading home, the four-hour drive allowed him to decompress enough so that he could gradually cross the boundary from the frenzied life of the public Stephen King to the much calmer, radically different life of the private Stephen King.

  On Halloween 1983, he got off the plane and jumped in a rental car, which was equipped only with AM radio. Steve had always liked hard-core rock and roll, the louder and meaner the better. The drive home that day seemed interminably long since then, as now, AM radio was a veritable wasteland of talk shows, sports, religious stations, news, maybe a few oldies stations, but no rock.
Bangor had one rock station, WACZ, and it was on the AM dial. Steve had become friends with Jim Feury, also known as Mighty John Marshall, one of the DJs at the station, and after he returned home, Steve had complained bitterly about his drive back from Boston. Marshall filed this comment away.

  One day Marshall asked Steve if he’d be interested in buying the station, which had just been put up for sale. If it was sold to someone else, the only way that WACZ could make a profit would be to run it via remote control, with automatic reel-to-reel machines and programmed Top 40 music.

  Steve didn’t hesitate. He bought the station because he didn’t want Bangor to be without a rock station. It was selfish, but in a way, he did it for the same reason why he gives blurbs to unknown writers whose work he loves: “If no one plays groups like the BoDeans and the Rainmakers, they won’t get contracts. If that happened, some of the fun would go out of my life, that sense of liberation only fresh, straight-ahead balls-to-the-wall rock music can provide.”

  In a way, he viewed the station, given the new call letters of WZON, as another form of expressing himself in addition to writing. “We’re going to do some things to make it an interesting station, and I’ve got to be able to harness some of my own talents to it,” he said in 1983, shortly after the purchase, admitting he was a novice when it came to running a radio station. “I’m studying how everything runs, it’s like I’m on my student driver’s permit.” If all went well with radio, he envisioned buying a TV station somewhere down the road; it would play horror movies twenty-four hours a day.

  The same month he bought the radio station, the book he never wanted to see in print, Pet Sematary, was published. His deal with the devil, Doubleday, was fulfilled.

  “That book came out of a real hole in my psyche,” he said. “If I had my way about it, I still would not have published Pet Sematary. I don’t like it. It’s a terrible book, not in terms of the writing, but it just spirals down into darkness. It seems to be saying nothing works and nothing is worth it, and I don’t really believe that.”