Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  In Pet Sematary, in the front of the novel where previous books of an author are listed, sharp-eyed fans noticed a book they’d never heard of: The Gunslinger. When Pet Sematary came out, King’s office was flooded with calls and letters from readers who wanted the unheard-of book and became incensed when they were told they couldn’t have it, since the publisher Donald Grant had sold out of the limited-run copies through his mail-order business. Grant’s office, along with Doubleday, was also inundated with communications from angry readers. Grant asked if he could print ten thousand more copies, and Steve agreed.

  Steve learned an important lesson about fans who were so adamant about reading every word he’d ever written that he could indeed publish his grocery list and haul in millions.

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  MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE

  If Steve had even been thinking of cutting back on his increasing cocaine and alcohol consumption, the publication of Pet Sematary all but squelched it. He was so upset that the book had been published—and he still fumed at the way Doubleday had essentially blackmailed him into giving them the book—that he cranked his already sizable consumption of beer and cocaine up a few notches. Though Tabby and his kids occasionally tried to intervene, Steve continued to deny that he had a problem.

  Cycle of the Werewolf was originally published in 1983 as a limited edition by the small publisher Land of Enchantment. The story of a small Maine town that has to deal with the sudden appearance of a werewolf that starts terrorizing the residents, Cycle of the Werewolf is ridiculously short by King’s standards, 128 pages, and was published in paperback two years later with a new title, Silver Bullet, to tie into the movie based on the book. King wrote the screenplay, and it was the directorial debut for Daniel Attias, who would go on to direct one of Steve’s favorite TV series over two decades later, Lost.

  King spent the first six months of 1984 campaigning for presidential candidate Gary Hart and held a fund-raising dinner at his house that winter. Hart was there and Steve played the proud host, inviting all of his friends to meet with the candidate and donate money to the campaign.

  Sandy Phippen noticed that Steve acted differently during the fund-raiser. “The house was packed, there were a lot of people, and he basically shifted into his public Stephen King persona,” he said, describing this mode as the opposite of his private one. “He was playing the role. That’s what you learn to do after a while, and that’s what people want to see.”

  Even Owen knew there were two Stephen Kings. Whenever Steve would leave Bangor to go on a book tour or to meet with movie producers or bookstore owners, his seven-year-old son would say, “Daddy’s going out to be Stephen King again.”

  ______

  A flurry of movies based on his books followed that fall, including Graveyard Shift and IT, which became a made-for-TV miniseries.

  In May of 1984, the movie Firestarter came out. A twenty-five-year-old Egyptian producer by the name of Dodi Fayed had acquired the rights to the movie for $1 million. Later, he would become known as the man who died with Princess Diana in her fatal car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997.

  Dino De Laurentiis viewed eight-year-old Drew Barrymore as the Shirley Temple of her generation and decided to cast her in the lead role of Charlie McGee. Barrymore was already familiar with the book; when it first came out, her mother saw the book and thought the picture of the girl on the cover resembled her daughter. They bought it and Drew started to read. A few chapters into the book, the little girl told her mother, “I’m the Firestarter, I’m Charlie McGee.”

  De Laurentiis served as producer and Mark Lester, whose previous credits included Roller Boogie and Truck Stop Women, directed Firestarter. When he first saw the movie, Steve, who didn’t write the screenplay, thought the movie was on the same level as The Shining. “Firestarter was one of my most visual novels and a resounding failure as a film,” he said. Steve’s dissatisfaction with the movie resulted in a bit of a public feud between writer and director.

  “I was appalled at some of the things he said,” said Lester, who added that King had earlier said he liked the way the film turned out. “I’m just appalled that a man of his wealth would actually stoop to these slanderous comments that he makes about people, attacking these movies.”

  “Mark’s assertion that I saw the movie and loved it is erroneous,” Steve volleyed back. “I saw part of an early rough cut. When I saw the final cut months later, I was extremely depressed. The parts were all there, but the total was somehow much less than the sum of those parts.”

  Although Firestarter bombed both with Steve and with the critics—Roger Ebert wrote that despite a roundup of interesting characters, “the most astonishing thing in the movie is how boring it is”—King’s name was still held in high regard across the board, and requests for him to star in a variety of sometimes surprising venues began to pour in.

  One of the few he agreed to was a TV commercial for American Express. In the early 1980s, the charge-card company had created a campaign featuring famous people whose faces weren’t necessarily well-known. Some of the other eighties-era celebrities who would ask viewers, “Do you know me?” in the ads included John Cleese, Tip O’Neill, and Tom Landry. Dressed in a smoking jacket, Steve wandered through the stage set of a haunted house complete with spooky organ music and lots of fog and thunder.

  He would later admit that it was a mistake to do the ad. “He felt like he created his own Frankenstein monster with those commercials,” said Stanley Wiater, author of several books about King, because his portrayal in the ads clearly played up to the stereotype of how people expected him to act.

  Yet, he’d had lots of practice, albeit on a much smaller stage. “The man is a frustrated actor,” said Tabby. “Peek in and listen to him read to his children. It might be from Marvel comics, or The Lord of the Rings, or something he’s written just for them. Or perhaps there’s an improvised puppet show with a makeshift stage and a cast of Sesame Street puppets, and our own repertory company of dragons, vampires, assorted Things.”

  After the American Express ad, the offers kept coming. If Steve had wanted to, he could have guest-starred on The Love Boat or channeled Rod Serling by hosting an updated weekly version of The Twilight Zone. He didn’t want to do them for a number of reasons: despite his increasing visibility, he still preferred that people and the media focus on his work, not him. He also knew even from being on the sidelines of Salem’s Lot that network censors would place unreasonable demands on him to water down his work.

  “You can’t show someone getting punched in the nose more than once in an hour of prime-time television, and you want to put horror on TV?” he asked rhetorically. “I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t want to be on TV for six weeks and then be axed because everybody tuned out when they found out there was nothing there to watch.”

  He continued to be a bit dumbfounded by the way people glommed on to him just because he was famous: “I’m a little bit amazed by the whole thing, and I don’t really understand it. Writers are not stars, they’re not supposed to be stars. It’s a thing that will play itself out in time. It’ll pass.”

  Famous last words. In any case, Steve knew he’d reached a saturation point when he received a call from a producer who asked if he wanted to appear on the game show Hollywood Squares. He turned down the opportunity, but not long after he was reading a story in the Boston Globe about the Red Sox when the reporter compared a particular game to one of his novels.

  “I’ve sort of become what I was writing about,” Steve said. “In a way, it’s the ultimate horror and the ultimate comedy at the same time.” But he took it in stride. “I think that America needs Santa Claus, and to some extent America needs the Easter Bunny, and America really needs Ronald McDonald, more than Santa Claus now, I think. But America needs a bogeyman too. And Alfred Hitchcock’s dead, so I got the job for a while.”

  Though he continued to live as normal a life as he could, his international exposure meant things had definitely cha
nged when he went out in public. He especially rued going to a mall. If he arrived early to do a book signing, he’d often wander around to do some window-shopping. That’s when the whispers started: “That’s Stephen King!” He tried his best to ignore it, but people would often follow him around.

  The publishers and editors who published him in the early days—and whom Steve continued to help out with an occasional story or introduction here and there—were also not immune from taking advantage of Steve’s star power. Not only did the magazines put his name in forty-eight-point type on the cover, but the anthologies such as Stalking the Nightmare, Tales by Moonlight, and some of the annual fantasy-story collections were quickly turning into the worst offenders. He couldn’t fault them entirely since these collections of stories by many different writers needed a few marquee names to get readers to pick up the book in the first place.

  However, he thought they were getting a bit carried away. “My name has been used prominently on enough covers stateside to make me feel a little bit like the come-on girl in the window of a live sex show on Forty-second Street,” he said.

  He announced that from that point on he would refuse to do “whore duty for some marketing guy” and altered all anthology contracts to dictate that his name appear alphabetically in the list of contributors as well as appear in the same-size font as theirs on the cover.

  With so many people grabbing at him, hoping to benefit from his success, he retreated more fully into his life at home. Bangor was one of the few places where he felt he could completely let down his guard and be himself. But he was also ambivalent about the place where he’d grown up and that had nurtured him as a writer.

  “I love Maine and I hate it,” he said. “There’s a bitter feel to the real country of Maine. Most people think of Maine as lobsters and Bar Harbor. But the real country is poor people with no teeth, junked-out cars in front yards, and people who live in pup tents in the woods with great big color TVs inside them.”

  He saw no reason to go looking far afield for stories when plenty were right under his nose in Bangor: “The small town is a great setting for a story of suspense, because we understand that there’s a microcosm. In New York City, there might be one hundred thousand town drunks. We really only need one. And in a small town, you only have one.”

  As Steve hunkered down in Bangor, he spent more time with Tabby and the kids. One of the family’s favorite pastimes was to sit at the dining room table and pass a book around, with each family member reading a passage before giving it to the next in line.

  They’d also play a game in which Steve would provide the setting and first few lines of a story before handing it over to one of the kids to continue. Later on, Owen and Joe would play a variation of the game on their own called the Writing Game, with one writing a page of a story before the other would take over.

  Joe, in particular, was showing signs of taking after his father. At age twelve, he wrote an essay and sent it to the Bangor Daily News, which printed it a few days later. “I thought I was on the verge of major celebrity,” he said. His feelings changed, however, when the story came out. “When I read it in the newspaper, I realized it was full of trite ideas and windy writing. At the end, they had added a little postscript that said, ‘Joseph King is the son of bestselling novelist Stephen King,’ and I knew that was the only reason they published the piece. At that age, the fear of humiliation is probably worse than the fear of death, and not long afterward I started to think I should just write under a different name.”

  Steve and Tabby never censored their kids’ choice of books or movies. In Joe’s case, it resulted in a higher-than-usual tolerance for the movies his father liked. For his twelfth birthday, he told his parents he wanted to invite his friends over to watch Dawn of the Dead. It was Joe’s tenth viewing of the film, but the first for most of his guests. Slowly, his friends left the room, but a couple stayed behind, wordless and white as ghosts.

  As Steve discovered with the flap over including The Gunslinger in his list of published books in Pet Sematary, an increasing number of people wanted to own everything he’d written, whether it was a limited edition of Cujo or a copy of one of the men’s magazines that contained one of his stories. They were known as completists: collectors who want to own everything he’s ever published, and then some.

  Even by 1984, the unofficial list of Everything King was long. In addition to first-edition hardcovers, there were first-edition mass-market and trade paperbacks and every foreign translation in all formats. In the limited-edition category were signed-and-numbered and signed-and-lettered books. Then there were audiotapes, video games, scripts, posters, and other promotional materials from Stephen King movies, not to mention the book-club editions, both U.S. and foreign, and lastly, Tabby’s novels.

  In coming years, the challenge for a completist would only grow and would come to include a signed, limited-edition Stephen King guitar. In 1997, a guitar-manufacturing company bought the black-walnut tree featured in the film version of Cujo and made 250 guitars from the wood. Each guitar had a sticker inside with King’s signature.

  Although he has authorized limited collectors’ editions of his own work, mostly to help fledgling publishers who are struggling, he began to have mixed feelings about the trend: “People would bring me books all wrapped up in cellophane and say, ‘Oh, please, just be very careful when you lift the cover, that binding has never been broken!’ I’d tell them what in the world were they talking about, it’s just a book! It’s not the fucking Mona Lisa.”

  King was still making public appearances at the horror and fantasy conventions that he had first started to attend back in the late seventies, though by the early eighties he had started to cut back. The fans were becoming scarier, in his opinion: “I’ve been at a couple of science-fiction conventions, and those people were out in a fucking void. There were people there who were literally separated from reality. Fundamentally, it seemed to me that they all felt alien, and maybe that’s why they like science fiction.”

  He did attend the Fifth International Conference on the Fantastic and the Arts in March 1984, where several scholars and professors studying King’s work were scheduled to present papers and talks. Tony Magistrale, then an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont, had written an essay entitled “Stephen King’s Viet Nam Allegory: An Interpretation of ‘The Children of the Corn,’ ” about the Vietnam elements in King’s short story.

  Afterward, Steve went out with several of the presenters, and he zeroed in on Magistrale’s paper. “He told me there was no way in hell he intended that story to be an allegory for Vietnam,” said Magistrale, who thought that it didn’t matter, adding the main criterion of English teachers and professors everywhere: “Literary criticism isn’t about what you meant, it’s about what I can prove.”

  Magistrate noted, “To me, there were so many things that stood out in the story: the guy was a medic in Vietnam, kids were getting killed at eighteen, the land had become tainted and polluted, and the high school was named after JFK. Steve didn’t concede my point, but we just chalked it up and laughed.”

  Magistrale included the essay in his first book on King, Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic.

  In November 1984, Thinner, the fifth Richard Bachman book, was published.

  This, the first Bachman book to appear in hardcover, was heavily promoted with advertising and pushed as a featured title at the American Booksellers Association Convention in May 1984. It was also heavily promoted to booksellers throughout the country.

  “As the publisher of some of the finest horror novels ever written, it takes a lot to get me excited about a new horror writer. Such a writer has now appeared,” Elaine Koster gushed in a promotional letter sent to booksellers with advance reading copies.

  “I wanted to jump up and down and say, ‘This is Stephen King!’ But I couldn’t,” said Koster. “We had many questions, but we never led anyone to believe that it was Steve. We stonewalle
d it, even though it would be to our advantage not to. It became a mission for me to respect Steve’s privacy.”

  The photo on the back of the book was of Richard Manuel, a friend of Kirby McCauley’s who lived near St. Paul, Minnesota, and made his living building houses. “We had to find someone who lived a long way from New York,” said McCauley. “There was a chance that someone in New York would recognize Manuel walking down the street.”

  For his part, Manuel was amused. After the book came out, a few friends and relatives called him to let him know of the striking resemblance he bore to the author of the hot new thriller.

  Soon after publication, readers began to send irate letters to Bachman, accusing him of deliberately copying Stephen King. “A lot of them were angry with me for that,” said Steve, who read the letters addressed to Bachman. “ ‘You can’t copy him,’ they said.”

  Thinner brought renewed interest to Bachman’s previous books. All but one, The Long Walk, were still in print after six years, highly unusual for a mass-market paperback by a supposedly no-name thriller writer, given the brief shelf life of most mass-market paperbacks.

  After Thinner came out, however, the questions about whether King was really Bachman started to come fast and furious. Each time King denied it, though he admitted he knew Bachman informally and that he was a chicken farmer, was shy, and disdained publicity. “The poor guy was one ugly son of a bitch,” he’d tell reporters.

  King and his publisher continued their denial for a couple of months in the face of a barrage of calls from all the major network TV shows from Good Morning America to Entertainment Tonight. Even a buyer at B. Dalton’s, then a major bookstore chain, called NAL with their suspicions and committed to purchasing thirty thousand copies if they would just fess up. One of the major book clubs, the Literary Guild, accepted Thinner, and King was amused when one of the club’s early readers remarked, “This is what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write.”