by Lisa Rogak
The cover was blown by Stephen P. Brown, who worked in a bookstore in Washington, D.C. Brown was a big King fan who had also read all of Richard Bachman’s books. After reading one of the advance reading copies of Thinner that came to the store a few months before publication, he suspected that Bachman and King were the same. “I was about eighty percent convinced Bachman was Stephen King,” said Brown.
He looked at the copyright pages on each of the first four novels, and Rage listed Kirby McCauley as the copyright holder. He sent a letter to King telling him of his discovery, thoroughly expecting to receive a letter of outraged denial. Instead he picked up the phone one day at the bookstore to hear the following on the other end:
“Steve Brown? This is Steve King. Okay, you know I’m Bachman, I know I’m Bachman, what are we going to do about it? Let’s talk.”
“All the Bachman books are sad books, they all have downbeat endings,” said Brown, which runs counter to King’s general philosophy about his books, that they should end on an up note. Pet Sematary and Cujo were the exceptions, while Thinner more closely resembled a King book with its upbeat ending, which is perhaps why so many people suspected Bachman of being King.
“The Bachman books didn’t fit into his career very well,” said McCauley. “He was known for his supernatural horror novels, and his fear was that he would lead his audiences astray.”
King officially came out as Bachman in the Bangor Daily News on February, 9, 1985, under the headline “Pseudonym Kept Five King Novels a Mystery.”
Once the cat was out of the bag, the number of copies of Thinner in print jumped tenfold, from 28,000 copies to 280,000. Regarding his unveiling as Richard Bachman, “I never meant that to come out,” said King. “I thought I could get away with it.” Bachman “died of cancer of the pseudonym.”
He said, “When I write as Richard Bachman, it opens up that part of my mind. It’s like a hypnotic suggestion that frees me to be somebody who is a little bit different. I think that all novelists are inveterate role players, and it was fun to be someone else for a while, in this case, Richard Bachman.”
Even though he wrote the book as Bachman, some of King’s habits stuck. In several places in the story the characters talk among themselves in Romany, the Gypsy language. “I yanked some Czechoslovakian editions of my books off the shelves and just took stuff out at random, and I got caught,” he admitted. “I got nailed for it by the readers, and I deserved to be because it was lazy.”
The Talisman, his first joint venture with Peter Straub, was published the same month as Thinner, with a first printing of 600,000 copies. The novel is the story of a twelve-year-old boy named Jack Sawyer who sets off on a coast-to-coast walk from New Hampshire to California in search of a talisman that will save the life of his mother, who is dying. Along the way, he finds himself in the Territories, a parallel universe set in medieval times. As before, attaching King’s name to anything resulted in a veritable gold rush.
“The book is full of little tricks between us where we’re trying to fool the reader into thinking that the other guy wrote it,” said Peter Straub. “If you come along something you think is a dead giveaway, it’s a trick.”
“One of the biggest practical jokes they played was to imitate each other,” said Bev Vincent, a friend of King’s and author of The Road to the Dark Tower. “If you read a section of The Talisman that has something to do with jazz, the natural assumption is that Peter wrote it, while in reality Steve did. And if there’s a rock-and-roll section, it’s probably Peter pretending to be Steve.”
“We both agreed that it would be nice to make the book seamless,” said King. “It shouldn’t seem like a game to readers to try to figure out who wrote what. When I worked on my half of the copyediting, I went through large chunks of the manuscript unsure myself who had written what.”
Once The Talisman came out, Straub was taken aback at his increased visibility, especially among the fans. “He got a taste of Steve’s life when the hard-core Stephen King fans started to follow him around trying to find out what Steve was really like,” said Stanley Wiater. “Things got pretty wild there for a while with people knocking on his door and calling him to pick his brain. He wasn’t sure he could handle it.”
Nineteen eighty-five was another breakneck year of accomplishment and accolades. Skeleton Crew, another collection of short stories, appeared in June. Given his unveiling as Richard Bachman earlier in the year, a collection of his first four pseudonymous works was published in October with the title of The Bachman Books, including Rage, Roadwork, The Long Walk, and The Running Man.
The only downside was the growing number of fans who traveled to Bangor every year to see the famous mansion and hopefully catch a glimpse of their idol, as well as a corresponding increase in mail. Steve had to hire a couple of assistants to help out not only with the deluge—more than five hundred fan letters were coming into the office each week by the mideighties—but also to assist with the contracts, agreements, and business correspondence Steve had to respond to. At one point, Shirley Sonderegger, one of his assistants, suggested that King launch a monthly newsletter, Castle Rock, in the hopes that this would satisfy his more rabid fans and cut down on the amount of fan mail that he and his staff had to answer. He agreed, though he wanted nothing to do with the publication beyond contributing an occasional article.
He never forgot that his success was due not only to his talent but also to being in the right place at the right time. “I think if I started publishing in the midsixties, I would have become a fairly popular writer,” he said. “If I started in the midfifties, I would have been John D. MacDonald, somebody that twenty million workingmen knew about, that they carried in their back pockets to work.” He just wouldn’t have been Stephen King, household name.
For years, Hollywood—and Dino De Laurentiis in particular—had been bugging Steve to direct a movie based on one of his stories, but he kept turning the idea down. Things came to a head when he handed in the screenplay for a film based on his short story “Trucks,” where trucks, tractors, and machinery of all kinds turn on humans, killing anyone in their path.
In his screenplay, which he wrote with no thought of directing, Steve included hundreds of specific camera shots, which suggested to De Laurentiis that Steve would be a competent director. Steve turned him down, but Dino wouldn’t take no for an answer. Steve reluctantly accepted, with one condition: if at any point in the project De Laurentiis felt that Steve was dropping the ball, Dino would not hesitate to replace him. They agreed, and production started in July at the De Laurentiis Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Once Steve warmed up to the idea, he was happy that his virgin attempt at directing would be Maximum Overdrive, the name they chose for the film. “I did Maximum Overdrive because I thought I wouldn’t have an actor walk off and have a tantrum if the actor happens to be a Mack truck,” he said. “Or that the electric knife won’t say it couldn’t do the nude scene because it was having its period. I thought that working mostly with machines would be easier than working with actors.”
It turned out to be totally different. “The trucks and the machinery were the real prima donnas!” he complained. “They fucked up without fail, while my actors always gave me more than I expected.”
Everything that could go wrong did, and not just due to King’s inexperience. Trucks refused to start, an electric knife got broken, and Armando Nannuzzi, the director of photography, lost an eye when a possessed lawn mower ran over a pile of wood chips and threw a splinter. But there were funny moments as well. The truck-stop set constructed for the movie looked so authentic that at least once a day a real truck would wander onto the set and the driver would hop out expecting to get some grub.
In one scene, a beer truck was supposed to get blown up and send hundreds of cases flying through the air. However, beer cans—which Miller donated to the movie for a plug—fly through the air a lot better when they’re empty. The cast and crew were all but ordered t
o take mass quantities of beer home and return the empty cans the next day. But even they couldn’t polish off enough beer. Steve postponed the scene as long as he could, but when the fateful day arrived, the crew poured the rest of the beer down the drain.
Despite his admonishments to both De Laurentiis and the crew to treat him like any other first-time director, for the most part they left him alone. “Once you get successful enough, there’s a perception of power that goes along with that so that people who know you’re messing up will stand back and sort of allow you to mess up,” he said, describing it as “the emperor’s new clothes” syndrome.
“I wish someone had told me how little I knew and how grueling it was going to be. I didn’t know how little I knew about the mechanics and the politics of filmmaking. People walk around the director with this ‘don’t wake the baby’ attitude. Nobody wants to tell you this, that, or the other thing if it’s bad news.”
What made matters even worse was that the mostly Italian crew spoke little English—De Laurentiis had brought the crew over from Italy—and Steve didn’t speak Italian, which meant that comments and direction that would normally have run a minute or two easily snowballed into ten or twenty minutes.
Later, he said that he hated the experience: “It was too much like real work. It took too much time and I was away too much. It made things difficult for Tabby and for the kids, and I just can’t see going through that kind of thing again.”
When the movie came out a year later, Steve was invited to be a guest VJ on MTV for an entire week, to coincide with its release. Among his favorite videos he introduced that week were “Who Made Who” by AC/DC, “Come On Feel the Noise” by Quiet Riot, and “Addicted to Love” from Robert Palmer.
While he was making the movie, an antipornography law went into effect in North Carolina. A lifelong proponent of free speech—after all, censorship is a direct threat to his livelihood—he saw the effects of the obscenity law firsthand: “When their antiporn statute became law, between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, all the Playboys and Penthouses disappeared from the convenience store where I stopped for my morning paper and evening six-pack. They went so fast it was as if the Porn Fairy had visited in the middle of the night.”
Of course, another little issue on the set was Steve’s escalating drug use. “The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn’t know what I was doing,” he said. During postproduction on Maximum Overdrive, his editor Chuck Verrill visited him, and he was appalled at the change in his author. “He was gargling Listerine and popping pills,” said Verrill. “He was still a nice guy and coherent, but he did seem to be strung out.”
Sandy Phippen saw the trouble brewing, describing how Steve ended up in the drunk tank at the Bangor police station one night. Steve also lived in an apartment in Brewer for a time after Tabby had reached the limits of her patience and kicked him out of the house.
Just as Steve liked to drink beer at book signings, he brought along a couple of six-packs when doing readings for local fund-raisers. Phippen was the librarian in Hancock Point, a summer colony about forty miles from Bangor. In 1982, he invited Steve to speak at an event at the local chapel to raise money for a new roof for the library. Sandy poured beer into an old white pitcher so members of the audience would think Steve was drinking water. But it was obvious, and some of the ladies were so appalled that he would be drinking beer in the church that they walked out.
The same thing happened during a talk he gave at the Virginia Beach Library Pavilion in 1986. Fifteen minutes into his talk, he pulled out a beer from an inside pocket and yelled, “Who’s going to be at the Silver Bullet tonight?” to the crowd. When the first can was gone, he popped open a second and lit a cigarette. The next day, some people called the library to complain.
Twelve years into his career, King was seemingly indestructible, and nothing and no one could stop him. Certainly the booze and the cocaine weren’t interfering with his output.
Steve continued to insist that he didn’t have a problem with drugs and alcohol, that he could quit anytime he wanted. But a part of him still needed to get high. He didn’t see a reason to stop. And until he was forced to, he wouldn’t.
In October 1985, King broke his previous record by having four books hit the New York Times bestseller list at the same time: Skeleton Crew in hardcover, and Thinner, The Talisman, and The Bachman Books in paperback.
His literary agent, Kirby McCauley, also made headlines when he negotiated a $10 million, two-book contract with New American Library—with a twist. Instead of the standard deal, assigning rights to a publisher for the life of the copyright, King decided to license books to a publisher for fifteen years. If he was happy with how the publisher marketed and promoted the books at the end of that time, he’d renew the deal for another fifteen years. If not, he’d look for another publisher.
“We’re not selling the books anymore, we’re renting them,” said Steve.
This was a novel arrangement even among bestselling authors, and many publishers were not happy since they expected that other internationally famous writers would insist on the same kind of deal in the future.
With all the money, however, Steve’s wealth still felt surreal. “Basically, I’d like to be like Scrooge McDuck and put all of my money in Shop ’n Save bags and keep it in a vault to play around with,” he said. “Then it might seem real.”
He also spoke about retiring from writing: “I want to clear everything off, get this stuff out of the way, and not take on any more commitments. Then I’m just going to sit around.” He described his perfect day: “When I get up in the morning, I’ll just grab hold of a book and go somewhere and sit in the corner and read all day long—except I’ll take a walk in the morning, and I’ll break at lunch for some hamburgers at McDonald’s, and take another walk in the afternoon.”
But he knew it was just a pipe dream. “I’d be bored shitless. I would be real unhappy if I were doing that. But that is the sort of goal that I always have in mind.”
In fact, in 1986, he moved his office out of the house and into a former National Guard barracks on Florida Avenue in Bangor, out near the airport behind a General Electric plant and next to a tuna-processing plant. To his friend Tony Magistrale, his choice of location was entirely appropriate: “That’s the heart of Bangor, which is perfect for Steve, who came from poverty and has strong blue-collar roots.” When Magistrale visited King in Bangor, he wanted to meet him at his office, not his house, because he felt it provided a clearer picture of the real Stephen King.
“There are two Stephen Kings,” Magistrate explained. “There’s the Stephen King who’s the Horatio Alger story of America, and the other Stephen King, the working-class hero who can create salt-of-the-earth characters like Stu Redman and Dolores Claiborne.”
Steve had repeatedly said, in interviews and to anyone who would listen, that he used his writing as an outlet for his fears in the hopes they would dissipate somewhat, if not disappear entirely. The funny thing was, with every book and screenplay he churned out, his fears not only didn’t go away, but they burned brighter in some cases. He even developed a few entirely new fears.
“I can still find fear. I can find more fear than I used to be able to find,” he said. “I can’t go to sleep in a hotel without thinking who’s in the room underneath me, dead drunk and smoking a cigarette and about to fall asleep so that the room catches fire, and when was the last time that they changed the batteries in the smoke detector?”
His biggest fears concerned his kids. “Because I have some money, I worry about whether bad guys are going to come and kidnap my kids and hold them for ransom. I’m afraid of what it’s doing to their lives, I’m afraid of what it’s doing to my life.”
Of course, the kids thought their parents’ fears were overblown. The thing that bugged Naomi most when she was a teenager was when teachers singled her out and strangers would gush over her because she had a fa
mous father. “It’s sort of like somebody recognizing Robin because he’s Batman’s sidekick,” she said. “It impresses the hell out of some people, but it puts you on a pedestal.”
It appeared that the Kings’ desire to raise their family as normally as possible and out of the glare of the spotlight by living in Bangor had been the right choice, for both kids and adults. “There are a lot of people who don’t know who I am, and that’s what I love about western Maine,” said Tabby. “And if they do, they don’t care. To them, I’m just another woman driving around with a dog in her car.”
Steve seemed to be particularly protective of Owen, yet also calmer. After all, Steve was closing in on forty, his success seemed pretty much entrenched, and his three kids were turning out fine so far. Given his vasectomy, there wouldn’t be any more, so a certain tenderness came over him when it came to his youngest child.
“Lately my smallest son has got this horror of going to school on rainy days,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, maybe they wouldn’t let him into the building. He’s only six and it’s in his brain but he can’t get it out of his mouth, it’s too big. So I keep him in the car on rainy days until the bell rings and it’s time for him to go in. A psychiatrist would say that I’m treating the symptom but not the cause, but I couldn’t give a shit about the cause. If keeping him in the car until the bell rings makes him feel better, then okay.”
One day Owen was complaining that whenever he needed to go to the bathroom, he had to raise his hand. “Everybody knows that I have to go pee-pee,” he told his father. Steve started to tell him he shouldn’t feel that way, but suddenly stopped because he’d felt the same way when he was in elementary school decades earlier. He comforted his son as best he could and immediately began to think how he could use the experience in a story, using the idea of “mean old teachers who make you raise your hand in front of all these little kids, and they all laugh when you’re walking out of the room because they know what you’re going to do.”