by Lisa Rogak
Nineteen eighty-eight was a quiet year when it came to Steve’s publishing career. The first trade paperback edition of The Gunslinger was published in September. Then in November, Nightmares in the Sky, a book of gargoyle photographs by F-stop Fitzgerald, an independent photojournalist, was published, and Steve had written the commentary for the book.
His reduced output was a wise move as the hard truths about his addictions started to emerge in small doses. He finally realized what he had turned into, as well as the stress he’d put his friends and family through.
He had been addicted to cocaine for about eight years. “I was high for most of the eighties. It’s not a terribly long time to be an addict, but it lasted longer than World War Two,” he said. “And that’s how it felt a lot of the time. I didn’t hide my drinking, but I hid my drugs because right away I knew it was a problem.
“The kids accepted my drinking as a part of life. I didn’t beat up on them or anything. Basically I don’t think I was so different from a lot of dads who have three or four martinis when they get in from work.”
“He covered well,” Joe later said about his father’s drug and drinking problems.
As another way to do some housecleaning in his new life, King decided to make a change with WZON, the radio station he’d owned for five years. In October, he switched WZON to a noncommercial format, similar to how public radio stations operate. Instead of generating revenue from commercials and live remote broadcasts, the station would make money from listener contributions and corporate grants, and Steve would make up the difference if necessary.
The following year, Stephanie Leonard decided to shut down Castle Rock, the newspaper. The quality of the publication had seriously deteriorated over the past year, mostly because Steve had stopped contributing, and all that remained were short stories by his fans and fawning reviews of his latest books. Newly sober and fragile, he needed to spend his energy and time more carefully. But more than that, he decided not to do anything he didn’t want to do. His family came first, then his work.
Nineteen eighty-nine brought the publication of several limited editions that had been in the works for a while, including My Pretty Pony and Dolan’s Cadillac. King’s only full-length novel published that year was The Dark Half, which came out in November.
My Pretty Pony was published in a limited metal-bound edition of 250 copies by the Whitney Museum, which published one limited-edition book each year as a fund-raiser. When the museum contacted him, King sent along “My Pretty Pony,” an unpublished, hundred-page short story about an elderly man who teaches his grandson about the quick passage of time. The book’s cover was made from stainless steel and had a digital clock embedded on the front. Even at $2,200, the book sold out immediately. King then assigned the mass-market rights to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for a printing of fifteen thousand copies with a cover price of $50.
The Dark Half was the last novel King would write before becoming totally sober, and perhaps not coincidentally, the plot revolved around the two personalities of one man. “I started to play with the idea of multiple personalities, and then I read that sometimes twins are imperfectly absorbed in the womb,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute. What if this guy is the ghost of a twin that never existed?’ I wrapped the whole book around that spine.”
With every additional day Steve spent without alcohol or cocaine, more scales fell from his eyes. Despite agreeing to license the rights to “My Pretty Pony,” Steve was starting to sour on the idea of limited editions. “You just have a book I once had in my hand, and I signed my name to it. So what?” he said. “Just because I touched it with my pen? I don’t completely understand it, other than it’s not normal.”
Though Steve had always participated in benefits and fund-raisers for a variety of causes, he decided to expand his efforts and commitments to others, not only through his foundation but by tying his creative output to local community and economic-development projects. He agreed to sell the movie rights to Pet Sematary only to a production company that agreed to film the story in Maine. The movie, released in April 1989, was a commercial success and brought more film crews to the state in coming years.
In the meantime, King’s relative calm, and sobriety, continued. He signed up as assistant coach on his son Owen’s Little League team and helped the team win the state championship in the summer of 1989. His family had grown closer since Steve had kicked drugs and alcohol, and no one was happier than Tabby and the kids.
In 1990, Steve found himself reunited once again with his original publisher, Doubleday, for the publication of The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. He was finally going to have one of his best-loved works published in the version he had originally intended. First, he restored the hundred thousand words that had been cut from the original edition. Then he updated it by adding a new beginning and end, along with a dozen illustrations by Bernie Wrightson, a well-known fantasy artist. Steve had admired his work for years and thought Wrightson’s art would enhance the expanded book.
Doubleday, of course, was still Steve’s last choice for a publisher, but because they had published the original novel, they still owned the rights. In the intervening years, however, Doubleday had been purchased by Bertelsmann and merged with Bantam and Dell into BDD, so Steve was dealing with an entirely new set of faces. Many people in the company were doubtful that they could be successful with what was essentially a previously published book with some new material. They did not consider the mythology and anticipation that had built up over the years about this uncut book. In its first week of sale in May 1990, at a then hefty cover price of $24.95 and at 1,153 pages, The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition rocketed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for many weeks.
By the time of its publication, Steve had celebrated a full year without drugs or alcohol. Some things were becoming clearer to him. For one, he felt his writing was more effective now that he was sober:
“I actually feel more creative. I went through a period where I felt a bit flat, like a cup of seltzer water where all the bubbles have departed. But now I feel like myself again, only with wrinkles.”
IT was first broadcast as a four-hour miniseries on ABC-TV on November 18, 1990, and King was thrilled that what he considered his magnum opus was dramatized the same year that the full-length version of The Stand was published. But much as he struggled with reducing the length of his books, he frequently felt constrained by not only network censorship but also by the length of time available for a broadcast. Perhaps that’s why, in recent years, he had pulled back from writing the teleplays for miniseries based on his books. “If I’d written the script for IT, it would have been a thirty-two-hour miniseries,” he joked.
Four Past Midnight, published in September 1990, was a collection of four novellas: “The Langoliers,” “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” “The Library Policeman,” and “The Sun Dog.”
As usual, the idea for one of them came out of the blue, when Steve was doing his usual mundane tasks. One morning Steve was having breakfast with Owen, when the twelve-year-old asked to borrow his father’s library card to take out a few books for a school project. When King asked why he couldn’t use his own card, Owen said he was afraid.
Of course, that got Steve’s attention. “What are you afraid of?” he asked. When he was six years old, one of Owen’s aunts had told him that he always had to return his library books on time or else the library police would show up at the house and punish him. When Steve heard his son’s story, it brought him back to his own childhood.
“When I was young, I’d always check the due date on library books, because I worried about what would happen if I brought the books back a year late,” he said, adding that on several occasions he’d lost a book and gone into a total panic.
Many scholars and fans who are intimately familiar with every word that Stephen King has ever written would point at April 16, 1990, as the turning point in his metamorphosis f
rom horror writer to one who could actually tell a pretty good story without once drawing on horror, blood and guts, or the supernatural.
That was the issue date when “Head Down,” a story about his son’s Little League team and Steve’s experience as an assistant coach, appeared with his byline in the New Yorker, the elite literary weekly magazine. One can only imagine the outrage when his byline appeared.
“I think a lot of people in the literary community look at horror as a gutter genre,” said Chuck Verrill, King’s longtime editor. “You don’t think of Philip Roth and Stephen King in the same sentence, but I think the door has been finally opened for him.”
King donated the payment from the New Yorker to the Bangor Little League. “It was the hardest work I’d done in ten years,” he said. “My method of working when I am out of my depth is brutally simple: I lower my own head and run as fast as I can, as long as I can. That is what I did here, gathering documentation like a mad pack rat and simply trying to keep up with the team. Hard or not, ‘Head Down’ was the opportunity of a lifetime, and before I was done, Chip McGrath of the New Yorker had coaxed the best nonfiction writing of my life out of me.”
Jonathan Jenkins grew up in Bangor and graduated from Bangor High School in 1990. The first couple of summers after graduation, he worked for the Growing Concern, an Orono-based landscaping company contracted to mow the lawn and maintain the gardens at Stephen King’s Bangor house. Jenkins compared the job to painting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Despite that he rode a self-propelled commercial mower that cuts a swath about five feet wide, the Kings’ lawn was “so big that as soon as we finished, we went back and started again,” said Jenkins.
Though Jenkins had grown up in Bangor and knew what the Kings’ house looked like, he wasn’t initially familiar with the elaborate gardens that Tabby had designed and planted because they were mostly in the back of the house. When Jenkins heard he’d be working at the house, at first he expected to be maintaining grounds that looked as if they were straight out of The Shining. “I kept picturing the kid running through the maze at the end of the movie,” he said.
But the grounds were more humble, with no topiary and no six-foot-high hedges. Instead, a good chunk of the area behind the house consisted of elaborate flower beds. Tabby was beginning to lose her sense of smell, so perhaps she kept adding more annuals and perennials to compensate.
Jenkins’s most vivid memory of mowing Stephen King’s lawn was the tourists, an endless stream of people. Some would camp out in front of the house, tightly gripping the bars of the wrought-iron fence, straining for a glimpse of Steve in one of the mansion windows. Others would drive by the house slowly, leaning out a car window with a video camera trained on the towers. “They’d head down the street, turn around, and drive by the house again,” said Jenkins. “It was a constant procession all day long. Every so often a guy would stick his head out the window and yell, ‘Hey, Lawnmower Man!’ ” Other times, people would come up to the gate with Polaroid pictures of the house and ask Jenkins if he could get Steve to sign them.
Steve occasionally wandered out into the yard with the dogs when the landscapers were working and would exchange a few words with Jenkins and the other workers, but Tabby was clearly in charge of the gardening effort. She set most of the flower beds in back of the house so she wouldn’t be on display to the gawkers. “I don’t ever recall her going out front,” said Jenkins. “Usually if she had an issue or wanted to talk to us, it would be out back or on the side of the house.”
One day Jenkins was out front mowing while a car full of teenagers was parked in the street. They kept asking him if Mr. King was home, then all of a sudden Steve pulled up in front of the automatic gate in his Suburban. Jonathan threw a glance toward him as a warning, but they followed his gaze and saw Steve just as he was driving through the gate. “They ran towards the Suburban and had just about reached it when he floored it and closed the gate behind him as fast as he could,” said Jenkins.
In addition to remembering the persistent tourists camped out in front of the house, Jenkins was impressed by Steve and Tabby’s generosity. One of his high school friends from Bangor was an aspiring actor who desperately wanted to go to college and earn a degree in theater, but his parents wanted him to go to medical school. “He got into a huge fight with his parents, and when word got out, Tabby told his parents she and Steve would pick up the tab for him to go to college,” said Jenkins.
It was too early in the season for Jenkins to be mowing the lawn when a man named Erik Keene broke into the Kings’ house on April 20, 1991, at six in the morning. Tabby was the only one home at the time, and after hearing the sound of glass breaking, she encountered Keene in the kitchen. He waved a box wrapped in brown paper at her and told her he had a bomb and was going to blow up the house because he claimed that King stole the plot for Misery from Keene’s aunt. Tabby ran out of the house in her nightgown and headed for a neighbor’s house to call the police.
With a bomb-sniffing dog in tow, the police searched the house and found Keene holed away in the attic. When they opened the box he had threatened Tabby with, they found about two dozen pencils with paper clips wound around them. Keene was arrested and prosecuted and served just over eighteen months in jail before he was extradited to Texas for a parole violation.
After the breakin, the Kings increased security at the house by extending the wrought-iron fence all the way around the yard, adding gates with access codes, and installing closed-circuit surveillance cameras. Spooked by the incident, the family lay low for most of the year.
In August 1991, The Wastelands, the third book of the Dark Tower series, was published. Eager fans got their hopes up that Steve would get back up to speed and bring the projected next four books of the series out in quick succession. Unfortunately, after The Wastelands appeared, readers who wanted to find out about the exploits of Roland Deschain would have to wait more than six long years until the next installment.
Steve’s next novel, Needful Things, the first book he wrote while completely sober, was published in October 1991. “I was in a sensitive place, because it was the first thing that I’d written since I was sixteen without drinking or drugging,” he said.
He intended the book to be a comedy about the Reagan years, but neither readers nor the critics seemed to get the joke. “I thought I’d written a satire of Reaganomics in America in the eighties,” he said. “The idea being that this man came to a small town, opened it like a junk shop and you could buy anything that you wanted, but you ended up paying with your soul.”
With its huge cast of characters, King viewed Needful Things in the same vein as Salem’s Lot and The Stand, but in retrospect, his opinion of the book has changed: “Over the years I’ve come to think that maybe it just wasn’t a very good book.”
Needful Things was billed as the last novel King would set in Castle Rock. He knew he would still write stories about Maine, but in the wake of his drawing attention to the Pine Tree State, a new group of writers had recently written novels about Maine. Except for a few—such as The Beans of Egypt, Maine, written by fellow native Mainer Carolyn Chute—Steve didn’t hesitate to lash out at those writers who wrote about his beloved Maine and got it all wrong. He was provincial and protective about his native state, and he believed that the Johnny-come-latelies shouldn’t even be writing about Maine.
“You can write about Maine if you are from away, as long as you write a story about somebody who’s from away who comes to Maine,” said Steve. “But if you want to write a story about Maine and Maine people, I think you have to grow up here.”
As 1991 ended, Tabby finally felt she could breathe easier. Steve was faithfully attending AA and NA meetings, the house was as secure as they could make it, even though King had made it clear he didn’t “want to live like Michael Jackson or Elvis at Graceland,” and he would continue to attend his beloved Red Sox games and appear at book signings.
10
IT GROWS ON YO
U
Gerald’s Game came out in May of 1992, and to call the novel a departure for Steve was the understatement of the year. Faithful readers who had no qualms about devouring King’s usual stories of murder, mayhem, supernatural creatures, and occasionally blood and gore threw down the book with horror when they learned it was about a couple who played sexual-bondage games in bed.
The idea for Gerald’s Game began when Steve thought he’d like to revisit the primary theme of Cujo, where one or two characters are essentially trapped within a small space. What would happen if a woman was trapped in a room by herself and couldn’t get out? And why was she there?
“She’s handcuffed to a bed,” participating in a bondage game, was the first thought that popped into his brain. “I started to consider what causes people to do this sort of thing, so I read a little bit about it and the whole thing struck me as a bit Victorian. There was something very Snidely Whiplash about the whole thing.”
Reading about sex games wasn’t the only research King had to do, unusual in itself for a man who professed to hate doing research. “I remember thinking that Jessie would have been a gymnast at school and she could simply put her feet back over her head, over the headboard, and stand up.” But he had his doubts. So after writing about forty pages of the book, he wanted to test the theory and he asked his son Joe to play guinea pig.
“I took him into our bedroom and tied him with scarves to the bedposts. At one point, Tabby came in and asked what I was doing, and I told her I was doing an experiment,” Steve said. After trying a few different positions, Joe couldn’t do it. Though he considered making Jessie double-jointed, King thought that was the easy way out, so it was back to the drawing board.