by Lisa Rogak
All the loyal fans who refused to buy the book because of the perceived subject matter would be surprised to hear King’s take on it: “Gerald’s Game is a book about child abuse. It’s an ordinary, grim story about a little girl who is abused by her father and grows up to be a certain kind of woman. She is chained to the bed because she has been chained in a certain kind of life.” Reviews were mixed: Entertainment Weekly called the main character Jessie Burlingame’s struggle 150 of the most excruciating, exhilarating pages in recent thriller fiction, yet a few sentences later lambasted King for his “stick-on feminism.” As predicted, many readers were offended by the sexual overtones of the book, pretty much a first in King’s oeuvre.
Like the publication of “Head Down” in the New Yorker two years earlier, Gerald’s Game was another departure for Steve. But the story made sense to him as a metaphor for his own struggles of the last few years. Not only was the novel set inside one room, but also within one woman’s brain. While a day didn’t go by when he didn’t want to drink a case of beer or snort up countless lines of coke, Jessie taught him the grace in the “one day at a time” motto of AA. He used the experience of his own sometimes overly long days to drag out Jessie’s minutes and make her story as horrific as possible to the reader.
In addition to his broadening horizons in his writing career, another surprising thing happened: once he had more than a tenuous hold on his sobriety, his marriage changed for the better. Steve and Tabby almost felt they were on a second honeymoon.
“People think that the kid stuff of love—you know, the romance, moon-June-spoon, and all the rest of it—ends with marriage, or shortly after,” he said. “When romance comes again, it comes as a complete surprise. And it’s much more uplifting ’cause you feel so grateful to have it return.”
Tabby agreed: “Sometimes creative people get creative about their marriage and find ways to revitalize it. Change happens, and you have to let it. Ultimately, it’s about contentment, partnership, and friendship. The other thing about marriage, if you get out early, you’ll miss the surprises, and some of them are wonderful.”
They also continued their charitable giving, primarily to Maine organizations. In 1992, they donated $750,000 for a new pediatric unit at Eastern Maine Medical Center.
Steve was still intimately involved with baseball, following the Red Sox and coaching Owen’s Little League team. When Owen turned thirteen and moved on to Senior League, the difference in the quality of the fields was night and day: the field was pockmarked and uneven, and the equipment looked as if it came from a yard sale.
“I thought it was shame that kids have to adjust to substandard fields with shoddy equipment,” King said. “It’s not on a par with world peace or ending hunger here in Bangor, but I was taught that charity begins at home.”
So with a $1.5 million contribution from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, he decided to build a regulation AA baseball field for teenagers in and around Bangor. The Shawn T. Mansfield Stadium is named in memory of fellow coach Dave Mansfield’s son, who died of cerebral palsy.
The stadium, which Mansfield has dubbed “Stephen King’s Field of Screams,” can seat fifteen hundred, is fully lit for night games, and has a state-of-the-art public address system. The infield is made of Georgia clay, and sod was painstakingly placed by hand in the outfield and around the pitcher’s mound. A full-size electronic scoreboard complete with a six-foot-high, six-hundred-pound, lit analog clock sits beyond the right-field fence.
In addition to his philanthropic efforts, Steve continued to be generous to small presses and publishers. Occasionally, he’d send a story over the transom to an editor who had no clue it was coming. In the spring of 1992, King sent the story “Chattery Teeth” to Richard Chizmar, founder of the magazine Cemetery Dance. Founded in 1988, Cemetery Dance is a horror magazine that pays homage to the old Twilight Zone TV show and publishes short stories, book reviews, and author interviews. King was a regular reader of the magazine, and when the story was published in the fall issue, his byline helped raise the profile of the magazine.
Not two years after Tabby’s encounter with Erik Keene, another fan began haranguing King. In the summer of 1992, Stephen Lightfoot showed up in Bangor, camping out in a van covered with messages that blamed King for John Lennon’s murder.
The police generally left him alone, but told him he’d be arrested if he strayed anywhere near Steve or his family. Not long after receiving the warning, Lightfoot showed up at a political rally in Portland for Representative Tom Andrews, and Steve and Tabby were in the audience.
A few of the volunteers on Andrews’s campaign saw Lightfoot’s van and watched as he approached some of the people in the audience. The volunteers called police, who said their hands were tied because Lightfoot hadn’t broken any laws. However, Steve was not the first famous person to appear in Lightfoot’s crosshairs; he was also warned to stay away from the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, earlier that summer.
Sandy Phippen has firsthand experience with the sheer determination of King’s fans. When Phippen lived in Orono, one Sunday morning he went to pick up a newspaper at a local store and ran into a couple who’d driven all the way from Oklahoma just to take a photo of Steve’s house. “This happens all the time to anyone who lives near Bangor,” Phippen said. Usually he just gives directions, but this time he actually drove them to Steve’s house.
Based on his expertise as a book reviewer for Down East magazine, Phippen started to lead literary tours of Bangor for tourists. “Of course, all anyone wanted to see was Stephen King’s house,” he sighed. Once he had a busload of tourists from Youngstown, Ohio, who were librarians. “There have been lots of other writers from the Bangor area through the years, and poor ones too,” he said. “But everyone just wanted to go to Stephen King’s house, and to see the Paul Bunyan statue. Finally, because it was getting dark and they wouldn’t be able to take pictures outside Steve’s house, I gave in.”
Shortly after Gerald’s Game was published, Steve appeared at the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association (ABA) in Anaheim, California, the largest publishing trade show in the United States. This year, however, in addition to talking with booksellers and reporters, he’d be doing something a bit different: he’d be playing his old electric guitar in a band made up solely of other bestselling authors at a charity gig.
He took the stage as rhythm guitarist in a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, where his bandmates included Amy Tan, Dave Barry, and Barbara Kingsolver, among others. They planned two performances during the convention—one on the convention floor, another in a local club. Their motto didn’t mince any words: “They play music as well as Metallica writes novels.”
The band was the brainchild of Kathi Kamen Goldmark, a San Francisco–based media escort who ferried authors from one interview to another when they came to town to plug their books. The conversations during the long days would often wander, and Goldmark would mention that she also sang in several small country bands.
She said the reaction from authors was universal: they all wished they could play in a band; perhaps they’d played in high school but had let their musical aspirations lapse over the years.
“I just kept hearing the same story, and we were all around the age of forty and thinking about the things we didn’t get to do,” she said, before the epiphany hit. Why not? Somehow she talked about a dozen authors into starting a band. In addition to Tan, Barry, and Kingsolver, other members included Ridley Pearson and Robert Fulghum. A friend who knew that King played guitar told Goldmark and suggested she invite him to be in the band. He accepted immediately.
She asked the members to fax lists of songs they’d like to play, keeping in mind that none of the authors knew anyone else, and what they all had in common was that they were amateurs. “Easy three-chord rock and roll was the only thing I had in mind,” she said.
Once word got out that Steve was playing in the band, everything changed.
Tickets to the two scheduled concerts began to sell briskly, and booksellers called to see if Goldmark could arrange a private dinner with King, among other requests.
The first order of business was to find out just how bad they were. Goldmark and musical director Al Kooper, a songwriter and producer who helped to form the band Blood, Sweat, and Tears and also played the organ on Bob Dylan’s classic “Like a Rolling Stone,” booked a few days in a practice studio near the convention hall.
“I walked into a band rehearsal room in Anaheim, California, in 1992 and there were a bunch of people playing instruments loudly and badly,” said Dave Barry, prize-winning humorist and columnist at the Miami Herald. “In the middle, thrashing away on his guitar, was Stephen King. I picked up my guitar and started thrashing away, adding to the bad music set.”
During the phase when Goldmark had the musicians faxing song lists back and forth, Barry thought that maybe he was getting in over his head: “Some of these people sounded like they actually knew what they were doing, with chord charts and the like flying through the air.” Though he’d played in a band during college, he knew he wasn’t that good. Once the rehearsal began, however, Barry relaxed: “I was relieved when I got there and saw how bad we all were.”
Ridley Pearson, whose books included Blood of the Albatross and Undercurrents, also showed up that first day feeling a bit intimidated, not as much for his musical skills, but because Steve was in the band. “I was a big fan of his,” he said. “I read his books early on.”
When they finally met, Pearson was disarmed by King’s demeanor. “He turned out to be this teenagery, goofy tall guy who is not entirely comfortable with himself, but incredibly smart and very funny,” said Pearson. “Somehow I expected this guy dressed all in black. But he’s this blue jeans and T-shirt dude who has never grown past the age of fifteen, which is true of all the Remainders, which is why we all get along.”
Once they got past the first couple of awkward rehearsals and started to hang out, Goldmark noticed the breadth of Steve’s knowledge of popular culture. “He knows about everything,” she said. “You can’t mention a song or artist or a book that he’s not familiar with. Name a song and he’ll quote the lyrics. It doesn’t matter if it was a recent hit or something from thirty years ago, he’ll know it.”
Tabby also came on board for the rehearsals and performances. To Goldmark’s relief, she fit right in. “She’s very unpretentious and no-nonsense and very funny,” said Goldmark, who booked a tour bus to take the band the ten blocks from the hotel to the gig and back. “She went out and bought a bunch of extralarge boxer shorts and got a bunch of people to throw them at the stage during the performance. As fun as the gig was, I think the bus was more fun.”
During the performances, Goldmark thought that Steve looked like a little kid at Christmas, and he acted like one too. Though King focused mostly on playing along on rhythm guitar, he did sing a few songs, including “Last Kiss” and “Teen Angel.”
“Steve would get going and kind of spontaneously mutate the lyrics,” said Dave Barry. “One night, on ‘Last Kiss,’ he sang, ‘When I awoke, she was lying there and I brushed her liver from my hair.’ ” The other band members cracked up and had to stop playing for several minutes.
No one—Kathi Goldmark or the authors in the band—expected the reaction to the Remainders to be so big, or to continue beyond the two shows. But it turned into a huge story not only with the national media, with the morning television stations frantically jockeying to get first dibs on the story, but also with the publishing industry all abuzz. After the final encore for the second performance, the band filed offstage, their heads still ringing with the thrill of playing for hundreds of screaming fans.
As Ridley walked behind Steve, suddenly Steve looked at him over his shoulder and said, “Ridley, we’re not done here.”
Within days, plans were being solidified for future performances as well as a road tour in 1993, which needed to be financed, so Steve proposed the idea of a book to his publisher, Viking, which they instantly agreed to. The working title was MidLife Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude. Everyone in the band would contribute, Tabby would take photos, and Dave Marsh, a music critic who had written biographies of Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, and the Who, would edit the book.
The Rock Bottom Remainders would play again.
After Gerald’s Game caught many Stephen King fans off guard, he continued to surprise them when Dolores Claiborne was published, the story of a woman who has led a long, hardscrabble life. When the story opens, she has been accused of murder, and not for the first time. Steve said he patterned Dolores’s life after his own mother’s, and that many of the stories in the book were those he had heard from Ruth when he was growing up.
To longtime fans who asked what happened to the horror, he assured them it would return, and soon. “Don’t say that I’m stretching my range or that I’ve left horror behind,” he said. “I’m just trying to find things I haven’t done to stay alive creatively.”
For a while, he actually considered combining Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game into one novel, since both involved the abuse of a woman. But after working on a few different angles, he decided to keep them separate. Since he was already working on Gerald’s Game when the idea for Dolores Claiborne came along, he opted to finish Gerald’s Game first.
In addition to branching out with the kinds of stories he told, he was also changing in at least one other way with his writing.
“The worst advice I’ve ever received is ‘Don’t listen to the critics.’ I think that you should, because sometimes they’re telling you something is broken that you can fix,” he said. “If you stick your head in the sand, you won’t have to hear any bad news and you won’t have to change what you’re doing. But if you listen, sometimes you can get rid of a bad habit. Hey, none of us like critics, but if they’re all saying something’s a piece of shit, they’re right.”
For most of his novels, and quite a few of his short stories, movie studios and production companies snapped up the film rights even before the books saw print. Dolores Claiborne was no exception, but he was starting to lose patience with film projects that were not true to the original story.
The simple reason why films such as Children of the Corn II got made in the first place was because of a contract loophole where, in addition to buying the rights to the story, the producers also obtained the rights to the title. So while the first movie out of the gate was typically faithful to King’s stories and novels, subsequent movies weren’t. But Steve had no way of stopping them.
“They suck!” he said. “Carrie 2? What’s the point? There are thousands of good scripts and screenwriters out there, but their work is going begging because these people are so intellectually bankrupt that they have to do Carrie 2 or Children of the Corn VI.”
Sometimes They Come Back spawned Sometimes They Come Back … Again, followed by Sometimes They Come Back … for More. Steve predicted that the fourth and fifth in the series could be called Sometimes They Come Back … for Dinner and Sometimes They Come Back … for Low, Low Prices.
“They’re like walking around with a piece of toilet paper on your shoe,” he said. “People tell me they thought it was really a kind of a piece of junk. And I didn’t even know it got made.”
In most cases there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He did prevail in one instance, when New Line Cinema released Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man, which starred Pierce Brosnan. The producers also had a script titled Cyber God, and they killed two birds with one stone by incorporating a few elements from King’s story into Cyber God, but ran it under the title Stephen King’s Lawnmower Man.
Steve was so incensed at how they’d abused his name and his story that he sued New Line to have his name and the title of the story removed from the film and promotional materials. Two separate courts found in his favor, but New Line refused to change the film’s title, and th
e first editions of the video still had Stephen King’s name in the title. Only after the company was ordered to pay him $10,000 a day and full profits did they remove his name from the movie.
While Lawnmower Man was an extreme example, he was sanguine about why so many of the movies based on his books or short stories turned out to be bombs: he referred to it as the Hotel Towel Problem. “You steal all the towels in the hotel room and try to get them into a single suitcase,” he said. “You sit on it and move the towels around, and it still won’t shut because there’s too much material.” A parallel issue involved film producers. “They’re like the sharks you see in horror movies. They’re nothing but eating machines that buy and option books, and then the projects just sit on their desks while they wonder what the fuck to do with them.”
While some might suggest that he could perhaps help reduce the number of bad movies produced by not selling any more film rights, he refused: “I can’t get frozen on either side by saying that I can’t take on one more project, or what if I say these people can’t do this and they would have made a fantastic film?” For example, several people told him he was making a huge mistake to give Frank Darabont the option for his novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, let alone sell it for only a thousand bucks. Darabont had previously written several episodes for the TV series Tales from the Crypt and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and his directorial debut was The Woman in the Room, a Dollar Baby short film that he’d made from one of King’s short stories. “I think that you have to take some risks, and you can’t do everything yourself because there’s just not enough life or enough time.”
One reason Steve decided he could throw the dice was because he had worked out a sweet deal with the production company Castle Rock Entertainment, a company that actor Rob Reiner and several Hollywood executives had founded in 1987 that dates back to Stand by Me. “They can have my work for a buck, and what I want in exchange is script approval, director approval, cast approval, and I want to have the authority to push the stop button at any point regardless of how much money has been invested,” Steve said.