Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  “What I get on the back end is five percent from dollar one, every dollar spent at the box office, I get five cents. Needful Things grossed twenty million domestically and I made half a million. With The Green Mile, I made twenty-five million.”

  Steve had also learned to put his foot down when it came to another visual medium as well: photographs of him. “If I see the red gels and the underlighting come out when someone is photographing me, I walk out,” he said. “All that shit to make me look spooky. I ask them when they’re photographing a black writer if they bring a watermelon and a barrel for him to sit on.”

  He wasn’t soured on all moviemakers; there was still one director he wanted to work with, though it looked as if the planets would have to align first.

  “Steven Spielberg and I have tried to work together three times, first on The Talisman, then on Poltergeist, and then on an original idea,” King said, but things never worked out. “It’s a case of two strong creative personalities, and Spielberg is fiercely creative, and unless you’re very, very quick, he’s always two steps ahead of you.” Steve admitted that in terms of his own creativity, he’s become accustomed to getting his own way. He cited a plaque that hangs in his garage that reads, If you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes. “That was basically the problem with us, who was going to be the lead dog.”

  For Steve and Tabby, exactly twenty years after they’d first received word that their lives had changed with the sale of Carrie, life was running smoothly and the family was calm.

  Tabby’s fifth novel, One on One, was published in the spring of 1993. The book was the fourth in her Nodd’s Ridge series and was billed as a modern-day Catcher in the Rye. As she saw her husband switch gears and begin to experiment with different genres, Tabby became inspired in her own work.

  “The biggest influence he’s had on my writing is that he taught me not to set limits on myself, that I was the only one who could decide what the limits were,” she said. “He’s also taught me the legitimacy of ordinary things in fiction.”

  She had returned to a regular schedule of writing, though it in no way resembled her husband’s output: “I live with somebody who writes a lot faster than me, so I tend to think I’m a very slow writer.” Steve carried on as usual: Nightmares and Dreamscapes, a collection of mostly previously published short stories, including “Head Down” and “Dolan’s Cadillac,” was published in October 1993. The story “The Fifth Quarter” also appears in the book, which is the only published story King wrote under the pseudonym John Swithen, when the piece originally appeared in the April 1972 issue of Cavalier.

  In the spring of 1993, Steve and the other members of the Rock Bottom Remainders went on a ten-day tour of eight East Coast cities from Providence to Miami. Tabby came along as photographer for the book that they’d collaboratively write about the experience: MidLife Confidential. After a few days of rehearsal in Boston, the band set out on the road in Aretha Franklin’s old tour bus with a playlist that included Dave Barry singing “Gloria,” Amy Tan doing lead vocals on “Leader of the Pack” and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” and Steve singing “Teen Angel” and “Stand by Me.”

  Though they had gotten a taste of it the previous year during the two-night Remainders stand in Anaheim, one of the first things the other author/musicians noticed was how much different Steve’s life was from their own.

  “No matter where you are, no matter what time of day, we were stopped, mauled, and interfered with because Stephen King just happened to be traveling with us,” said Pearson. “The guy does not have a private moment in his existence, but he does a beautiful job of dealing with it.”

  Barry concurred: “He’s amazingly polite considering that there are times when people can be very intrusive. I’ve heard him explain to people that he can’t give them an autograph because he wasn’t working that day, and if he signs one, he’ll end up signing four hundred. Some people get it and some people don’t. Sometimes you see them get mad like he owes them.”

  Sometimes the fans employed the other Remainders to get King’s autograph. After performing at a Philadelphia club called Katmandu, everyone hustled onto the bus for the long ride to Atlanta for the next concert. Barry was the last one on the bus, getting there just in time to see a huge crowd of people hanging around the bus all clutching Stephen King books. Steve was already on the bus, and people immediately corralled Barry and begged him to bring Steve out to sign their books.

  “So I gave a little speech, telling them that they just got to see him play for two hours, he’s exhausted, we’re all exhausted, and we had a long bus ride ahead, so thanks for coming, but just let him be now,” Barry said. “They were all watching me and nodding at everything I was saying, and as soon as I finished, they started up again, asking me to drag him out of the bus. They didn’t hear a single word I said. And nobody asked for my autograph, either. Al Kooper said if the bus crashed, the headlines would read, ‘Stephen King and 23 Others Dead.’ ”

  Later that night, a few hours out of Philadelphia, the bus stopped at a rest area. “We all pile out to go take a pee at this truck stop at four in the morning, and when we came out maybe fifteen minutes later, there were four people standing out in front of our bus holding copies of The Stand,” said Pearson. “Which meant that the gas jockeys had called their friends, woke them up, they got dressed, grabbed their copies of The Stand, drove to the truck stop, and were standing there in ten minutes to get Stephen’s autograph at four in the morning.”

  The behavior of some fans inside the clubs and concert venues was no less bizarre. At one performance, a man who thought he was going to hear an actual band lit a cigarette just before he stomped out in disgust. “Somebody next to him was just drunk enough to think, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and lit his lighter next, and pretty soon we had that old Bob Dylan moment going,” said Pearson. “A thousand people swung back and forth with their lighters for our ridiculous band.”

  Five minutes later, Pearson glanced into the audience. “There in front of Steve is this perfectly attractive forty-five-year-old woman, her mouth open in total adoration, holding both hands up just like as if welcoming him to hug her,” said Pearson. “And all ten of her obviously plastic fingernails were on fire.

  “I shouted over to Dave, ‘I never want to be that famous.’ ”

  Goldmark would be the first to admit that the band would not have been the same without King, and not just because of the crazed pyromaniacs. “He made it bigger,” she said. “He made it different, and he gained the band a lot of notoriety and interested a lot of people.”

  But despite his obvious visibility onstage, Steve saw the band as a kind of refuge. “His life is just really different from anybody else’s, but he makes a real effort to be a regular guy, to roll with it, to take the regular seat on the airplane instead of getting the upgrade,” said Goldmark. “I felt that was really important to him. He hung with the group and I was really impressed by that.”

  The few times that Steve and Tabby had to leave the tour on other business, even for a few hours, they regretted it. Once they reached Miami for the ABA Convention, she and Steve stayed at a different hotel from where the band was based. “In retrospect, it was a mistake,” she said. “Once we were at the American Booksellers Convention, Steve wasn’t part of the band anymore, instead he was Stephen King Public Figure, bug in amber. From the silly bitch who threw herself into the limo to announce that she was in love with his mind to eating in a restaurant so full of publishers it might as well have been in New York, the tour felt like it never happened.”

  As band photographer, Tabby found the tour to be a welcome respite from their public lives as well. “After the first day, we all forgot that she was taking pictures,” said Goldmark. “We already knew her from the first year, and it made much more sense to have her as the photographer than having some strange person with a camera come on board. The whole thing was just so much fun, like a weird, wonderful little summer camp.”

  Wh
en the tour ended in Miami, everyone agreed that they would perform at least once a year at ABA.

  Insomnia came out in April 1994. The story is about a widower who starts suffering from a severe lack of sleep. Soon, his sleep deprivation becomes so bad that he believes he’s hallucinating—at first, that is. The truth slowly sinks in, and soon the main character, Ralph Roberts, is in battle with a slew of supernatural demons intent on taking the town of Derry and its inhabitants by force. At 832 pages, compared with the comparatively anemic length of Gerald’s Game at 331 pages and Dolores Claiborne at 305, it appeared that King was back in his old stomping grounds.

  Though Insomnia fell within the same category as Steve’s usual horror books, he was still reaching out into new areas. With the publication of Insomnia, some critics automatically categorized Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne as experimental works in King’s lifelong opus, and his latest book only proved that he was still entrenched in the horror niche and would remain there until his last book was published. King dismissed this theory out of hand: “I’m sure that I could make a very nice living just being Stephen King for the rest of my life. But if it came down to just doing that, I’d rather not write at all.”

  King has suffered bouts of insomnia on and off through the years. His “What if?” moment for the book came during a particularly bad stretch of sleepless nights, and writing the book only exacerbated his condition: “While I was writing it, I hardly slept at all.”

  But the book almost didn’t see the light of day. After he’d spent four months writing and had about 550 pages of the manuscript, he suddenly decided it wasn’t publishable.

  Steve had long held the theory that in writing, all he’s doing is unearthing stories that already exist, extracting them from the earth as intact as possible. “I really think that the stories are found articles and the story basically tells itself,” he said. “When I’m working on something, I see a completed book. In some fashion, that thing is already there. I’m not really making it so much as I am digging it up, the way that you would an artifact, out of the sand. The trick is to get the whole thing out so it’s usable, without breaking it. You always break it somewhat—I mean, you never get a complete thing—but if you’re really careful and lucky, you can get most of it.”

  He believes this so deeply that he bristles whenever someone suggests that he has created his stories and characters out of thin air. “Actually, when I feel that I’m creating, I feel that I’m doing bad work,” he said. “I don’t feel like a novelist or a creative writer as much as I feel like an archaeologist who is digging things up and being very careful and brushing them off and looking at the carvings on them.”

  In that way, Insomnia felt as if he had created it. And he was not happy. “Taken piece by piece and chapter by chapter, it’s good,” he said. “But I didn’t get this one out of the ground. It broke. And I sometimes go back and think I can fix it, but then I remember that I can’t, because of something in the story.”

  He put the manuscript away for a while, and one day about a year later he picked it up and finished it in a white-hot heat. When the book was published, he did a cross-country promotional book tour on his Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail, stopping only in independent bookstores to do signings along the way. Insomnia spent fourteen weeks on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list and Booklist deemed it marvelous.

  Despite his success of almost twenty years and publishing dozens of books, Steve still faced blocks of his own making: “For me, a lot of times the real barrier to get to work—to get to the typewriter or the word processor—comes before I get there.” He often has days when he is unsure whether he can write that day, this coming from a man who is obsessive about his writing and who has spoken of retiring countless times. “I have a lot of days like that. I think it’s kind of funny really, that people think that just because I’m Stephen King, it doesn’t happen to me.” Usually his hesitation comes when he knows he has to write a difficult scene, but like many other writers, once he sits down at the desk and puts his fingers on the keyboard, he falls right back into the story.

  On May 8, 1994, The Stand debuted as a four-part miniseries on ABC.

  “The Stand is the most important project, in terms of film, that I’ve ever done,” he said. “It was a huge effort and more work than any two or three novels I’ve ever done in my life.”

  When Steve set out to write the screenplay for the book, he had originally intended it to be a movie for theatrical release. Try as he might, he couldn’t condense the story enough, and he and director George Romero thought about turning it into two separate films before farming it out to another writer, but then ABC approached Steve about turning it into a miniseries.

  Once the script was finalized—the length of the miniseries was pegged at over six hours—Steve broke with his usual hands-off approach when selling movie rights to his books and was on the set of The Stand for most of the 125 days of shooting, serving as coexecutive producer. There was no way he’d miss it; after all, it was his baby.

  “I was mostly making sure that they were doing what they were supposed to do,” he said, but he occasionally caught a mistake that few other people would have picked up on. When Ray Walston, Gary Sinise, and Corin Nemec were on Walston’s porch, Nemec, who played Harold, wanted to go to Stovington, but Sinise, in the role of Stu Redman, said there was no need, since the people there were all dead.

  Nemec’s line in the script was “Let’s just say I’m Missouri.” After three takes, King interrupted the actors to ask Nemec to repeat the line. Nemec pointed to the script where it read, “I’m Missouri,” which turned out to be a printing error.

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘Let’s just say I’m from Missouri,’ meaning ‘Show me,’ ” King said. “This was not a case of an actor being stupid, this was the case of an actor with so much reverence for the script, apparently, he didn’t want to change a word.”

  Little noticed on the set was Steve’s son Joe, who joined the crew as a production assistant during a semester off from college. And Steve decided to take a cameo role in the miniseries to play the part of Teddy Weizak, who gives Nadine a ride and also serves as a border guard.

  “I actually have a part this time that isn’t a total country asshole,” he said. “Starting with Creepshow, I got sort of typecast. I’ve played a lot of hick morons in my career.”

  The Shawshank Redemption followed in theaters that fall, and the movie received raves from critics, even those who had previously automatically panned a movie or book simply because King’s name was attached.

  In fact, Shawshank stood out simply because many moviegoers had no clue that Steve wrote the story that the film was based on. It was no secret that many of his previous movies had turned out to be clunkers. But people who couldn’t be bribed to walk into a movie theater to watch a Stephen King movie—or to read one of his books—loved the film and dragged their friends along to see it.

  Case in point: One day Steve was in a grocery store in Sarasota when a woman approached him to tell him she was happy to meet him, but that she didn’t read his books or watch his movies because she didn’t like horror. He asked her what she did like, and she rattled off a list of movies including Shawshank Redemption.

  “I wrote that,” he said.

  “No, you didn’t,” she said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Steve excused himself to pay for his groceries.

  Somewhat less publicized in the mass media, but much discussed among New York literary insiders, was the appearance of a short story with a Stephen King byline in the New Yorker. “The Man in the Black Suit,” published in the October 31, 1994, issue, was King’s second appearance in the magazine. Was a new, more literary game afoot for King? Or were the definitions of high and low literature being blurred?

  Steve had shown Chuck Verrill, his longtime editor, his stories from time to time for consideration for future short-story collections. Verrill thoug
ht that a couple of his nonsupernatural stories might be a good fit for the New Yorker. Verrill sent them along to Chip McGrath, then the fiction editor at the magazine, who said he’d rather have one of King’s typical stories. Verrill sent along “The Man in the Black Suit,” and the magazine published it in the Halloween issue. Steve’s reaction was mixed: “I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, and I’m grateful for the exposure, but it’s still a little bit like being a prostitute and being put at the head of a float on National Whore’s Day.”

  Yet, the stories he wrote that strayed outside his well-worn horror path were much harder for him to write. “It’s like having to learn to think all over again,” he said. “At this point, writing on a nonsupernatural level is like learning to talk after you’ve had a stroke.”

  11

  THE GOLDEN YEARS

  Nineteen ninety-five was characterized by the fast and furious release of movies based on King’s novels and stories. Both The Mangler and Dolores Claiborne came out on the big screen in March, while The Langoliers appeared as a made-for-TV movie two months later. Rose Madder, Steve’s only novel to be published that year, followed in July. It’s the story of an abused woman who escapes her violent husband to look for a new life and, through a mysterious painting she got by pawning her engagement ring, discovers her power. Obviously, a critic at Entertainment Weekly did not go along with King’s new direction and panned the book, grading it C-minus, asking, “When did Stephen King stop being scary?”

  The year unfolded with reprints of previously published novels, audiobooks, and short fiction and nonfiction appearing in a variety of magazines and journals. Perhaps the biggest surprise was when Steve’s New Yorker story “The Man in the Black Suit” won first prize in the O. Henry Awards. It would be published in the accompanying anthology, Prize Stories 1996: The O. Henry Awards. Yes, it was that Stephen King. He hypothesized that the only reason he won was because the stories were submitted without the authors’ names. “There’s an immediate attitude that anyone who’s reaching a large, popular audience, what they’re doing is crap,” he said. “You’ve got these two places: high literature and popular fiction. In between is this great big river of misunderstanding. There are a lot of people who are dedicated to keeping the clubhouse white.”