Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  As usual when the main character was a writer, Steve gave a disclaimer in case some readers would think he was writing autobiographically: “Mike is probably as close as you could get to me, even though I’ve been careful to distance myself from him. He’s not as successful, he has no children, his wife is dead, and he has writer’s block. But our take on what the writing is about and how the writing works is very similar.”

  The jacket copy played it to the hilt, highlighting his recent O. Henry Award. CNN called the book a “classic ghost story,” and like clockwork it hit the New York Times bestseller list the first week it was published and stayed there for a month.

  As he made the promotional rounds for Bag of Bones, Steve was still talking about retiring, or at least taking a little bit of time off. But even as the words left his mouth, he realized the odds were not good: “You know how when you’re on the turnpike on a hot day, and you always seem to see water at the horizon? That’s my year off, right there! Whenever I get there, it’s always a little further along.”

  Steve and Tabby’s kids were grown, out of the house, and forging paths of their own. Though Joe and Owen were pursuing writing careers full speed ahead, Naomi needed to have a serious operation in 1997. She was still running the restaurant, but business wasn’t as good as she and her partner had projected, and she was mulling over her path in life when she was hit by a drunk driver and forced off the road.

  The other driver was never found. According to an eyewitness, the car bore no tags or registration. Naomi was seriously injured, her back refracturing along an old spinal injury. The accident shook her world.

  “My first reaction was to pray really hard for survival,” she said. “My later reactions were anger, fear, and grief because there were significant losses and no way to recoup them.” She said for years afterward she was incredibly nervous whenever faced with a situation where she found herself in traffic merging to her right. “I had a choice to make: to reopen my heart that was scarred with anger, fear, and grief, or to live confined in an emotional spiritual cage.”

  She was an active member of the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, near Portland, and before she entered the hospital, over one hundred parishioners gathered to pray for her. She later said that her most memorable spiritual experience was that healing service. “Words fail to describe it,” she said. “Your pulse merges with a sense of unity. You can feel the heartbeat of the world.”

  A few days after her operation, those same church members said that they had visions of her going to seminary to become a minister. She dreamed about it too.

  “I kept having a dream about a closet full of robes and vestments and clerical garb,” she said, “but everyone knew that no gay girl kid was going to be able to do that.”

  In the aftermath of what turned into a lengthy recovery, Naomi decided to close Tabitha Jean’s, her Portland restaurant. Her priorities were changing. She was beginning to heed the call she’d heard to attend seminary and become a Unitarian/Universalist minister, though the fact the business was struggling helped strengthen her resolve. While the restaurant did well at lunch, a dinner crowd never materialized the way she had envisioned.

  Following in her father’s philanthropic footsteps, Naomi donated all equipment from the restaurant to several local charities, including the Preble Street Mission, a Portland homeless shelter and soup kitchen; the East End Family Workshop, a local child-care center and resource service; and the First Universalist Church of Yarmouth, her home church.

  Health problems were starting to weigh Steve down as well. Though he had always worn Coke-bottle glasses for his severe myopia, his eyesight was getting worse. In 1997, he was diagnosed with macular degeneration, with total blindness the eventual outcome. The following year, he suffered a detached retina. His vision primarily deteriorated in his straight-ahead perspective, but not in the peripheral vision. He didn’t seem too disturbed by it.

  “That’s the part I want to keep, as a man and as a writer, is what I see out of the corners,” he said.

  Tabby had also experienced her fair share of health issues. Not only had she lost most of her sense of smell, but she was diabetic as well. And a few years earlier, she’d had an operation where, according to Rick Hautala, “the doctors came out with some or all of one kidney in a bucket.”

  It was a poorly kept secret that Steve never liked Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining, and he’d always wondered what a remake would look like. He finally got his chance in April 1997 when Mick Garris directed a three-part miniseries that aired on ABC-TV.

  Through the years, Kubrick was unhappy with Steve’s continued criticism of his 1980 film. ABC was happy with The Stand, so they invited Steve to work on another miniseries for the network. He replied that he’d like to rework The Shining into a miniseries, and this time he’d like to write the screenplay. To remake the movie, a deal unusual for Hollywood was struck between three parties, Steve, Kubrick, and Warner Brothers, who had produced the original film: the miniseries would only get made if Steve kept his mouth shut about Kubrick’s version. He agreed, the standards and practices department gave his script a green light, and production began.

  This time, he wanted to see how much he could get away with, since the network was obviously pleased with his treatment of The Stand, despite a number of questionable scenes. “I wanted to push the envelope, and I’d worked enough with them that I felt confident enough that they would let me do just that,” he said. He sensed that the censors knew they were working within a pretty broad gray area, so Steve tried to stay away from scenes that he knew they’d want to cut.

  “We had a number of problems with the network in terms of the violence between a man and his wife,” said King. “The last hour of the show is very harrowing. He’s chasing her, she’s trying to protect the kid, and he’s got a mallet which he’s hitting her with, and hitting her and hitting her. In the movie he was hit once but she wasn’t.”

  Ironically, the horror sailed through with flying colors, but a stumbling block was Wendy Torrance’s telling her husband to stick his job up his ass. The censors refused to budge, so Steve changed the line to “Take this job and stick it!” Yet the issue of Danny’s life being endangered was overlooked by the censor’s red pencil. When the miniseries aired, ABC received a number of complaints about the harrowing scenes when Jack pursued his son, practically nonstop. After The Shining aired, censors at all three networks agreed that from now on, in programs airing before 9 p.m., they’d excise any scenes or situations where children would be placed in physical and emotional jeopardy.

  On December 1, 1997, Michael Carneal, a fourteen-year-old freshman at Heath High School, in West Paducah, Kentucky, shot and killed three students at a school prayer meeting and wounded five others. Carneal had a copy of Rage, the first novel by Richard Bachman, in his locker.

  Barry Loukaitis, just shy of his fifteenth birthday, killed two fellow students and his algebra teacher on February 2, 1996, at Frontier Junior High in Moses Lake, Washington. After he shot his teacher, fifty-one-year-old Leona Caires, Loukaitis was overheard quoting from Rage, “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?”

  In the wake of the shootings, and after the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999, where thirteen people were killed and twenty-three wounded, King made an important decision. “I sympathize with the losers of the world and to some degree understand the blind hormonal rage and ratlike panic which sets in as one senses the corridor of choice growing ever narrower, until violence seems like the only possible response to the pain,” he said. “And although I pity the Columbine shooters, had I been in a position to do so, I like to think I would have killed them myself, the way one puts down any savage animal that cannot stop biting.”

  The FBI asked King to help set up a computer profile to identify teenagers who have similar tendencies. He declined, but realized he’d had enough.

  “I’ve written a lot of books about teenagers who are pushed to violent acts,” he said
. “But with Rage, it’s almost a blueprint in terms of saying, ‘This is how it could be done.’ And when it started to happen, I said, ‘That’s it for me, that book’s off the market.’ ”

  He told New American Library, the publisher of the early Bachman novels, to declare the book out of print.

  During the New England ice storm of 1998, which toppled trees and knocked out power across the region for up to two weeks or more, Steve and Tabby’s opinion toward Maine winters began to change. He was walking one of their dogs in the driveway, taking baby steps down the icy surface to get the mail, when a chunk of ice fell off the mailbox, barely missing the dog. “That’s when we asked ourselves, ‘Why are we still here in the winter?’ ” The only answer they could find: “Because we always have.” So they decided to start spending the winter months near Sarasota, Florida. “The first thing I always do in the morning is turn on the TV and see what they’re getting hit with up North,” he said.

  He and Tabby typically made their annual pilgrimage back and forth by car. Steve’s fear of flying was still as strong as ever, though he tended to joke about it. “There’s no breakdown lane up there. If it stops, it’s over, forget it,” he said, adding that he prefers to fly first-class not only for the advantages and service, but also, “If there’s going to be an accident, I want to be the first to the crash site. On the other hand, if you’re in the last row, at least you don’t have to linger in a burn ward.”

  Once when he was flying on a small jet, he commented that he wouldn’t mind flying if he could just get knocked out for the entire flight, but without resorting to the drugs and booze that he had kicked in a hard-won fight a decade earlier. One of the pilots said they could do it by lowering the oxygen back in the passenger section. Steve brightened and told them to do it, but they refused.

  Once he had a real scare when he was flying on a Learjet and the plane hit clear-air turbulence. “It was like hitting a rock wall in the sky,” he said. “The oxygen mask came out and I thought that we were dead. You never want to see an oxygen mask, except in the film at the beginning.” The turbulence was so bad that his seat was ripped from the floor and he landed lying on his side still strapped into the seat.

  It took a while for him to get on a plane again.

  Older and wiser, Steve was starting to become more sanguine about not only his place in the canon of popular fiction, but also about the reality of the publishing marketplace. He recognized that his decision to not focus strictly on writing horror had driven away some readers. “Over the years, I’ve lost readers,” he said. “After all, I’m not exactly providing the same level of escape that Salem’s Lot or The Shining did. People tell me I never wrote a book as good as The Stand, and I tell them how depressing it is to hear that something you wrote twenty-eight years ago was your best book.”

  Regardless of the topic or approach he took in a new novel, the process was always the same. “Once the actual act of creation starts, writing is like this high-speed version of the You Can Make Thousands of Faces! flip books I had when I was a kid, where you mix and match,” he said. “You can put maybe six or seven different eyes with different noses, except in writing a novel there aren’t just thousands of faces, there are literally billions of different events, personalities, and things that you can flip together.”

  Even though some of the readers who had been with him from the beginning were falling away with his new brand of books, he was about to embark on a project that would bring millions of new fans into the fold, all saying—just as had happened when Stand by Me and The Shawshank Redemption were released—“I didn’t know Stephen King wrote that!”

  Production began for The Green Mile, with Frank Darabont directing and serving as screenwriter. Steve visited the set a few times and said that Tom Hanks stayed in character the whole time Steve was there. “He strapped me into the chair, tightened the straps, and put the hood on my head and screwed it down. I said, ‘Okay, I’ve got the idea, now let me out of here,’ ” Steve said. Then he asked Hanks to trade places. Hanks refused, telling King that since he was in charge of the block, he could never sit in the chair.

  Steve continued to branch out even on TV. Instead of adapting his novels and stories for miniseries, he was invited to write an episode for the fifth season of The X-Files, which aired on February 8, 1998. He had appeared on Celebrity Jeopardy! with David Duchovny and Lynn Redgrave in November 1995, and Steve won, donating his proceeds of $11,400 to the Bangor Public Library. After the show Duchovny, who played the role of Fox Mulder on The X-Files, suggested that Steve write an episode for the series. He returned to Bangor, watched a few shows, and started talking with Chris Carter, who created the series.

  The episode, named “Bunghoney,” was classic Stephen King. Gillian Anderson, in the role of Dana Scully, takes a rare weekend break to a town in Maine, where she meets a number of residents who have clawed out their eyes. She volunteers her services to the police in town and discovers the cause to be a single mother with a supposedly autistic daughter whose favorite doll, named Chinga, appears to be possessed and the cause of the discontent in town. According to King, Carter radically edited his original script, which revolved around the theme of the government pursuing the little girl.

  But Carter wanted King to focus on Chinga, so Steve rewrote the script. Carter still wasn’t happy with the revisions, so instead of giving it back to Steve for another try, he instead rewrote it himself. The episode that finally aired bore little resemblance to Steve’s initial idea.

  Though Steve had dreamed for years about finding his father—or at least, what happened to him—he’d never actively pursued it, perhaps afraid of what he’d discover.

  One day in the late nineties, someone did the digging for him.

  A crew at the CBS television network was working on a documentary on Steve, and they interviewed David King, his brother. The issue of their father came up, and though both brothers typically dismissed the question, this time David gave the producers Donald King’s Social Security number. After a bit of research, the crew found a trail that had long gone cold. Steve’s premonitions from the eighties were right on track. In November 1980, Donald King had died in the small town of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, known as the Gateway to the Poconos, and ironically five miles west of Bangor, Pennsylvania.

  Though Steve and David had mixed feelings about the news, the producers presented them with photos of the new family their father had started, which included three boys and a girl, their half brothers and half sister.

  King believes that his father’s widow, Brazilian by birth, had no clue of her late husband’s past. “Bigamy is a very severe offense, which would have serious consequences for those children,” Steve said. “I couldn’t do that to them, bring that knowledge. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say.”

  12

  MISERY

  The last year of the millennium began beautifully for Steve. He had four solid projects scheduled: The Storm of the Century, the story of a stranger who shows up in a small town in Maine just before a massive blizzard and who knows all the residents’ secrets, would debut as a miniseries in February. The novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was slated for publication in April, and Hearts in Atlantis, a collection of stories that link a group of friends from childhood through adulthood who are influenced by the Vietnam War, was scheduled for September. The eagerly anticipated Green Mile movie would reach theaters in December, just in time to attract the Christmas crowds.

  Stephen King had been scaring the bejesus out of readers and movie lovers all over the world for a quarter of a century. He decided to throw himself a party on the anniversary of the first publication of Carrie. After an exquisite dinner and lots of champagne—except, of course, for the host—the highlight of the night finally arrived: the lights were dimmed, a projection screen was lowered, and the invited dignitaries were treated to a best-hits version of the bloodiest, scariest snippets from films based on King’s novels.

  He could have chosen any venue i
n the entire world and flown two hundred of his closest friends and colleagues in via first class and it wouldn’t have made a dent in his bank account. But staying true to form, he wanted his celebration to be held at nothing less than Manhattan’s Tavern on the Green, which fit his persona as the hick from Bangor perfectly, as the landmark restaurant is a place most New Yorkers would disdain as suitable only for tourists who don’t know any better.

  Though he still sold movie rights and usually eschewed getting involved in the script or the production, he would occasionally go to the other extreme and write the screenplay, serve as executive producer, and spend as much time on the set as possible. Storm of the Century was one of those projects.

  “I think that the best rule is to either be all the way in or be all the way out,” he said. “With Storm of the Century I was all the way in, and I really enjoyed the process.”

  In developing the story for the four-part miniseries, King returned to a theme he had explored countless times before: the secrets that people in a small town know about each other but rarely give voice to. Not until a stranger enters the community do the secrets and long-held resentments finally get aired, which leads to a total meltdown for the town and the people.

  As he had done previously with The Stand and IT, King had to shape the screenplay to get by the ABC censors. By this time, he’d had a lot of practice in what they’d accept and what they’d give a thumbs-down. He’d figured out a sneaky trick: “I build in three or four paper tigers that I can let go in trade for the stuff I feel is really important, and generally that works pretty well.”

  The one tug-of-war with Storm of the Century occurred when a deputy says, “You know, this is gonna be one bad mother of a storm.” The censors told Steve to take out the phrase. Steve’s reply: “Every sitcom on American TV is salacious in tone. We argued back and forth, but finally, I got my own way. Usually, with TV, if you whine enough, you do.”