by Lisa Rogak
In case Smith or a relative got the idea to cash in on the gruesome history of the van, King’s friend and lawyer Warren Silver offered Smith $1,500 for the vehicle, which he accepted. For a while, Steve played with the idea of using the van for a fund-raiser for a Bangor charity—five bucks buys you three swings with a sledgehammer—but Tabby discouraged him. In the end, the van was crushed and cubed.
The pair of Steve’s glasses found on the front seat of Bryan Smith’s van made out better than Steve’s body did. The wire frames were bent, but even after the impact of the van at forty miles an hour, the lenses were fine. He chose to reuse the lenses and put them in new frames.
That fall, as he recovered and began to give interviews, his typical humor returned. King vowed that if the external rotator was still on his leg in late October, he would hang a string of Halloween lights on the clamps of the device.
He also realized it was time to quit his painkillers. While he was aware the pain was fading away, from several previous decades’ worth of heavy addiction to alcohol and drugs, his body was beginning to invent new pain in order to justify the drugs. “I was manufacturing the pain to get the medication. There was a point there where either I stopped using or I would have to get my Vicodin prescription filled in a wheelbarrow,” he joked. The only choice was to go cold turkey. “Kicking a prescription like that is physical. It took about two weeks. You kick it and you sweat, you’re awake nights, you twitch, and then it’s gone.”
By the time The Green Mile movie came out on December 10, Steve was well enough to attend the premiere. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “By taking the extra time to allow the movie to run for three hours, Darabont has made The Green Mile into a story which develops and unfolds, and has detail and space. The movie would have been much diminished at two hours.” Janet Maslin of the New York Times said that “unassumingly strong, moving performances and Mr. Darabont’s durable storytelling make it a trip worth taking just the same.”
Undoubtedly, that woman in the grocery store would have denied that it was a Stephen King movie too.
13
SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK
The new century brought King many new challenges and events, some of them strange, some of them expected. Recovery continued slowly, but he persevered. Though he could only write up to an hour and a half at a time, his productivity obviously did not suffer. He completed the draft of On Writing, wrote the e-novella Riding the Bullet, penned the screenplay for Kingdom Hospital, a thirteen-episode TV series, and cranked out Dreamcatcher, which weighed in at a mere 624 pages. He also resumed his collaboration with Peter Straub on Black House.
He had finished writing From a Buick 8 a couple of months before his accident, and it was scheduled for publication in 2000, but his publisher, Susan Moldow, thought it would be in bad taste to publish the book so shortly afterward since a horrific car accident is prominently featured in the novel.
After the accident, Steve and Tabby decided to stick to the routine they’d started a couple of years earlier and spend the winter in Florida. They would be away from the doctors who had been treating and closely monitoring him, but they were fearful of what a harsh Maine winter could do to Steve’s legs and hips, which were still held together by a convoluted network of pins and rods. Not only would the cold aggravate his pain and stiffen his joints, but if Steve slipped on the ice, he’d be almost back to square one.
A few benefits came from smashing up his body. When he visited the Red Sox camp during spring training in Fort Myers in the spring of 2000, the moment he showed up, he was mobbed by the players. “Nomar [Garciaparra] comes over, Bret Saberhagen comes over, Tim Wakefield comes over, and Tim goes, ‘Come on, get it up, get it up!’ They all wanted to see my leg,” Steve said.
Peter Straub visited Steve and Tabby for a week in February so they could resume working on Black House, the sequel to The Talisman. They collaborated on a forty-page bible that spelled out the bones of the story along with an outline and other details. Their working method was different this time around: When they worked on The Talisman, they spent a lot of time together at Steve’s home in Maine and Peter’s in Connecticut and taking long drives to nowhere to hash out the details. For Black House, they corresponded via e-mail and gabbed on the phone, then began to write. Steve would crank out the novel in a chunk of approximately fifty pages before forwarding it to Peter, who’d read it over and write his own fifty-page segment before sending it back.
Straub said they had more fun writing Black House than The Talisman and the work proceeded more quickly as well, though their writing styles and methods of working are quite different. “Steve is more straightforward than I am, far less given to complexity of both plot and characterization,” said Straub. “We both love the sweep of narrative and are both attracted to grandeur, and we are intensely interested in the various manifestations of evil. And our senses of humor coincide at many points, because we can reduce each other to helpless laughter.”
Steve thought of Peter like a big brother. As they worked on the second novel, they wrote with an eye toward a third. “There was never any question that there would be another book,” said King. “It’s just a question of trying to find the time.”
Stanley Wiater characterized their relationship as yin and yang: “Peter is a man who gets up in the morning, puts on a suit, and walks around looking like a million bucks. Stephen King gets up, puts on blue jeans and his shit-kicker boots, and he looks like he’s going to go out and drive a garbage truck. Peter Straub is very refined. He’ll look at the wine list and immediately know the best one. In his drinking days, Steve would always pick the Miller or Budweiser.”
In the first few months of 2000, electronic books were starting to gain some traction in the world of publishing, though there were no hard figures yet and many people both in and outside of the industry viewed reading a book on a computer screen as a novelty. Ralph Vincinanza, Steve’s foreign-rights agent, suggested that he think about trying out this new medium. “It would be nice to get an idea of what this market is like now,” said Vincinanza.
Steve pondered it and told his agent he had a novella that would work as an e-book. When Vincinanza read Riding the Bullet, he thought it would work well in the new format. “I thought it was a really good story in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of length,” he said.
“It was a way of saying to the publishers that I don’t necessarily need to go through them,” said King. “I wanted to break some trail for some other people, and it was a way of keeping things fresh.” He was also curious to see what the response would be.
Within twenty-four hours after it first appeared as a downloadable PDF file in e-book and Windows formats on several Web sites—Amazon and Barnes & Noble initially offered the book at no charge, while netLibrary and a few other sites charged $2.50 per download—Riding the Bullet had been downloaded four hundred thousand times.
The success of Bullet got Steve thinking of other stories to experiment with in electronic format. He and Tabby frequently joked that after his brush with death, they were living in the Bonus Round, and so he felt freer to experiment on his own. The Internet was still the equivalent of the Wild West, and he loved gunslinger stories.
In 1982, Steve and Tabby had grown weary of sending out the same old Christmas cards every year, so he decided to start a serial novel that he would bind and send to friends. The Plant was the story of a houseplant named Zenith the Common Ivy that is anything but common; in fact the story bore an eerie resemblance to Little Shop of Horrors, an off-Broadway musical from 1982 about a giant man-eater of a plant as well as a classic 1960 horror movie by Roger Corman and starring Jack Nicholson. The Plant was King’s first self-publishing effort through his Philtrum Press. He printed 226 copies of the handsome green chapbook.
In 1983, he sent out the second chapter of The Plant. In 1984 he gave The Plant a year off, publishing in its stead the limited edition of The Eyes of the Dragon, the book he wrote for Na
omi. In 1985 he published and sent out a third installment of The Plant.
Little Shop of Horrors was made into a movie for the second time in 1986 and was the major reason why there would be no fourth installment. He felt that the stories were just too similar and didn’t want to be accused of copying someone else’s idea.
After the success of Riding the Bullet, he thought about experimenting further with electronic publishing by offering The Plant for download. But first he wanted some feedback from readers. He posted a query on his Web site asking (a) if he should publish The Plant in serial format, and (b) if people thought readers would pay for it on the honor system, like an unattended roadside farm-stand where people take what they want and leave the money in a coffee can.
His fans, as expected, eagerly responded and encouraged him to proceed with his experiment.
The first serial appeared on the Web site in July, with a new edition appearing each month until December. After the sixth installment had appeared, Steve announced that he was stopping his experiment, at least temporarily. About 75 percent of the people had paid up, though he admitted that while some were freeloaders, others had failed to fork over the dollar for each installment because they were stymied by the technology.
But also, Steve had lost interest in the story. He’d decided to publish the story for public consumption because he wanted to motivate himself to work on it again, but that didn’t work. Essentially, the six parts of the electronic version of The Plant were the three versions published back in the eighties, and he wrote little new material for the e-book.
But he couldn’t entirely be faulted; understandably, he still wasn’t back to full steam ahead since his accident. And three other projects were consuming his attention: Black House, Dreamcatcher, and the fifth Dark Tower book. He departed from his usual strategy—write first, research later—on Dreamcatcher, the story of four childhood friends who reunite in adulthood to fight both psychological and supernatural demons. He compared his new novel to a Tom Clancy book, where the story line required more details about the military—particularly helicopters and Humvees—than he knew, so he approached the National Guard base in Bangor for help.
He asked for a ride in a Humvee, and a couple of soldiers took him, with a brace still on his leg, out into a marshy area near the barracks. Steve was thrilled. As a result of his research, he offered to appear in a thirty-second public service announcement to promote the Maine National Guard’s college tuition-assistance program.
In a scene reminiscent of his old American Express commercials from the early eighties—“Do you know me?”—King started his spiel in the TV spots by saying, “You know, one of the few things scarier than my books and movies is trying to pay for college.”
The PSAs were so successful that the “commercial” was pulled from the airwaves two months early, with fifty-five new recruits enlisting in the Army Guard and twenty more signing up with the Air Guard. The original $300,000 in the program earmarked for troops pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees was boosted to $500,000 with the help of additional federal funds.
In June 2000, Steve and Tabby flew to Nashville to witness a “ceremony of union” between Naomi, thirty, and her fifty-four-year-old professor at Meadville Lombard Theological School, who goes by the name of Thandeka. Naomi had enrolled at the seminary in 2000.
Thandeka is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and received her doctorate in the philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate School. She and Naomi met at Meadville, and like Naomi she had undergone a change of heart in midlife and decided to go to seminary after spending sixteen years as a TV producer.
In 1984, the Bishop Desmond Tutu blessed her with her Xhosa name, which means “one who is loved by God.”
Steve was still on crutches when he and Tabby flew to Nashville, but by the time his birthday rolled around in September, he was walking unassisted. He still had some pain in his hip and needed to work on his range of motion, but his leg was as good as it was going to get, with no pain. “My body is fifty-two years old except for my hip, where it’s about eighty-five now,” he said. “I never think anymore, ‘I’m going to New York.’ It’s more like ‘I’m taking my leg to New York.’ ”
On September 21, Steve and Tabby were celebrating his birthday when word arrived that Bryan Smith, the man who had caused him so much pain and agony and lost work time over the past fifteen months, was dead of a drug overdose. King offered a brief statement:
“I was very sorry to hear of the passing of Bryan Smith. The death of a forty-three-year-old man can only be termed untimely.”
On Writing, King’s first nonfiction book in two decades, was published in October with a first printing of five hundred thousand copies. Though he had always shied away from writing his autobiography, this was as close as he would ever get, albeit in a selective way, by focusing on a few choice events from his childhood in a section he entitled “C.V.” In a separate section, he also described the details of his accident and subsequent recovery, assembling it as best he could from the bits and pieces he recalled, and from what others had told him.
Steve, who once said, “Facts don’t bother a novelist,” confided that writing the book, especially the second half when he was still recovering from the accident, was more difficult than he had expected. “It’s like sex in a way,” he said. “You’d rather do it than write about it.”
At 288 pages, the book was one-fourth the length of The Stand. He worried that after more than twenty-five years of publishing novels, it was only a paltry book and asked himself, “Is this all you really have to say about the art and craft of writing?” He was satisfied that it was, yet he realized that some folks would be put off by the idea of Stephen King writing a book on how to write: “It’s like the town whore trying to teach women how to behave.”
Just as happened when he turned in his scripts for miniseries to the networks, his editor came back with some objections to his manuscript for On Writing, particularly because one of the markets for the book would be high school students. When told to tone down the language a bit, Steve knew that he had accomplished what he’d set out to do as he viewed the book as a renegade primer, “an outlaw text.” He said, “If you give a book to a kid and tell him to take it home, put a book jacket on it, and give it back at the end of the year, they think it’s a dumb book. But if it’s something that they have to go and buy themselves, they take it more seriously.”
He also resumed working on the fifth Dark Tower book, though at the time he started it, he intended the last three books to be published as one. Though his fans breathed a great sigh of relief, his reasons for returning to Roland Deschain were selfish: “I decided that I wanted be true to the twenty-two-year-old who wanted to write the longest popular novel of all time. I knew it was going to be like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub, and I thought I’m just going to keep on working, because if I stop, I’ll never start again.”
January 2, 2001, marked a milestone in Steve and Tabby’s lives: their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Their friends and colleagues were not surprised that they’d lasted this long.
“They have one of the best and healthiest marriages you can possibly imagine,” said Otto Penzler. “She knows him so well and he’s dependent on her. She’s his crutch. Tabby has gotten him through a lot of stuff.”
George MacLeod, Steve’s college buddy, agrees, adding that Steve would never think of straying: “Steve is very conservative in that regard. He’s a one-woman man, that is his nature.” In at least one regard, according to MacLeod, Tabby and Steve are complete opposites. “There’s a side of him that is still some nervous kid, while I’ve never seen that in Tabby at all. She’s very, very comfortable with herself and very up-front when she needs to be. My guess is that he probably still depends on that in her, and she runs interference for him.”
“Tabby keeps the monsters away,” said Steve.
“You never know what you’re going to get with Tabby, she’s very
mercurial,” said Rick Hautala. “Sometimes when I see her, she’ll give me a big hug and a kiss and tell me that she’s happy to see me, and the next time she’ll hold back and just say hi.”
While Steve has been known to rattle off a list of his most common fears, adding more as the years go by, Tabby has struck many of their friends as completely fearless. “Tabby’s not afraid of him, or anything,” said Dave Barry.
“I think that people fear things they shouldn’t and don’t fear things they should,” she says. “Like anybody else, if the plane drops, I’m going to scream. But fear stops you from moving forward and keeps us from knowing things.”
Steve admits that without Tabby he wouldn’t have generated the sheer number of pages that he has. “When people ask me how I’ve managed to remain so prolific, I tell them that I haven’t died and I haven’t gotten divorced. I’ve had a fairly settled life, and that’s made it possible for me to contemplate some god-awful things in my fiction.”
Despite his output, however, King doesn’t think he writes a lot. “I just write every day and keep it rolling along. I think a lot of writers have a tendency to stand back awhile and sort of sniff around a project if it’s not going well. That never works for me; I find that once I get out of the driver’s seat, I don’t want to go back in. The story gets old for me very quickly, and I begin to lose whatever feelings I had for the characters. So when I run into tough sledding, my impulse is to push straight ahead and the material piles up. If it’s bad, I can always rip it out later.”
Have any famous actresses caught his eye? “There are always temptations when you’re off on tour and doing the conventions, and plenty of groupies,” he said. “But no wife wants to be traded in for a trophy wife. What helped was that my father deserted my mother and I saw what my mother’s life was like after that, what the consequences were when the man leaves.”
Both maintain that they’ve been faithful through their decades of marriage. Says Tabby on the prospect that Steve would fool around, “I would cut something off and then I would shoot him.”