by Lisa Rogak
“They really love each other, number one,” said Sandy Phippen. “They’re wonderful together, and I love the way she takes over. And they also play off each other all the time. They make fun of each other, and I think he lets her handle everything.”
But all that togetherness only goes so far. Neither Steve nor Tabby think they could write a book together. “Sounds like a quick ticket to divorce court,” he joked. “I don’t think we could do it, though the thought has crossed my mind.”
“I’ve never sought out collaboration,” said Tabby. “I’ve seen other people do it, and I think it takes a lot of generosity and a willingness to let go of control to some degree. I’ve seen my husband do it, but I don’t think he lets go of control. I think he just bullies his way into what he wants like a freight train.”
But another problem was at hand. “We did once talk about doing a project together, but the minute the businesspeople got involved, it turned into Steve’s project,” she said. “It was like I wasn’t even in the room. I ended my involvement immediately.”
She has also ruled out writing a book with either of her sons. “We read each other’s shit and offer suggestions that may or may not be taken, and that’s the end of it,” she noted.
In February 2001, King filed a lawsuit against his insurance company, Commercial Union York Insurance, stemming from his accident two years earlier. The insurance company had paid him $450,000—Commercial Union stated that amount was the limit of his policy—while Steve sued for the full value of his $10 million umbrella policy to cover his medical bills and lost income. The lawsuit estimated his total losses to be $75 million.
The media had a field day and his loyal fans questioned why, when Steve had more money than God and had always claimed that money mattered little to him, he’d suddenly got greedy.
To those who knew him, however, it wasn’t a surprise. “The money was irrelevant, it was the principle of the thing,” said Stephen Spignesi. “If he had not gotten what he believed the policy entitled him to, he would have felt that he was wasting the money, and growing up dirt-poor in rural Maine, it was a sin to waste money. And if he has a contract in place with an insurance company and they’re screwing him so that the money would come out of his pocket, it would be a waste. That’s why he sued.”
In the end, the two sides settled the lawsuit when Steve suggested that the insurance company donate $750,000 to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, where he’d spent three weeks recovering after the accident, and the company agreed.
Dreamcatcher, the novel he began writing a few months after the accident, was published in March 2001.
“It’s a book about guys,” he said. “I wanted a truer version of Iron John. I wanted to write a book about how guys act with other guys and what it means to be a man among other men.”
The book seemed a way to overcompensate for the spate of novels he’d written over the years featuring strong female characters, though other messages clearly wormed their way into the story line. “There is a terrifying fear of the government that runs throughout the book, that they would rather kill all of us than tell us the truth,” he said.
He couldn’t help but use his recent pain and recovery in the novel. “The character in the tree stand had been hit by a car and was recuperating, and I obviously knew how that felt. When I wrote about it, I didn’t think about the pain as much. It was like being hypnotized. But there are things in the book that are extremely gruesome, and I found myself pulling back a bit.”
His original title for the book was Cancer, but Tabby talked him out of it, since she thought it would be bad karma.
The month after Dreamcatcher was published, one of Steve’s stories appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. Editor Otto Penzler selected “Quitters, Inc.,” a story about a man who wants to quit smoking and hires an agency that promises to help him no matter what, for the anthology, which put Steve in the esteemed company of some of his childhood heroes, including John D. MacDonald and Shirley Jackson.
He’d written “Quitters, Inc.” back in the seventies, when he habitually listened to blasting rock and roll while he wrote. Now, however, he started to gravitate toward a subgenre of country music called cross-country, a cross between rock and country. While he still listened to rock and roll, he no longer listened to it blaring through the speakers while working on a first draft of a short story or novel. Now when he was working on a first draft, he worked in complete silence, a first for him.
One thing hadn’t changed, however: the more rabid fans still camped out in front of the bat-garnished wrought-iron fence for hours in hopes of a glimpse of Steve. They’d occasionally throw packages over the fence, books and presents, and sometimes harangue people driving through the gate. After September 11, however, the entire country was skittish, including Steve and Tabby, who had dealt with crazed fans for years. One day not long after the terrorist attacks, a fan left a package on the walkway leading up to the house and the police were called. But the parcel was not an explosive device: instead, a copy of IT got blown to bits, tiny shards of paper littering the entire neighborhood after the bomb squad was called in.
September 11 also had an adverse effect on Black House, since it was to be published on September 13. Steve and Peter were scheduled for a heavy-duty publicity tour that included national TV talk shows and interviews and book signings, but in the end everything was canceled. “It was almost like the book never happened,” said King. “I called Peter on the phone and told him I didn’t think anyone would want to read about a supernatural cannibal after what just happened. The book eventually did pretty well, but not at the time. Nothing did really.”
Stephen King’s Rose Red, a three-part miniseries with an original script by King, debuted on ABC on January 27, 2002. Scribner wanted to publish a book to tie in with the movie but preferred a prequel to the story, not just a novelization of the miniseries, and they came up with the title: The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red. Stephen was busy writing the script for the miniseries, so they asked him for some suggestions for writers who could handle the job. Ridley Pearson’s name came up from his association with Steve playing in the Remainders. Since Pearson had first joined the band, he’d written several well-received novels, including Chain of Evidence and Beyond Recognition.
Steve immediately agreed, though it was the first time he allowed a book to be written as a prequel to his work, as well as not by his own hand. Ridley flew out to Seattle, where he and Steve spent several days on the movie set, hashing out the story line and interviewing the actors. “He’s an amazingly generous guy,” said Pearson. “We split royalties on the book and he helped me immensely whenever I had questions about the story.”
Though they had spent time together with the band, this was the first time they were able to sit down and talk one-on-one, not only about the book and the show, but also about life itself.
“He’s a sixty-year-old man who acts like a goofy teenage boy who also happens to be the smartest man in the room,” Ridley said, adding that he never got the sense that Steve was comfortable with his physical self. “He’s a big man, and you know how some big guys carry themselves like if the door’s in his way he’s going to knock it down? Stephen isn’t that way. He’s more gawky and geeky. He carries himself as if he doesn’t want to be as tall as he is.”
One time Ridley visited Steve and Tabby in Bangor, and she took him on a tour of the underground part of the house. She led him to the library, where Steve had an old-fashioned paperback rack from a drugstore, with “lots of fifties paperbacks because I love the covers, and a certain amount of pornography from the sixties, paperback pornography that was done by people like Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, just because it amuses me,” said King. “You see little flashes of their style.”
Tabby nonchalantly mentioned to Ridley that the library held around seventeen thousand books. “We got to the end and there was one little cabinet that had a label that said TBR on i
t, with about thirty books in it,” he said. TBR stood for “To Be Read.” Pearson pointed at the label and she nodded, which meant that Steve had read every book in that library except for the thirty books in the cabinet. “I said, ‘That’s not possible,’ and she said, ‘I assure you he has read them all.’ ”
When Rose Red was published, it hit the top of the bestseller lists the first week it appeared and stayed there for almost three months. It was Pearson’s first number one bestselling book. Though Steve was pleased that Pearson had written the prequel to Rose Red, he warned his friend about the fallout that would come after the book was published.
“He called me up and said, ‘Ridley, watch out because from here on out, mark my words, the reviewers are going to savage you.’ And he was absolutely right,” said Pearson. “That was the beginning of the end. Before that everybody loved me. After that everybody hates you.” Steve knew from firsthand experience that once an author becomes popular and hits the bestseller lists, many critics no longer believe his work is any good, and their disdain will show up in their reviews.
Steve and Tabby had fallen into a comfortable rhythm of spending half the year in Maine and the other half in Florida.
After spending several winters in Florida, the Kings decided to spring for a house in Osprey, about ten miles south of Sarasota. They paid $8.9 million for a waterfront, seventy-five-hundred square-foot, contemporary home on Casey Key, which set a record for the highest-priced house in Sarasota County; it took another five years for a pricier house to sell.
Steve spent every day he could at Red Sox spring training, just down the road in Fort Myers, and admitted that the location of their house had more than a little to do with his favorite pastime. “I’m not going to say that we moved down here the way that alcoholics move into barrooms, but there might have been an element of that involved,” he admitted.
Tabby usually stayed home. “I stopped being interested in professional sports a long time ago,” she said. “I’ll watch a little hockey and a little ball, but it’s a boys’ club with no girls allowed. So to hell with it.”
But her then eighty-two-year-old mother, Sarah Spruce, loved to talk baseball with her son-in-law, often tying up the phone line for the entire game to offer comments and opinions and commiserate when necessary.
“She’s Steve’s baseball buddy,” said Tabby. “She’s one of those Maine women who’s been following the Red Sox forever.”
Steve had become so well-known as a long-suffering Red Sox fan that baseball fans flocked to the games as much to see him as to see the game. “I’ve become sort of a Red Sox mascot,” he said. People approach him to gab but also to give him gifts, such as CDs, baseball caps, and even fake bloody socks, after the stitches in pitcher Curt Schilling’s ankle let go during Game 6 of the AL play-offs against the Yankees in 2004 and again in Game 2 of the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals; Steve’s collection of bloody socks stood at seven.
For the most part, however, fans just wanted to talk baseball with him. They’d ask his opinion on the prospects for the coming year and the merits and weaknesses of the players on the roster. They’d spend an afternoon happily watching the game and offering commentary.
By the time Everything’s Eventual, a collection of short stories, was published in March of 2002, Steve was hard at work writing the final three books of the Dark Tower series. Though he was always a fast writer, he worked even more feverishly with these books than any others he’d written since he had quit cocaine, which had admittedly been a big part of the reason for his marathon writing sessions in the early eighties.
So why rush now? “Because it seemed to me that once I got started with the actual writing, this time it felt like one of those WWF wrestling matches where it’s for all the beans,” he said. “And I felt like if I didn’t finish this time, I never would, so I just hammered away until they were done. And once they were done, there was no reason not to publish them as soon as possible.” Though he wanted all three books to be published at the same time, the publisher didn’t concur.
Due to the long gaps between the first four books, Steve also knew that many readers didn’t want to start reading the first book knowing that the last one wasn’t even written yet. NAL decided to reissue the backlist in June 2003, then Scribner scheduled the publication of Wolves of the Calla, the first of the new Dark Tower books, five months later, in November. Song of Susannah—number six—followed in June 2004, and the final book, The Dark Tower, was published on Steve’s fifty-seventh birthday, September 21, 2004. “I think it made up for all the waiting people had to do, to be able to say to them that these books are going to come in fairly rapid succession,” he said.
Like clockwork and despite his feverish workload, Steve announced—for maybe the fourth or fifth time in his career—that he would be done writing books after the few more required by his contract. He made the announcement in anticipation of his next novel, From a Buick 8, which would be published in September 2002. He was worried that he was starting to repeat himself and that people would regard his new novel as a reworking of material he used in Christine, since both stories featured a supernatural car from the 1950s.
His editors, fans, and family had all heard it before, and so their first inclination was to say, “Yeah, right,” and nod right along to humor the boy who cried wolf. “Of course, for Steve that means that instead of three books a year, he’ll only write one,” said Stanley Wiater.
Some believed that his public announcements of never publishing another book had ramped up in the years since he had quit drinking and drugging as a way to replace the countless times through the seventies and eighties he had promised Tabby he would quit the booze and cocaine, or at least cut back. Saying he was going to retire and not following through had just replaced his pronouncements of earlier years.
“Work is his only drug,” said Wiater.
“I have nightmares when I’m not working,” Steve admitted. “I think that basically what doesn’t come out on the page just has to come out some other way.”
“Steve used to say he’d commit suicide if he couldn’t write, which has always pissed me off,” said Tabby. “I tell him if he pulled an Ernest Hemingway on me, I’d kick his body into the street and dance on it!”
But people had a real concern that maybe this time he was serious. After all, the accident had created lots of changes in his life, and also in his demeanor. He seemed calmer, more resigned to the onslaught of time and to the decrease in his fan base somewhat due to the well-trumpeted charges that he had turned literary. His books stayed on the top of the bestseller lists for only a few weeks now; previously, they would perch at number one for months.
“I’ve killed enough of the world’s trees,” he said, quickly tacking on that it didn’t necessarily mean he would stop writing. “I’ve always rejected the idea that every book had to be available to every consumer, but I’d never stop writing because I don’t know what I’d do between nine and one every day, but I’d stop publishing. I don’t need the money.”
He simply explained that after the last of the Dark Tower books was published in 2004, he felt that he had said everything he had ever wanted to say in his life, and then some.
Despite that he insisted that this time he was really going to retire, no one around him believed him, least of all those people in the business who had heard it all before. Susan Moldow, the publisher of Scribner, didn’t believe a word he said. In the five years since King had signed with Scribner, she estimated that he’d threatened to retire at least six different times.
Even Peter Straub concurred. “I have a great deal of difficulty believing it,” he said, joking that From a Buick 8 “might be his last novel for the year.”
Two months later, Steve reiterated his desire, though he tempered his words a bit: “I can’t imagine retiring from writing. What I can imagine doing is retiring from publishing. If I wrote something that I thought was worth publishing, I would publish it.”
&nb
sp; But this was just another of those times he was toying with his fans, and his constant threats to retire were in reality a long-running tongue-in-cheek joke that most people were in on. “A year from now, people will say the idea that this guy was going to retire is a laugh,” he said.
Even he knew he was a hopeless case: “I’m like a drug addict, I’m always saying I’m going to stop, and then I don’t. When I’m not working, my mind doesn’t take kindly to being unhooked from its dope. I get migraines and very vivid nightmares. It’s almost like the d.t.’s, like my mind and body are trying to scare me back to work.”
As 2003 began, it looked as if King were doing the impossible and sticking to his guns about kicking back and retiring. He wrote numerous articles for magazines and newspapers and contributed new introductions to revised editions of his work. His only book published that year was The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla. According to his prediction, after the last two books in the series were published, the world would have seen the last new Stephen King book.
In June, the first four books of The Dark Tower were reissued, and the first book bore significant changes from their original versions. “I rewrote the whole thing,” he said. “After all, they were written when I was young. It always seemed to me like I was trying too hard to make it be something really, really important, so I tried to simplify it a little bit.”
In August, he started writing a regular column for Entertainment Weekly, reviewing new books, movies, and music. It was a culmination of everything he’d loved about pop culture through the years and bore great similarities to “The Garbage Truck” column he wrote in college.
“It’s exactly the same,” said Tabby. “He’s engaged with pop culture in a way that I’m not. Most of the new-music suggestions come from our children. He goes to movies, and I don’t. I’m old enough to have seen every damn movie, and all they’re doing is remaking them at this point.”