Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

by Lisa Rogak

  His taste in music would surprise those who knew him as an aficionado of loud rock, the harder the better. In particular, he confessed his admiration and appreciation for the rapper Eminem.

  “I understand Eminem,” said Steve. “He’s funny and clever and really angry. And he’s a kindred spirit.”

  He was also beginning to realize that he was on the downhill side of life and started to cooperate with old friends and colleagues who were in a position to help shape and interpret his legacy. He granted Tony Magistrale, his old buddy from the University of Vermont, an interview for his new book, Hollywood’s Stephen King.

  Though Steve maintained that he was fully recovered from the accident, Tony was taken aback when he first saw his friend; after all, the last time he’d seen him was a couple of months before the accident.

  “He had changed physically, he looked fragile and he was still walking with a cane,” Tony said. “He showed me his leg, and it was a mess. He was still working with the doctors to come up with a cocktail of medications that would be effective, allow him to sleep and allow him to experience life without too much pain. So he was still struggling.”

  Magistrale added that he saw an emotional change in his friend as well. “There was a period there for about five or seven years where he was obsessed with the accident, which manifested itself in Kingdom Hospital,” a TV series that King wrote and produced and debuted in March 2004 and ran for one season on ABC.

  But happily, Tony saw that some things about Steve hadn’t changed. Tony asked him to recommend a few places to eat in Bangor, and the only places he named were diners.

  One day Tony asked him outright, “ ‘Steve, you made fifty-five million dollars last year. What are you doing in Bangor, Maine?’ He looked at me like I was some sort of bug.”

  Steve answered, “Where would you like me to live, Tony? Monaco?”

  “We both had a good laugh at that,” said Magistrale.

  The literary establishment was up in arms again when it was announced that the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters would be given to Stephen King at the annual awards ceremony in November. He was tickled at the idea; finally, after decades of selling millions upon millions of books all around the world but having the literary world thumb their noses at him, here he was, getting the recognition he’d always craved and felt he deserved.

  The backlash began almost immediately. Self-professed keeper-of-the-literary-keys critic and Yale professor Harold Bloom thundered, “Another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life.” However, this exact prize had four years ago been given to Oprah Winfrey, without this sort of controversy. Previous recipients included Ray Bradbury, Studs Terkel, and Toni Morrison.

  “I thought it was absurd for them to say, ‘Don’t give this award to Stephen King.’ It wasn’t as though they were giving me a National Book Award for a novel I wrote,” he said, joking, “They were giving me it the way they give the Miss Congeniality Award to a girl who’s not going to be Miss America.”

  Steve admitted the award was more important than that, but he was extremely bothered by the continued prejudices of people who consider any novel that hasn’t been christened as literary to be beneath them and not worth the paper it’s printed on. “There’s an unstated prejudice that if it’s popular, it can’t be good because the reading taste of the American public is idiotic,” he said. “That kind of elitism drove me totally insane as a younger man. I’m better now, but there’s still a fair amount of resentment toward that.”

  Steve made the rounds of TV and radio talk shows and interviews with newspaper reporters. He wasn’t feeling great, and his doctor had diagnosed him as having pneumonia and warned him against traveling and speaking. But the recognition was too great for King to pass up, so he continued a jam-packed promotional schedule in the days leading up to the awards dinner on November 19, which undoubtedly weakened him further.

  “That award nearly killed me,” he said later. “I was determined I was going to accept it and make my speech.” He returned home after the ceremony and was hospitalized four days later with double pneumonia, the result of a long-festering problem dating back to the collapsed lung he suffered in the wake of the car accident. “My lung had collapsed and the bottom part of it had not reinflated, but no one knew that,” he said. “It stayed collapsed and got rotten and infected the rest.” He remained in the hospital for almost a full month; surgeons performed a thoracotomy, a major surgical procedure that allowed doctors to remove fluids and infected tissue from the lung.

  While he was in the hospital, he contracted a bacterial infection that lasted for three months. By the time it had cleared up, he weighed only 160 pounds, “a skeleton on feet,” as he described it. In fact, he came closer to death during this hospital stay than as a result of his car accident.

  Despite vomiting every few hours, he continued to write. “Even when I felt dizzy and weak, the words were always there for me,” he said. “The writing was the best part of the day.”

  When the doctors told Tabby they were sure he was out of the woods, she asked him a question: “Can I redo your office?”

  “I said yes because with a tube in my chest and another one down my throat, that was all I could say,” he said. “She knew I couldn’t argue.”

  When he returned home a week before Christmas, he asked about her renovation of his office, but Tabby told him not to go in there because she thought he’d be upset. So, just as he had told generations of schoolkids to run out and read his books the second a grown-up told them they shouldn’t, one night when he had insomnia, he made a beeline to his office. The room was devoid of furniture, the rugs were rolled up, and the books were all in boxes. “It was like the ghost of Christmas yet to come, a vision of the future,” he said. “This is what it will be like in twenty or twenty-five years when I’ll be in a coffin and Tabitha will have rolled up the rugs and will be going through all my effects, all the papers and unfinished stories. It’s the clearing up after a life. My brother and me did it when my mother died of cancer.”

  He thought back to the story he’d written a couple of years earlier, “Lisey and the Madman,” which was slated to be published in a forthcoming anthology, McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, with Michael Chabon editing, in November 2004. As he had done countless times before, he took two apparently disparate ideas and, just like a kid playing with a chemistry set, combined them to see what happened.

  “Ideas come along and I have to follow them,” he had previously said whenever he announced his pending retirement and then didn’t. He started working on what would turn out to be the novel, Lisey’s Story.

  He was off and running, writing about the wife of a famous novelist who is still muddling through daily life two years after his sudden, unexpected death. He later explained Lisey’s Story as transmogrifying from a novel about a still-grieving woman to a story about repression and how people tend to conceal not only things but feelings. Steve maintained he was writing a love story.

  The novel had faint echoes of his 1998 book, Bag of Bones, which was also billed as a love story. The theme of that book was also about a dead spouse and a prolific novelist, except the roles were reversed, with a widower who wrote bestselling books but suffered from writer’s block for three years after his wife’s death.

  14

  THE END OF THE WHOLE MESS

  As 2005 began, Steve and Tabby had fallen into a comfortable rhythm of spending half the year in Maine and the other half in Florida. As his schedule continued to slow down—maybe there was something to this “retirement” thing after all—his kids started to ramp up their careers.

  Joe’s first collection of stories, 20th Century Ghosts, was published in 2005 in a limited edition of two thousand copies by PS Publishing, a small specialty publisher, after every American publisher who had taken a look rejected it. The book won two Bram Stoker Awards and a World Fantasy Award—other winners th
at year included Haruki Murakami and George Saunders—and the British Fantasy Award for Best Fiction Collection.

  Joe wanted to distance himself from his father as much as possible, choosing to make it on his work alone. When he first began to write seriously and submit his work shortly after graduating from college, he chose his namesake, Joe Hill, for his pen name. “I figured if I wrote genre fiction as Joseph King, it would look like a grab at my dad’s coattails,” he explained. “Whereas I could write whatever the hell I wanted as Joe Hill. I had ten years to write and not have the pressure of being a famous guy’s kid.”

  His work style is very different from his dad’s. “I’m not the kind of guy who can or wants to write thirty stories a year,” he said. “It takes me a month or more to write a good story, not a week. I try like hell not to be boring and make an effort to avoid adverbs, which is how I describe my fiction: horror stories with few adverbs.”

  Joe met the woman who would become his wife, Leanora LaGrande, in the MFA program at Columbia University. “A lot of people marry their moms,” Joe said. “I kind of married my dad. I’ll go from the manuscript I gave her and the manuscript I gave him and go back and forth, and it’s the same comments.” Joe adds that Leanora reads Steve’s manuscripts too.

  Like his father, Joe started to work in other venues. He got in touch with an editor at Marvel Comics and wrote “Fanboyz,” an eleven-page tale for Spider-Man Unlimited. “Working on that story was the fulfillment of a very intense childhood fantasy,” he said.

  Like his older brother, after Owen attended Vassar College, he got an MFA from Columbia, though he had reservations about entering grad school. “Writing programs aren’t for everyone, and if you want to write straight genre stories, you’ll have a real battle on your hands,” he said. But he benefited greatly from the time he spent at Columbia. “I had wonderful teachers who focused very hard on the details, on the precision of good writing, and helped coax work out of me that I’m very proud of.”

  Unlike his brother, however, he decided to keep his name intact. “Obviously I have an advantage as a writer in terms of name recognition, but it’s also a disadvantage because people expect it just to be a nepotistic exercise and for you to suck,” he said, which is the major reason why his stories are different from his father’s. “I write more contemporary straight fiction with no supernatural elements. I wanted to find my own place in the world, not make any bread off his name.”

  Owen’s first book, We’re All in This Together, a collection of one novella and four short stories, was published by Bloomsbury in June 2005. As with his father, the inspiration for the title novella came from two disparate places: “I was morbidly depressed after Bush won the election in 2000, and I had this crazy idea that he’d step down because he didn’t get the popular vote. I thought about what kind of person would actually do something about it and how he’d get his point across.” He thought back to a family from Bangor that would write slogans and draw pictures on a billboard outside their house according to the season. He combined the two concepts into the novella.

  Also like his brother, Owen met his future wife, Kelly Braffet, when he was in graduate school at Columbia. When reporters interviewed him for his book, they never failed to mention that the couple lived in a deconsecrated Catholic church in Brooklyn. Braffet, author of the novels Josie and Jack, the story of a brother and a sister who are psychologically dependent on each other, and Last Seen Leaving, about a mother and a daughter who are estranged from each other, said that Owen takes after his father as far as his work habits. “Owen works a hell of a lot more than I do, which makes me feel guilty, which makes me work more,” she said.

  Owen’s thought trajectories also follow his father’s. Braffet says that he’ll come home from a simple trip to the corner store for a sandwich with an idea for his next novel. “I’ve got a great idea for a story,” he’ll say. “See, there’s this birthday-party clown with Tourette’s and he’s got a brother who’s a financial adviser, and they go deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean surrounded by all of these urns of ancient olive oil.”

  For his part, Steve enjoys both his sons’ works, though he does see clear differences: Joe clearly gravitated toward writing genre fiction, while Owen studiously avoided it. “I read Joe’s stuff, and I relate to it because it’s plot-driven and high conflict,” Steve said. “Owen writes more like Bret Easton Ellis, flavor-of-the-month New York relationships.

  “There are two great things about this. The first is that what Owen is doing doesn’t bear any resemblance to my writing. And the second thing is, thank God he’s good.”

  Naomi was also finding a firm foothold in her chosen field of the ministry. She graduated with a master’s in divinity from Meadville Lombard Theological School in June 2005, where she won the Robert Charles Billings prize for excellence in scholarship, awarded to the student with the highest academic standing. After graduation, she was ordained by her home church, the First Universalist Church in Yarmouth and was assigned to her first parish later that summer: the Unitarian Universalist Church of Utica, New York.

  As in her days as a restaurateur, she bristled whenever anyone asked about her parents. When asked what drew her to the Unitarian faith, she replied, “We begin and end with primary experience: awe, wonder, fear, trembling, amazement. Everything else is commentary.”

  After she got settled in upstate New York, Steve had to change the automatic response he’d given over the years whenever someone asked where he got his ideas from. “I used to say that I got my ideas from a small used-idea shop in Utica. I’d bring them down, dust them off, and they worked just fine. When Naomi became a pastor in Utica, I had to stop making jokes about it.”

  But that didn’t mean he had to stop joking with her. “I tell her that Unitarianism is God for people who don’t believe in God, and she just laughs.”

  In the summer of 2007, she left her position as pastor at the First Unitarian Church in Utica, New York, to become the minister at the River of Grass Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Plantation, Florida.

  The Unitarian/Universalist faith is known for its acceptance of gay and lesbians, and even though she was warmly acknowledged by her own church, Naomi became easily enraged at those who weren’t able to see past her sexuality and felt like shaking her fist at the world even though she was an ordained minister.

  “I struggle with tolerating the theology that doesn’t allow me to exist,” she said. “Hellfire and damnation for gay and lesbian people, for women in ministry, for Unitarian Universalists. My paradox is learning to love more fully people who don’t see those of us who are also people, created and beloved of God.”

  She maintains that she hasn’t entirely abandoned the family business: “Everyone in my family tells stories. They use the written word and I tell stories through sermons.”

  The way she talks about giving a sermon sounds a lot like how her father has described writing. “To me, giving a sermon is thrilling. It’s like dancing for a long time. Your sense of beginning and ending disappears, and you never know what will happen.”

  She has also followed her father’s habit of incorporating popular-culture icons into her sermons. In the fall of 2007, she mentioned the Island of Misfit Toys, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Harold and the Purple Crayon in her sermons, among others.

  Steve and Tabby are understandably proud of their grown-up brood. “It’s such a surprise when kids are suddenly strong adults,” said Tabitha. “For a long time, my basic standard of parenthood was nobody’s in jail.”

  When editor Charles Ardai first got in touch with Steve about the Hard Case Crime series, a new line of original and reprinted detective paperback novels, the most he hoped for was a cover blurb for one of the books. A big fan of the genre, King decided he’d rather write a book than a blurb, with the result being The Colorado Kid, which was published in October 2005 to lead off a season including books by Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, and Donald E. Westlake. The novel was extremely short by King
’s usual standards, only 184 pages, but it was just a warm-up for King’s next project. And it looked as if he had returned to his old ways, starting to crank them out again.

  Steve finished writing Cell in July 2005 after he spent four months on the first draft. The next book scheduled to be published was Lisey’s Story, in the fall of 2006, but Scribner switched gears and wanted Cell to come out first, almost instantly, as it turned out. Their target date was January 2006, because John Grisham didn’t have a novel coming out that month, as he usually did, which meant there was a slot to fill. Publisher Susan Moldow also wanted to publish Cell first because she believed it would boost Lisey’s numbers when it came out.

  Steve turned around the final two drafts by October, and Cell was published in January.

  Chuck Verrill edited Cell, as he had done with most of Steve’s other books. But Steve wanted Nan Graham, who edited Frank McCourt’s bestseller Angela’s Ashes and has worked with Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, at Scribner to edit Lisey’s Story, because he thought it needed a woman’s touch. “I thought Chuck got a little out of joint about it because he had done all the other ones, but he did a great job on Cell, and Nan did a great job on Lisey’s Story,” Steve said. “The books were like apples and oranges, so editing Lisey’s had to be different from Cell, which really was an instant book.”

  For his part, he even handled his second and third drafts on each book differently. With Cell, Steve edited the book on a computer to respond to Chuck’s comments and questions. When Steve edited Lisey, he followed his usual path of editing on paper, incorporating Nan’s suggestions into an entirely new draft that he wrote again from the beginning. He viewed the books as falling into entirely distinct categories, along the line of how Graham Greene saw his books: some were novels and some were sheer entertainment. In King’s eyes, Lisey’s Story was a novel, while Cell was entertainment.

  He was starting to exercise the same managerial style—deciding which editor was best to handle a particular book—when it came to movies based on his stories and novels, even if he had made up his mind that it was a hands-off film project. He wanted to have final casting approval over the actors who would appear in the films, even though he didn’t usually object. In one case, however, he put his foot down. A producer was preparing to launch Misery on Broadway and sent Steve a list of candidates for the major characters. One of their choices for Annie Wilkes was Julia Roberts, but Steve immediately nixed the idea. “Roberts is a fine actor, but Annie is a big, brawny woman who’s capable of slinging a guy around,” he said. “Don’t give me a pixie!”