Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King

INTRODUCTION

It’s probably no surprise that his fears rule every second of Stephen King’s existence. He’s surrounded by them, and anyone who’s read even one of his novels knows that the most innocent item can be a harbinger of terror.

At various times through the years, King has rattled off a veritable laundry list of his fears: the dark, snakes, rats, spiders, squishy things, psychotherapy, deformity, closed-in spaces, death, being unable to write, flying—fill in the blank, the list is long. He’s described himself as having a permanent address in “the People’s Republic of Paranoia.”

His treatises on his fear of the number thirteen—triskaidekaphobia—are particularly revealing. “The number 13 never fails to trace that old icy finger up and down my spine,” he wrote. “When I’m writing, I’ll never stop work if the page number is 13 or a multiple of 13; I’ll just keep on typing till I get to a safe number.

“I always take the last two steps on my back stairs as one, making thirteen into twelve. There were after all, thirteen steps on the English gallows up until 1900 or so. When I’m reading, I won’t stop on page 94, 193, 382, since the sums of these numbers add up to thirteen.”

You get the picture. King—he prefers to be called Steve—draws upon his fears quite liberally in his writing, yet at the same time, part of the reason that he writes is to attempt to drown them out, to suffocate them and put them out of their misery once and for all so he’ll never be tormented by them again.

Yeah, right. He doesn’t believe it either.

The only way he can block them out is when he’s writing. Once he gets rolling and is carried along by a story about a particular fear, it’s gone, at least temporarily. He writes as fast and furiously as he can because if there’s one thing Stephen King knows after spending decades writing, it’s this: the moment the pen stops moving or the computer switches off, the fears will rush right back, ready for another round.

Despite his fear of therapists, he once went to see one. When he began cataloging his fears, the therapist interrupted him, telling him to visualize his fear as a ball he could close up in his fist. It was all he could do not to run for the door. “Lady, you don’t know how much fear I’ve got,” he replied. “I can maybe get it down to the size of a soccer ball, but fear is my living and I can only get it so small.”

In an exchange with Dennis Miller on his former TV talk show, Steve was thrilled to discover that he had found a kindred spirit in the Land of Fear. The men were discussing their shared dread of flying when King offered his theory about how the collective fear of people on a plane helps prevent a crash.

“Right,” said Miller with a knowing nod. “The degree of rigidity in our body keeps the wings up.”

Not quite, as Steve went on to explain. “It’s a psychic thing, and anybody with half a brain knows that it shouldn’t work. You have three or four people who are terrified right out of their minds. We hold it up. The flight you have to be afraid of is the flight where there’s nobody on who’s afraid of flying. Those are the flights that crash. Trust me on this.”

A few nervous laughs came from the audience. Both men blinked past the glare of the lights and then looked at each other. They think we’re kidding?

Without fear where would Stephen King be? It’s almost as if he’s hooked on his anxiety, just one more thing for him to mainline, like the booze and drugs he was hooked on for decades. In fact, he’s made no secret of his lifelong struggle with substances.

“All those addictive substances are part of the bad side of what we do,” he said. “I think it’s part of that obsessive deal that makes you a writer in the first place, that makes you want to write it all down. Writing is an addiction for me. Even when the writing is not going well, if I don’t do it, the fact that I’m not doing it nags at me.”

One of the amazing aspects of Stephen King’s life is that his copious drug and alcohol abuse didn’t interfere with either the quantity or the quality of his prodigious output. However, while he would later acknowledge his surprise that his work didn’t suffer—especially when the haze was thickest—he’s also spoken with regret that he couldn’t remember writing certain books, such as Cujo. This clearly bothered him, for he always fondly looked back on each of his novels and stories, revisiting them as if they were old friends, rerunning the memories of the nuances and the ideas of a world and people that he just happened to have pulled out of his head.

Writing horror and telling stories had become so ingrained in him over the years that cranking out thousands of words every day of the year was second nature to him, despite a daily input of booze and drugs that would easily have killed a college kid on a weekend binge. Indeed, some of the tall tales and denial extended to what he told interviewers. For years, he told them that he wrote every day, taking a break from writing only on the Fourth of July, his birthday, and Christmas. That was patently untrue. He later said that he couldn’t not write every day of the year, but he thought telling fans that he allowed himself a whole three days away from writing made him seem more personable. He hadn’t yet realized that admitting his addictions to his fans would make him appear even more human.

While he’s long been an unapologetic admirer of everything mainstream—he’s referred to himself as the Big Mac of authors—he isn’t always comfortable on the pedestal. Steve’s iconic position in popular fiction was cemented early on, only a few years after his first novel, Carrie, was published. And yet, he isn’t above—or below—using his fame when it suits him.

King claims to hate being famous—his wife Tabby detests it even more, calling life with a celebrity spouse like being in “a goddamn fishbowl”—but even after three decades in the public spotlight, he still talks to journalists from media large and small, gives public talks, attends Red Sox games, and conducts book signings. After all, with more than thirty years in the business, his ability to sell books has little to do with whether he gives a bunch of interviews. Though he claims to be shy, he’s still as open and self-deprecating as he was when he first started out.

Then, of course, there’s the flip side: “When you get into this business, they don’t tell you you’ll get cat bones in the mail, or letters from crazy people, or that the people on the tour bus will be gathered at your fence snapping pictures.”

Because he lives a life that is so out and about, pick a random New Englander and chances are he’ll have a story about a Stephen King sighting.

A New Hampshire man who regularly visited Fenway Park knew that Steve had season tickets to the Red Sox games. For several years, he kept an eye out for Steve, but he never spotted him. One day at the stadium, he saw King walking toward him and he froze. He couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, all he could come out with was “Boo!” as they came eye to eye. Steve said “Boo!” back and headed for his seat.

“He’s just a competitive guy who wants to be the best at what he does,” says Warren Silver, a friend from Bangor.

This, after sixty-three books published in thirty-five years, including collaborations, short-story collections—and having The Green Mile count as six separate books. Since the publication of Carrie in 1974, none of his books has been out of print, an accomplishment that can be matched by few bestselling authors. Proof still that his fears loom large.

Does he write for a particular person? While he admits that he writes to vanquish his fear, and writing for an audience of one—himself—he has occasionally provided a glimpse of the real man behind the curtain, a man whom Steve has no real recollection of: his father, who walked out of the family home one evening for a pack of cigarettes and kept on going, leaving his wife and two sons—David, age four, and Steve, two—to fend for themselves throughout a childhood of wrenching poverty and great uncertainty.

“I really think I write for myself, but there does seem to be a target that this stuff pours out toward,” he said. “I am always interested in this idea that a lot of fiction writers write for their fathers because their fathers are gone.”

Steve coped with a difficult childhood by turning first to books and then to writing his own stories. And as he put it, it’s a world that he has never really left.

“You have to be a little nuts to be a writer because you have to imagine worlds that aren’t there,” he said. “You’re hearing voices, you’re making believe, you’re doing all of the things that we’re told as children not to do. Or else we’re told to distinguish between reality and those things. Adults will say, ‘You have an invisible friend, that’s nice, you’ll outgrow that.’ Writers don’t outgrow it.”

So who is Stephen King, really? The standard assumption of casual fans and detractors is that he must be a creepy man who loves to blow things up in his backyard. Loyal fans usually go a bit deeper, knowing him to be a loyal family man and a benefactor to countless charities, many around his Bangor, Maine, home.

His friends, however, present a different, more complex picture.

“He’s a brilliant, funny, generous, compassionate man whose character is made up of layer upon layer,” says longtime friend and coauthor Peter Straub. “What you see is not only not what you get, it isn’t even what you see. Steve is a mansion containing many rooms, and all of this makes him wonderful company.”

According to Bev Vincent, a friend whom Steve helped out with Vincent’s book The Road to the Dark Tower, a reference guide to King’s seven-volume magnum opus, his self-image is somewhat surprising: “Steve still sees himself as a small-town guy who has done a few interesting things but doesn’t think that his personal life would interest anyone.”

And he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to read an entire book about him—let alone write one. On the other hand, he has no problem if people want to discuss his work, either face-to-face or in a book.

But we all know he’s wrong. Stephen King has led an endlessly fascinating life, and because we love, admire, and are scared out of our minds by his books, stories, and movies, of course we want to know more about the man who’s spawned it all. Who wouldn’t?

This is a biography, a story of his life. Of course his works play into it, they are unavoidable, but they are not the featured attraction here. Stephen King is.

Through the years, Steve’s fans have been legendary for taking him to task whenever he’s gotten the facts wrong in his stories. For instance, in The Stand, Harold Lauder’s favorite candy bar was a PayDay bar. At one point in the story, Harold left behind a chocolate fingerprint in a diary at a time when the candy contained no chocolate. In the first few months after the book was published, Steve received mailbags full of letters from readers to inform him of his mistake, which was remedied in later editions of the book. And then of course, the candy company began to make PayDays with chocolate. Though some might claim Steve was prescient, you can’t blame the man; after all, this is a guy who isn’t exactly fond of doing research when he’s deep into the writing of a novel. “I do the research [after I write],” he said. “Because when I’m writing a book, my attitude is, don’t confuse me with facts. You know, let me go ahead and get on with the work.”

On the other hand, his lack of concern with the facts of both his fictional and real lives has proved to be more than a bit frustrating to me and other writers. In researching this biography, I’ve attempted to check and double-check the facts of his life, but whether it’s the natural deterioration of memory that comes with age or two solid decades of abusing alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs in various combinations, the guy can’t be faulted for fudging a few dates here and there.

For example, in On Writing, he wrote that his mother died in February 1974, two months before Carrie was first published. However, I have not only a copy of his mother’s obituary but her death certificate, both of which show that she most definitely died on December 18, 1973, in Mexico, Maine, at the home of Steve’s brother, Dave.

Once I knew I was going to be writing about King’s life, I got busy. I dug up old interviews in obscure publications that only published one issue back in 1975, read numerous books, and watched almost all of the movies based on his stories and novels—good and bad, and, boy, the bad ones can be a hoot. I also plunged into the many books that have been written about him and his work since the early eighties. As with the films, there are some good ones and some that are not so good.

The thing that struck me was not the blood and guts and special effects; the gory scenes in his books and movies weren’t as bad as I’d imagined they would be. And it wasn’t his ability to draw and develop characters; I already knew that was one of his particular talents.

What really got me was how funny the man is. I mean, really funny. Yes, his use of pop-culture references and brand names can be amusing when placed side by side with a guy who has a cleaver sticking out of his neck, or as with a corpse in an office setting with an Eberhard pencil stuck in each eye, but his sense of humor just knocked me over. I fell off the couch when the ice cream truck in Maximum Overdrive started playing “King of the Road,” and again in Graveyard Shift when rats are trying to stay on top of broken planks coursing down a fast-moving stream in the middle of a mill’s floor and the music playing is “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys. King did not write the screenplay for the latter, but you just know his long arm of influence made it into the film.

Steve has gone on the record countless times to say that the one question he hates most is “Where do you get your ideas?” To me as a biographer, all you have to do is ask, “Is it authorized?” to make my face screw up like King’s after an awestruck fan has asked him the idea question.

No, this biography is not authorized. The running joke among biographers is that if it is authorized, the book makes a good cure for insomnia. King does know about this book and told his friends that they could talk with me if they desired. I visited Bangor over several gray, bleak November days in the fall of 2007 to check out all of the key Stephen King haunts. In other words, all the highlights on the local Stephen King tours. It was sheer serendipity that one morning I found myself sitting in his office in the former National Guard barracks out near the airport, with his longtime assistant Marsha DeFillipo grilling me about my aim for this book.

For most of that half-hour interrogation, the man himself hovered just outside the doorway, listening in on our conversation but never once stepping inside.

In the end, perhaps the most surprising thing about Stephen King is that he is a die-hard romantic, which is evident in all of his stories. And to the surprise of his millions of fans, he would be the first to admit it, though to hear him explain it, maybe it’s not really much of a revelation.

“Yes, I am a romantic,” he said back in 1988. “I believe all those sappy, romantic things, that children are good, good wins out over evil, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I really believe all that shit. I can’t help it. I see a lot of it at work.”

However, the most romantic hearts are often the most haunted. I chose Haunted Heart as the title of this biography because it’s clear that Stephen King’s childhood indelibly shaped him for both good and not so good.

In an interview with the BBC, when Steve talked about his father and growing up without him, he began with a bit of an edge, a defiance as if to say, “Why are we talking about this? I’m so over it and have been for decades.” Once he got going, however, things got painfully intimate, revealing the hurt, petulant boy that still exists close to the surface beneath Stephen King’s skin. During his childhood, the other kids had fathers and he didn’t, he explained. Male relatives were around, to be sure, but it wasn’t the real thing. It would never be the real thing.

“At least the father in The Shining was there, even though he was bad,” he said. “For me, there was a vacuum that was neither good or bad, just an empty place.” At that point, his face crumpled a little, he distractedly ran a hand through his hair, and he looked away from the camera, which remained focused on him for a second or two before abruptly cutting away.

In short, Stephen King has never gotten over feeling like an abandoned child and he never stopped being a child permanently haunted by his father’s absence. That’s something that will never change. It has affected his entire life, from his childhood and his marriage to his books. Especially his books.

Keep this in mind as you read both this book and Steve’s novels, and you’ll find that it will go a long way toward a deeper understanding of the man and the worlds he’s created.