Stephen King: Playboy Interview

In the early winter of 1972, a Maine housewife dusting her husband's makeshift study fished a discarded manuscript out of the wastebasket and sat down to read it. When Stephen King returned from teaching high school English that evening, his wife, Tabitha, persuaded him to resume work on the abandoned novel, despite his conviction "that I had written the world's all-time loser." Several months later, he submitted the revised version to Doubleday & Company in New York. Carrie, a twisted fairy tale about an ugly-duckling adolescent transformed into a merciless engine of psychic destruction, was purchased by Doubleday in March 1973 for a $2500 advance and subsequently sold a modest 13,000 copies in hardcover. Reviews were both sparse and mixed; some dismissed the novel as a potboiler, but New York Times critic Newgate Callendar hailed it as "brilliant...A first novel guaranteed to give you a chill." Screen rights were purchased by United Artists, and Brian De Palma's 1976 film version, starring Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, was a critical and commercial success, while New American Library paid $400,000 for paperback rights and subsequently sold more than 2,500,000 copies. King, dubbed "the modern master of horror" by The New York Times, had exploded onto the publishing scene and had begun his meteoric rise on the best-seller lists.

His second novel, Salem's Lot (originally titled The Second Coming), was published in 1975 and dealt with a plague of vampires that terrorized and ultimately overwhelmed a small Maine community.

The paperback edition sold 3,000,000 copies and swept King to the number-one spot on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. Film rights were sold to Warner Bros., which released it in 1979 as a two-part, four-hour made-for-television movie starring David Soul. Of all his books, Salem's Lot remains King's personal favorite, and he is planning a sequel.

In rapid succession, King published The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978) and Night Shift (1978), a Grand Guignol—style collection of short stories. The Shining sold more than 50,000 copies and was his first hardback best seller. A harrowing account of a family's destruction by an old hotel that has become a repository of supernatural evil, the novel was greeted favorably by critics who had previously either ignored King or dismissed him as another shockmeister. In 1980, Stanley Kubrick's lavish $18,000,000 film production of the book, starring Jack Nicholson, was roundly panned by critics, though it was a solid box-office hit and ranks among the 20 most profitable films ever released by Warner Bros.

The Stand, an 800-page futuristic disaster novel with mystical overtones, was also a best seller and received mixed reviews. Some praised it as King's most ambitious work; others felt it was wordy and pretentious.

With the publication of The Dead Zone in 1979, King might have been disturbed by the divided critical reaction to his work, but he could also afford to cry all the way to the bank. He had left Doubleday and had signed a three-novel, $3,000,000 contract with New American Library. Working at the prolific clip of a book a year, King followed The Dead Zone with Firestarter in 1980, Cujo in 1981 and, in 1982, a collection of four novellas, Different Seasons, that sold to the Book-of-the-Month Club for $500,000 and was among the top-selling hardcover novels in the country in 1982. Danse Macabre, a nonfiction survey of horror in literature, film and the mass media, was published by Everest House in 1981 and was hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as "one of the best books on American popular culture in the late 20th Century."

By the early Eighties, King had become the only author in history to have three books simultaneously on the New York Times hard- and softcover best-seller lists. With the publication in April 1983 of Christine, the saga of a boy and his haunted 1958 Plymouth Fury, an estimated 40,000,000 copies of King's books were in print around the world. He also branched out and wrote the screenplay and starred in one of the five segments of George (Night of the Living Dead) Romero's seriocomic film Creepshow. According to Douglas Winter, author of a recent critical study, The Reader's Guide to Stephen King, "In less than ten years, King has become the most popular writer of horror fiction of all time, a publishing phenomenon whose success, a conjoining of talent and timing, was seemingly inevitable."

To examine the work and probe the psyche of this master of the macabre, Playboy sent novelist Eric Norden to Bangor, Maine, where King lives with his wife and three children. Norden reports:

"It was a foggy, drizzling morning in late November when I showed up at King's sprawling 24-room Victorian mansion, replete with brooding twin turrets and black-wrought-iron fence. The grillwork on the imposing front gate was fashioned into an intricate spider web surmounted by two perching metal bats as big and about as inviting as vultures. It was a fittingly sinister lair for the writer one hostile critic had called the 'Wizard of Ooze.' But the gate didn't creak, and when King shambled out into the rain to greet me, his appearance was disarming.

"He is a strapping 6'4" and weighs in at 200 pounds, a genial bear of a man with an infectious grin and disconcertingly gentle blue eyes behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. His jet-black hair commas over one eyebrow and curls at the nape of his neck, and his beard is thick but neatly trimmed. (A dedicated baseball fan, he grows it every year at the end of the world series and shaves when the spring season begins.) He was dressed casually in a faded-blue Levis work shirt, jeans, black-leather motorcycle jacket and scuffed-suede pukka boots—his everyday uniform in Bangor, which he describes affectionately as 'a hard town, a hard-drinking workingman's town.'

"The interior of the house quickly dispels the Charles Addams façade; it is a series of large, airy rooms tastefully decorated in traditional New England style and presided over by a full-time housekeeper. Two secretaries staff King's office, where he hammers out 1500 words between 8:30 and 11:30 every morning of the year except Christmas, the Fourth of July and his birthday. The preserved head of a rattlesnake encased in a glass globe has a place of honor on his desk, and he's fond of telling interviewers that he writes as he does because he has the heart of a small boy: 'In fact, I keep it at home in a jar on my desk, as Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, was fond of saying.'

"King works on a Wang word processor, which is currently linked by telephone hookup to an IBM model belonging to writer Peter (Ghost Story) Straub, with whom he is collaborating on a forthcoming horror novel titled The Talisman, scheduled for publication in 1984. (Other work in progress includes a novel about burial customs, Pet Sematary—no typos in the title, it's derived from a child's spelling—Night Moves, an anthology, and IT, a horror magnum opus about a monster in the sewers that may top 2000 pages on completion.) King is compulsive about his output and suffers from headaches and insomnia if he falls behind schedule. But he's not finicky about working conditions—his children wander freely in and out of his study when he's composing, and he often writes to the blare of hard rock.

"King is a loving and protective parent and enjoys a close relationship with his three kids, 12-year-old Naomi, ten-year-old Joe and five-year-old Owen. They often watch horror films together on King's 4'x 3' Panasonic Cinemavision video-beam console, which dominates a corner of the toy-strewn den. (One memorable lunchtime midway through our interview, King sent out for Big Macs while he screened Blood Feast, a particularly gory Sixties cut-and-slasher, and kept telling me, 'Go ahead and have another burger' while a starlet was being disemboweled and her blood-dripping liver was being devoured in living color.)

"King's relationship with Tabitha is equally close. They met when both were students at the University of Maine and were married in 1971. An attractive brunette in her early 30s, Tabitha is a talented author in her own right, and her blackly humorous fantasy novel, Small World, was published in 1981. Warm and supportive, Tabby is also a no-nonsense woman, a fact King welcomes and credits for helping him avoid the pitfalls of celebrity. His children are no more overwhelmed by their father's fame than their mother is: 'When I'm about to go out on a publicity tour for one of the books,' King observes ruefully, 'Owen just says, "Oh, Daddy's going out to be Stephen King again."'

"King seems sincerely unimpressed about being a multimillionaire; all his money is handled by a New York accountant, who doles out $200 to him for walking-around money every week. 'The rest is all on paper,' he explains, 'and I don't even know how much I'm worth.' His lifestyle is simple and unpretentious—he loves his weekly bowling night out with the boys and an occasional bout of cross-country skiing—with the exception of a few extravagances, such as the family's two Mercedes. One notable luxury is a modern 11-room summer house on a hilltop overlooking lonely Lake Kezar in the foothills of the White Mountains. That was the scene where much of our interview was conducted to avoid the ubiquitous long-distance telephone calls from publishers, agents, editors and Hollywood producers that plague King in Bangor.

"As banks of autumnal mist rolled in across the lake on the first day of the two weeks I would spend interviewing King, I began by asking him how it felt to see a fantasy fulfilled."