by George Beahm
On Mother’s Day, May 13, 1973, King got a phone call from Thompson. The news was that the paperback rights to Carrie had sold to NAL for $400,000. King, by contract, would get half. King had suddenly and unexpectedly been catapulted to instant success.
Flabbergasted by the news, King felt he had to somehow mark the moment, and decided to buy Tabitha a gift. He walked to LaVerdiere’s Super Drug on Main Street and bought her a hair dryer for $16.95. When she returned home and asked what it was for, as King recalled in On Writing, “She didn’t appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty little four-room apartment, just as I had, and began to cry.”
Sanford Street, to where the Kings moved after Carrie sold; they rented a walk-up, four-room apartment in a house.
David Bright, who was King’s editor at The Maine Campus when they were both students at the University of Maine at Orono, was now a reporter with the local paper, the Bangor Daily News, in which he reported the news of King’s breakthrough sale:
Steve King can’t quite make up his mind whether or not he should retire. For King, the book marks his first hit after three strikeouts in trying to break into the novel business. That the book is about Maine high school life is no coincidence, for King wrote his first book while in high school himself. His first rejection, along with a letter that perhaps he should try another field of endeavor, came that same year. King says teaching often takes up time he’d rather spend at writing.… Five of his students at Hampden Academy have asked his advice on novels they are writing and he is encouraging them as best he can, which is one of the reasons he hasn’t decided to quit teaching despite his new-found fortune.
“A GOOD STORY”
1974
In a letter sent to reviewers of Carrie, Doubleday wrote:
Doubleday is pleased to present you with this special edition of Carrie, by Stephen King. We feel it may be the novel of the year—a headlong narrative with the drive and the relentless power of The Exorcist, with the high voltage shock of Rosemary’s Baby. More than that, it is part of a rare breed in today’s fiction market—a good story. Don’t start it unless the evening in front of you is free of appointments; this one is a cooker.
Carrie is the story of a girl who has been the odd one all her life, the misfit, the born loser. Torn between her fanatic mother who sees sin everywhere—in the nudity of a girl’s shower room, in any friendship Carrie might develop with girls her own age, and especially in dating—and her own pathetic wish to become part of the world that shuns and attracts her, Carrie becomes the butt of every cruel joke, the object of any malicious prank. But Carrie is different, more than a victim of forces she cannot understand, she possesses a strange and frightening power which she can hardly control. And when one final prank is played, the unleashing of Carrie’s power proves as spellbinding as it is devastating.
We hope that Carrie will excite you as much as it has us. A tremendously readable ESP novel, it is also a quietly brilliant character sketch of a young and unusual girl trying to find her way out of a very personal hell. We think Carrie and Stephen King have a bright future, and we welcome this chance to share both of them with you.
15
WILLIAM G. THOMPSON:
ANOTHER GOOD ANGEL
Most of the books I liked seemed to carry the Doubleday imprint. I particularly liked one of their novels, The Parallax View by Loren Singer, so when I finally had a manuscript ready, I addressed it to ‘The Editor of the Parallax View’ and sent it off to Doubleday.
—STEPHEN KING, 1981
Acquisition editors serve as reconnaissance scouts for their publishers, ranging far ahead of the main body to find new writing talent. Sometimes, the talent comes to them; sometimes, they search authors out. The stakes are high. Finding, nurturing, and publishing the right author can be a windfall for the publisher. As the saying goes: publishers make books, but authors make publishers.
King is certainly right in saying that, in the midseventies, Doubleday was a bookpublishing powerhouse. By his estimate, Doubleday was issuing five hundred books annually, and had its own book club as well. King’s initial thinking was that their sheer volume meant they were always on the prowl for new writers; he was right in thinking so. In fact, publishers are always on the lookout for fresh, new talent: They can’t get enough to suit them, and regrettably settle for less: It’s a seller’s market if you’ve got the goods, as King does.
In King’s case, he was fortunate to get William G. Thompson for his editor, if only by default: The editor of The Parallax View was out sick for the day. Just the flu. King’s query letter was passed on to Thompson, who responded to King.
After a long and stellar career, Thompson no longer hangs his shingle at a publishing house; he’s an independent editorial consultant helping authors with their book-length manuscripts. For writers of commercial fiction, that’s good news. What are the odds that the same editor would discover not one but two of the bestselling authors of our time? Thompson discovered Stephen King, of course, and also John Grisham. It was hardly luck: A good editor recognizes great talent when he sees it.
A lifetime in the book trade, as an editor, has served him well. On his Web site, Thompson gives two pieces of advice, to whet an aspiring writer’s appetite for his editorial services. On premature submissions, he writes:
A lot of new writers make the mistake of sending a manuscript to an agent or publisher before it’s actually ready. You may have an interesting story line, but it doesn’t translate into potential sales until it’s wrapped up in a full-size, polished, marketable manuscript. Then you have something to offer.
In other words, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, so make it count by making your manuscript as good as possible.
In King’s case, Thompson asked for a rewrite on the last quarter of Carrie, which King was happy to do. That the book sold to Doubleday and went on to command a record sale to a paperback house is testimony to the validity of Thompson’s acumen. On stories, Thompson offers the following:
If a fiction author knows how to tell a story, I can help him nail down what the story is—help him flesh it out and give dimension to the characters without losing track of the story. With many manuscripts, I also try to bring a cinematic sense, thinking of how it would play as a movie.
Thompson started out at the bottom rung of the ladder, selling to independent booksellers. “Carrying the bag,” as it was called, meant carrying an overstuffed, big bag of advance copies, promo sheets, and other sales literature to pitch books individually, and as quickly as possible, to booksellers. His “beat” was New Orleans and Memphis.
He then moved to New York City to begin his career as an editor, where he is properly credited for discovering and nurturing Stephen King. He went on to serve as editor for Everest House, which published King’s major nonfiction work, Danse Macabre, and also worked as editor for G. P. Putnam and Arbor House. He finished his editing career at Wynwood Press, where he served as editor in chief. Though the company is now defunct, it published John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill. (Grisham’s second, more commercial novel, The Firm, catapulted him to fame and fortune.)
Writers who’ve been privileged to work with Thompson and have their manuscripts sharpened and honed to a razor’s edge sing his praises. Novelist Kate Wright wrote on his Web site, “Bill is the perfect kind of editor who can be critical, discerning, precise and, most important of all, encouraging. You can trust him to know what needs to be done to get your manuscript in the best possible shape.”
Rev. Canon John H. Taylor, wrote, “No one knows writing—the arc of a story, the texture of a description, the heartbeat of character—and nobody knows the publishing industry like Bill Thompson. If you have a book in you, he’s the one to help you bring it to life.”
In “A Girl Named Carrie,” an essay Thompson wrote for Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King, he boiled it all down to this: “Basically the editorial process means
understanding what the author wants to do and helping him get there.”
He realizes that authors, for all sorts of reasons, can lose sight of the story’s objective by getting caught up in the details and failing to see the big picture or the flaws inherent in the structure. Even Stephen King, whose submitted manuscripts usually require little editing, acknowledged that, for Carrie, Thompson’s editorial input was invaluable. In “On Becoming a Brand Name,” King wrote:
Thompson’s ideas worked so well that it was almost dreamlike.… That was my first experience with what editors are supposed to do. I think that on subsequent occasions, Thompson’s advice has been good or better, but in that particular case, it was inspired.
The book industry is replete with good editors, but Bill is a rara avis, a black swan among white ones. As King and Grisham would tell you, Bill is, simply, the best.
16
NELLIE RUTH PILLSBURY KING:
THE FUTURE QUEEN OF DURHAM
THE POWER TO DREAM
Parents are supposed to be safety nets for their children; the ideal 1950s nuclear family included a set of parents—a father and mother—who functioned as just such a safety net, but Stephen King’s mother, Ruth, had to take up all the slack because the other “safety net” had a king-sized hole in it.
Back in the 1950s, the local, state, and federal governments didn’t have an interlocking system of support for single mothers. The support system, instead, was the extended family, which comprised siblings and grandparents—the more, the merrier.
Everything we know about Ruth King we know through Stephen King’s interviews, autobiographical pieces in Danse Macabre, and afterwords to his stories (notably, “The Woman in the Room”), as well as through one interview with Stephen’s brother, David.
From Ruth’s high school yearbook we learn that she excelled in public speaking, which “won distinction for her in numerous plays and honor for the school in every contest she has entered.” Trained as a pianist, she also played the organ on a radio show that was broadcast on the NBC network, recalled Stephen.
Lacking a college education, and, after her husband left the family, saddled with the responsibility of looking after two children and her own parents, Ruth could never afford the luxury of pursuing her own dreams. She lived and sacrificed for her boys to ensure that they, unlike her, would go on to realize their dreams. She wanted them to have a better chance of succeeding in life by going to college and earning a diploma: a one-way ticket out of Durham, Maine, which held her captive from a better life.
Stephen King once observed that dreams often die before the dreamer, which unfortunately was true in his mother’s case. As King told Mel Allen in an interview published in Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King:
She was a very hardheaded person when it came to success. She knew what it was like to be on her own without an education, and she was determined that David and I would go to college. “You’re not going to punch a time clock all your life,” she told us. She always told us that dreams and ambitions can cause bitterness if they’re not realized, and she encouraged me to submit my writings.
It was all Ruth King could do to make ends meet by working a series of low-paying, blue-collar jobs. In fact, over a nine-year period, Stephen recalled his mother worked as a “presser in a laundry, doughnut-maker on the night shift at a bakery, store clerk, housekeeper.” (From the bakery, she brought home broken cookies for dessert.)
Like his mother, Stephen shared a talent for public speaking and a love of drama activities, which may help explain why Stephen King can speak with ease extemporaneously at public events.
Early on, when Ruth saw Stephen’s love of writing, she not only encouraged him but also gave him money for postage to send the manuscripts off to publishers. And for both her sons, when they were in college, she scrimped up five dollars for each on a regular basis so they’d have pocket money. It would only be later that Stephen discovered she skipped meals to come up with the “money we so casually accepted. It was very unsettling,” he recalled in an interview reprinted in Bare Bones.
As for reading material, Ruth enjoyed reading Fate magazine, which purported to publish “true stories of the strange unknown,” according to its cover. It focused on the paranormal field, which the magazine’s current-day Web site defines as embracing “vanished civilizations, communication with spirits, synchronicity, exotic religions, monsters and giants, out-of-place artifacts, and phenomena too bizarre for categorization.” Science fiction, horror, and the paranormal were all subjects of intense interest to Stephen King, too.
When Stephen King was a teenager growing up in Durham, his neighbors thought of him as weird for preferring the company of his imagination instead of playing with his friends outside. But it was a good weird. Ruth encouraged him to dream and write, and, as he continued reading and writing popular fiction, he inevitably turned his attention to professional publication.
It wasn’t clear where Stephen King’s writing talent would take him, but it was clear that he had the goods. The big question was what he would do with it.
No MORE BROKEN COOKIES
As children, we need to have our dreams encouraged and nurtured. My mother did that for me.
—STEPHEN KING, DEDICATING THE MILTON ACADEMY’S RUTH KING THEATRE
In a perfect world, people would get their just desserts, not broken cookies.
The Kings didn’t live in a perfect world; they lived in a hardscrabble world. “For ten years,” he told Playboy, “we lived a virtual barter existence, practically never seeing any hard cash. If we needed food, relatives would bring a bag of groceries; if we needed clothes, there’d always be hand-me-downs.… So, yeah, I guess in many ways it was a hard-scrabble existence but not an impoverished one in the most important sense of the word. Thanks to my mother, the one thing that was never in short supply, corny as it may sound to say it, was love.”
In early 1973, King had just sold his first book, Carrie: He was on his way to becoming a professional writer. King, finally, had broken through in a life-changing way. That was when Ruth King knew everything would turn out just fine for her son; it was, she knew, only a matter of time because he’d keep at it until he reached the level of success he’d strived for. Sadly, Ruth King’s days were numbered: the cancer that riddled her body would soon take its inevitable toll. Upon learning this, Stephen and his family moved from Bangor to North Windham, Maine, to be near her.
Stephen made sure she got an advance copy of Carrie; in a short chapter in Lord John Signatures (1991), he explained that
I signed my first autograph in late 1973.… That autograph read: For Ruth King—Thanks for letting me wonder. I love you, mom—Stephen King. … I haven’t the slightest idea what happened to the proof copy. It would be worth a small fortune, I suppose, in the mad atmosphere of today’s collector’s market, where the autographs of some writers command sums of money which seem—to me, at least—surreal.
In On Writing, Stephen King recalled her last moments. “My boys,” she said. A shadow of her former self, Ruth was 90 pounds, down from her normal weight of 160. On December 18, 1973, at 7:15 A.M., Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King passed away. She was only sixty years old.
“She was a wonderful lady,” Stephen recalled to Playboy, “a very brave lady in that old-fashioned sense, and went to work to support us, generally at menial jobs because of her lack of any professional training. After my father did his moonlight flit, she became a rolling stone, following the jobs around the country.… She worked as a laundry presser and a doughnut maker—like my wife, twenty years later—as a housekeeper, a store clerk; you name it, she did it.”
Stephen King later told Mel Allen in an interview, “Ah, if my mother had lived, she’d have been the Queen of Durham by now.”
If only.
Ruth P. King Obituary
The Lewiston Daily Sun,
December 19, 1973
Durham—Mrs. Ruth P. King, 60, a resident of Methodist Corner
, died Tuesday at the home of her son [David] in Mexico [Maine]. She was born in Scarborough, Feb. 3, 1913, the daughter of Guy H. and Nellie Fogg Pillsbury. She was educated in schools of Scarborough and the New England Conservatory of Boston, Mass. She was a retired worker from the housekeeping department at the Pineland Hospital. She was a member of the First Congregational Church of Durham. Surviving are two sons, Davie V. of Mexico and Stephen E. of North Windham; three sisters, Mrs. Mary Donahue, Durham, Mrs. Lois Story, Scituate, Mass., and Mrs. Ethelyn P. Flaws, Durham.
PAYING IT FORWARD
After King became successful, he told David Pettus during an interview in Fan Plus that he had no love for his father but loved his mother. When asked, “Do you ever wish they could see you now?” King responded,
Sure. I mean, my father I could care less about. But I wish my mother could see me now. It would be great. She worked very hard all her life for us, and I’d like to give her all the nice things I could give her now. I always think of her when something good happens to me. I think, gee I gotta call my mother and tell her—and then I say, shit, she’s dead. It’s really a nasty trick for things to have turned out that way. But it leaves me, as her son, in a position of not being able to pay back—anything.
Stephen and Tabitha King do what others in their position have done: They pay it forward. Their generosity, through foundations they’ve established, and especially to the Bangor community, speaks volumes about their character. The Kings know what it’s like to not have money, so they donate money to pay for critically needed heating oil for indigent families and donate to other worthy causes. That’s how the Kings were raised. Their parents taught them well.
