Lisa Rogak - Haunted Heart

“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.

By all accounts, Stephen King should never have been born.

His mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, who went by her middle name, married a captain in the merchant marines named Donald Edwin King on July 23, 1939, in Scarborough, Maine. But given Donald’s frequent and lengthy absences due to the encroaching war, their marriage was on shaky ground from the start.

Doctors had informed Ruth that she would never bear children, and so the Kings did what many presumably infertile couples did back then and applied to adopt a child.

David Victor was adopted shortly after his birth in Portland, Maine, on September 14, 1945, a month after the end of the war.

Despite her doctor’s diagnosis of infertility, in the midwinter of 1947, Ruth discovered she was pregnant. Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, two years to the day after David’s adoption was finalized. He shares the birthday with H. G. Wells, author of such sci-fi classics as The War of the Worlds, who was born eighty-one years earlier.

Nellie Ruth Pillsbury was born on February 3, 1913, in Scarborough, Maine, to Guy Herbert and Nellie Weston Fogg Pillsbury. She was the fourth of eight children.

Ruth’s ancestral roots ran deep in her seaside hometown of Scarborough, Maine. Her great-great-grandfather Jonathan Pillsbury moved to town before 1790 just after the American Revolution ended, married a local woman, and raised a family. Ruth’s ancestors owned property, farmed, and built ships and houses in Scarborough for many generations. The family lived on Prouts Neck, a peninsula a fifteen-minute drive from Portland, whose population was a mix of summer people and locals whose roots went back at least several generations. As a young girl, Ruth was surrounded by her siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Artist Winslow Homer, who died in 1910, had his studio and retirement home near Guy Pillsbury’s home.

In the nineteenth century, Scarborough was an active seaport. In addition to farming, townspeople participated in fishing and shipbuilding. A dike was built in 1877 to control overflowing tidal marshes, but it changed the seascape around Scarborough from a port to a salt marsh.

The town recovered and gained popularity as a summer destination in the early 1900s when regular trolley service brought tourists from Boston and New York. Vacation establishments known as shore dinner houses sprang up along with tourist homes and hotels and motels. A majority of the population worked at jobs in the tourist industry for the summer, including a hotel known as the Pillsbury House, run by some of Ruth’s relatives from 1915 to 1932. In the early 1900s, Ruthie’s father, Guy, supplemented his main income as a carpenter by shuttling tourists from the station to their hotels in a horse-drawn carriage.

Nellie, Ruth’s mother, had worked as a schoolteacher before her marriage, and the entire Pillsbury family placed a high importance on education and music for their children. Ruth’s siblings would go on to attend Bowdoin, Northeastern, and Emerson.

In 1931, the Depression was deeply entrenched in coastal Maine. Natives were already used to making do with what they had, but the Depression brought even less hard cash to down-east households as fewer tourists could afford to travel to the state for vacation. Guy Pillsbury had a houseful: his oldest daughter, Mary, at twenty-three, was still living at home, as were his other children, Mollie, Lois, Mary, Guy Jr., Carolyn, Ethelyn, and Ruth. It was time for some of them to move on. Ruth was only too happy to set off to see the world.

After her idyllic childhood, Ruth studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston for a time. Little is known about her life during the Depression, but clearly she didn’t have an easy time of it when it came to her personal life.

A couple of years after she left Scarborough in 1931, Ruth got married, but the marriage quickly soured and she filed for divorce. In the 1930s, divorce was rare in the United States, and many men would automatically have viewed a divorced woman as damaged goods. A few years later, she met Donald Edwin King, who was born on March 11, 1914, to William R. and Helen A. Bowden King, in Peru, Indiana, and Ruth’s history as a divorced woman didn’t seem to bother him.

Ruth and Donald were married on July 23, 1939, in Scarborough, Maine, with her family present. Shortly after the wedding, the couple moved to Chicago to live with Donald’s family at 4815 Belle Plaine Avenue. The honeymoon quickly wore off as Ruth found herself homesick for her native Maine. She was frequently alone while Donald continued to travel around the world as a merchant marine.

Over the next six years, the couple moved frequently. After spending a couple of years in Chicago, they moved to 17 Terrace Place in Croton-on-Hudson, just north of New York City. But again, Don took off, leaving Ruth to fend for herself for a few years while her husband visited sporadically.

She put a brave face on things and decided to pursue a musical career. Every Sunday morning, she ferried herself to Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center to play the organ on a radio show called The Church Today on the NBC network, a weekly broadcast of a traditional church service. If Donald objected to his wife’s career, it didn’t stop her. After all, Ruth was a headstrong woman. Besides, he wasn’t around enough to be bothered by it.

When it was clear that World War Two would soon end, the Kings returned to Maine and Donald retired from his footloose life. The couple fell into an uneasy truce in their modest home in Scarborough, Maine, an hour’s drive from Ruth’s relatives in Durham. Ruth had never learned to drive a car and depended on her husband to get around. He didn’t care for her family, so visits were infrequent. The couple’s unhappiness grew.