Stephen King's Real Horror Story: How the novelist's addiction to drink and drugs nearly killed him



Stephen King survived his drink and drug ordeal

As the tall, thin man in his mid-40s lay unconscious on the floor of his office, his eyes shut tight and his shirt-front soaked with blood, the silence of the night all around him was broken only by the shrieks of the bats which haunted the rafters of his vast Victorian mansion.



The scene was like something out of a novel by that master of the macabre Stephen King, ironic given that the comatose figure was none other than King himself - dead to the world after drinking countless cans of beer and snorting so much cocaine that his ravaged nose had become a gushing crimson fountain.



Shocking though his condition was, this was no one-off. Writing 63 books over 35 years, with best-selling stories such as Carrie, The Shining, Misery and The Green Mile turned into blockbusting movies, King has long been one of the world's most successful authors, with an estimated fortune of £135million.



Yet, as is revealed in a fascinating new biography, he spent most of the Eighties on an extended drug and alcohol binge which so fogged his mind that even today he cannot remember working on many of the books he wrote during that period.



For King, drink and drugs helped provide an escape from the unhappiness which has dogged him since he was a child, growing up in poverty in Portland, Maine, after the Second World War.

His father Donald, a womanising vacuum cleaner salesman, walked out on the family in 1949 when Stephen was just two. Left to bring up the boy and his older brother David, their mother Ruth took a succession of poorly paid menial jobs, leaving her sons in the care of various relatives. King was convinced she would one day abandon him and his brother, just as their father had.



An insecure child, plagued by nightmares in which his mother was laid out in a coffin and he saw himself hanging from a gallows, with crows pecking out his eyes, his anxieties included everything from a terror of falling down the toilet, to paranoia about death, deformity, and even clowns.



As he grew up, he discovered that he could only deal with these bogeymen by writing stories about them, rattling away so furiously on his second-hand typewriter that the letter M eventually broke off and he had to write in the missing letters by hand.



But as a student of English at the University of Maine, he also found more dangerous ways of escaping from reality. Taking marijuana, speed and LSD, he was arrested a month before his graduation for stealing traffic cones after drinking heavily at a local bar - a warning of the far more worrying behaviour to come.

Jack Nicholson stars in one of Stephen King's best-known works, The Shining

He married fellow student Tabitha Spruce in January 1971. Their daughter Naomi had been born the previous June and when their son Joe arrived in 1972, the couple struggled to survive on King's salary as a high-school teacher.



Forced to work in a laundry during the school holidays to help pay the bills, and receiving a string of rejection letters from publishers, King became increasingly frustrated at his failure as a novelist. When he was drunk, his anger became focused on his children.



'I wanted to grab them and hit them,' he has admitted. 'Even though I didn't do it, I felt guilty because of my brutal impulses. I wasn't prepared for the realities of fatherhood.'



The death of his mother at the end of 1973 sent him into a depression which did not lift even after the publication of his first success, Carrie, the following year. This one book earned him £100,000 for the paperback rights alone, more money than he'd ever hoped to see in a lifetime.



Still tormented by a desire to hurt his children, he turned to the technique he had learned as a child himself - believing that if he wrote about something bad, then it would never happen. This resulted in The Shining, the story of a little boy whose alcoholic father tries to kill him.



While this may have helped control his hostility towards his family, it did nothing to reduce his drinking. His friends noted he could down six to eight beers in the time it took them to drink two and soon he was even imbibing during book signings.



On one occasion, his wife kicked him out of their home in Bangor, Maine. But even this did not stop his hitting the bottle - for his addiction was driven by an awful fear. Since he had been drinking when he wrote his first best-sellers, he now worried that he might be unable to write without being drunk, unthinkable for a man whose creative outpourings were the only way he could cope with the dark thoughts that plagued him.



These now included phobias of snakes, rats, small spaces, 'squishy' things, flying, and even the number 13 - and the importance of his writing as a means of keeping these at bay became apparent when he had a vasectomy following the birth of his son Owen in 1979.



During the midst of a furious writing session in the days following the operation, he began bleeding from the incision and his wife was horrified to find him sitting at his typewriter in a pool of blood. She tried to get him to stop work, but he brushed her off.

'Anyone else would have been screaming, but he said, "Hold on, let me finish this paragraph!" ' she recalled.



Smoking at least two packets of cigarettes a day, King craved anything which might drive him on in his writing, including the cocaine freely available at the Hollywood parties he attended as Carrie and The Shining were turned into movies towards the end of the Seventies.



Many of King's novels play on fears that most people have - like all-engulfing, dangerous mist

'One snort and cocaine owned me body and soul,' he said. 'It was my on-switch, and it seemed like a really good energising drug.'



In 1980, the Kings renovated and moved into an imposing 24-room house in Bangor - with bat motifs on the stained-glass windows and a wrought-iron fence paying homage to the real-life creatures which flitted-around the old roof spaces.

This became a place of pilgrimage for King fans, who hung around for hours in hope of a glimpse of their hero, throwing books and presents into the seven-acre garden and occasionally haranguing visitors as they drove through the gates.



They kept vigil unaware that, during his late-night marathon writing sessions, their idol was supplementing the many gallons of beer he drank with so much cocaine that he had to stick cotton wool up his nose to stop blood dripping on to his typewriter.



His dependency had reached such a pitiful stage five years later that he had resorted to buying antiseptic mouthwash for its alcohol content - as his editor Chuck Verrill saw during the making of the film Maximum Overdrive, King's directorial debut.



'He was gargling Listerine and popping pills,' recalled Verrill. 'He was still a nice guy and coherent, but he did seem to be strung out.'



King later said he was 'coked out of my mind' during the making of the film, but at first his escalating drug problem did not appear to affect his output. His spine-chiller It became America's best-selling book of 1986 and the following year he received critical acclaim for his thriller Misery.



By then, however, he was sober for only three hours a day, and he spent most of that time thinking of blowing his brains out. 'I love my life and my wife and kids, but I've always been somewhat quasi-suicidal, constantly wanting to push things past the edge,' he said.



With his blackouts from cocaine and alcohol becoming more and more frequent, and his book The Tommyknockers receiving a critical savaging in 1988, those around him worried that he was reaching rock bottom.



Still popular: Stephen King has retained his appeal despite the problems he faced in the Eighties

Padding down their magnificent mahogany staircase each morning, Tabitha King had become used to finding her husband passed out in a puddle of vomit next to his desk - and finally she decided that she had endured enough.



Searching through his office one day, she gathered up all the paraphernalia of his substance abuse: the packets of white powder, the cocaine spoons, the empty beer cans, and the bottles of Listerine.

Throwing these into a dustbin, she called together their children and a few friends as witnesses, emptied the contents on to the floor in front of her husband, and warned that she would leave him if he continued on his path towards self-destruction.

King stared at the incriminating pile of evidence gathered in front of him and finally realised that, if he didn't change his ways, it would probably cost him his family - even his life. Even so, it took many false starts and broken promises for him to go clean and, when he finally did, his greatest fear came true: he could no longer write.



Realising that this might easily send him into a relapse, Tabitha King remained at her husband's side throughout many difficult nights and days, helping him to write one word at a time until, little by little, his ability to tell a story returned.



As he emerged from this period of crippling writer's block, his admirers claimed there was a new intelligence and depth to his writing. This seemed confirmed in April 1990, when critics who looked down on his work were outraged by the publication of one of his short stories in the New Yorker, the magazine regarded as the preserve of America's literary elite.



With more thoughtful works such as The Green Mile and Hearts In Atlantis, he has since moved still further from the blood-curdling novels for which he is famous. But devotees of his horror stories should not give up hope.



His writing may no longer be fuelled by his addiction to drugs and alcohol, but King is still driven to tell stories as a way of allaying his many fears. Although he has addressed just about all of those over the years, from clowns in It to crazed fans in Misery, there is one thing he has not yet found the courage to face.

'To me, spiders are just about the most horrible, awful things that I can think about,' he has confessed. 'But I want to write about them because it's the one theme that scares just about everybody.'



It might take some time for Stephen King to face this final nightmare but, given his past compulsion to write away his terrors, we can be sure that he will one day do so and once again terrify us all.



Adapted from Haunted Heart: The Biography of Stephen King by Lisa Rogak, to be published by JR Books on May 16, £16.99. & Lisa Rogak. To order a copy for £15.30 (p&p free) call 0845 155 0720.