The Princess Bride

'His name wasn't always King,' Carly said then. 'He has ancestors who lived in Florin City way back when. He still visits in the summertime.'

I sat back down.

'Does he know about me?'

'Bill, of course. And I told him just what the peace settlement says—that you're exhausted. That's easy enough to believe. My God, you haven't written a novel in well over a decade.'

She now strongly resembled Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. 'I'll see you in court,' I said, tossing some money on the table, walking out. A stupid and hollow thing to say. She could keep pressuring me with the lawsuits. No question, she had all the cards.

All but one.

***

LATE THE NEXT morning I was sitting in the airport in Bangor, Maine. I knew King basically from Misery, a screenplay I wrote from one of his best and favorite novels. I'd come up to Bangor a couple of times, just your basic research, chatting with him, a few questions I thought could be better answered in person than over the phone. We had a sneak for him when the movie was done and Rob Reiner, the director, and I paced the lobby while it was on, hoping he'd like it. It meant a lot to us to please him. Rob's career really took off with Stand By Me, another work by King (a novella called The Body).

We could tell as soon as we saw him walking out that he was happy about what we'd done with his baby. He loved Kathy Bates especially. (Not alone in that; she won the Oscar for Best Actress.) It's funny but what I remember even more was the moment before it started when he left us to take his seat: the look on his face was so hopeful. Like a kid. I commented on that to Rob who said, 'I think he's as vulnerable now as when he started— which is how he's managed to stay Stephen King.'

I don't think everyone realizes what a phenomenon he is. It's not just the hundreds of millions of books sold —it's that he has arguably been the hottest writer in the world for so long. Carrie came out in '74—a quarter century sitting closest to the fire.

I saw him through the window now. Jeans, lumberjack shirt, shambling walk. King's a lot bigger than you think. And remarkably unpretentious.

We sat in a private corner of the waiting room—I hadn't eaten since the legendary lunch the day before with the Fiend of Florin. And I'd been up half the night getting everything all set, just how to say it rationally, novelist to novelist, storyteller to storyteller, and the way it went in my head I wasn't even halfway through before he said, 'Bill, that bitch lied to me, she said you didn't want to do it. I only said I'd get involved because she talked to a bunch of relatives I still have back there and they put pressure on me but I felt dragged into the damn thing from the beginning.'

The silence went on. King looked at me. Waiting. I knew I was making him nervous, just sitting there, but I couldn't figure how to start. All I knew was I didn't want to embarrass him. Or, worse, humiliate myself.

Finally he asked, 'How's Kathy? I liked her in Titanic.'

He's giving you a way to start, I told myself. So talk about Kathy Bates. You've got a great Kathy Bates story, tell him. 'I don't see her much, but did I ever tell you how she got the Misery part? It's a great story.'

King shook his head.

'I wrote the part for her. I'd seen her on stage for years—she's one of the great actresses but she'd never gotten her break in films—and before I started I was talking with Rob and I said, 'I'm going to write Annie Wilkes for Kathy Bates.' And Rob said, 'Oh, good. She's great. We'll use her.''

'Then what?' King asked.

'That was it. The most sought after female role that year and it went to this unknown. I loved being part of that. Changing a life.'

'Great story, all right,' King said, trying to sound enthusiastic. But I knew his heart wasn't in it.

'No!' I said, way too loud, but I was not in the best of shape, as readers of these pages will have sensed. 'No,' I repeated, more conversationally. 'That's not the story. Here's the great story.'

King waited.

'Okay. So Rob calls her in. Just Kathy and Rob in the room and she has never come close to a lead in a movie and Rob just lets it fly: 'You've got the part.' Kathy sits there for a moment before she says this: 'The part. I've got it.' Rob nods, repeats the news. 'You've got it.' Now there's another pause before Kathy comes out with this: 'The Annie part. Annie Wilkes. That part?' Rob nods again. 'Annie Wilkes. The lead.' Now a little faster from Kathy: 'And I've got it and it's all set and everything.' 'All set,' from Rob. Now she leans forward a little. 'Let me just get this straight—I am playing Annie Wilkes, the lead, in Misery?' 'Yup,' says Reiner. And Kathy goes on: 'It's done and everything, I mean, I am definitely playing Annie, and that's set and done and everything, no mistakes or anything?' And Rob says, 'It is so set you wouldn't believe it.' And then there is a moment of silence in the room. And then she says this: 'Can I tell my mother?''

King just loved it. (I do too. It's one of my all-time favorite sweet Hollywood stories.) He laughed and smiled and looked at me questioningly, and I raised my right hand and said, 'All true, word of honor,' and I could feel myself, at last, relaxing. I knew I could do it now, talk to him, convince him not to do the sequel, because, after all, I had done The Princess Bride and, even on this earth, fair was occasionally fair, and he said, 'I really liked the movie.' I said, 'I did too, not just Kathy but how about Jimmy Caan?' Then he said, 'I meant The Princess Bride.'

'Thanks. So do I,' and I was about to go on when I realized something. Something just awful. He hadn't mentioned the novel, just the movie. But, my God, he had to like it, I was just being paranoid.

'I wish I felt the same about the novel,' he said, and I could see it pained him to say it.

The most popular storyteller of the century tells you that you suck as a storyteller. I would like to report I handled the whole thing with maturity. But, alas, what I said, like a total jerk, was, 'Yeah? Well, a lot of people liked it just fine, thank you very much.'

Suddenly he was leaning in toward me. 'Bill, the way you caught his style was fine, but, the fact is, I don't like a lot of what you did with the abridgement. For example, Chapter Four—you cut out seventy pages on Buttercup's training. How could you do that? There was wonderful stuff in there. You must have seen the Royalty School. It's one of the great buildings left in all of Europe. Buttercup's curriculum is amazing. How could you leave it out?'

'I was mostly interested in the story, you know, the plot.' And that's when I broke it to him. 'I never went there. To Florin. What was so important about going?'

'What was so important? You flew up here just to check out things for a screenplay adaptation.'

I didn't say anything then because I could feel this terrible wind coming and I knew it would blow me away.

'That's why I want to do Buttercup's Baby' he said. 'Get things right this time.'

I was dead in the water. I stood, thanked him for his time, started out, devastated.

'I'm really sorry,' he said.

I made a smile. Not the easiest thing for me to pull off at that moment, but I liked King, didn't want him of all people to see me fall apart.

He called after me: 'Bill—wait—I just had an idea. Listen—I'll do the abridgement and you can do the screenplay. I'll make that a deal-breaker in my contract.' King was trying to be helpful, I understood that, but right there in the airport I told him about my dad reading to me and Jason not liking it and me realizing how I had only been read the good parts and now Jason was me and he had this kid, Willy, this wonderful child named after me, and Willy wanted me to read it to him and none of this abridgement business would have happened if I hadn't started it and what would he do if he ever lost it, his power, storytelling, as I'd lost mine, and how would he like to spend the rest of his life writing perfect parts for perfectly horrible people who happen to be movie stars this week, with all that power—