In this case, I prefer to trust my feelings more than my memory. The only thing I’m positive about is how I felt when I heard Rob Reiner was dead: a combination of sadness and disbelief. As for the rest … Robert Stone had it right when he said “the mind is a monkey.”
I think I saw “Stand by Me” in the fall of 1985. Back then it was still called “The Body,” which was the name of my novella, on which Rob’s film was based. I think he showed it to me in a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel with a rock ’n’ roll band thudding away somewhere in the distance. That band was pure ’80s. The movie allowed me entry to another, more innocent, time: 1959.
I’m pretty sure Rob was wearing a checked short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, as if he’d just come from the golf course. (For all I knew, he had.) The only thing I’m absolutely sure of is that he hovered until the movie was going and then left the room. Later he told me he couldn’t bear to see my reaction if I didn’t like it. I was an audience of one, sitting in a high-backed chair filched from one of the hotel’s meeting rooms.
I was surprised by how deeply affected I was by its 89 minutes. I’ve written a lot of fiction, but “The Body” remains the only nakedly autobiographical story I’ve ever done. Those kids were my friends. We never walked down a railroad track to see a dead body, but we got up to other stuff. The story was about my reality as I had lived it on the dirt roads of southern Maine. There really was a junkyard dog, although his name wasn’t Chopper. There really was a kid who went swimming and came out covered with leeches in surprising areas, but it wasn’t Gordie Lachance; it was me.
And there really was a kid who was accused of stealing milk money, although his name wasn’t Chris Chambers. He did borrow — we won’t call it stealing — his mom’s Bel Air. With me riding shotgun, he drove it 90 miles per hour down Route 9 in our backcountry hometown. We were 11.
What I’m saying is that in Rob’s hands, it all rang true. The funny parts were really funny (including the barf-o-rama) and the dramatic parts hit me where I lived, or where I did live back in the days when John F. Kennedy was president and gas was a quarter a gallon.
I had felt just that torn between the writing life and the lives of my friends, who were living for the moment and not going anywhere in particular, except maybe Vietnam. I chose writing, but it was a near thing.
When the movie was over, I thanked Rob and surprised the hell out of myself by giving him a hug. I’m not ordinarily a hugging man, and I don’t think he was used to getting them. He stiffened, muttered something about being glad I liked it, and we both stepped away.
I apparently wasn’t done feeling my feelings. I went into the nearest men’s bathroom and sat in a stall until I got myself under control. Nostalgia can be dangerous when it’s up close. I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but it feels true.
When I came back from the men’s, Rob and I had a more normal conversation. He asked me for notes; I had none. I had just let the whole thing wash over me. I marveled at what a good story the truth could make in the right hands.
Years later Rob arranged a screening of “Misery,” which was also based on one of my books, for me. I was equally delighted with that film but not as emotionally wrecked by it. What I liked — what Rob dared to catch — was the mixture of humor and suspense. When Annie Wilkes, perfectly portrayed by Kathy Bates, tellsPaul Sheldon that the champagne they will drink is “Dom Per-IG-non,” it’s both funny and touching: This woman has never had anyone to teach her the correct pronunciation. Rob caught that perfectly.
Much later, after Rob had become an auteur and I had become whatever it is I became, we met in New York. At his behest I took part in a political documentary about how little liking we had for Donald Trump. Rob took a lot of brickbats and slurs for it on Twitter with his customary grace. (I refuse to call it X; that’s for porno films.) He was a political presence, a social commentator and a wicked satirist. But all that still pales for me when I watch Chris Chambers say to the weeping Gordie Lachance: “You’re gonna be a great writer someday.”
That weeping boy was me. It was Rob Reiner who put it on the screen.
Source photograph by Columbia Pictures, via Everett Collection.
Stephen King is the author of numerous works of fiction.
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