11/22/63 Part 92

Well . . . almost everyone talked to him. Marina Oswald did not, and Manchester's consequent harsh treatment of her may have something to do with that. Marina (still alive at this writing) had her eye on the main chance in the aftermath of her husband's cowardly act, and who could blame her? Those who want to read her full recollections can find them in Marina and Lee, by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. I trust very little of what she says (unless corroborated by other sources), but I salute-with some reluctance, it's true-her survival skills.

I originally tried to write this book way back in 1972. I dropped the project because the research it would involve seemed far too daunting for a man who was teaching full-time. There was another reason: even nine years after the deed, the wound was still too fresh. I'm glad I waited. When I finally decided to go ahead, it was natural for me to turn to my old friend Russ Dorr for help with the research. He provided a splendid support system for another long book, Under the Dome, and once more rose to the occasion. I am writing this afterword surrounded by heaps of research materials, the most valuable of which are the videos Russ shot during our exhaustive (and exhausting) travels in Dallas, and the foot-high stack of emails that came in response to my questions about everything from the 1958 World Series to mid-century bugging devices. It was Russ who located the home of Edwin Walker, which just happened to be on the 11/22 motorcade route (the past harmonizes), and it was Russ who-after much searching of various Dallas records-found the probable 1963 address of that most peculiar man, George de Mohrenschildt. And by the way, just where was Mr. de Mohrenschildt on the night of April 10, 1963? Probably not at the Carousel Club, but if he had an alibi for the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of the general, I wasn't able to find it.

I hate to bore you with my Academy Awards speech-I get very annoyed with writers who do that-but I need to tip my cap to some other people, all the same. Big Number One is Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. He answered billions of questions, sometimes twice or three times before I got the info crammed into my dumb head. The tour of the Texas School Book Depository was a grim necessity that he lightened with his considerable wit and encyclopedic knowledge.

Thanks are also due to Nicola Longford, the Executive Director of The Sixth Floor Museum, and Megan Bryant, Director of Collections and Intellectual Property. Brian Collins and Rachel Howell work in the History Department of the Dallas Public Library and gave me access to old films (some of them pretty hilarious) that show how the city looked in the years 196063. Susan Richards, a researcher at the Dallas Historical Society, also pitched in, as did Amy Brumfield, David Reynolds, and the staff of the Adolphus Hotel. Longtime Dallas resident Martin n.o.bles drove Russ and me around Dallas. He took us to the now-closed but still standing Texas Theatre, where Oswald was captured, to the former residence of Edwin Walker, to Greenville Avenue (not as gruesome as Fort Worth's bar-and-wh.o.r.e district once was), and to Mercedes Street, where 2703 no longer exists. It did indeed blow away in a tornado . . . although not in 1963. And a tip of the cap to Mike "Silent Mike" McEachern, who donated his name for charitable purposes.

I want to thank Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, former Kennedy aide-de-camp d.i.c.k Goodwin, for indulging my questions about worst-case scenarios, had Kennedy lived. George Wallace as the thirty-seventh president was their idea . . . but the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. My son, the novelist Joe Hill, pointed out several consequences of time-travel I hadn't considered. He also thought up a new and better ending. Joe, you rock.

And I want to thank my wife, my first reader of choice and hardest, fairest critic. An ardent Kennedy supporter, she saw him in person not long before his death, and has never forgotten it. A contrarian her whole life, Tabitha is (it does not surprise me and should not surprise you) on the side of the conspiracy theorists.

Have I gotten things wrong here? You bet. Have I changed things to suit the course of my story? Sure. As one example, it's true that Lee and Marina went to a welcome party thrown by George Bouhe and attended by most of the area's Russian emigres, and it's true that Lee hated and resented those middle-cla.s.s burghers who had turned their back on Mother Russia, but the party happened three weeks later than it does in my book. And while it's true that Lee, Marina, and baby June lived upstairs at 214 West Neely Street, I have no idea who-if anybody-lived in the downstairs apartment. But that was the one I toured (paying twenty bucks for the privilege), and it seemed a shame not to use the layout of the place. And what a desperate little place it was.

Mostly, however, I stuck to the truth.

Some people will protest that I have been excessively hard on the city of Dallas. I beg to differ. If anything, Jake Epping's first-person narrative allowed me to be too easy on it, at least as it was in 1963. On the day Kennedy landed at Love Field, Dallas was a hateful place. Confederate flags flew rightside up; American flags flew upside down. Some airport spectators held up signs reading HELP JFK STAMP OUT DEMOCRACY. Not long before that day in November, both Adlai Stevenson and Lady Bird Johnson were subjected to spit-showers by Dallas voters. Those spitting on Mrs. Johnson were middle-cla.s.s housewives.

It's better today, but one still sees signs on Main Street saying HANDGUNS NOT ALLOWED IN THE BAR. This is an afterword, not an editorial, but I hold strong opinions on this subject, particularly given the current political climate of my country. If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy's head explodes.

Before I finish, I want to thank one other person: the late Jack Finney, who was one of America's great fantasists and storytellers. Besides The Body s.n.a.t.c.hers, he wrote Time and Again, which is, in this writer's humble opinion, the great time-travel story. Originally I meant to dedicate this book to him, but in June of last year, a lovely little granddaughter arrived in our family, so Zelda gets the nod.

Jack, I'm sure you'd understand.

Stephen King Bangor, Maine

Book Clubs: Travel Back to

11/22/63.

with

STEPHEN KING.

This book club kit contains everything you will need for an evening dedicated to 11/22/63: suggested questions for discussion, a conversation with Stephen King about the book, a playlist, and a selection of recipes. There'll be a whole lotta shakin' goin' on!

Questions for Discussion 1. Where were you when JFK was a.s.sa.s.sinated?

2. 11/22/63 is filled with historical research-it twins real events with events and characters from King's imagination. Did you learn anything surprising about the actual events leading up to the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination while reading this novel?

3. Our hero Jake Epping goes on an epic journey to try to prevent Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination. Why choose this watershed moment in American history rather than any other moment? Would you choose a different moment, and if so, when?

4. Many great books, TV shows, and movies have investigated the idea of time travel. Do you have any particular favorite books or films that explore this?

5. When Jake lives in 1960s small town Texas, he meets some of the most important people in his life, including the lanky, lovely librarian Sadie. Why is Jake drawn to her? And why is she drawn to him? How does their relations.h.i.+p change over the course of the novel?

6. What is the role of romance in this book? Some reviewers of 11/22/63 cited King's optimism about love-after reading 11/22/63, do you agree?

7. Jake (or rather George) has to spend a lot of time in Dallas, which he experiences as a malevolent place. Jodie, on the other hand, is everything idyllic small town America should be. Do you believe that certain places are evil at certain times?

8. 11/22/63 gives readers an opportunity to immerse themselves in the past, in all its casual cigarette smoking glory-the music, food, language, cars, and dancing. What are your favorite things about the '50s and '60s King creates in 11/22/63? And least favorite?

9. Do you believe in the b.u.t.terfly effect/chaos theory?

10. If you could pick any other period in history that you could go back to, which would it be?

11. Conspiracy theories abound, and numerous books have been written on the subject of the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination. In his afterword, King concludes (as Jake does in the book) that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, a disturbed and grandiose man who altered world history forever all on his own. Do you agree?

A conversation with Stephen King about 11/22/63 Photo: Shane Leonard Where were you when JFK was a.s.sa.s.sinated?

When I got the news I was in a hea.r.s.e. I was a tuition kid in a little town and there was no bus service to the high school where we went. So our parents clubbed together and paid a guy who had a converted hea.r.s.e, which he turned into a kind of school bus, and we went back and forth in that.

We didn't get the news that Kennedy had been a.s.sa.s.sinated in school. But when we got into the hea.r.s.e to go home, the driver, Mike, had the radio on for the first time in living memory. We heard that Kennedy had been killed. Mike, who was kind of silent, spoke up. "They'll catch the son of a b.i.t.c.h who did that and somebody will kill him." And that's exactly what happened.

When and why did you decide to write a novel about the Kennedy a.s.sa.s.sination?

I tried to write this novel in 1973 when I was teaching high school. At that time it was called Split Track and I wrote fourteen single-s.p.a.ced pages. Then I stopped. The research was daunting for someone who was working full-time at another job. Also, I understood I wasn't ready-the scope was too big for me at that time. I put the book aside and thought someday maybe I'd go back to it.

I'm glad that I didn't go forward with it then. In 1973 the wound was still too fresh. Now it's going on half a century since Kennedy was a.s.sa.s.sinated. I think that's about long enough.

I recently saw Robert Redford's film The Conspirator about the Lincoln a.s.sa.s.sination. That was a hundred fifty years ago, but it's still kind of a shock to see the president of the United States a.s.sa.s.sinated by a lone gunman.

How does having a modern character going back in time affect the way you depict the 1950s, as opposed to simply setting a novel then?

Jake Epping, my main character, makes several different trips into the past-every trip takes him back to two minutes before noon on September 19, 1958, and every trip is a complete reset. Little by little he gets used to it, but the contrast between his twenty-first-century sensibility and the world of that late fifties and early sixties is jarring in a way that Mad Men isn't. And sometimes it's pretty funny, as when Jake gets caught singing a risque Rolling Stones tune and tries to convince his girlfriend that he heard a song containing the lyrics "she tried to take me upstairs for a ride" on the radio!

We're pretty well anch.o.r.ed in the present, the world that we live in as it is now-a world where there's four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, where men and women have a certain equality, where there's an African American president, where we have computers. When you first go back to 1958, the trip is jarring. Yet the longer Jake stays, the more he feels at home in that particular world. Eventually, he doesn't want to leave it. He's gotten fond of his life at a time when you didn't have to take your shoes off at the airport.

The act of writing is almost an act of hypnosis. You can remember things that are not immediately accessible to the conscious mind. I felt extremely challenged as I began this book. Could I really capture the sense of what it was like to live between 1958 and 1963? But writing, like anything imaginative, is an act of faith. You have to believe that those details will be there when you need them.

The more I wrote about those years, the more I remembered. I used research when I fell short but it was amazing how much came back to me-the sound coins made when you dropped them into the machine when you got on the bus; the smell of movie theaters when everybody was smoking; the dances, the teenage slang, books that were current, and the importance of the library in research. There's a funny sequence where Jake needs to find somebody and is very frustrated; if he had his computer he could simply run a search engine and get what he needed in two or three minutes. There weren't Jetways then; you walked out of a terminal and mounted the steps to get on a TWA plane. Now, TWA doesn't exist anymore, but that's the airline carrier that brought Lee Harvey Oswald back to Texas.

When researching the music of the day, do you listen to those songs as you write?

I've always been a pop music fan. I have a good grasp of music between 1955 and now-it's just one of the places where my head feels at home. It's also one of the indicators of how American life changes and what's going on at any particular time.

One of the epigrams for 11/22/63 is "dancing is life," and dancing is something that has always interested me. It's symbolic in so many ways of the courting ritual. The changes in dancing mirror the changes in the way we court and love and live over the years. I went to YouTube to watch videos of dances from the fifties and the sixties and that was an interesting thing, to watch people do the Stroll and the Madison, the Lindy Hop, h.e.l.l's a Poppin'-fantastic stuff. I'm crazy about music and I'm crazy about dancing and some of that's in the book.

I listen to music all the time. Not when I'm composing fresh copy, but when I'm rewriting or editing, I've always got it on and it's always turned up really loud. I also have certain touchstone songs that I go back to-they drive my wife, my kids, my grandchildren crazy. I'm the sort of guy who will play Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" twenty-five times until I discover the song was written by Dolly Parton and then I listen to the Dolly Parton version forty times.

The music that made the biggest impression on me was rock 'n' roll from the early fifties. I tried to get into the book the excitement that the kids felt to hear someone like Jerry Louis, Chuck Berry, or Little Richard. The first time you heard Little Richard your life changed. The first time I heard Freddie Cannon do "Palisades Park" I thought to myself, "This makes me feel so happy to be alive."

Your 11/22/63 Playlist Stephen King listened to these songs while writing 11/22/63. Play them in the background during your book club gathering, and read his comments below. Enjoy!

1. "Swing the Mood," Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers:

"Most music critics of the purist stripe absolutely hated this collaboration between elderly British DJ John Pickles and his son, Andrew (aided by producer Mark 'The Hitman' Smith). For one thing, all the vocals have been speeded up, so everyone is singing an octave higher than normal. I'm no purist, and I just love this. There's a video on YouTube that's full of joyful dancing (not to mention Elvis deplaning in Germany with a dufflebag over his shoulder). The accompanying track is a variation."

2. "Screw You, We're From Texas," Ray Wylie Hubbard:

"Kind of says it all, don't it?"

3. "The Walk," the Inmates:

"I think the original was by The Diamonds, but this version is way cooler."

4. "Honky Tonk Women," the Rolling Stones 5. "That's Right (You're Not from Texas)," Lyle Lovett:

"Lots of people in Dallas will probably point this out to me. Like I don't know."

6. "She's About a Mover," Sir Douglas Quintet:

"Guest appearance at Miz Mimi's wedding party."

7. "You're Gonna Miss Me," the 13th Floor Elevators:

"Many would say the Elevators were the quintessential Texas rock band. They were from Austin, they swallowed LSD by the bushel, and frontman Roky Erikson ended up in a mental asylum. Without the Elevators, ZZ Top probably never exists. Then there was this young girl, Janis Joplin, who sometimes sang with them."

8. "Heaven's Just a Sin Away," John Fogerty:

"The ultimate cheating song. This version probably isn't as good as the honky-tonk original, by The Kendalls, but it's good. Always makes me think of Jake and Sadie at the Candlewood."

9. "Texas Time Travelin'," Cory Morrow 10. "C'mon Everybody," Eddie Cochran: