A writer in debt to the King

Spend an hour with Ron McLarty, and you’ll get hints that he’s a cursed man, a charmed man, a caveman, a super-human, a comedian and a fly-fishing fan. Viewers of “Sex and the City,” “The Practice” and “Law & Order” know him as an actor. But in the three decades that McLarty, 57, sat at a desk for five hours every morning writing 44 plays, 10 novels and countless poems and short stories, no one ever called him a novelist -- until Stephen King.

It was June 2003. McLarty, whose expressive eyebrows, careening nose and belly-deep voice have added character to Broadway plays, films, TV shows and commercials, was auditioning for King’s ABC miniseries “Kingdom Hospital.” At the time McLarty thought it was one of the worst auditions of his life. “I wanted to apologize, but I didn’t,” McLarty recalls. “All I wanted to do was get out of that room.” Before he could bolt, King stood up and said, “Are you Ron McLarty, the novelist?”

With those words, King set in motion a Rube Goldberg-esque tale that would result in McLarty receiving $2 million for a two-book deal -- including “The Memory of Running,” published Dec. 29 -- and between $500,000 and $1 million to write the screenplay.

No wonder every few weeks a handwritten note lands in King’s mailbox, signed, “I love you! Ron.”

By 1995, McLarty -- a self-professed “caveman” who doesn’t know how to use a computer -- had spent two decades writing, pen on legal pad, every day from 5 to 10 a.m. Since high school, he has had insomnia that allows him only four hours of sleep a night but never leaves him fatigued. (When McLarty can’t sleep at all, he meditates on pursuits he loves, like fly-fishing.) His morning exercises had created plenty of work for his typist but not a single clipping or even a rejection slip for the writer.

He did have fans, however, in the audio book world. He had become one of Recorded Books’ most popular readers while acting out what is now 125 books for them, so Claudia Howard, the executive producer, took a look at “The Memory of Running,” written in the late 1980s.

“I pretty much read two books a day, so it takes a lot for me to sit up and take notice,” she says. “About 30 pages into Ron’s book, I realized I was listening to a unique American voice.”

That voice spun the tale of Smithy Ide, a drunken, overweight New England factory worker whose parents are killed in an automobile crash. (The author lost his parents in the same manner.) While grieving their loss, Smithy learns that his troubled sister, who disappeared years earlier, has died in Los Angeles. He sets out -- on his bicycle -- on a cross-country journey to retrieve her remains.

Knowing that no publisher had ever even bothered to send the manuscript back to McLarty in the self-addressed, stamped envelope he always enclosed, Howard persuaded her boss to “publish” the work in audio book format -- read, of course, by McLarty. In the fall of 1995, “The Memory of Running” became the first book to be released solely on tape. McLarty got some press from that, and in the spring of 1996, a library in Middleburg, Va., invited him to a listening group that had enjoyed his 13 1/2 -hour book. Eighty people were in the audience.

“You imagine a guy who’s never gotten any praise, never gotten any work published.... I floated out of there,” McLarty says. “This was going to give me another 10 years’ worth of writing, I thought!”

Although that appearance gave him contact with a literary agent, the year ended without any more hope of a book deal. So did 1997, and 1998, and ...

By the time McLarty had his encounter with King, “The Memory of Running” was, well, a distant memory. But after King’s question, McLarty sprinted to the Recorded Books office to have them send a copy to King. He assumed that King, an avid listener of books on tape, had seen his name in the Recorded Books catalog.

Two months later, while en route from New York to Los Angeles to do some filming, McLarty heard from Recorded Books: King was going to write about “The Memory of Running” in his Entertainment Weekly column. The headline? “The Best Book You Can’t Read.”

McLarty was certain he’d get a paperback out of the review that compared Smithy to heroes such as Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield and Yossarian and urged readers to buy the recorded book so it might actually get published.

“Armed with this, I thought I would get my complimentary 100 paperback copies of it, and I’d be able to give it around and say, ‘Yeah, that’s right! I published it!’ ” McLarty says.

The numbers he was imagining for himself were $10,000, maybe $15,000. But the first offer came in at $300,000, and his agent had to restrain McLarty from jumping at it -- and with good reason. Eventually, seven publishing houses bid on it. McLarty had to get a fax machine for the converted garage he was renting in Sherman Oaks to have the auction. Viking Penguin won the rights.

McLarty estimates that his short stories would create a stack of paper to the ceiling. And he has a message about those 44 plays: “They’re out there, America! You can have them! Just call me! I’ll send them to you, no questions asked! In a brown paper bag!”

Although McLarty would like to see his plays produced and he’s pleased that he has another book, “Art in America,” coming out in a year, he says, “the one thing about my writing is that I really do want to say is that it gave me a lot more than I gave it, right out of the chute. I would never be bitter if I’d never gotten published or been produced.

“Writing has been for the pleasure and the joy of it. When I say I used it to explain the world to myself, I really did. I really, really did.”

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The Memory of Running

Ron McLarty

Viking Books: 358 pp., $24.95

Signing

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena

When: 7 p.m. Monday

Info: (626) 449-5320 or www.vromansbookstore.com