In living rooms across America, Larry King was as comfortable a guest as a favorite uncle passing by to chat with his family.
Never too aggressive, never going directly to the jugular, King – with his trademark suspenders, tortoiseshell glasses and rolled up sleeves – talked to presidents, authors, actors, mediums, villains, heroes or anyone with a product to push , a political race to win or an image that needs reform.
In a career spanning half a century, King has become one of the most famous talk show hosts and opinion leaders in the world with his playful and rarely confrontational style of play, leading his guests back and forth wherever his curiosity takes him. .
Rarely out of the spotlight for a long time, the 87-year-old king died on Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said Ora Media, the company behind the “Larry King Now” and “Politicking with Larry King” programs, in a statement. King was hospitalized with COVID-19 earlier this month.
King ended his longtime program on CNN in 2010, but returned to television several times as a moderator and, occasionally, a pitchman. During his 25 years presiding over “Larry King Live”, the first international live talk show on TV, King has been dubbed in the press in various ways as the “yak master of America”, the “pope of conversation” and the “banana of conversation” “-show hosts. “
With his dark hair combed back, the jacketless king sat at his desk with his old-fashioned microphone and – leaning forward, hunched shoulders – did what he thought he did best: “attract people in an interview ”.
“Tonight!” it exploded in its familiar baritone at the beginning of each show, beginning a brief introduction of the night’s guest – or guests – sitting in front of him or in another satellite studio.
For King, it could mean Frank Sinatra or Henry Kissinger, Don Rickles or the Dalai Lama.
Over the decades, a seemingly endless succession of celebrities, politicians and several journalists and experts have duly answered King’s questions.
It was a simple formula: King and his guest would talk at length, so King would take calls from viewers.
“Bethesda, Maryland, hello!” he would say after pressing one of the flashing lines on his desk phone.
Launched on CNN in June 1985 with then-New York governor Mario Cuomo as the first guest, “Larry King Live” became CNN’s most watched show, and King became a household name.
But it was the 1992 presidential campaign that took King and his show to a new level.
It all started with a February appearance by Ross Perot, in which the Texas billionaire, after prodding King, said that if “ordinary people” put his name on all 50 state ballots, he would agree to run as an independent candidate for president.
Perot’s appearance that generated headlines made King a major force in the political world and made “Larry King Live” a must-see for politicians.
That year, more than a dozen presidential candidates faced King’s cameras.
For King, the 1992 presidential campaign, in the words of then-Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg, “bathed him in gold as an American institution.”
In 1993, King moderated a 90-minute debate on the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement between Vice President Al Gore and Perot that, according to CNN, had the largest audience in its history at the time, with over 16 , 3 million viewers.
Washingtonian magazine considered King to be the most influential media personality in the country.
But along with its success came criticism – for flattering celebrities, for asking “softball questions” and, when interviewing politicians, for not asking difficult follow-up questions, letting them escape with elusive responses.
“King couldn’t find his way to the jugular, even with a compass, racing dogs and body map,” wrote Rosenberg, one of King’s most severe critics, in 1995.
For his part, King readily acknowledged that he was not a journalist. As a talk show host, he preferred the term “infotainer” – offering a hybrid of information and entertainment.
Asked to explain his success as a talk show host, King told Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1996 that it was “because I am sincere. I’m very curious. I care what people think. I listen to the answers and leave my ego at the door. I don’t use the word ‘I’, which is irrelevant in an interview. There is nowhere else to show off. “
As Cuomo once said about King: “He has the ability to ask the questions you would ask in your living room.”
And in taking this approach, King’s questions often generated revealing, sometimes surprising, answers.
He once asked the violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz: “Jascha, why the violin?”
Heifetz replied, “My mom made me.”
And there was this exchange during King’s 1992 interview in Washington with former President Nixon:
Rei: “Mr. President, finally, is it difficult to return to this city? Is it difficult to drive through Watergate? “
Nixon: “Well, I’ve never been to Watergate, so it’s not difficult for me.”
King: “You never came in? Never been to the restaurant? “
Nixon: “No, no, no. Other people were there, unfortunately. “
When Mikhail Gorbachev was asked why he appeared on King’s show, the former Soviet leader replied through an interpreter: “First, because it is Larry, and second, because it is live. I know that America watches you. “
King’s announcement in June 2010 that he would leave his program at the end of the year came after a sharp drop in audience for his program and his reconciliation with his seventh wife, Shawn, after they both filed for divorce. They again filed for divorce in 2019.
In announcing his pending departure, King, 76, told viewers that it would give him more time to stay with his wife and watch his children’s Little League games, but that he would return to CNN to present a series of specials.
“I am incredibly proud to have recently made the Guinness Book of World Records for having the oldest show with the same host at the same time,” he told viewers.
King, who looked just like a “normal guy” from Brooklyn, who used to say “go” and “isn’t”, was an unlikely TV star.
In addition to presenting “The Larry King Show”, an evening radio talk show on the 1978-94 Mutual Broadcasting System, King was the author of several best-selling books, wrote a long weekly column of random thoughts for USA Today, made over 20 cameos in films and, in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, launched an hour-long pop culture podcast.
No one was more surprised by his success than King.
“For all of this to happen to a Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” he told the London Guardian in 1994, “it is an extremely impressive thing.”
King was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn, NY, on November 19, 1933. His parents owned a bar and steakhouse there, but King’s father sold the business after the outbreak of World War II and went to work in a factory in defense in New Jersey to assist in the war effort.
In 1944, when King was 10, his father died of a heart attack and King’s mother went to work in social security before taking a job as a dressmaker in the Manhattan clothing district to support King and his younger brother, Martin.
His father’s death had a profound effect on King. He began to neglect his studies and in high school he was labeled a troublemaker. His grades remained poor in high school, and he barely managed to graduate in 1951.
A Washington Post reporter once asked King, “Who is Larry King?”
“All the things Larry Zeiger never was,” he replied.
Although King dreamed of becoming a radio announcer while growing up, he spent the first few years after high school working in a variety of casual jobs. But in 1957, after hearing that Miami was a good place to go on the radio, King, 23, went to Florida.
The only job he could find was sweeping the floor of a small AM, WAHR station, with the promise of a job in the air when someone resigned. When the morning disc jockey left two weeks later, the general manager asked King to intervene. Half an hour before it aired, King recalled, the general manager told him that Zeiger looked “very German, very Jewish” and suggested the name Rei.
In 1958, King moved to a larger radio station, WKAT, and the increasingly popular disc jockey started playing a four-hour radio show at Pumpernik’s, a popular Miami restaurant, where he quickly moved from interviewing restaurant customers to talk to celebrities like Lenny Bruce, Bobby Darin and Ella Fitzgerald.
In 1960, King also started running a talk show on Sunday evening for a local TV station. Two years later, he was hired by the Miami radio station WIOD and started doing a talk show on the boathouse used in the private surfing series “Surfside 6”.
His local popularity increased further when he became the color commentator for the Miami Dolphins’ football broadcasts on WIOD and began writing columns in local newspapers.
King started to live well in the 1960s. But despite earning an impressive nearly $ 70,000 a year in 1966, he found himself deeply in debt, thanks to overspending and horse racing bets.
“In my most selfish moments, which were many, I felt like I owned Miami – and I lived like I did,” he wrote in Larry King of Larry King, his 1982 autobiography. “I felt that everything I Larry King wanted, Larry King should have. And I wanted the best. “
Years of overspending, coupled with his heavy gambling debts, made King start lying to his friends so he could borrow money from them.
In 1971, King was arrested after financier Louis Wolfson, with whom King had business, filed charges of major theft against him. A judge dismissed the charges because the statute of limitations had expired, but the scandal shook King’s career.
He lost his local radio show, his secondary role as a Miami Dolphins colored man, his television show and his newspaper column.
Unable to get a stable, yet deeply indebted job, King spent the next few years working as a freelance writer and announcer and doing public relations for a horse racing track in Shreveport, Louisiana.
But the turnaround for King began in 1975, when WIOD radio, under a new general manager, decided to give him another chance.
In 1978, the same year he declared bankruptcy, King’s career took a giant leap when the Mutual Broadcasting System offered him the opportunity to host a national nightly radio program.
“The Larry King Show”, originally broadcast from Miami before moving to Mutual Studios in Arlington, Virginia, premiered in 1978 on 28 stations. In the early 1980s, the program was being broadcast by about 250 Mutual affiliates in all 50 states and won a Peabody award.
In 1983, King attempted a national TV talk show – a 90-minute syndicated program on 118 stations. Failed. But then, in 1985, CNN and “Larry King Live” came.
Once ranked as the leader in cable TV news, King’s program was third on its schedule in 2010 – from a reported peak of 1.64 million in 1998 to an average of 700,000.
But when he ended his 25-year “Larry King Live” season on December 16, 2010, about 2.24 million people watched the 77-year-old talk show host, who wore red suspenders and a red and – tie of white polka dots for the occasion.
“It is not very common in my life that I am speechless,” he said at the end of the show. “I never thought it would last that long or reach that point.”
Survivors include three children, nine grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He was passed away by a son and daughter who died a week apart last year.
McLellan is a former Times writer.