Of U.S. TV interviews, dead at 87

he seems to be one of the happy ones.”

MIAMI RADIO BEGINNINGS

King was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger on Nov. 19, 1933, in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. He said at age 5 he knew he wanted to be on the radio and in 1957 he moved to Miami, which he had been told had a burgeoning radio market.

King started doing odd jobs at a Miami station and one day was asked to fill in for an announcer who walked off the job. Before he went on the air, the station manager urged him to change his last name to King because it was easier to pronounce and less ethnic than Zeiger.

King became a fixture in Miami but as his reputation grew, so did his troubles.

In 1971 he was arrested on a grand larceny complaint filed by Miami financier Lou Wolfson, who had been in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wolfson allegedly paid King in hopes of gaining influence on the administration of then-U.S. President Richard Nixon.

The charge against King was dropped because the statute of limitations had expired, but the scandal knocked him off the air for some three years. He did public relations work for a Louisiana racetrack until station WIOD in Miami hired him.

King rebounded and the Mutual radio network gave him a nationwide audience in 1978. He relocated to Washington, a move that led to the CNN job.

He suffered a heart attack and had bypass surgery in 1987, prompting him to start the Larry King Cardiac Foundation a year later. He had surgery in 2007 to clear a blocked artery, was treated for prostate cancer in 2010 and said in 2017 that he had been treated for lung cancer.

King was married eight times to seven women, most recently to singer Shawn Southwick, who was 26 years younger. He had five children, two of whom died in 2020.