Larry King’s long run made the case that there’s no such thing as a dumb question
LARRY King’s vintage microphone, the RCA Type 77-D that referenced his rise as a radio man, was a prop that worked as a powerful symbol of both past and present in a relentlessly evolving media age. The microphone was a security blanket for everyone involved: for King, for his 60,000 interview subjects, and for the viewers of his nightly CNN talk show, once touted by the network to number a billion or so worldwide.
The microphone indicated that King – who died Saturday at age 87, having lived most of his life as a persona more than a person, and perhaps outliving the era that made him – wanted the whole world to hear what his guests had to say. The microphone didn’t stand for posterity or nostalgia so much as a visual representation of the major media moment, the heat of notoriety in its full and o en fleeting flash. The microphone acknowledged the need to ask and answer the great mysteries of life – the scandals, the personal struggles, the rises and the falls, the regrets in real time.
Mostly, the microphone stood for an increasingly rare virtue: listening. (Listening, and its nearly extinct counterpart: a genuine, unflagging curiosity about someone other than yourself.)
The microphone, like the man hunched over it, imparted a corny notion of importance, an a empt to lend authority over the still-nascent cable feed of the 1980s. The microphone made all “Larry King Live” interviews seem like a great get, a worthy exclusive, a hot insight, something you’d be er watch if you want to keep up. King’s life could be wri en as one man’s determination to keep up, for an audience that always knew he was pre y much winging it - and loved him for it.
Some of King’s gets were be er than others, of course (not every night could have Marlon Brando; not every night could feature Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and Jordan’s King Hussein historically united on the same show in 1995. Not every night could be Vladimir Putin or Ronald Reagan, Lady Gaga or Muhammad Ali, Miss Piggy and Kermit, Paul and Ringo), but his show was invariably, relentlessly topical. It was broad in a time of wondrous broadness, before the disrupting rise of the niche market.
To be si ing at the table on CNN’s “Larry King Live” – just you, him and the big old mic
- was proof that one had truly arrived. The suspenders. The odd questions. Why, King wanted to know. His favourite question, because that’s all any of us ever really want to know: Why?
During his 25-year reign on CNN, especially in the years roughly bookended by the 1994 murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and the 2009 death of Michael Jackson, “Larry King Live” was a necessary and vital stop on the way to one’s public judgment. More than one celebrity used his show as a form of recompense, coming to him dirty and damaged with the hope of leaving clean. Others used it as an opportunity to show their more vulnerable side, in a calculated way. Most used him as a means to promote their latest film or album, to gin up some buzz.
No ma er what brought them to “Larry King Live,” it was understood that the questions would be coming from a place of genuine wonder, rather than showy intellect.
King was a singular personality, a mutation of the common man, a New Yorker unafraid to just ask the question. The effect was a successful mixing of the da with the de . When news of his death spread Saturday, much of the immediate tribute came in the form of defense of King’s mastery of the “dumb question,” and rightly so.