American talk show host who interviewed 50,000 people
Larry King, who has died aged 87, was a legend of US broadcasting, and the king of the talk show. Over five decades, he interviewed some 50,000 people, from presidents and movie stars to death row inmates. Sporting his trademark braces over a shirt with rolled-up sleeves, he presented himself as an old-school news man, said The Times – but he described himself as an “infotainer”. He rarely prepared for his interviews, and he tended to lob “soft balls”. He wanted, he said, to ask the kind of questions a curious member of the public would ask; and he believed that not having a prepared list made him better able to listen to his guests’ answers. It led to the odd gaffe: in 2007, he asked Jerry Seinfeld if his hit 1990s sitcom had been cancelled when, in fact, NBC had famously begged the comedian to make another series. But it facilitated a breezy, non-confrontational style which could be remarkably effective. “I don’t pretend to know it all,” he said in 1995. “Not, ‘What about Geneva or Cuba?’ I ask, ‘Mr President, what don’t you like about this job?’ Or ‘What’s the biggest mistake you made?’ That’s fascinating.”
King was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933. His father died when he was nine, at which point his mother went on welfare, before finding work as a seamstress. A troubled boy, Larry only just graduated high school. Asked once,
“Who is Larry King?” – he replied: “All the things that Larry Zeiger never was.” He’d always wanted to work in radio, though, and when he heard there were opportunities in Florida, he moved to Miami – and got a job sweeping floors at a local station, with a promise he might get a chance on air. One morning, the DJ didn’t turn up, and the manager duly gave him the slot. Half an hour before going on air, he renamed himself: Zeiger, he’d been told, sounded “too ethnic”. In 1958, he moved to a bigger station, where he broadcast from a popular Miami restaurant – and started interviewing its customers, some of whom were famous. But King was a gambler, said the LA Times, and in the 1960s he lived too large – and became involved in a financial scandal that cost him his career. After several years in the doldrums, he bounced back in 1978, with The Larry
King Show, which proved a massive hit. Then, in 1985, the cable channel CNN offered him his own TV show, Larry King Live.
It ran for 25 years. “Every day of my life is a learning experience, and I’m fascinated by everything,” he said in 2014. “My curiosity in all those years has never dimmed since I was a little kid.” King married his childhood sweetheart aged 19. It proved short-lived, as did most of his next seven marriages. He was married longest to his last wife, Shawn Southwick, from whom he separated in 2019. He had five children, two of whom predeceased him.