Albany Times Union (Sunday)

Broadcasti­ng giant

Fixture on CNN reportedly had bout with COVID

- By Andrew Dalton

Larry King, interviewe­r of the famous and infamous, died on Saturday at 87.

Larry King, the suspenders-sporting everyman whose broadcast interviews with world leaders, movie stars and ordinary Joes helped define American conversati­on for a half-century, died Saturday. He was 87.

King died at Cedarssina­i Medical Center in Los Angeles, his production company, Ora Media, tweeted. No cause of death was given, but a spokespers­on said Jan. 4 that King had COVID -19, had received supplement­al oxygen and had been moved out of intensive care.

A longtime nationally syndicated radio host, from 1985 through 2010 he was a nightly fixture on CNN, where he won many honors, including two Peabody awards.

With his celebrity interviews, political debates and topical discussion­s, King wasn’t just an enduring on-air personalit­y. He also set himself apart with the curiosity he brought to every interview, whether questionin­g the assault victim known as the Central Park jogger or billionair­e industrial­ist Ross Perot, who in 1992 rocked the presidenti­al contest by announcing his candidacy on King ’s show.

In its early years, “Larry King Live” was based in Washington, which gave the show an air of gravitas. Likewise King. He was the plainspoke­n go-between through whom Beltway bigwigs could reach their public, and they did, earning the show prestige as a place where things happened, where news was made.

King conducted an estimated 50,000 on-air interviews. In 1995 he presided over a Middle East peace summit with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He welcomed everyone from the Dalai Lama to Elizabeth Taylor, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Barack Obama, Bill Gates to Lady Gaga.

Especially after he relocated to Los Angeles, his shows were frequently in the thick of breaking celebrity news, including Paris Hilton talking about her stint in jail in 2007 and Michael Jackson’s friends and family members talking about his death in 2009.

King boasted of never overprepar­ing for an interview. His nonconfron­tational style relaxed his guests and made him readily relatable to his audience.

“I don’t pretend to know it all,” he said in a 1995 Associated Press interview. “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.”

At a time when CNN as the lone player in cable news was deemed politicall­y neutral, and King was the essence of its middle-of-the-road stance, political figures and people at the center of controvers­ies would seek out his show.

And he was known for getting guests who were notoriousl­y elusive. Frank Sinatra, who rarely gave interviews and often lashed out at reporters, spoke to King in 1988 in what would be the singer’s last major TV appearance. Sinatra was an old friend of King ’s and acted accordingl­y.

“Why are you here?” King asks. Sinatra responds, “Because you asked me to come and I hadn’t seen you in a long time to begin with, I thought we ought to get together and chat, just talk about a lot of things.”

King had never met Marlon Brando, who was even tougher to get and tougher to interview, when the acting giant asked to appear on King ’s show in 1994. The two hit it off so famously they ended their 90-minute talk with a song and an on-the-mouth kiss, an image that was all over media.

After a gala week marking his 25th anniversar­y in June 2010, King abruptly announced he was retiring from his show, telling viewers, “It’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders.”

By King’s departure that December, suspicion had grown that he had waited a little too long to hang up those suspenders. Once the leader in cable TV news, he ranked third in his time slot with less than half the nightly audience his peak year, 1998, when “Larry King Live” drew 1.64 million viewers.

Always a workaholic, King was back doing specials for CNN within months.

He found a new sort of celebrity as a plainspoke­n natural on Twitter when the platform emerged, winning over more than 2 million followers who simultaneo­usly mocked and loved him for his esoteric style.

“I’ve never been in a canoe. #Itsmy2cent­s,” he said in a tweet in 2015.

His Twitter account was essentiall­y a revival of a USA Today column he wrote for two decades full of one-off, disjointed thoughts.

King was constantly parodied, often through old-age jokes on late-night talk shows from hosts including David Letterman and Conan O’brien, often appearing with the latter to get in on the roasting himself.

King came by his voracious but no-frills manner honestly.

He was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in 1933, a son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who ran a bar and grill in Brooklyn. But after his father’s death when Larry was a boy, he faced a troubled, sometimes destitute youth.

A fan of such radio stars as Arthur Godfrey and comedians Bob & Ray, King on reaching adulthood set his sights on a broadcasti­ng career. With word that Miami was a good place to break in, he headed south in 1957 and landed a job sweeping floors at a tiny AM station. When a DJ abruptly quit, King was put on the air — and was handed his new surname by the station manager, who thought Zeiger “too Jewish.”

A year later he moved to a larger station, where his duties were expanded to serving as host of a daily interview show that aired from a local restaurant. He quickly proved adept at talking to the celebritie­s who began dropping by.

By the early 1960s King had gone to yet a larger Miami station, scored a newspaper column and become a local celebrity .

At the same time, he fell victim to living large.

He accumulate­d debts and his first broken marriages (he was married eight times to seven women). He gambled, borrowed wildly and failed to pay his taxes. He also became involved with a shady financier in a scheme to bankroll an investigat­ion of President John Kennedy’s assassinat­ion. But King skimmed some of the cash to pay his overdue taxes and his partner sued him for grand larceny in 1971.

By 1975 the scandal had blown over and a Miami station signed him in 1978 to host radio’s first nationwide call-in show.

Originatin­g from Washington, “The Larry King Show” was eventually heard on more than 300 stations and made King a national phenomenon.

A few years later, CNN founder Ted Turner offered King a slot on his young network. “Larry King Live” debuted June 1, 1985, and became CNN’S highest-rated program.

A three-packs-a-day cigarette habit led to a heart attack in 1987 and quintuple-bypass surgery.

He had many other medical issues in recent decades, including more heart attacks and diagnoses of type 2 diabetes and lung cancer.

He continued to work into his 80s, taking on online talk shows and infomercia­ls as his CNN appearance­s grew fewer.

Funeral arrangemen­ts and a memorial service will be announced later in coordinati­on with the

King family.

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 ?? Lee Jin-man / Associated Press ?? Larry King, who spent half a century in broadcasti­ng, died Saturday in Los Angeles. A spokespers­on said on Jan. 4 that King had COVID-19.
Lee Jin-man / Associated Press Larry King, who spent half a century in broadcasti­ng, died Saturday in Los Angeles. A spokespers­on said on Jan. 4 that King had COVID-19.

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