TALK SHOW HOST LARRY KING DIES
King, whose broadcast interviews with world leaders, movie stars and ordinary Joes helped define American conversation for a half-century, was 87.
Larry King, who shot the breeze with presidents and psychics, movie stars and malefactors — anyone with a story to tell or a pitch to make — in a half-century on radio and television, including 25 years as the host of CNN’s globally popular “Larry King Live,” died Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 87.
Ora Media, which King co-founded in 2012, confirmed his death in a statement posted on King’s own Twitter account and said he had died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
The statement did not specify a cause of death, but King recently had been treated for COVID-19. In 2019, he was hospitalized for chest pains and said he had suffered a stroke.
A son of European immigrants who grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and never went to college, King began as a local radio interviewer and sportscaster in Florida in the 1950s and ’60s, rose to prominence with an allnight coast-to-coast radio call-in show starting in 1978. From 1985 to 2010, he anchored CNN’s highestrated, longest-running program, reaching millions across America and around the world.
With a folksy personality, King interviewed an estimated 50,000 people of every imaginable persuasion and claim to fame — every president since Richard Nixon, world leaders, royalty, religious and business figures, crime and disaster victims, pundits, swindlers, “experts” on UFOs and paranormal phenomena, and untold hosts of idiosyncratic and insomniac telephone callers.
Forever star-struck
King might have made a fascinating guest on his own show: the delivery boy who became one of America’s most famous TV and radio personalities, a newspaper columnist, the author of numerous books and a performer in dozens of movies and television shows, mostly as himself.
His personal life was the stuff of supermarket tabloids: married eight times to seven women; a chronic gambler who declared bankruptcy twice; arrested on a fraud charge that derailed his career for years; and a bundle of contradictions who never quite got over his own success but gushed, star-struck, over other celebrities, exclaiming, “Great!” “Terrific!” and “Gee whiz!”
He made no claim to being a journalist, although his show sometimes made news, as when Ross Perot announced his presidential candidacy there in 1992.
And he was not confrontational; he rarely asked anyone, let alone a politician or policymaker, a tough or technical question, preferring gentle prods to get guests to say interesting things about themselves.
He bragged that he almost never prepared for an interview. If his guest was an author promoting a book, he did not read it but asked simply, “What’s it about?” or “Why did you write this?” Nor did he pose as an intellectual. He salted his talk with “ain’t,” and “the” sounded like “da.” To a public skeptical of experts, he seemed refreshingly average.
“There are many broadcasters who’ll recite three minutes of facts before they ask a question,” he said in a memoir, “My Remarkable Journey” (2009, with Cal Fussman). “As if to say: Let me show you how much I know. I think the guest should be the expert.”
Politicians, crackpot inventors, conspiracy theorists and spiritual mediums loved his show, which let them reach huge audiences without facing challenging questions. King called it “infotainment,” and for millions across America and some 130 countries around
the world, it was a delightful, if sometimes bizarre, hybrid of information and entertainment, delivered in prime time for an hour each weeknight.
King lived in Beverly Hills, Calif., and his show was broadcast mainly from CNN’s Los Angeles studios but sometimes from New York or Washington, where he had been a radio interviewer for Mutual. As in his radio days, he took questions and comments from callers.
Friendly interrogator
King had what one writer called a face made for radio. It was gaunt and bony, with a prominent nose, receding hair, thin lips and beady eyes behind oversize blackrimmed glasses. He was raptor thin, a strict dieter since a 1987 heart attack and quintuple bypass surgery. In his trademark shirt sleeves and suspenders, he slouched in a chair on his elbows and peered over a desk at his guests. His voice, a raspy rumble, delivered bursts of irreverence and humor, but his questions were usually brief and friendly.
The topics were anything: politics, crime, religion, sports, business, news events such as O.J. Simpson’s long-running 1995 murder trial, with its endless players and analysts. But he rarely plumbed subjects deeply, and he was accused by critics of pandering to the sensational, like the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson, by reminiscing with their confidants.
Mainstream journalists scoffed at his lean treatments and nice-guy techniques. But his audiences and sponsors were faithful.
After decades of success, however, “Larry King Live” began losing its high ratings and A-list bookings as many viewers turned to partisan voices such as MSNBC’s liberal Rachel Maddow and Fox’s conservative Sean Hannity. By 2010, King’s audience had fallen to a fraction of what it had been.
He stepped down in December, and CNN replaced him with “Piers Morgan Tonight.”
In 2012, King migrated to the internet with a show streamed by Ora.tv on Ora TV, Hulu and RT (a U.S. version of Russia Today). The show was called “Larry King Now.” But it was hardly the same.