Larry King’s long run made the case there’s no such thing as a dumb question IN THE SPOTLIGHT
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 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 made all “Larry King Live” interviews seem like a great get, a worthy exclusive, a hot insight, something you’d better watch if you want to keep up.
To be sitting 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 favorite 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 matter 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 daft with the deft. 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.
Most reporters eventually figure out that the dumb question is a powerful tool of inquiry. Kind people know it, too, and still practice the art. In its disarming way, the dumb question produces answers that the subject isn’t tired of answering. It turns the interview into a conversation. It invites rather than antagonizes. What’s worse than an interviewer who tries to cram everything they already
know into the question? (You’re all too nice to name a prime example, but I’m not: Chuck Todd.)
King would often boast about not boning up on the details of a subject’s life and work before an interview. He trudged confidently into the emotional and factual blind. It could seem rude and even socially inept, but the viewer identified with it. At a time when we are so busy whatabouting one another with instant fact-checks, maybe we’d get along better if we stopped to ask a dumb question or two.
He was afraid of dying. Or not afraid so much as desperately curious. Being interviewed by Mike Wallace in
1992, King seemed fixated on the idea that we are but mere “blips” in the universe. Where do we go when we die? What’s next?
He asked Tammy Faye if she believed in heaven. “You know I do,” she replied, “And I genuinely want to see you in heaven someday.”
King was never sure, often telling people he relied on the maybe/maybe-not eschatological stance of his Jewish background. Still, it’s fitting to imagine him loosed in that great cocktail party in the sky, reacquainted with so many of the boldface names he’d interviewed in this realm. Asking dumb question after dumb question, with all eternity to get the answers.