‘Heartbroken’ family mourns Larry King
Larry King, the Brooklyn-bred man who became cable TV’s most wellknown talk show host, died Saturday. He was 87.
King had been hospitalized with COVID-19. He died Saturday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Ora Media, a production company King founded with Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim.
“For 63 years and across the platforms of radio, television and digital media, Larry’s many thousands of interviews, awards, and global acclaim stand as a testament to his unique and lasting talent as a broadcaster,” the company said.
King’s three surviving children mourned him in a family statement shared Saturday night on his Twitter account.
“We are heartbroken over our father’s death,” the statement read, signed by Larry King Jr., Chance King and Cannon King. “The world knew Larry King as a great broadcaster and interviewer, but to us he was ‘dad.’
“He was the man who lovingly obsessed over our daily schedules and our well-being, and who took such immense pride in our accomplishments – large, small, or imagined. And through it all, we knew without a doubt in the world that he loved us more than life itself. He was an amazing father, and he was fiercely loyal to those lucky enough to call him a friend. We will miss him every single day of our lives.”
Over the course of more than five decades in radio and TV broadcasting, half of it spent hosting CNN’s “Larry King Live,” King mingled with the famous and infamous and average people.
By his count, he interviewed more than 60,000 subjects, and when his run on cable ended in 2010, he segued to the internet with “Larry King Now,” a daily talk show on Hulu from Ora TV, and was active on Twitter.
King was not immune to other illness: 30 years after undergoing quintuple heart bypass surgery, a checkup in 2017 revealed a cancerous lung tumor that was removed with surgery.
He revealed he had a stroke in March 2019, was in a coma for weeks and considered suicide. “I thought I was going to bite the bullet; I didn’t want to live this way,” he told an interviewer at Los Angeles station KTLA. In April that year, he had an angioplasty. Again, he recovered and kept working.
Near the end of 2020, King landed in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with
COVID-19. Hospital protocols prevented his family from visiting him. He was moved to the intensive care unit on New Year’s Eve and was receiving oxygen but moved out of the ICU in early January and was breathing on his own, said David Theall, a spokesman for Ora Media.
The author of several books, King started his career in Miami radio before moving on to TV and newspapers. His nightly CNN program, which premiered in 1985, remained the network’s top-rated show throughout his tenure, which ended in 2010.
Though some journalists tended to dismiss him as a celebrity interviewer who didn’t ask tough questions, the truth was more complex.
“King was one of the few people in broadcast history who basically created his own phenomenon,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute. “He didn’t need a network. The network needed him.”
He said, “He coaxed, rather than challenged, and the result, while not always groundbreaking, was always interesting and smart. His dirty little secret was he was a much more intelligent guy than he let on, and a much better listener than most people in television. But he really believed that his guest was the star, and his job was to help reveal that.”
King’s interview subjects included Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and thousands of others, including Paul McCartney, Bette Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Madonna and Malcolm X.
The son of an Austrian immigrant, he was born Lawrence Harvey Zieger. King talked about surviving as an “acne-faced,” overweight child entertaining classmates by imitating famous radio personalities.
King’s break came on a radio station in Miami. A Miami Herald column followed, in which King talked up stars such as Frank Sinatra. His weekly column ran in USA TODAY from 1982 until 2001.
“To be a good interviewer is one part asking good questions and a large part just listening,” radio host Michael Smerconish said Saturday on CNN. “He knew how to handle that.”