Iconic TV personality who shaped American discourse for decades
LOS ANGELES: 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 on Saturday. He was 87.
King died at Cedars-sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Ora Media, the studio and network he co-founded, tweeted. No cause of death was given, but CNN reported on January 2 that King had been hospitalised for more than a week with Covid-19.
A longtime nationally syndicated
radio host, from 1985 through 2010, he was a nightly fixture on CNN, where he won many honours, 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.
And he was known for getting guests who were notoriously elusive such as Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando.
In June 2010, King abruptly announced he was retiring from his show.
King was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in 1933, a son of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. After his father’s death, he faced a troubled, sometimes destitute youth.
On reaching adulthood, he landed in Miami in 1957 and found a job sweeping floors at a tiny AM station. When a deejay abruptly quit, King was put on the air — and was handed his new surname by the station manager, who thought Zeiger was “too Jewish”.
By the early 1960s, King had gone to a larger Miami station, scored a newspaper column and become a local celebrity himself.
At the same time, he fell victim to living large.
He accumulated debts and 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 when King skimmed some of the cash to pay his overdue taxes, his partner sued him in 1971. The charges were dropped, but King’s reputation appeared ruined.
But by 1975 the scandal had largely blown over and a Miami station gave him another chance. King was signed in 1978 to host radio’s first nationwide call-in show, “The Larry King Show” that made him a national phenomenon. A few years later, “Larry King Live” debuted on June 1, 1985, and became CNN’S highest-rated programme.
King continued to work into his late 80s. “Work,” King once said. “It’s the easiest thing I do.”