San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
LARRY KING
1933-2021
Longtime media personality, known for his interviews and suspenders, had been treated for COVID-19.
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 cofounded in 2012, confirmed the death in a statement posted on King’s Twitter account and said he had died at CedarsSinai Medical Center.
The statement did not specify a cause of death, but King had recently been treated for COVID19. In 2019, he was hospitalized for chest pains and said he had also 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 coasttocoast radio callin show starting in 1978, and from 1985 to 2010 anchored CNN’s highestrated, longestrunning program, reaching millions across America and around the world.
With the folksy personality of a Bensonhurst schmoozer, 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. 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, starstruck, 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: just a curious guy asking questions impulsively.
Larry King was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn on Nov. 19, 1933, the second son of Edward and Jennie Gitlitz Zeiger, immigrants from Austria and Belarus. Their first son, Irwin, had died earlier. A younger brother, Martin, became a lawyer.
At 23, he went to Miami and was hired by a small station, WAHR, to sweep floors and run errands. When a disc jockey suddenly quit, he was asked to take over the 9 a.m.tonoon broadcast.
Minutes before airtime on May 1, 1957, at the station manager’s suggestion, the name Lawrence Zeiger was abandoned, and Larry King (the surname taken from a liquor distributor’s advertisement) sat before a live microphone for the first time.
In the early 1960s he did latenight radio interviews on WIOD, was a color commentator for Miami Dolphins football games, and dabbled in television with a talk show on WLBW and a weekend show on WTVJ. He later wrote columns for the Miami Herald and the Miami News. Ella Fitzgerald and Ed Sullivan befriended him. Jackie Gleason became his mentor and got him an interview with Frank Sinatra.
In 1978, King was hired by Mutual as host of a weeknight coasttocoast radio talkathon for night owls and early risers. “The Larry King Show,” featuring interviews and listener calls, drew a devoted national following and ran until 1994.
Ted Turner put him on CNN in 1985, and his first guest was Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York. “Larry King Live,” became television’s highestrated talk show and CNN’s biggest success.
Survivors include three children, nine grandchildren and four greatgrandchildren. He was predeceased by a son and a daughter who died within a week of each other last year.