Legendary talk show host Larry King dies

The statement did not give a cause of death.

He struggled with various health problems.

He battled a number of health problems over the years, suffering from several heart attacks. In 1987, he underwent a quintuple of bypass surgery, inspiring him to establish the Larry King Heart Foundation to provide assistance to the uninsured.

Most recently, King revealed in 2017 that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer and successfully underwent surgery to treat it. He also underwent a procedure in 2019 to treat angina.

He interviewed every president, from Ford to Obama

In an era full of star journalists, King was a giant, among the most prominent interrogators on television and host to world-class presidents, movie stars, and athletes.

With an affable, laid-back demeanor that set him apart from more intense television interviewers, King perfected an informal approach to the question-and-answer format, always leaning forward and listening intently to his guests, rarely interrupting.

“I’ve never learned anything,” King liked to say, “as he spoke.”

CNN President Jeff Zucker on Saturday acknowledged King’s role in raising the profile of the network around the world.

“We regret the passing of our colleague Larry King,” he said in a statement.

“The energetic young man from Brooklyn had a storied career spanning radio and television. His curiosity about the world fueled his award-winning career in broadcasting, but it was his generosity of spirit that drew the world to him. 25 years spent with CNN, where his interviews with newsmakers really put the network on the international stage. From our CNN family to Larry’s, we send our thoughts and prayers, and a promise to continue your curiosity for the world in our work. “

During that quarter-century, King hosted “Larry King Live” on CNN, a span that was highlighted by more than 30,000 interviews, including every sitting president from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama, and thousands of phone calls from viewers. .

Wendy Walker, its longtime executive producer on the show, said King treated all of the subjects in his interviews the same, from heads of state to ordinary Americans.

“The only thing I loved was being in front of that camera,” he said. “He was a very interesting man, but one hour a day, when the lights came on, he was just perfect. He treated all the guests the same. It didn’t matter if he was a president or someone from the street.

King was known for not spending time preparing for interviews, preferring instead to let his natural curiosity guide the conversations, Walker said.

“That was probably the hardest part of our job: trying to prepare him because he never wanted to be prepared,” he recalled. “He read all day and watched the news so he was really informed, but he really just wanted to hear his guests speak and then ask their questions.

The show made King one of the faces of the network, and one of the most famous television journalists in the country. His USA Today column, which ran for nearly 20 years until 2001, showcased King’s distinctive style in print, inviting readers to follow a trail of non-sequiturs that served as a window into his mind.

“The most underutilized player in the NFL this year was Washington’s Desmond Howard … Despite what I think of Lawrence Walsh, we will always have a need for a special prosecutor because a government cannot investigate itself,” King wrote in a column from 1992.

Those reflections, combined with his unmistakable appearance – oversized glasses, ever-present suspenders – made King cartoon-ready. In the 1990s, he was portrayed by Norm MacDonald on “Saturday Night Live,” who channeled the USA Today column with an impersonation.

Joking aside, King’s influence is evident today in the generation of podcasters who have imitated, whether deliberately or not, his conversational approach to interviews.

“A good interview: you know more than you know before you start. You should come out with maybe some of your opinions changed,” King told the Los Angeles Times in 2018. “You certainly should be entertained, an interviewer is also an artist.”

He began his media career as a disc jockey.

Born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger on November 19, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, King was raised by two Jewish immigrants. His mother, Jennie (Gitlitz) Zeiger, was from Lithuania, while his father, Edward Zeiger, was from Ukraine. Edward died of a heart attack when King was 10 years old, a memory King said he mostly “blocked.”

Left to raise King and her younger brother Marty alone, Jennie Zeiger was forced to receive welfare to support her children. The death had a profound effect on King and his mother.

“Before his death, I had been a good student, but then I stopped being interested,” King told The Guardian in a 2015 interview. “It was a huge blow to me. But eventually I channeled that anger because I wanted him and my mother to be proud. “

King said his father had an enormous influence on him, instilling in his son a sense of humor and a love of sports. And no sport drew more affection from King than baseball.

He grew up as a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and continued to support the team after their move to Los Angeles. He was a fixture in the team’s home games at Dodger Stadium, often seen in the high-priced seats behind the plate. In 2004, King wrote a book appropriately titled “Why I Love Baseball.”

“He was a voracious Dodgers fan, a baseball fan,” said Charley Steiner, a longtime friend and sportscaster of the Dodgers. “And we were complaining and fighting about what the Dodgers were doing. He was terribly frustrated year after year when the Dodgers won the division, they fell short in the World Series. But this year he got to see the Dodgers win the World Series. It was. made you enormously happy. “

King’s media career began in earnest in 1957, when he accepted a job as a disc jockey at WAHR-AM in Miami. It was then that he made the decision to remove his last name.

“You can’t use Larry Zeiger,” he recalled his boss saying at the station. “It’s too ethnic. People won’t be able to spell it or remember it. You need a better name.”

“There was no time to think whether this was good or bad or what my mother would say. It would air in five minutes,” King wrote in his 2009 autobiography.

“The Miami Herald was spread out on his desk. Face up was a full page advertisement for King’s Wholesale Liquors. The general manager looked down and said, ‘King! How about Larry King?'”

His CNN show premiered in 1985.

It was around this time that King entered what would become a series of failed marriages. His union with Frada Miller was annulled and the dates of his second marriage to Annette Kaye are not publicly available.

From 1961 to 1963, King was married to Alene Akins, whom he remarried from 1967 to 1971; Before remarrying, King married Mickey Sutphin in 1964 before divorcing in 1966.

King remained in Miami for years, finally being hired as a columnist for the Miami Herald in 1965. In 1971, he was arrested in Miami on grand theft charges, which led to his suspension from the station and the newspaper where he worked. Although the charges were dropped the following year, King was not rehired, prompting him to leave Florida and head to Louisiana, where he worked as a freelance journalist.

In 1978, King returned to Miami and to WIOD, the station where he was employed at the time of his arrest. The same year, “The Larry King Show” was launched as a syndicated late-night radio show. It originally aired in 28 cities; In five years, it had spread to 118 cities, serving as a springboard to fame. The show won a Peabody Award in 1982.

In 1985, “Larry King Live” premiered on CNN, beginning a long and storied run that included a series of high-profile interviews. Throughout its more than two decades on the air, the show was routinely CNN’s most-watched show, and King was arguably the network’s biggest star.

King left CNN in 2011, a move he hoped would amount to retirement. But he kept working until his death, hosting “Larry King Now,” a show that aired on Ora TV, Hulu, and RT America. Apparently King never wanted the interview to end.

“I love what I do,” he said, “I love asking questions, I love doing interviews.”