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LOS ANGELES (AP) – Larry King, the common man in suspenders whose broadcast interviews with world leaders, movie stars and ordinary people helped define the American conversation for half a century, died Saturday. He was 87 years old.
King died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Ora Media, the studio and the network he co-founded, tweeted. No cause of death was given, but CNN had previously reported that he was hospitalized with COVID-19.
A longtime national syndicated radio host, from 1985 to 2010 he was a late-night fixture on CNN, where he won many honors, including two Peabody Awards.
With his celebrity interviews, political debates, and current affairs discussions, King wasn’t just an enduring on-air personality. He also stood out with the curiosity of being brought to each interview, whether to question the assault victim known as the “Central Park Jogger” or the billionaire industrialist Ross Perot, who in 1992 shook up the presidential race by announcing his candidacy in King’s program.
In its early years, “Larry King Live” was based in Washington, DC, which gave the show an air of seriousness. Equally King. He was the plain middle man through which the Beltway bigwigs could reach their audiences, and they did, earning the show’s prestige as a place where things happened, where news was delivered.
King conducted an estimated 50,000 on-air interviews. In 1995 he presided over a Middle East peace summit with PLO President 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, from Bill Gates to Lady Gaga.
Especially after she moved to Los Angeles, her shows were frequently at the center of celebrity breaking news, including Paris Hilton talking about her 2007 jail time and Michael Jackson’s friends and family talking about his death in 2009.
King boasted of never preparing too much for an interview. His non-confrontational style relaxed his guests and made him easily identifiable with his audience.
“I don’t pretend to know everything,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press in 1995. “No, ‘What about Geneva or Cuba?’ I ask, ‘Mr. President, what is it you don’t like about this job? ′ Or ‘What is the biggest mistake you made? ‘ It is fascinating “.
At a time when CNN, as the sole actor on cable news, considered himself politically neutral and King was the essence of its middle ground, political figures and people at the center of controversies sought out his show.
And he was known for entertaining guests who were notoriously elusive. Frank Sinatra, who rarely gave interviews and often lashed out at reporters, spoke to King in 1988 in what would be the singer’s last major television appearance. Sinatra was an old friend of King’s and acted on it.
“Why are you here?” King asks. Sinatra replies, “Because you asked me to come and I hadn’t seen you in a long time to begin with, I thought we should get together and chat, just talk about a lot of things.
King had never met Marlon Brando, who was even harder to come by and more difficult to interview, when the acting giant asked to appear on King’s show in 1994. The two got along so well that they ended their 90-minute talk. with a song and a kiss on the mouth, an image that was in the media in the following weeks.
After a gala week marking his 25th anniversary in June 2010, King abruptly announced that he was retiring from his show, telling viewers, “Time to hang up my night suspenders.” Named as his time slot successor: British journalist and television personality Piers Morgan.
With King’s departure in December, suspicion had grown that he had waited too long to hang up those suspenders. Once a leader in cable television news, it ranked third in its time slot with less than half the nightly viewership in its peak year, 1998, when “Larry King Live” drew 1.64 million viewers.
His wide-eyed, normal-type approach to interview by then felt dated in an era of nervous, aggressive, or charged questions from other presenters.
Meanwhile, occasional glitches had made him seem out of touch, or worse. An excellent example from 2007 found King asking Jerry Seinfeld if he had voluntarily abandoned his sitcom or if it had been canceled by his network, NBC.
“I was the number one show on television, Larry,” Seinfeld replied with a stunned look. “Do you know who I am?”
Always a workaholic, King would be back doing specials for CNN within months of performing his nightly duties.
He found a new kind of celebrity on Twitter when the platform emerged, gaining over 2 million followers who simultaneously poked fun at him and loved him for his esoteric style.
“I have never been in a canoe. # Itsmy2cents, ”he said in a typical tweet in 2015.
His Twitter account was essentially a revival of a USA Today column he wrote over two decades full of isolated and disconnected thoughts. Norm Macdonald delivered a parody version of the column when he portrayed King on “Saturday Night Live,” with deadpan lines such as, “The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the equator.”
King was constantly parodied, often through old age jokes on late-night talk shows from hosts like David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, often appearing with the latter to participate himself.
King came honestly in his ravenous but no-frills manner.
He was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in 1933, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who ran a bar and grill in Brooklyn. But after his father died when Larry was a child, he was faced with a troubled, sometimes destitute young man.
A fan of radio stars like Arthur Godfrey and comedians Bob & Ray, King, upon reaching adulthood, set his sights on a broadcasting career. With the news that Miami was a good place to go, he headed south in 1957 and got a job sweeping floors at a small AM station. When a DJ abruptly quit, King went on the air and was handed his new last name by the station manager, who thought Zeiger was “too Jewish.”
A year later, he moved to a larger station, where his duties were expanded from the usual pattern to serving as the host of a daily talk show that aired from a local restaurant. He quickly proved himself equally adept at speaking to the waitresses and celebrities who started passing by.
By the early 1960s, King had gone to an even larger Miami station, scored a column in a newspaper, and became a local celebrity.
At the same time, he was a victim of living large.
“It was important to me to come across as a ‘great man,” he wrote in his autobiography, which meant that “I made a lot of money and gave it away generously”.
He racked up debt and his first broken marriages (he was married eight times to seven women). He gambled, he borrowed wildly, and he didn’t pay his taxes. He also got involved with a shady financier in a scheme to fund an investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. But when King grazed some of the cash to pay his overdue taxes, his partner sued him for grand theft in 1971. The charges were dropped, but King’s reputation seemed ruined.
King lost his radio show and, for several years, struggled to find work. But by 1975, the scandal was largely over and a Miami station gave it another chance. Regaining his local popularity, King was hired in 1978 to host the first national radio show.
Hailing from Washington on Mutual Network, “The Larry King Show” eventually ran on over 300 stations and made King a national phenomenon.
A few years later, CNN founder Ted Turner offered King a spot on his young network. “Larry King Live” debuted on June 1, 1985 and became CNN’s highest rated show. King’s starting salary of $ 100,000 a year eventually grew to more than $ 7 million.
A three-pack-a-day smoking habit led to a heart attack in 1987, but King’s quintuple bypass surgery didn’t stop him.
Meanwhile, he went on to show that, in his words, “I’m not good at marriage, but I’m a great boyfriend.”
He was only 18 when he married his high school sweetheart Freda Miller in 1952. The marriage lasted less than a year. In the following decades he would marry Annette Kay, Alene Akins (twice), Mickey Sutfin, Sharon Lepore, and Julie Alexander.
In 1997, he married Shawn Southwick, a country singer and actress 26 years his junior. They would file for divorce in 2010, rescind the application, and then file for divorce again in 2019.
The couple had two children, King’s fourth and fifth children, Chance Armstrong, born in 1999, and Cannon Edward, born in 2000. In 2020, King lost his two oldest children, Andy King and Chaia King, who died of problems. of unrelated health in weeks of each other.
He had many other medical problems in recent decades, including more heart attacks and diagnoses of type 2 diabetes and lung cancer.
In early 2021, CNN reported that King was hospitalized for more than a week with COVID-19.
Through his setbacks, he continued to work into the late 1980s, participating in online talk shows and infomercials as his appearances on CNN waned.
“Work,” King said once. “It’s the easiest thing I do.”
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Former AP Television writer Frazier Moore contributed biographical material to this report.
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