Larry King (born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger; November 19, 1933 – January 23, 2021) was an American television and radio host, whose awards included two Peabodys, an Emmy and ten Cable ACE Awards.
King was a WMBM radio interviewer in the
Miami area in the 1950s and 1960s, and gained prominence beginning in 1978 as
host of The Larry King Show, an all-night nationwide call-in radio
program heard on the Mutual Broadcasting System. From 1985 to 2010, he hosted
the nightly interview television program Larry King Live on CNN. From
2012 to 2020, he hosted Larry King Now which aired on Hulu, Ora TV, and RT
America. He continued to host Politicking
with Larry King, a weekly political talk show which aired weekly on the
same two channels from 2013 until his death in 2021.
Miami Radio and Television
A CBS staff announcer, whom King met by
chance, suggested he go to Florida which was a growing media market with
openings for inexperienced broadcasters. King went to Miami, and after initial
setbacks, he gained his first job in radio. The manager of a small station,
WAHR (now WMBM) in Miami Beach, hired him to clean up and perform
miscellaneous tasks. When one of the station's announcers abruptly quit, King
was put on the air. His first broadcast was on May 1, 1957, working as the disc
jockey from 9 a.m. to noon. He also
did two afternoon newscasts and a sportscast. He was paid $50 a week.
He acquired the name Larry King when the
general manager claimed that Zeiger was too difficult to remember, so minutes
before airtime, Larry chose the surname King, which he got from an
advertisement in the Miami Herald for King's Wholesale Liquor. Within two years, he legally changed his name
to Larry King.
He began to conduct interviews on a
mid-morning show for WIOD, at Pumpernik's Restaurant in Miami Beach. He would interview whoever walked in. His first
interview was with a waiter at the restaurant.
Two days later, singer Bobby Darin, in Miami for a concert that evening,
walked into Pumpernik's having heard King's radio show; Darin became King's first
celebrity interview guest.
King's Miami radio show brought him
local attention. A few years later, in May 1960, he hosted Miami
Undercover, airing Sunday nights at 11:30 p.m. on WPST-TV Channel 10
(now WPLG). On the show, he moderated
debates on important local issues of the day.
King credited his success on local
television to the assistance of comedian Jackie Gleason, whose national
television variety show was being taped in Miami Beach beginning in 1964.
"That show really took off because Gleason came to Miami," King said
in a 1996 interview he gave when inducted into the Broadcasters' Hall of Fame.
"He did that show and stayed all night with me. We stayed till five in the
morning. He didn't like the set, so we broke into the general manager's office
and changed the set. Gleason changed the set, he changed the lighting, and he
became like a mentor of mine."
The Larry King Show
On January 30, 1978, King went national
on a nightly Mutual Broadcasting System coast-to-coast broadcast, inheriting
the talk show slot that had begun with Herb Jepko in 1975, then followed by "Long
John" Nebel in 1977, until his illness and death the following year. King's Mutual show rapidly developed a
devoted audience.
The Larry King Show was
broadcast live Monday through Friday from midnight to 5:30 a.m. Eastern
Standard Time. King would interview a guest for the first 90 minutes, with
callers asking questions that continued the interview for another 90 minutes.
At 3 a.m., the Open Phone America segment began, where he allowed
callers to discuss any topic they pleased with him, until the end of the
program, when he expressed his own political opinions. Many stations in the
western time zones carried the Open Phone America portion of
the show live, followed by the guest interview on tape delay.
Some of King's regular callers used pseudonyms
or were given nicknames by King, such as "The Numbers Guy", "The
Chair", "The Portland Laugher", "The Miami
Derelict", and "The Scandal Scooper". At the beginning, the show had relatively few
affiliates, though the number was eventually above 500. King hosted the show
until stepping down in 1994. King
occasionally entertained the audience by telling amusing stories from his youth
or early broadcasting career.
For its final year, the show was moved
to afternoons. After King stepped down, Mutual gave the afternoon slot to David
Brenner and Mutual's affiliates were given the option of carrying the audio of
King's new CNN evening television program. After Westwood One dissolved Mutual
in 1999, the radio simulcast of the CNN show continued until December 31, 2009.
Larry King Live
Larry King Live began
on CNN in June 1985. On the show, King hosted a broad range of guests, from
figures such as UFO conspiracy theorists and alleged psychics, to prominent
politicians and entertainment industry figures, often doing their first or only
interview on breaking news stories on his show. After broadcasting his CNN show
from 9 to 10 p.m., King then traveled to the studios of the Mutual Broadcasting
System to do his radio show, when both shows still aired.
Two of his best remembered interviews
involved political figures. In 1992, billionaire Ross Perot announced his
presidential bid on the show. In 1993, a debate between Al Gore and Perot
became CNN's most-watched segment until 2015.
Unlike many interviewers, King had a
direct, non-confrontational approach. His reputation for asking easy,
open-ended questions made him attractive to important figures who wanted to
state their position while avoiding being challenged on contentious topics. King
said that when interviewing authors, he did not read their books in advance, so
that he would not know more than his audience.
Throughout his career, King interviewed many of the leading figures of
his time. According to CNN, King conducted more than 30,000 interviews in his
career.
King also wrote a regular newspaper
column in USA Today for almost 20 years, from shortly after that first
national newspaper's debut in Baltimore-Washington in 1982 until September
2001. The column consisted of short
"plugs, superlatives and dropped names" but was dropped when the
newspaper redesigned its "Life" section. The column was resurrected in blog form in
November 2008 and on Twitter in April 2009.
During his career, he did more than
60,000 interviews. CNN’s Larry King Live
became "the longest-running television show hosted by the same person, on
the same network and in the same time slot", and was recognized for it by
the Guinness Book of World Records. He
retired in 2010 after taping 6,000 episodes of the show.
King’s Death
On January 2, 2021, it was revealed that
King had been hospitalized ten days earlier in a Los Angeles hospital after
testing positive for COVID-19. On
January 23, he died at the age of 87 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los
Angeles.
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