These days, it’s hard to imagine a time when a plurality of the population agreed on anything, especially media consumption.
Strange as it sounds to say, for 25 glorious years, Larry King was the glue that helped hold a grateful nation together. From 1985 to 2010, when King commandeered the 8 p.m. hour of CNN as the host of Larry King Live, basic cable subscribers of every ideological stripe or none at all could gather to spend time in the company of an essentially neutral arbiter of the day’s news, gossip, or scandals. Following a decade in exile from mainstream cable news, King died on Jan. 23 at the age of 87.
As broadcasters go, King was not a beloved figure in the mold of Walter Cronkite, nor was he one recognized for his erudition on the order of Eric Sevareid. Instead, King achieved ubiquity through branding so canny and so consistent that it surely would impress the brand-conscious 45th president (a not-infrequent guest). From his often headache-inducing shirt-and-suspenders combinations to his shoulders-up-to-his-ears hunch, King was something like an instant caricature — a living, breathing Al Hirschfeld drawing. Even the famous set of Larry King Live, with its light-bedecked map of the world and decorative RCA-style microphone, emblazoned itself on our consciousness.
Beyond such superficial details, King created an interview style that was the very opposite of the loaded-question journalism preferred on today’s partisan cable news channels: King’s questions to guests could sound almost comically innocent in their naivete, and he seemed to pride himself on giving the impression that he had no dog in any given fight. Most of the time, King seemed to be a regular guy asking the sort of questions we might pose of politicians or celebrities, an impression formed in part by his quaint devotion to taking live calls from viewers (“Dubuque, Iowa — hello!”). In a way, Larry King Live often unfolded like a down-market version of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal with a less wonkish but amiable host and callers closer to those who phone into home-shopping channels.
Born Larry Zeiger in Brooklyn, King grew up in a scrappy household shared by his mother, Jennie, and his younger sibling, Martin. His father, Aaron, died when Larry was still a child.
“I remember the inspectors from the Welfare Department coming to our house,” King told People magazine in 1981. “They opened the refrigerator and asked my mother how she could afford the meat. She could afford it because she didn’t eat it. She gave it to my brother and me.”
No less enterprising was King’s transition from high school, where he did not exactly excel, to his chosen field: radio. As he recalled in his autobiography My Remarkable Journey, King was advised by a CBS staff announcer to set himself up in Miami, where he was hired by WAHR and ditched his birth name for the haphazardly chosen King — it was inspired by an ad the station manager saw in the newspaper. He recalls having cottonmouth during his debut, leading the manager to ream him out: “This is a communications business!”
Making his way to bigger stations and increasing popularity, King never again had difficulty connecting with an audience, whose feedback was directly solicited through live calls fielded on The Larry King Show, which began on the Mutual Broadcasting System in 1978. Similar to Walter Winchell, King had a snappy, Guys and Dolls-like delivery that was well-suited to radio, but unlike Winchell, his persona actually improved on television.
On CNN, King refereed his share of meaty policy debates — especially prescient was the showdown over NAFTA between former Vice President Al Gore and former independent presidential candidate Ross Perot — but just as often, he devoted shows to topics most viewers had a genuine, if surreptitious, interest in. During countless hours given to the O.J. Simpson trial, the death of Anna Nicole Smith, and various supernatural topics, including legendary confrontations between purported psychics and professional paranormal debunker James Randi, King served as the stand-in for our collective id. Some shows were so fascinatingly cringe-inducing, such as his tete-a-tete with Marlon Brando, you could hardly look away.
When King was ushered off CNN in 2010, supplanted by Piers Morgan, it was the passing of an era. King’s eight marriages to seven women, as well as a convoluted charge of grand larceny emanating from a bad business association, actually burnished his image as something of a rascal, and he remained on the scene thanks to infomercials and the internet. But his days of being a common source of conversation were over. How many watercooler conversations were enhanced by talking about what Tammy Faye Bakker had said to King the night before?
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
