Larry King: A Good Face for Radio

Broadcast legend Larry King (Lawrence Zeiger, 1933-2021) passed away so recently that this post can almost serve as an obituary. We lost him during the Covid pandemic, though at age 87, as in so many cases, his bout of coronavirus surely just provided the final push.

King was a real one-trick pony. He did what he did for an astounding 63 years, and would have kept doing it, all things remaining the same. Look at that photo above from the beginning of his career. To all appearances he had changed very little by the end of it! I had a friend who called him “the ugliest man on television”. I wouldn’t disagree, but I’d never have said it. He had, as the expression goes, a good face for radio, his one true love.

King was a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. It remained a key element of his personality all his life. My favorite Larry King exchange went as follows. Some guest mentioned the hip-hop artist 50 Cent. And King goes, “His name is 50 Cent? What’s his brother, a buck and a quarter?”

Determined to break into radio, King moved to the growing market of Miami in the 1950s. After working as a factotum at a local station for a time, an emergency no-show gave him his first on-air opportunity and he nailed it. In 1978, he launched The Larry King Show over the Mutual Broadcasting System. He interviewed celebrity guests, and then took calls from listeners. The popularity of this show eventually landed him Larry King Live, his national TV program on CNN, which followed the same format, and which lasted from 1985 through 2010. From 2012 until the end of his life he hosted Larry King Now, on Hulu and other platforms.

Throughout the course of his career, King interviewed an astounding 50,000 to 60,000 people, ranging from world leaders to book authors to pop stars to movie actors. I am delighted to learn that he winged every interview. He didn’t research his guests, didn’t watch their new movie, or read their new book, just had a conversation with them with a blank slate. He was down to earth, but smart enough to have intelligent conversations using this approach. He was sometimes criticized for being a “softball” interviewer, though I can certainly recall plenty of occasions when he asked direct and even uncomfortable questions. He had a crusty quality which people loved, and yeah looking at him made you want to puke, but I really loved and respected him, much more than so many others in the same business. (I hated Charlie Rose, for example, and didn’t care for Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer, among that generation of news-oriented interviewers, though I did like the 60 Minutes guys Mike Wallace and Morley Safer. Since we’re keeping score.)

King’s first celebrity interview was Bobby Darin; according to IMDB his last (not counting a special gimmick interview where the guest was himself) was actor Danny Pudi.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.