Lawrence Harvey Zeiger (born
November 19, 1933), better known by his showbiz name Larry King, is an
American
television
and radio host.
He is recognized in the United States as one of the premier
broadcast interviewers. King has conducted some 40,000 interviews
with politicians, athletes, entertainers, and other newsmakers. He
has won an
Emmy Award, two
Peabody Awards, and ten
Cable ACE Awards.
King began
as a local Florida
journalist
and radio interviewer in the 1950s and '60s. He became
prominent as an all-night national radio broadcaster starting in
1978, and then began hosting the nightly interview TV program
Larry King Live on
CNN, which started in 1985.
Biography
Early life
Lawrence Harvey Zeiger was born to Jennie (
née Gitlitz), a garment worker, and Edward Zeiger,
a restaurant owner and defense plant worker.
Larry's parents were
Jewish and had emigrated from Belarus
(Minsk and
Pinsk) to Brooklyn
, New York City
, where Larry was born. His father died at 44
of
heart disease when King was nine,
and his mother had to go on
welfare to support Larry and his
younger brother. His father's death affected King greatly, and he
lost interest in school, ruining his chances to go to college.
After graduating from high school, he worked to help support his
mother. From an early age he wanted to go into radio.
Miami radio
A CBS staff announcer, whom King met by chance, told him
to go to Florida, a growing
media market where openings still existed for inexperienced
broadcasters. King rode a bus to Miami
.
After initial setbacks, King got his first job in radio through
persistence.
The manager of a small station, WAHR (now
WMBM
) in Miami Beach
, hired him to clean up and perform miscellaneous
tasks. When one of their announcers quit, they put King on
the air. His first broadcast was on May 1, 1957, when he worked as
the
disc jockey from 9 a.m. to
noon. He also did two afternoon newscasts and a sportscast. He was
paid $55 a week. He acquired the name Larry King when the general
manager Martial Cemen said that Zeiger was too ethnic and difficult
to remember, and instead suggested the surname
King, which
he got from an ad in
The Miami
Herald for King's Wholesale Liquor. He started
interviewing on a midmorning show for
WIOD, at
Pumpernik's Restaurant in Miami Beach. He would interview anyone
who walked in. His first interview was with a waiter at the
restaurant. Two days later, singer
Bobby
Darin, in Miami for a concert later that day, walked into
Pumpernick's as a result of coming across King's show on his radio;
Darin became King's first celebrity interview guest.
His Miami radio show launched him to local stardom.
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 issues of the time.
King credits his success on local TV to the assistance of another
showbiz legend, comedian
Jackie
Gleason, whose national TV variety show was being filmed in
Miami Beach during this period. "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."
WIOD gave King further exposure as the color commentator for the
Miami Dolphins broadcasts during the
early part of the Miami Dolphins' 1971 season.
However, he was
dismissed by both radio station WIOD and
television station WTVJ
as a
late-night radio host and sports commentator as of December 20,
1971, when he was arrested after being accused of grand larceny by
a former business partner. Other staffers covered the
Dolphins' games into their 24-3 loss to Dallas in
Super Bowl VI. King also lost his weekly
column at the Miami Beach Sun newspaper. The charges were dropped
on March 10, 1972, and King spent the next several years in
reviving his career, including a stint as the color announcer in
Louisiana for the Shreveport Steamer of the World Football League
in 1974-75. For several years during the 1970s in South Florida, he
hosted a sports talk-show called "Sports-a-la-King" that featured
guests and callers.
National TV and radio career
King managed to get back into radio by becoming the color
commentator for broadcasts of the
Shreveport Steamer of the
World Football League on KWKH.
Eventually, King was rehired by WIOD in Miami. In 1978, he went
national, inheriting the nightly talk show slot on the
Mutual Radio Network, broadcast
coast-to-coast, that had been
"Long John"
Nebel's until his death, and had been pioneered by
Herb Jepko. One reason King got the Mutual job is
that he had once been an announcer at WGMA-AM in Hollywood,
Florida, which was then owned by C. Edward Little. Little went on
to become president of Mutual and was the one who hired King when
Nebel died. King's Mutual show developed a devoted audience.
It was broadcast live Monday through Friday from midnight to
5:30 a.m. Eastern Time. King would interview a guest for the
first 90 minutes, allowing callers to continue the interview for
another 90. At 3 a.m., he would allow the callers to discuss
any topic they pleased with him, until the end of the program,
where he expressed his own political opinions. They called that
segment "Open Phone America." Some of the regular callers included
"The Portland Laugher," "The Miami Derelict," "The Todd Cruz
Caller," "The Scandal Scooper," "Mr. Radio" and "The Water Is Warm
Caller." "Mr. Radio" had over 200 calls to King during Open Phone
America. The show was wildly successful, starting with relatively
few affiliates and eventually growing to more than 500. It ran
until 1994.
For its final year, the show was moved to afternoons, but, because
most talk radio stations at the time had an established policy of
local origination in the time-slot (3 to 6 p.m. Eastern Time)
that Mutual offered the show, a very low percentage of King's
overnight affiliates agreed to carry his daytime show and it was
unable to generate the same audience size. The afternoon show was
eventually given to
David Brenner and
radio affiliates were given the option of carrying the audio of
King's CNN evening program. He started his CNN show in June 1985,
and the
Westwood One radio simulcast of
the CNN show continues.
On the
Larry King Live
show, King hosts guests from a broad range of topics. This includes
controversial figures of
UFO
conspiracy theories and alleged
psychics. One notable guest is
Sylvia Browne, who in 2005 told the
Newsweek magazine that King, a
believer in the paranormal, asks her to do private psychic
readings.
Unlike many interviewers, King has a direct, non-confrontational
approach. His interview style is characteristically frank, but with
occasional bursts of irreverence and humor. His approach attracts
some guests who would not otherwise appear. King, who is known for
his general lack of pre-interview preparation, once bragged that he
never pre-reads the books of authors who appear on his show. In a
show dedicated to the surviving Beatles, for example, King asked
George Harrison's widow about the
song "Something," which was written about George Harrison's first
wife. He seemed surprised when she did not know very much about the
song.
Throughout his career King has interviewed many of the leading
figures of his time. In all, CNN's online biography continues to
claim that King has conducted more than 40,000 interviews over the
course of his career. King would have to have conducted over 800
interviews a year in order to have talked to this many
people.
King also wrote a regular newspaper column in
USA Today for almost 20 years, from shortly after
that newspaper's origin 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.
1987 heart attack
On February 24, 1987, King suffered a major
heart attack and then had
quintuple-
bypass
surgery. Coincidentally, this occurred the day after King took
over the
Don and Mike Show. It was
a life-altering event for King. Smoking was one of his trademarks
and he was unashamed of his addiction. A three-pack-a-day smoker,
King kept a lit cigarette during his interview so he would not have
to take time to light up during breaks. Today he encourages
curbing smoking to reduce the risk
of
cardiovascular disease,
and has not smoked for twenty-two years.
King has written two books about living with heart disease.
Mr.
King, You're Having a Heart Attack: How a Heart Attack and Bypass
Surgery Changed My Life (1989, ISBN 0-440-50039-7) was written
with New York's
Newsday science
editor B. D. Colen.
Taking On Heart Disease: Famous
Personalities Recall How They Triumphed over the Nation's #1 Killer
and How You Can, Too (2004, ISBN 1-57954-820-2) features the
experience of various celebrities with cardiovascular disease
including
Peggy Fleming and
Regis Philbin.
Charitable works
As a result of heart attacks, he established the Larry King Cardiac
Foundation, an organization to which
David Letterman, through his
American
Foundation for Courtesy and Grooming, has also contributed.
King gave
$1 million to George Washington University
's School of Media and Public Affairs for
scholarships to students from disadvantaged
backgrounds.
On September 3, 2005, King aired "How You Can Help," a three-hour
special designed to provide a forum and information clearinghouse
for viewers to understand and join nationwide and global relief
efforts. This was following the devastation to the Gulf Coast by
Hurricane Katrina.
Guest Richard Simmons, a native of New
Orleans
, told him, "Larry, you don't even know how much
money you raised tonight. When we rebuild the city of New
Orleans, we're going to name something big after you."
Later controversies
On September 10, 1990, while on
The Joan Rivers Show,
Rivers asked King which contestant in the
Miss America pageant was "the ugliest." King
responded, "
Miss Pennsylvania. She
was one of the 10 finalists and she did a great ventriloquist bit
[...] The dummy was prettier." King was a judge for the September
8, 1990 pageant. King later sent Miss Pennsylvania, Marla Wynne, a
dozen long-stemmed roses and a telegram apologizing for saying she
was the ugliest contestant in the pageant that year.
In 1997, King was one of 34 celebrities to sign an open letter to
then-German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl,
published as a newspaper advertisement in the
International Herald
Tribune, which protested the treatment of
Scientologists in Germany, comparing
it to the
Nazis' oppression of
Jews in the 1930s. Other signatories included
Dustin Hoffman and
Goldie Hawn.
On September 23, 2004,
John
Clark sued King and CNN after an interview with his ex-wife,
Lynn Redgrave, aired. Clark argued
that he was defamed by the banner statements scrolling at the
bottom of the screen, and that the taped show did not allow him to
appear to defend himself. The court would not allow the suit to
proceed ruling that he was not defamed. Two years later, the
United
States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San
Francisco, dismissed his appeal.
Personal life
King has been married eight times, to seven women. With wife
Shawn (née Engemann, b. 1957), a
former singer and TV host, he has two children: Chance, born March
9, 1999, and Cannon, born May 22, 2000. He is stepfather to
Danny Southwick. He also has three
adult children from previous marriages: Andy and Chaia (with Alene
Akins) and Larry Jr. born November 1961 (with Annette Kaye), whom
King first met when Larry Jr. was in his thirties. Larry Jr. and
his wife Shannon have three children. On the couple's 10th
anniversary in September 2007, Southwick-King, boasted that she was
"the only [wife] to have lasted into the two digits."
In 1997, Dove Books published a book written by King and Chaia,
"Daddy Day, Daughter Day". It tells each of their accounts of his
divorce with Akins, aimed at young children.
In a May 2009 interview with
Anderson
Cooper, King revealed that he was raised in a Jewish home but
now is an
agnostic.
In July 2009, King appeared on
The Tonight Show with Conan
O'Brien where he told Conan about his wishes to be
cryogenically preserved upon death (which King had
mentioned in his newest book).
Awards
King has received many broadcasting awards. He won the
Peabody Award for Excellence in broadcasting
for both his radio (1982) and television (1992) shows. He has also
won 10
CableACE awards for Best
Interviewer and for Best Talk Show Series.
In 1989, King was inducted into the
Radio Hall of Fame, and in 1996 to the
Broadcasters' Hall of Fame. In 2002, the industry magazine
Talkers named King both
the fourth-greatest radio talk show host of all time and the top
television talk show host of all time.
King was given the Golden Mike Award for Lifetime Achievement in
January 2009, by the Radio & Television News Association of
Southern California.
King is an honorary member of the Rotary Club of Beverly Hills. He
is also a recipient of the President's Award honoring his impact on
media from the Los Angeles Press Club in 2006.
King is the first recipient of the Arizona State University
Hugh Downs Award for Communication
Excellence, presented April 11, 2007, via satellite by Downs
himself. Downs, the highly respected broadcaster and TV host,
sported red suspenders for the event and turned the tables on King
by asking "very tough questions" about King's best, worst and most
influential interviews during King's 50 years in
broadcasting.
Filmography
References
- jweekly.com
- Larry King, A Heart Healthy Life to Enjoy.
The Larry King Cardiac Foundation. Accessed on May 5,
2007.
- Broadcaster's Hall of Fame biography
- Museum of Broadcast Communications
biography
- Anchors & Reporters: Larry King.
http://www.cnn.com. Accessed on May 5, 2007.
- NEWSMAKERS:`Ugliest' beauty offered equal time,
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution,
September 12, 1990
- The People Column, Roanoke Times,
September 15, 1990
- Drozdiak, William (1997-01-14). U.S. Celebrities Defend Scientology in Germany,
The Washington Post, p. A11
- Clark's opening Appeal brief
- [1]
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