Larry King, the broadcasting luminary who had established his legacy through a number of radio and TV talk shows over the course of over 50 years, has died. Per CNN, Ora Media—the production company that King co-founded—announced his death with an official statement on Facebook. “With profound sadness, Ora Media announces the death of our co-founder, host and friend Larry King, who passed away this morning at age 87 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles,” it reads. “For 63 years and across the platforms of radio, television and digital media, Larry’s many thousands of interviews, awards, and global acclaim stand as a testament to his unique and lasting talent as a broadcaster.” King was recently hospitalized with COVID-19 for over a week; however, an official cause of death has not been released. He was 87.
Brooklyn-born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger began his news and broadcasting career in Miami, Florida, where he landed his first job in radio. At first, he was hired to clean and perform miscellaneous tasks. When one the the station’s announcers unexpectedly quit, King was tapped on the spot to replace him, which led to his first broadcast in 1957. When it was clear that he had every intention of remaining on the air, Zeiger was urged to change his last name, which was deemed “too difficult” to resonate at the time. Just before returning to the airwaves, the burgeoning host landed on the surname King—a name inspired by a Miami Herald advertisement for King’s Wholesale Liquor. He legally changed his name to Larry King to years later.
As he began to establish himself as a local personality, King started to conduct interviews. His first celebrity interview was with singer Bobby Darin, who was in town for a show and was familiar with King’s work. He would continue to expand his professional portfolio with work in sports commentary and late-night radio hosting. In 1978, he got his first national radio gig with Mutual Broadcasting System, which gave him a nightly show that was first helmed by Herb Jepko. As is the case with his early foray into broadcasting, King quickly gained a devoted following that grew attached to his affable style of questioning and straightforward insight. After gaining a certain level of prominence, he was given his own show—Larry King Live—by CNN in 1985.
Over the show’s 25-year life span, King conducted over 30,000 interviews and cemented his impact on journalism and the broadcast industry. Fans grew enamored with his unchanging, breezy style of interviewing that conveyed a deep interest in his guests, whether they were dignitaries or promising upstarts. To King, his limited time with the person on the other side of the desk was best spent granting them space to share a genuine piece of themselves, and that meant setting his own ego aside and letting his show ultimately be about them. “There are many broadcasters who’ll recite three minutes of facts before they ask a question,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir, My Remarkable Journey. “As if to say: Let me show you how much I know. I think the guest should be the expert.”
King departed Larry King Live in 2010 with the intention of hosting the occasional special event. In 2012, he left the network entirely. In that same year, he co-founded Ora TV with business magnate Carlos Slim. There, he continued his talk show work with Larry King Now despite his very public health issues with heart disease and diabetes. Determined, he continued to examine politics and American culture one interview at a time. (Ora TV even hosted the third-party presidential debate in its first year.)
As a pop culture figure, King’s TV career includes over 60 guest starring credits—most of which involve him lampooning himself—in shows ranging from Arthur to WWE Raw. His dark-rimmed glasses, suspenders, clasped hands and intimate, forward-leaning posture culminated in a vision ripe for friendly impersonation and contributed to his status as a familiar icon. As tributes continue to pour in, fellow political journalist and TV host Steve Kornacki perhaps summarizes King’s impact best: “Larry King was a radio and TV legend with an insatiable curiosity about people and a real sense of humor. He could get anyone talking, from Hollywood stars to the guy on the corner.” King is survived by his three children Larry, Jr., Chance, and Cannon.
69 Comments
and he only looked 673…
RIP to a titan of broadcasting.
I was going to say, I would have been 93-95 easily. Still sucks either way.
To which Larry replied – Cool cool cool cool
Um, hello? Launchpad McQuack and The Sun Chaser? That’s basically a private plane. Looks like Larry got him with a GOTCHA! question. Maybe Pudi needs to learn more about his character.
I’ll take “People who I thought were already dead” for $200, Alex.
Alex???
Hello, is this thing on?
Wow. Did NOT see that one coming. Straight outta nowhere.
I will always remember him as Larry “Geoff Peterson” King
We’re currently at 414,000 officially reported COVID-19 deaths, which is the equivalent of if Hurricane Katrina had killed every single person in New Orleans, plus an extra 25,000 for good measure. I’m relieved beyond words that Trump is gone but this is still a waking nightmare. R.I.P. to a broadcasting legend who is sadly just another drop in the pandemic bucket.
414k is total ww2 American deaths. Just think about that for a solid minute.
Plus 9,000 (according to Wikipedia)
I rounded but yeah. Its basically here.
Or a hundred 9/11’s.
Sure, but I’m going to insist on accounting for changes in population first.
Fair enough.
Hopefully it ends soon. It is the same all over the world that accurately reports numbers. Most countries in Europe have 1/6 the population of the United States, so if you would multiply their deaths by 6 it is basically the same percentage.
Nooooooooooooope.https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
Um, your link proves me right, America is 16th by mortality and another 30 are so close to America that it really makes no real difference. So what is your point? Only America has covid? That is news to the rest of us.
Deaths per 100,000 population U.S. is fourth, behind the U.K. (who also did a terrible job early on) Italy (who got absolutely massacred in the early months) and Czechia (not sure what the story is there). We’re miles ahead of Canada, Germany, Poland, France, or South Africa.
Miles ahead of France? They have 1112 deaths per million, America has 1200. That is hardly “miles”. They have 72,000 deaths and 1/6 America’s population. You multiply it by six to 320 million (what the population of America is) they would have 420,000 deaths, same as America. Canada is sparsely populated. Germany did okay for a while, but they have it again as bad as ever. I don’t know a lot about Poland. South Africa undereports their deaths, especially the first six months of the pandemic. . Their actual death toll is believed to be much higher.
I know that people don’t actually picture Canada’s population spread like peanut butter across the physical country, but even then, are we that sparsely populated? I guess I’m speaking specifically for Ontario, most of which doesn’t look a lot different from New York. I guess I’m just saying that us not behaving like Georgia and Florida had something to do with it, too.
For a little context: if you add together the populations of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand, you get around 425 million people. Among these 425 million or so people, there have been, in total, almost exactly 8,000 deaths (and 5,000 of those are from Japan alone). These numbers are projected to remain fairly stable from now on.
Meanwhile, the US has a population around 330 million people. Among these 330 million people, there have been, in total, around 414,000 deaths. A quarter of these have come in less than the last month. It’s likely that there’ll be another 200,000 deaths by summer.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that one of these sets of numbers is not like the other set of numbers.To put that another way: Japan has 40% of the population of the US (and the Japanese population is more densely packed, which should make diseases spread faster). But there have been more COVID fatalities in the US in the last two days alone than in Japan in the whole of the last twelve months. That’s not a rounding error. Except in the sense that the total Japanese death toll – already proportionally high for the Asia-Pacific region – could literally be a rounding error compared to the US figures.
Nor is there any mystery about why. Take Germany, for instance: they got covid early, but clamped down hard, and had extremely low death rates all through the spring. But by autumn, they’d relaxed their rules – largely because they were delegated to (more conservative) local governments – and as a result death rates have soared.Stopping people dying from COVID is straightforward. You just need:- strict and enforced rules against unnecessary socialising (and if they’re enforced strictly, the rules themselves can be more lenient), particularly including movement between high- and low-infection areas. This lowers case numbers and keeps them contained.
– an effective early testing and contact-tracing system. This damps down local outbreaks before they become epidemics.
– a robust healthcare system that allows for early and effective treatment (treating earlier not only reduces deaths, but reduces the load on the system, because less intensive treatment is needed)And obviously compulsory masks and a strong system of quarantine go without saying.The pandemic really demonstrates how important it is to be resolute in the face of exponential growth: going half as hard doesn’t give you twice as many deaths, it gives you hundreds of times more deaths.
I’m 45, and his persona and complete lack of interview skills have been a joke my whole life. As far as I could tell, his only skill was being able to score big-name guests (presumably because they knew they had nothing to fear from him.) Was he ever respected as an actual journalist/interviewer? I’m asking seriously here, not (just) to be snarky.
From the time he started Larry King Live to about 2005, there was no one better at making a politico or talent feel at ease. During my publicity days I got to take to stars doing publicity for their respective films to Larry King Live.His entire demeanor was extraordinary. He would come to the green room, make-up cape still on to greet, talk a bit and it would then proceed so smoothly it was uncanny. He had a professionalism to get people to open up that many of his shows are historic journalistic pieces during that period.That is why he could get so many of the greats on his show. He wasn’t a soft baller, he just had that calm tone in his voice and so quick on his feet. He was a legend no differently than Lowell Thomas and Paul Harvey but his nose for news more akin to Edward Murrow.
That’s good to know, and does indeed explain his appeal to guests. I suppose my frustration is in how little that seemed to translate into valuable (or, for my tastes) interesting on-camera substance. And I get that sort of thing is an appeal for some viewers as well. I mean, Carson did that for 30 years and was beloved, so maybe my mistake was expecting more from Larry King (perhaps his being on CNN instead of late night NBC changed my perception of what to expect.)
Yeah, there are two different interview techniques for getting good information out of people. One is the relentless grilling that is sometimes necessary with disingenuous politicians or other people that have had extensive media training. It can make for great sound bites if done right. The other is to make your subject comfortable enough that they end up revealing things they otherwise wouldn’t have, something more akin to what a lot of documentarians do. The latter is probably less exciting to watch in a news environment where we’ve come to expect people yelling at each other as the default, but it’s no less effective.
i think once he started doing cameos in movies it was all downhill, which was i believe ghostbusters in 1984, so my entire life.
He just made it look that easy.
He did a great interview on Pete Holmes You Made It Weird years ago explaining his process. IIRC, basically he goes out of his way to empathise with his guest and ask questions from their own POV. He uses the example of interviewing someone from Al Queda. Essentially, asking “difficult” questions gets the interviewer credit but the interviewee will clam up. But if you let them explain themselves, they’ll give you much more.Basically be nice to everyone and give them enough rope to hang themselves. I used to interview people for TV (I was off camera) and most of his advice on that podcast was super useful.
Australia’s Andrew Denton is so unassuming, so non-threatening, in a Louie Theroux kinda way, he could get confessions out of people not noticing themselves doing it. His show? It was called‘Enough Rope’. And they still went on. Alan Bond …
He was so fucking good in his day
If anyone isn’t aware, the UK interviewing legend (of the soft style) was Michael Parkinson. Not every interview went well, and he certainly made mistakes (he interviewed over 2,000 people, over 40 years*), but when they went well he created some fantastic television – sometimes funny, sometimes moving, usually interesting. Mostly just by letting the other person talk, and just nudging them along when they faltered. [it was weird watching him do it to American celebrities – they often came on expecting to give the usual promo fluff, and ended up in an unexpected therapy session, which sometimes they clearly loved, and sometimes they absolutely hated]. I think all modern UK non-political interviewers – from Graham Norton through to Louis Theroux – have sort of begun from a point of what worked on Parkinson, and taking it in their own way.(and the guest lists! You’d have line-ups like… *looks at a list* Shirley Bassey, Hugh Laurie and Ronnie Corbett all in one episode. Or Samuel L Jackson, Twiggy, and Dara O’Briain. Sharon Stone, Bette Midler, and Stephen Fry. Or, for a hate-watch, Tony Blair and Kevin Spacey together. Cameron Diaz, John McEnroe and Rory Bremner. His Billy Connolly interviews were legendary. But yeah, youtube has a copy of, for example, Parkinson interviewing Robin Williams and Stephen Fry (with musical appearance by James Taylor) that’s definitely worth watching…)
[our political interviewers, on the other hand, have a tradition of being hyper-aggressive and confrontational – sometimes brilliantly, sometimes excessively (you have to give the politician a chance to give a bad answer before lambasting them!).]*non-consecutively. He had a series in the 1970s, and then came back 1998-2007. The former run is the more famous, when he was sharper and more the “it” guy of the moment; I only saw the second run, but actually, from what I’ve seen, it’s better than the original – he’s got less ego, and he’s more willing to let go of control, with a less predetermined set of questions.
I don’t think you’re the right person to dictate what a good interviewer should act/interview like if you’re asking this question, and no, I’m not being snarky.
I’m 52 and you’re telling me your age, dildo? King was Great.
My age was mentioned as a reference point for how long King’s persona had consistently been treated as a running joke, which led into an honest question about whether there was more to him than I’d seen. Then several people answered, “yes there was” and gave specific examples and explanations.You, on the other hand, are just an asshole.
Okay, GenX.
Jesus, non-asshole. He’s dead. Proudly stating your ignorance of him ain’t even an opinion.
I’ll take “People who I thought were already dead” for $200, Alex.
Alex???
Hello, is this thing on?
He was sleeping through his last decade on CNN. The amount of times he ignored what the guest was saying and reacted as though they gave the response he expected was ridiculous.
And this is most definitely the time to talk about that! Well done!
“Number of times.”
He was often asleep on his old overnight show on the radio, too…He was pretty hated by his Mutual radio crew so they always saved the tapes of his screw ups. Sadly, most of the good stuff isn’t on YouTube, like the clip of him not knowing his show had started. He spent a good five minutes just shooting the shit with an author, thinking he’d eventually be cued in, but no one bothered to let him know so off he went with banal small talk and awkward pauses. By the time he realized he was on, it was time for a commercial break.
Maybe because no one’s interesting any more?
Legend.
. . . and I woke up to the news that Larry King had passed away. Pascagoula, Mississippi! You’re on!
One of the last of the old school radio men.RIP
Here’s a favorite clip of mine:
That’s great. Rickles is just one of the most naturally sharp and inherently funny ever.
R.I.P. Larry King. He may be gone, but… He’s still in the vents….of our hearts.
For years I’ve had a standing bet with a friend that when Larry King died his suspenders would wind up in the Smithsonian, but now I just feel like an asshole.
If you’re a big enough asshole they’ll put that in the Smithsonian too.Pickled in a jar or dried out like a leather cheerio? You decide.
RIP.
Now let’s see how accurate this was.
Larry outlived Osama and Regis. Spooky!
You forgot to mention his greatest contribution: His stream of consciousness column in USA Today. I get a good feeling when I see a police officer on a horse…I’ve never been a big fan of daylight savings time…I never get tired of listening to Canada’s national anthem….
He migrated all those musing to Twitter in his later years, still a treat.
I know I’m supposed to make fun but I agree with all of those things.
“The Boeing 727 is still my favorite aircraft.”
Paul Newman told him, “you never get over it!”
He really does have a long list of memorable pop culture moments.
I was gonna say, unfortunately when you mention Larry all i can think of is the Brando interview (or more accurately, the SNL skit about it featuring Travolta as Brando)
Thanks for posting this – and so early. I don’t know why I expected to see it reported on Jezebel. Their bloggers don’t even roll out of bed until 12:00. Or the Root… yeah, no way.
So was it COVID or something else? He was a public figure so I don’t think it’s disrespectful to be curious.
he was hospitalized for COVID on Jan 2
Yes. Now I remember that news. All of the Trump drama obscured most everything else.
Covid plus being old enough to have crossed the Rubicon with JC.
So sad. Was watching him nail an interview with Anthony Jeselnik, just yesterday. A mentor to the Great Craig Ferguson – A Massive Loss XO
Larry King is so legendary, I don’t think I’d seen or heard any of his work (growing up and living in Australia), I think I just kinda knew what he looked like (probably from an old MAD magazine), and even I knew how significant a figure on American TV he was.
I’ll take “People who I thought were already dead” for $200, Alex.
Alex???
Hello, is this thing on?