Larry King, the king of the TV celebrity interview, has written his memoirs after a lengthy and varied career in broadcasting.
In My Remarkable Journey (Viking Canada), King seems to bare his soul as he recalls his Ukrainian ancestry, his poverty-stricken youth in Brooklyn after his father’s untimely death, his eight marriages (yes, eight), his ascent as a broadcaster, his brush with the law and his encounters with the famous and the infamous.
It’s a breezy, informative book, and King’s fans will probably appreciate it as a peephole into his life.
Now 75, King, formerly known as Larry Zeiger, was born and bred in Brooklyn, a kid who never went to college but made it big as a media star.
His dad, Eddie (Aron), immigrated to the United States in 1923 from the city of Kolomyya in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire and what is now Ukraine.
As King says, he was fortunate to have left: “”Hundreds of Jews in [his] city… would be rounded up and executed by the Nazis in 1941. Fourteen thousand more would be sent to the Belzec death camp.”
Eddie, the owner of a bar and grill, married Jennie Gitlitz in 1927. He died when King was just nine years old, forcing his wife to go on welfare. “My mother was a great seamstress,” he writes. “She would take in dresses to hem from people on the block for a little extra cash.”
Despite the adversity, King had a fairly happy childhood.
“I couldn’t imagine a better place to grow up than Brooklyn in the ’40s,” he observes in a reference to its small-town atmosphere and camaraderie. “Nobody moved, nobody divorced, and your friends were your friends forever.”
King wanted to be a broadcaster, but had to endure the drudgery of dead-end odd jobs before broadcasting finally beckoned.
“I had the passion to transmit, and for as long as I could remember people had always said that they loved my voice,” he says.
One day, he ran into a CBS Radio staff announcer who had these words of advice for him: “Go down to Miami, kid, and give it a shot. They’ve got lots of stations. It’s easier to get started in Miami.”
He arrived in Florida in 1957 with $18 in his pocket and got his big break soon afterward, replacing a morning DJ. The general manager of the station told him he couldn’t use his real name on air because it was too ethnic. “You need a better name,” he said.
“I was going on the air in five minutes,” he writes. “The Miami Herald was spread out on his desk. Face up was a full page for King’s Wholesale Liquors. The general manager looked down and said, ‘King! How about Larry King.’” At that moment, the brand Larry King was created. “OK,” I said. “This was the opportunity of a lifetime. I wasn’t going to blow it.”
Yet he almost flubbed it. He was so nervous that, for the first time in his life, he was speechless. “The next thing I knew, the general manager was kicking open the door to the control room. ‘This is a communications business,’ he roared. Shaken by this embarrassing incident, King found his voice at last.
He turned out to be so popular that a female caller once asked him out on a date. King’s account of his mad dash to her house, and back to the station again, is simply hilarious.
King owed some of his success to the Frank Sinatra interview he snagged in 1964. Sinatra never did interviews, but thanks to the intercession of a friend, the temperamental crooner agreed to appear on King’s show.
King admits that he has been a spendthrift. “Sometimes, I used to wonder. Where the hell did all that money go? I didn’t do drugs. I wasn’t a drinker. I wasn’t into nightclubs. I just lived beyond my means. I should have owned a Chevy. I drove a Lincoln. A new Lincoln. Every year. There were women. Days at the racetrack.”
It would be an understatement to say that he had a thing for women. Instead of bedding them, he married them. “My social life was as out of control as my finances,” he acknowledges.
Due to his association with a certain shady figure in Florida, King got into trouble with the law, being charged with grand larceny in 1971. A judge dismissed the case several months later, but by then King was unemployed and under a mountain of debt.
At this low point, he won $8,000 at the racetrack, then acquired a position as a publicist in Louisiana.
In 1977, he received a phone call that, as he says, “changed my life.” The Mutual Broadcasting System offered him a job as an all-night national talk show host in Miami.
Several years later, Ted Turner, the proprietor of the newly formed CNN network, came calling.
“I was probably the first major personality who went on the air for Ted,” he writes. “At the time, people called CNN the Chicken Noodle Network… I had no idea if CNN would be successful. But I liked Ted and figured it would be fun to go along for the ride.”
Describing his broadcasting style, King says he never prepares questions in advance. “I’m in the moment. I guess I have a natural ability to draw people out.”
King says that Bill Clinton, the locqacious former president of the United States, has been his best interviewee. He adds that the monosyllabic Hollywood actor Robert Mitchum was his most difficult interview. He rates Nelson Mandela, the South African freedom fighter cum politician, as the most extraordinary person he has met.
He enjoyed interviewing Vladimir Putin when he was Russia’s president. “I found Putin very genial. I was most surprised when the subject turned to his favourite place to visit. He was in New York. I asked him if he liked New York. He said it was all right, but not his favourite place. “So I said, ‘What’s your favourite place? He said, Jerusalem. That shocked me. He used to go there when he was with the KGB.”
In closing, King admits that he has a few regrets. Chief among them is his proclivity for matrimony. “I certainly wouldn’t have gotten married eight times.”
Otherwise, he seems content, his zest for living undiminished. In his will, he has instructed his current wife, a Mormon, not to pull the plug on him if he is ever on life support.
“I agree with Woody Allen. I’m not that afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”