Larry King
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Since 1985, King has hosted CNN’s nightly interview show, Larry King Live. The title is increasingly ironic as time passes and the evenings when King doesn’t seem on the verge of death grow fewer and further between.
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Early life and career
King grew up in Brooklyn. When he was nine, his 44-year-old father dropped dead of a heart attack, and his mother had to go on welfare (relief, it was then called) to support the remaining family. King lost interest in school and did not attend college; instead he took a stranger’s advice and hopped a bus for Florida to pursue his dream of a career in radio. From that day forward, King’s first piece of advice to anyone interested in getting a foot in the door in broadcasting is to take a 20-hour bus trip to a culture-free location based on a tip from someone you barely know.
King made his on-air debut on May 1, 1957 on WIOD in Miami, when someone suddenly quit and there was no one else to shove on the air at 9am but the gofer. The station manager, Marshall Simonds, gave King a regular gig but, fearing that “Zeiger” screamed “Jew,” also gave him the new and improved ethnic-free surname “King.” The name was inspired by a newspaper advertisement Simonds had seen for King’s Wholesale Liquors, a Miami establishment. Little did King know how close he was to being known throughout his career as “Larry Rocko’s Discount Lingerie.”
King was quickly making $55 a week, spinning records in the morning and doing sports and the news in the afternoon. Foreshadowing his need for excessive exposure that he would so indulge in the latter part of the 20th century, King soon added an interview show to the soup. A local TV show followed, as did the role of color commentator for the Miami Dolphins. Things were going well.
Too well.
Criminal record
On December 20, 1971, King was arrested and charged with grand larceny in connection with a complicated series of events that defy explanation, but by most accounts involve some sort of stock deal gone wrong. This run-in with the law resulted in King’s notoriously awful mug shot.
The case was eventually resolved with King’s plea of no contest to a single charge of passing bad checks. Still, these shenanigans were sufficient to derail King’s radio career, and he was off the air for three years. It was a peaceful three years for the Florida community and for the broadcast world at large.
Question-asking
King got back into radio with a gig as color commentator for Louisiana’s Shreveport Steamer of the World Football League (not to be confused with Ohio’s Cleveland Steamer of the World Coprophilic Sexual Practices League). In 1978, King began hosting the Mutual Radio Network’s national overnight show and filling five-and-a-half hours a night with interviews and phone calls from listeners. The show ran until 1994.
On June 3, 1985 he added a similarly formatted nightly hour on CNN, where his softball questions to guests about whom he’s done absolutely no research can be heard to this day. Oddly, this lack of preparation, which might seem like something to be embarrassed about, is instead something King is proud of. Among the lines of questioning this willful ignorance inspires:
- “You are?”
- “How did you know the victim?”
- “So, why are you here? What do you have to do with this story?”
- “How do you feel?”
- “Hello?”
Though being totally unprepared and firing a barrage of frivolous questions might sound like a recipe for terrible interviews, King has had pretty much everybody in the world on his show over the years, and has won more than a dozen awards for his work, which says something extremely not good about the culture.
The utter toothlessness of King’s interrogative style was best evoked in 1992 by Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg, who imagined what King might ask the likes of Hitler (“So, tell me, Adolf, how did you move all that furniture up the mountain to the Wolf’s Lair?”), Stalin (“Hey, Joe, where can I get one of those overcoats like yours?”), Jack the Ripper (“Something I’ve always wondered – how do you see so well in the dark?"), Yasser Arafat (“How often do you shave?"), and Ted Kennedy (“The car that went into the drink. Did it get good mileage?”).
Health issues
On February 24, 1987, King’s dickish decades-long habit of smoking as much as three packs of cigarettes a day led inexorably to a major heart attack and subsequent quintuple-bypass surgery. It also indirectly led to the publication of his book, Mr. King, You’re Having a Heart Attack, which laid out the groundbreaking hypothesis that smoking three packs a day for years and years is not beneficial to one’s health.
His women
King is currently on marriage number seven, to Shawn Southwick, a collagen-lipped Renaissance woman (singer / model / actress) 27 years his junior. They have been married ten years, a record for King, and have not yet set a date for their divorce.
King, in his sixties at the time, somehow managed to impregnate Southwick twice, producing two sons: Chance (named to remind King how the son came to be) and Cannon (named to remind King of what his penis doesn’t in any way resemble).
Movies
Apparently feeling that his level of overexposure is insufficient, King has carved out an acting career. He has appeared in dozens of movies and television episodes, almost always playing “Himself,” a dick named Larry King.
King’s connection to the cinema extends beyond his work in front of the camera. He is also one of the nation’s most prolific quote whores, and his preposterous raves continue to adorn the advertisements for countless movies that most legitimate critics loathed. Among his critical bon mots: “Sean Penn gives the performance of a lifetime,” not in Dead Man Walking or Sweet and Lowdown or I Am Sam or Mystic River, all movies for which the actor and dick received Academy Award nominations, but rather in the laughable remake of the classic film All the King’s Men.
Nor is King in any way judicious with hyperbole. King deemed The Good Shepherd “The Best Spy Movie Ever!” Two For the Money, though unseen by pretty much the entire population of the world, was to King, “The Best Movie About Gambling Ever Made!” The not-totally-awful Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely was “Far and Away the Best Musical Biography Ever Made!”
In 2007, King revealed his reviewing philosophy to Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. “I know they’re only looking for a catchphrase. If I like the movie, I give ‘em a quote. If I don’t like something, I’m not gonna rap it.” King recounted his bewilderment when he took his most recent family to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. “I had no idea what was going on. I turned to my wife and said, ‘What is this movie about? I don’t get it.” The quote that appeared above his name in movie ads: “Finally, a Movie Worth Seeing Over and Over Again!”
Writing
Though King is the putative author of many books that are widely believed to have been ghostwritten, the purest examples of his own writing style appeared in the USA Today column that ran every Monday for almost 20 years. For dedicated fans of the column, its demise on September 24, 2001 was as harrowing as the more obviously impactful events of thirteen days earlier.
Though often mere recaps of televised interviews, it was in the seemingly casually-dashed-off observations that often ended the columns that King found his true métier as a writer. If the highlights of his two decades of newspaper work were collected into one big fat paragraph, it might read like this:
“…Peppermint is best in mouthwash … That El Nino wasn't fooling around … I still like full service at the gas station … Milk tastes better out of a bottle … The shopping mall at the Pittsburgh Airport is as nice, if not nicer, than most in the whole country … I wonder what percentage of folks still use fountain pens … I can't explain it, but there's something about a fax machine that turns me off … My all-time favorite movie candy is Good 'n Plenty … I hope Alec Baldwin knows how good an actor he is … Do guys get shaves at barber shops anymore? … The older I get the less I like winter … When they miss delivering my morning paper, it's going to be a bad day all day … I never see men wear fedoras anymore … Whenever I can, I still watch Columbo repeats on A&E … You look up the word funny in the dictionary, you get a photo of Sinbad … Do kids still shoot marbles?”
Miss Pennsylvania
King was a judge at the 1990 Miss America pageant. A few days later he appeared on fellow dick Joan Rivers’s talk show. Rivers asked him who the “ugliest” contestant was. Unequivocally he shot back, “Miss Pennsylvania,” adding, “She did a great ventriloquist bit. The dummy was prettier.” The girl’s mother did not take this observation lightly. “For him to attack any girl who was on that stage, in his position as a judge, I think, is contemptible.”
Contemptible, yes, but also transcendently dickish, hence the story’s inclusion in this entry.
Little League controversy
On March 10, 2008, during a little league game in which his son was playing, King got into a confrontation with one of the league’s umpires. According to an eyewitness, "[Mr. King] was making a fool out of himself as a manager on the field, talking in the middle of the field in the middle of plays." The TV host was relegated to the bleachers, but after continuing to be disruptive, was forced to watch the game from beyond the outfield.
Thus, the circle of life continues as dick fathers embarrass their dick sons, thereby passing their dickishness along across generations. (See also: George Bush and George W. Bush)
Trivia
Despite King’s adoption of a regal surname, there is no traceable royal blood in his lineage.
In the photo featured on his Wikipedia page, King looks like an angry bullfrog.
