No cause of death was given, but a spokesperson said Jan. 4 that King had COVID-19, had received supplemental oxygen and had been moved out of intensive care. His son Chance Armstrong also affirmed King’s departure, CNN reported.
Together with his celebrity interviews, political debates and topical talks, King was not just an enduring on-air character. He also set himself apart with the curiosity he brought to each interview, even whether questioning the assault victim known as the Central Park jogger or billionaire industrialist Ross Perot, who in 1992 rocked the presidential contest by announcing his candidacy on King’s show.
In its early decades,”Larry King Live” was based in Washington, which gave the show an air of gravitas. Likewise King. He was the plainspoken go-between through whom Beltway bigwigs can reach their public, and they did, making the display prestige for a place where things happened, where information was created.
King ran a estimated 50,000 on-air interviews. In 1995 he presided over a Middle East peace summit with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Especially after he relocated to Los Angeles, his displays were frequently from the thick of breaking celebrity news, including Paris Hilton speaking about her stint in prison in 2007 along with Michael Jackson’s friends and family members talking about his death in 2009.
King boasted of not overpreparing for an interview. His nonconfrontational style relaxed his guests and made him easily relatable to his audience.
“I don’t pretend to know all of it,” he explained in a 1995 Associated Press interview. ′ I inquire,’Mr. President, what do not you enjoy about this job? ′ Or’What’s the biggest mistake you ever made? ′ That is fascinating.”
At a time when CNN since the only participant in cable information was deemed politically neutral, and King was the essence of its middle-of-the-road position, political figures and individuals at the center of controversies would search out his series.
And he was famous for getting guests that had been notoriously elusive. Frank Sinatra, who seldom gave interviews and frequently lashed out at reporters, spoke to King in 1988 in what would be the singer’s final significant TV appearance. Sinatra was an older buddy of King’s and acted so.
“Why are you here?” King asks. Sinatra responds,”Since you asked me to come and that I had not seen you in a long time to start out with, I thought we ought to get together and talk, simply talk about a lot of things.”
King had never met Marlon Brando, who had been tougher to get and harder to interview, when the acting giant requested to appear on King’s show in 1994. The two hit it off so famously they finished their 90-minute talk with a tune and an on-the-mouth kiss, an image that was all over media in following weeks.
After a gala week declared his 25th anniversary in June 2010, King abruptly announced he was retiring from his series, telling viewers,”It’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders.” Named as his successor at the time slot: British journalist and TV personality Piers Morgan.
From King’s departure that December, suspicion had grown that he had waited a bit too long to hang up those suspenders. Once the leader in cable TV news, he ranked third in his time slot with less than half of the nightly audience his peak year, 1998, when”Larry King Live” drew 1.64 million audiences.
His wide-eyed, regular-guy approach to interviewing by then felt obsolete within an era of edgy, pushy or rich questioning by other hosts.
Meanwhile, occasional flubs had left him seem out of touch, or even worse. A prime example from 2007 found King inquiring Jerry Seinfeld if he had voluntarily left his sitcom or been canceled by his own community, NBC.
“I was the No. 1 show in tv, Larry,” replied Seinfeld with a flabbergasted look. “Do you know who I am?”
Consistently a workaholic, King would be back doing specials for CNN inside a few months of accomplishing his nightly duties.
He discovered a new sort of star as a plainspoken natural on Twitter when the platform emerged, winning over more than two million followers who simultaneously mocked and adored him for his esoteric style.
“I’ve never been in a canoe. #Itsmy2cents,” he said in a normal tweet in 2015.
His Twitter accounts was a revival of a USA Today column that he wrote for two decades filled with one-of-a-kind, disjointed thoughts. Norm Macdonald delivered a parody version of the column when he played with King on”Saturday Night Live,” with deadpan lines like,”The longer I think about it, the more I value the equator.”
King was always parodied, often through old-age jokes on late-night conversation shows from hosts including David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, often emerging with all the latter to get in about the roasting himself.
King came with his voracious but no-frills manner honestly.
He was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in 1933, a son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who conducted a bar and grill in Brooklyn. But following his father’s passing when Larry was a boy, he confronted a troubled, occasionally destitute youth.
A fan of these radio stars as Arthur Godfrey and comedians Bob & Ray, King on attaining maturity set his sights on a broadcasting career. When a deejay abruptly ceased, King was set on the atmosphere — and was passed his new surname by the station manager, who believed Zeiger”too Jewish.”
A year after he transferred to a bigger channel, where his responsibilities were expanded from the usual patter to serving as host of a daily interview show which aired from a local restaurant. He quickly proved equally adept at speaking to the waitresses, and the celebrities who started dropping by.
From the early 1960s King had gone to a bigger Miami channel, scored a newspaper column and become a local performer himself.
At the exact same time, he fell victim to living large.
“It was important for me to encounter as a’big guy,”’ he wrote in his autobiography, which meant”I left a great deal of cash and spread it around lavishly.”
He gathered his first broken unions (he had been married eight times to seven women). He gambled, made wildly and neglected to pay his taxes. In addition, he became involved with a shady financier at a scheme to bankroll an investigation of President John Kennedy’s assassination. But when King skimmed a number of the money to pay his overdue taxes, his partner sued him for grand larceny in 1971. The charges were dropped, however King’s standing appeared destroyed.
King dropped his radio show and, for several years, struggled to find work. However, by 1975 that the scandal had mostly blown over along with a Miami channel gave him another opportunity. Regaining his regional popularity, King was signed in 1978 to sponsor radio’s first nationwide call-in show.
Originating from Washington about the Mutual network,”The Larry King Show” was finally heard on over 300 channels and made King a national phenomenon.
A couple of decades after, CNN founder Ted Turner offered King a slot on his young community. “Larry King Live” surfaced June 1, 1985, and became CNN’s highest-rated program. King’s beginning salary of $100,000 annually finally climbed to over $100,000 million.
A three-packs-a-day cigarette addiction resulted in a heart attack in 1987, but King’s quintuple-bypass surgery didn’t slow him down.
Meanwhile, he continued to prove that, in his words,”I’m not good at marriage, but I am a great boyfriend.”
He was just 18 when he wed high school girlfriend Freda Miller, in 1952. The union lasted less than a year. In subsequent decades he’d wed Annette Kay, Alene Akins (double ), Mickey Sutfin, Sharon Lepore and Julie Alexander.
In 1997, he married Shawn Southwick, a country singer and actress 26 years his junior. They would file for divorce in 2010, rescind the filing, then file for divorce in 2019.
The couple had two sons — King’s fourth and fifth children, Chance, born in 1999, also Cannon Edward, born in 2000. In 2020, King dropped his two oldest children, Andy King and Chaia King, who died of unrelated health problems within weeks of each other.
He had many other medical problems in recent decades, including more heart attacks and diagnoses of type 2 diabetes and lung cancer.
Through his insecurities that he continued to work into his late 80s, shooting on online talk shows and infomercials as his appearances on CNN grew fewer.
“It’s the easiest thing I do.”
Funeral arrangements along with a memorial service will be declared later in communicating with the King family,”who ask for their privacy at this time,” in accordance with the tweet out of Ora Media.
