Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/100592/1005520.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 13KB | 241 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 74

A King Who Can Listen


The road to talk heaven has been bumpy for LARRY KING, but now
he's having the year of his life

By STANLEY W. CLOUD/WASHINGTON


    Want to know how ambitious Larry King, the top banana of
talk-show hosts, is? When King, born Larry Zeiger, was growing
up in Brooklyn, New York, and indifferent about school, his
father went to the principal and suggested that Larry's teacher
install him as eraser monitor. Most kids would have been
horrified. Eraser monitors come in early, stay late, get all
dusty with chalk, get razzed by classmates. But little Larry
Zeiger thought the job was a promotion. Sitting out there on the
playground, pounding erasers together and choking on chalk dust,
he thought he was on his way at last.

    Now, after a half-century of hustling and scratching,
after no college and hard knocks, after working as everything
from mail-room clerk to racetrack flack, after six marriages,
one annulment and five divorces, after being arrested for grand
larceny, after declaring bankruptcy, after suffering a heart
attack and undergoing bypass surgery, after all this and more,
Larry King has finally arrived. His weeknight shows on CNN and
Mutual radio are watched and listened to by more than 4 million
people. A King interview nudged Ross Perot into the
presidential arena. Another caused Dan Quayle to ruminate on
what he might do if his daughter deto have an abortion. Last
week King questioned Henry Kissinger on the POW-MIA issue, while
Perot was dickering with King's producers about using the show
to announce whether he would re-enter the race.

    If all that weren't enough, USA Today runs King's weekly
column of plugs and random thoughts (some quite a bit more
random than others). And last week a new King book -- When
You're from Brooklyn, Everything Else Is Tokyo -- was published
by Little, Brown. On the lecture circuit, King pulls in $35,000
an appearance, and his total annual income is well over $2
million. Says King: "I'm 58 years old, and I'm having the best
year of my life."

    As he speaks, he is standing on the balcony of his posh
eighth-floor apartment in Arlington, Virginia. He waves an arm
through the air. "Some view, huh?" he says in his famed Brooklyn
baritone. Some view: first the Potomac River, then a panorama
of marble. Directly ahead, in a precise line, are the Lincoln
Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capitol. To the left
is the Kennedy Center; to the right, the Jefferson Memorial.
From his balcony King can also see the Watergate apartments, the
home of his childhood friend Herbie Cohen, a successful lawyer
and consultant. King used to tell a story about how he, Herbie
and another Brooklyn teenager named Sandy Koufax (the Hall of
Fame southpaw who pitched for King's beloved Dodgers) once
drove to Connecticut to settle an argument about how many scoops
of ice cream you could get in New Haven for 15 cents.

    Good story. Funny, as King told it. He loves yarns and
tells them all the time. Like the one about being made eraser
monitor or the one about how Jackie Gleason helped him make a
name for himself on Miami TV. His stories almost always feature
some big-name celebrity. King's apartment walls are crammed
with pictures of himself and famous stars. There's a framed
letter from Sinatra that reads, "You're a good friend and --
unlike many others -- were not there to trap or ensnare me or
to sensationalize in any way." There are pictures of Ronald
Reagan, Richard Nixon, George Bush. There's a story about every
picture, about every name.

    Some may even be true. The one about Cohen, Koufax and the
ice cream, however, is not. Last year a Washington Post
reporter checked with Koufax. The former Dodger said he'd never
been to New Haven, and although he did grow up in the same
neighborhood as King, they did not really become friends until
they were adults. So why did King make the story up? Part of the
answer may lie in that Brooklyn playground where the little boy
proudly pounded erasers. King, the son of Russian-immigrant
Jewish parents, was one of those kids who, if they don't like
the way things are, imagine them to be better. Ask him about the
Koufax business, and he shrugs and looks away. "I tell a lot of
stories that are part fact, part history, part imagination," he
says quietly. "It was just a story. I guess I told it so often
that even I thought it was true."

    Despite King's monumental ego, when he sits down in front
of a microphone or camera to conduct an interview, he seems to
undergo a personality change. Suddenly, his favorite subject --
himself -- is no longer on the table. "I don't consider myself a
journalist," King says, "but journalism results from what I do."
In other words, he doesn't try to elicit facts so much as
feelings, emotions, motives. "I like questions that begin with
`why' and `how,' and I listen to the answers, which leads to
more questions." It works: when Perot on his CNN Larry King Live
show last February sounded tentative about the possibility of
running for President, King kept following up until Perot all
but announced. "My earliest memory," King says, "is of asking
questions: What did you do that for? Why did you do it?"

    King's radio show has a "more comfortable" pace, as he
puts it, and thus tends to make less news and to offer a
somewhat less glittering roster of guests. But whoever his
guests may be, King unashamedly plugs their books, records,
movies, plays, whatever, as if they were his very own. Although
he is a Democrat and self-described "Adlai Stevenson liberal,"
he stays reasonably apolitical on the air. "If I were to
interview President Bush about his alleged affair,'' he says,
"I wouldn't ask if he'd had one. I'd ask him, `How does it feel
to read these things about yourself?' "

    Every morning at 9, having worked the previous night until
2 a.m., King climbs out of his king-size bed, dons a running
suit and a pair of Mephisto athletic shoes, then paces briskly
on a treadmill for 30 minutes. He has been doing this every day
since his heart attack in 1987. He flips through six
newspapers, eats a cardiologically correct breakfast, changes
into his street clothes and -- with an 18-karat Cartier bracelet
on his right wrist and a sleek, all-black Movado watch on his
left -- descends to his apartment-house garage. There he climbs
into his black Lincoln Town Car and drives across the Key Bridge
to Georgetown, where he gets his thinning hair done by Bernard
of Okyo.

    When the familiar swept-back hairdo has been built and
lacquered, King often drives downtown for lunch at Duke
Zeibert's, one of the capital's last old-fashioned, macho places
to be seen. From his usual table, he can quickly scan, and be
scanned by, every patron who enters. For lunch he invariably has
slab after slab of Streit's salted matzos, lavishly spread with
light margarine, plus a lettuce-and-tomato salad. Between bites
he waves to and chats with all the pols, power brokers and
wannabes.

    King has produced five books about himself, an
autobiographical record that testifies both to his marketability
and his storytelling gifts -- as well as to his ego. In his
first book, published 10 years ago, before he had his national
TV show, he wrote, "When I'm 58, I would like to have a
newspaper column and be doing a one-hour radio interview show
and a television talk show on a regular basis." Except that his
radio show is three hours, those ambitions were fulfilled
exactly.

    It wasn't easy. His father Edward Zeiger died in 1944 when
Larry was only 10. (His brother Marty was six.) His mother
Jennie went on relief for a year and then got a job in a
sweatshop. King had long dreamed of being on radio and after
high school took a job in the mail room of a New York office
building that also happened to house a radio station. Five years
later, in 1957, hearing that Miami was a more promising venue,
he caught a bus heading south, started pounding on doors and
finally was hired as a disk jockey on WAHR. He changed his name
to King and soon had his own sports show.

    Not until he moved over to Miami's WKAT, however, did King
begin doing interviews with celebrities and almost anyone else
who happened by. By 1970 he was a local hit. He had a radio
talk show, a TV interview show and a newspaper column -- and he
was the color man for the Miami Dolphins. He played the horses
a lot, drove Cadillacs and was married to a former Playboy
Bunny named Alene while having affairs on the side -- "I felt
that Larry King deserved to be seen with beautiful women." He
was generally behaving, as he put it, "as if I . . . didn't
have to live by the same rules others live by."

    To prove the point, he was running up huge debts. He has
admitted ripping off some of his wealthy acquaintances, notably
Lou Wolfson, a Miami financier who in 1968 ran afoul of the
Securities and Exchange Commission. King told Wolfson he had
influence with John Mitchell, soon to be Attorney General in the
Nixon Administration. In fact, Mitchell had told King he
wouldn't handle the case, but King, claiming Mitchell's firm was
charging for legal services, was collecting thousands of dollars
from Wolfson anyway -- and pocketing the money. King also kept
a $5,000 payment that Wolfson had asked him to pass on to New
Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, whose investigation of
the John F. Kennedy assassination Wolfson partly financed.
Wolfson went to prison, but, on his release, he filed a
grand-larceny complaint against King, who was arrested by Miami
police on Dec. 20, 1971. The charge was dropped three months
later because the statute of limitations had expired.

    Suddenly, King was out of luck, out of money and out of
work. His marriage to Alene, which had produced a daughter --
King's only natural child, although he has one adopted son --
ended in divorce. (It had ended that way once before, but after
several soap-opera twists, the couple had remarried in 1967.)
King lost his TV and radio shows, his job with the Dolphins and
his newspaper column. To make ends meet he did some free-lance
radio work and later moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he
was a p.r. man for the local racetrack and did play-by-play for
the old World Football League's Shreveport Steamer.

    In 1975, when one of his former Miami stations, WIOD,
offered him his old job back, he eagerly accepted. The next year
he married for the fourth time. In 1978, by now $350,000 in
debt, he declared bankruptcy and, lured by the prospect of a
national audience, moved to Washington and launched The Larry
King Show for Mutual radio. But even as King was regaining his
balance, a new crisis was looming. He was somewhat overweight,
was working almost all night, every night, and was chain-smoking
cigarettes. In February 1987 he felt the chest pains of a major
heart attack that would force him to shape up and slow down.

    Now, despite a couple of more bad marriages, he is at the
top of his form and the top of his game. Each evening during
the week, he drives from his apartment to the CNN studio in
Washington, whence Larry King Live originates. There, with the
considerable assistance of his executive producer, Tamara
Haddad, who screens his calls for pace and subject matter --
"Quickly, what's the question? No, I already got five people who
want to ask that" -- King conducts the show that has made so
much news this year. He famously does it with virtually no
advance preparation, a technique he says helps him ask the kind
of questions the people in his audience would ask. When the TV
show is over, he drives to the Mutual studios for his radio
show. His audiences seem to love him -- even when he is rough
on them. Recently a caller to the "Open Phone America" portion
of his radio show (for which calls are not screened) babbled
incoherently for 30 seconds before King punched the button and
growled into his mike, "How was he able to dial?"

    Having fulfilled one personal 10-year plan, King in the
next decade would like to ease back gradually and maybe do a
little acting. He even dreams of taking a summer off to be a
baseball announcer. But the man who was once a wide-eyed eraser
monitor knows very well what got him where he is. "I never want
to give up my TV show," he says. "If -- God forbid -- I ever
became President, I'd keep right on doing Larry King Live from
the White House."