King - Truth be told : off the record about favorite guests, memorable moments, funniest jokes, and a half century of asking questions

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY LARRY KING

My Remarkable Journey

The Peoples Princess

My Dad and Me

Taking on Heart Disease

Remember Me When Im Gone

Anything Goes!

Powerful Prayers

Future Talk

How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere

The Best of Larry King Live

When Youre from Brooklyn, Everything Else Is Tokyo

On the Line

Tell Me More

Tell It to the King

Larry King

This book is dedicated to Hunter Waters.

Hunter was a Larry King Live producer who passed away with esophageal cancer early this year at the age of thirty-two.

I remain amazed by people of faith who can explain the passing of such a young, vital person. It always made me happy to see his smiling face. I always loved hearing the sound of his voice.

Rest well.

Time

Ive never thought much about time, because Ive always been too busy looking at my watch.

That sounds like something Yogi Berra might say. But its true. You cant be a broadcaster without being extremely conscious of the clock. Im never late. I remember a time after I had heart surgery. I was at the La Costa Resort, waiting for my surgeon to meet me so we could head to the airport. I said, Jeez, where is he? Somebody who knew him said, He can be late. Hes a surgeon. Surgery doesnt start without him.

A broadcaster cannot be late. Well, he can. But hell be fired. For fifty-three years, my day has been planned around six oclocks and nine oclocks. Its hard to explain how conscious of the clock that makes you. I can only give you a sense.

Not only are you always conscious of the hour when youre in broadcasting, but you also have a heightened awareness of seconds. When youve repeatedly got to slide into a commercial break, you understand exactly how long five seconds lasts.

I used to have a cheap little clock on the set of Larry King Live. Every time Jerry Seinfeld came on as a guest hed swipe it. It wasnt a case of: The shows over, heres your clock. Hed never give it back. Id have to go to Radio Shack and buy another.

Jerry, I finally saidafter he took it for the third time. Give the clock back.

You dont need it, he said. Youve got a clock in your head.

He was right. But the strange thing about the clock in my head is that it always seems to be in the future. This is how it feels: Just say theres a miracle and I landed an interview with God on Monday night. Itd be on the front page of every newspaper: LARRY KING TO INTERVIEW GOD MONDAY. You know what Id be thinking? What am I going to be doing on Wednesday night?

For fifty-three years, thats the way my mind has worked: thinking about whats next and constantly checking my watch to make sure Im on time for it. But thats very different from stopping to think about time and the meaning of its passing.

As my CNN show wound down the last two weeks of its twenty-five-year run, a moment came that made me stop to reflect. During the final minute of a satellite interview with Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister invited me to Moscow. Then, through his interpreter, he turned the tables on me.

Can I ask you one question?

Sure.

In U.S. mass media, he said, there are many talented and interesting people. But, still, there is just one king there. I dont ask why he is leaving. But, still, what do you think? We have a right to cry out: Long live the King! When will there be another man in the world as popular as you happen to be?

Ive never taken compliments well, and my head dipped. Its OK in broadcasting to look down at your notes for an instant. But your eyes cant become glued to your desk. My head just wouldnt come up. I doubt many broadcasters have been faced with a similar situation. It wasnt a mistake. A reaction isnt a mistake. I was humbled.

For the first time since May 1, 1957, I was speechless. That moment with Putin connected me to my first moment on the air.

As I lowered the music to my theme song in the control booth of a tiny radio station in Miami Beach, my mouth felt like cotton. I couldnt introduce myself. I opened my mouth, but no words came out. WAHR listeners must have wondered what the hell was going on when I took up the theme song again and lowered it once more. Again, no words came out. Maybe the audience could hear the pounding of my heartbut that was about it. I took up the theme song again, then brought it down for the third time. Nothing. Thats when the station manager kicked open the control room door and screamed: This is a communications business!

It was as if he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook the words out of me. I told the microphone how all my life Id dreamed of being a broadcaster. I told it how nervous I was. I told it how the station manager had just changed my name a few minutes earlier and then kicked open the door. I let myself be me, and the words started flowing.

So my career had started with an awkward moment of speechlessness. I couldnt believe I was actually on the air. And now my television show was approaching an end with another speechless moment. The prime minister of Russia has just called me a king.

The same lesson I learned on my first day guided me through the awkwardness fifty-three years later: Theres no trick to being yourself.

My head came up to look at Putin in the monitor. My words were not memorable, but they were sincere.

Thank you. Thank you, I told him. I have no answer to that.

In so many ways, the end has brought me back to the beginning. The moment with Putin makes me look back on everything thats happened since my mother came to America by boat from the tsars Russia. I can picture my mother. If I close my eyes, I can even hear her voice: Again, youre unemployed?

She had a great sense of humor, Jenny Zeiger. The classic Jewish mother. Truth is, only my mother would have believed that a kid like me, who never went to college, could have had such success. The more I look back, the more unbelievable it becomes. There have been so many twists and turns.

I think of my earliest memories of the Russians. As a boy I rooted for them when I studied World War II maps in the newspapers. They were fighting the Germans on the second front.

Everyone I knew loved Joe Stalin. Papa Joe, we called him. By the time I got my first teenage kiss, we hated him. Stalin had seized the Eastern bloc.

There was panic in America the year I started in radio. Sputnik had been launched. We were no longer in the lead. The Soviets could look down on us. I was a married man with a young son when I saw tanks roll down the streets of Miami during the Cuban missile crisis.

Humor helps after moments like that. The comedian Mort Sahl did a funny bit on how things change: An American soldier gets knocked unconscious during World War II and doesnt wake up until more than fifteen years later.

Get me my gun! he says. Get me my gun! Im gonna go kill those Germans!

No, no, the doctors try to calm him, the Germans are our friends.

Are you crazy? the soldier says, Weve got to help the Russians get the Germans.

No, no, no. World War II ended years ago. The

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