Background

Ethnicity: Larry King's parents were both Jewish emigrants. His mother, Jennie (Gitlitz), was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, and his father, Aaron Zeiger, was born in Kolomyia, Ukraine.

Larry King was born Lawrence Leibel Harvey Zeiger on November 19, 1933, in New York City, New York, the United States, Jennie (Gitlitz), a garment worker, and Aaron Zeiger, a restaurant owner, and defense-plant worker. Larry also had a younger brother, Marty.

Education

Larry King grew up in Brooklyn, where he attended Lafayette High School, a public high school. When King was only nine years old, his father suffered from a fatal heart attack, throwing the family into economic chaos and forcing them to go on welfare. His dad’s passing so emotionally affected the young and impressionable Larry, he lost nearly all interest in school and started getting into big trouble.

His mother decided to opt for government welfare in order to support both her sons, due to financial constraints. After he graduated from high school, he decided that he would work to support his mother and never went to college. However, from very early on, his lifelong dream was to have a career in the radio business.

Career

After a number of early struggles, Larry King persevered and got his first job in the radio. A chance meeting with a CBS television announcer set King on the pathway to a career in radio. The announcer told him to go to Florida, a state with a growing media market that was hiring inexperienced broadcasters. Here, he was asked to perform a number of odd jobs.

But when one of their male announcers quit in May of 1957, King was put on to replace him. He must have impressed his manager because King was immediately put on the 9:00 AM to noon shift. He also did two-afternoon newscasts and a sportscast. Doing all this while receiving a $55 a week salary made the young King feel he was fulfilling his long-time dream.

The name he was going by at the time, Larry Zeiger, didn't sit well with the station's general manager since he thought it sounded too ethnic and was hard to remember. Minutes before the young King was to go on air, he chose the last name "King" after seeing an advertisement for King's Wholesale Liquor. King soon found popularity in the South Florida radio scene.

Larry King was a popular personality in the south Florida radio market. His success in the medium led him to try his hand in the emerging world of television, and in 1960 he began hosting a program on a Miami station. He hosted Miami Undercover, on which he presented debates pertaining to important issues of the time.

During this time and through the early 1970s, he maintained shows on both radio and television and added newspaper columns in The Miami Herald and The Miami News, which helped fuel his popularity in Florida. King's hard-earned success shuddered to an unfortunate halt in the 1970s.

During the 1960s, he overspent wildly, gambled on horses, and failed to pay his taxes. He also became involved with Lou Wolfson, a shady Florida financier who had been connected with the scandal that led to the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas in 1969.

King left Florida radio in 1971, taking his talents and his focus to the West Coast, where he rebuilt his career by writing magazine articles and working in radio. By the mid-1970s, the time had healed his reputation and image and he was welcomed back into the market where he had started: south Florida.

After building his show up in Miami, King was able to take his self-titled radio program, The Larry King Show, to a national audience in 1978, making it the first nationwide call-in show. The show featured guest interviews and call-ins from the listening audience and became very successful, growing to over 500 affiliate stations. This work caught the attention of media mogul Ted Turner, who hired King to host his own talk show on the then-fledgling Cable News Network (CNN) in 1985.

The program was television’s first live phone-in show with an international audience. It became known not only for King’s off-the-cuff interview style (he prided himself on doing very little research on his guests) but for its popularity as a platform for political candidates.

As a testament to the show's influence, Ross Perot chose to announce his 1992 presidential bid on Larry King Live. In addition, King has also used his show as a portal for other fundraising events, including disaster relief in New Orleans and Haiti.

Though Perot failed to secure the presidency, the following year he and Vice Pres. Al Gore used King’s show as a forum for debating the North American Free Trade Agreement. Over time King became an internationally recognized figure, as famous as the celebrities, newsmakers, and world leaders that he interviewed.

In December 2010 Larry King Live ended its run, after 25 years on the air. British tabloid journalist Piers Morgan was chosen to take over for King. King resumed interviewing notable personalities on Larry King Now, a talk show that premiered on the Web site Hulu in 2012, and the following year he added the talk show PoliticKING with Larry King.

Outside his career as a talk show host, King has appeared as himself in several movies and television shows. He's also done voice work in such animated films as Shrek 2 (2004), Shrek the Third (2007), and Bee Movie (2007). He's also written several books on heart disease after he suffered a heart attack in 1987. King's autobiography, My Remarkable Journey, was published in 2009.

In 2012 King launched his own web series, Larry King Now, which is in the same vein as his TV talk show on CNN. In addition, he participated in documentaries, including 1989: The Year That Made Us (2019) and Dispatches from Quarantine (2020).

Achievements

• 

  Larry King Live, hosted on CNN, had a successful run from 1985 to 2010. It is deemed as one of the longest-running talk-show programs in American history, with a whopping total of one million viewers every night. This one-hour show was broadcast three times a day and could be seen by audiences all over the world on CNN International.
  
  Some of the notable episodes of the show included the debate between Ross Perot and Al Gore, the episode with Ryan Seacrest, and the episode featuring the ailing Tammy Faye Messner. The success of the show was phenomenal and is still regarded as his biggest accomplishment.
  
  In 1989, Larry King was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame. He was presented the Peabody Award for Excellence in broadcasting for both radio and television shows, in 1982 and 1992 respectively. He was also the proud recipient of the President’s Award, honoring his impact on media from the Los Angeles Press Club, in 2006.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Primary Colors

    (John Travolta leads an all-star cast - including Oscar wi...)

    1998
  • Crazy People

    (A bitter ad executive who has reached his breaking point ...)

    1990
  • Dave

    (Just who runs this country anyway? Uncanny Presidential l...)

    1993
  • Bulworth

    (A veteran US Senator decides to end his life by hiring an...)

    1998
  • The Stepford Wives

    (Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick star in this dark com...)

    2004
  • Contact

    (Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey star in this grippin...)

    1997
  • Exorcist III

    (A haunted homicide detective is confronted by the apparen...)

    1990
  • John Q

    (Denzel Washington delivers a searing performance as a des...)

    2002
  • Shrek 2

    (Lovable ogre Shrek has his marriage to a princess come un...)

    2004
  • Shrek the Third

    (Get ready for Thirds - the greatest fairytale never told ...)

    2007
  • The Jackal

    (A Russian mobster pulls out the stops, hiring the world's...)

    1997
  • Enemy Of The State

    (A lawyer goes on the run after he is given a video tying ...)

    1999
  • Power of Few

    (Religious conspiracy collides with urban crime on a day o...)

    2013
  • Swing Vote

    (In a remarkable turn-of-events, the result of the preside...)

    2008
  • Shrek Forever After

    (The further adventures of the giant green ogre, Shrek, li...)

    2010
  • The Contender

    (Sexy secrets from a woman's past come to light as she run...)

    2000
  • The Kid

    (A man's life is upended when he meets a 9-year-old versio...)

    2000
  • Bee Movie

    (Having just graduated from college, a bee by the name of ...)

    2007
  • Chloe & Theo

    (From the northern ice comes a gentler kind of hero.)

    2015

• TV series

  • American Crime Story

    (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story explores...)

    2016

Religion

Larry King described himself as a Jewish agnostic in 2005. Ten years later, King stated that he was fully atheist. He also said that religious differences caused the collapse of his marriage to Mormon Shawn Southwick.

Politics

In 2016, King stated that he would have to vote for Hillary Clinton, despite his close friendship with Donald Trump. King considered himself an independent. He recalled he voted for Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential race, which saw the California Republican win his first term in office.

Views

Larry King established the Larry King Cardiac Foundation in 1988 after quintuple bypass heart surgery. He also donated $1 million to George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs for scholarships to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. King also provided information to help viewers understand and get involved in nationwide and global relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina.

Quotations: "You cannot talk to people successfully if they think you are not interested in what they have to say or you have no respect for them."

"If at first, you don't succeed, punt."

Membership

Larry King was an honorary member of the Rotary Club of Beverly Hills.

• 

  Rotary Club

Personality

Larry King never prepared for any of his interviews because he believed that the audience would know very little about the interviewee and as a result, he preferred to ask basic questions to the interviewee to get to know them through the course of the show. King also swore never to read any of the books the people coming on his show had written. According to King, he wanted to come at it fresh and be in the same position as his audience members.

Interests

• reading

• Politicians

  Richard Nixon

• Writers

  The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly, One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson, Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert, Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, How to Overthrow the Government by Arianna Huffington

• Sport & Clubs

  baseball, Los Angeles Dodgers

• Music & Bands

  Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, the Beatles

Connections

Larry King was married eight times. When he was just 19 years old, King married his high school sweetheart Freda Miller. In 1953, just a year after they wed, their families forced the sweethearts to annul the union. In the early 1960s, King met and then rushed into marriage with Annette Kaye. Kaye gave birth to a son, Larry Jr., in November 1961.

Before the year was even up, King and Kaye had divorced, and this was no conscious uncoupling. For one, King all but abandoned his newborn son and didn’t actually meet the boy until Larry, Jr. was well into his thirties.

The very same year his son was born, King took up with the beautiful Alene Akins. Their first meeting was a very racy affair: Alene was a Playboy Bunny, and King actually met her while he was at one of the Playboy-branded nightclubs. The broadcaster obviously liked what he saw, because he then married her in 1961 and even adopted her son Andy.

King’s marriage to Alene Akins was as rocky. After a year of marriage, they divorced, and King took up with his fourth wife, Mary Sutphin. When they divorced, King ended up with Akins. They married again and had a child together, Chaia, in 1969. King and Alene Akins divorced for good in 1972, and his next marriage, this time to math teacher Sharon Lepore, fell apart in 1983.

By 1989, when King met his new love interest, businesswoman Julie Alexander, it all really started to spiral. King was so blasé about marriage that he actually proposed to Alexander on their very first date. This was also despite the fact that she lived in Philadelphia while he worked in Washington. This union with his sixth wife lasted exactly one year.

In 1997, King married his seventh wife, Shawn Southwick, a singer and an actress who hosted a television show. Southwick was more than 25 years younger than King. Southwick and King tied the knot in a hospital room. King was just about to go in for full-on heart surgery on a clogged blood vessel, and the iconic journalist likely wanted to feel less alone throughout the whole process. The pair later had two children together, Chance and Cannon.

Shawn Southwick ended up being Larry King’s final wife, but their marriage still didn’t last. When the couple made it to their 10th anniversary in 2007, Southwick lightly joked that she was "the only [wife] to have lasted into the two digits." Despite this, they first filed for divorce in 2010, reconciled, and then filed again in 2019.

Father:

Aaron Zeiger

Mother:

Jennie Gitlitz

ex-wife:

Freda Miller

ex-wife:

Annette Kaye

Son:

Larry King Jr.

ex-wife:

Alene Akins

ex-wife:

Mary Sutphin

Daughter:

Chaia King

Son:

Andy King

Son:

Cannon Edward King

Son:

Chance Armstrong King

ex-wife:

Julie Alexander

ex-wife:

Shawn Southwick

ex-wife:

Sharon Lepore

Friend:

Ted Turner

Ted Turner was King's best man during the King-Southwick Mormon-Jewish wedding ceremony.

Friend:

Donald Trump

References

• My Remarkable Journey The definitive autobiography of one of the most famous personalities in television history - an intimate, revealing, and riveting memoir that will show a Larry King the world has never known, up close and personal.
  2009