Rise to Fame
A Brooklyn kid named Lawrence Harvey Zeiger borrowed his stage name from a newspaper liquor ad minutes before his first broadcast. His Miami radio career got derailed in 1971 when he was arrested on grand larceny charges and lost his job at WIOD. The comeback was a nationwide call-in show on the Mutual Broadcasting System that grew to 500 affiliates. CNN came calling in 1985, and Larry King Live ran for 25 years as cable news's most coveted interview seat.
In the Spotlight
The knock on him was always that he threw softballs. He didn't read guest books. He didn't ambush. He asked 'What's it about?' to authors of books they'd spent years writing. But that approach made him the safest landing pad in American media for anyone with something to sell or explain, which is why Ross Perot chose Larry King Live to announce his 1992 presidential campaign, and why the Perot-Gore NAFTA debate drew 16.3 million viewers. He died in 2021 with a handwritten will leaving his estate to his five children and a probate fight already underway with his widow.
Side Notes
Eight marriages to seven women (he married Alene Akins twice, once in 1961 and again in 1967) made his personal life an ongoing tabloid subplot. In the summer of 2020, five months before his own death, his son Andy died of a heart attack at 65 and his daughter Chaia died of lung cancer at 52 within weeks of each other. He'd already filed for divorce from his final wife in 2019. After his 1987 heart attack, he founded the Larry King Cardiac Foundation to provide free cardiac procedures to uninsured patients, a detail that doesn't fit any clean narrative about him.
Final Chapter
He died January 23, 2021, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from sepsis, not COVID-19 directly, though he'd been hospitalized with COVID in December 2020. Family members wore his signature suspenders at a private funeral held the following week. A handwritten 2019 will left his estate to his five children; widow Shawn Southwick King challenged it in probate court alleging undue influence, and the dispute settled confidentially in June 2021.