Larry King was a an American television host, radio host, and paid spokesman. He died on January 23, 2021.
So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about Larry King.
- Larry King was born as Lawrence Harvey Zeiger
- He was born on November 19, 1933
- He died on January 23, 2021
- He was an American television host, radio host, and paid spokesman
- His work was recognized with awards including two Peabodys, an Emmy award, and 10 Cable ACE Awards
- King began as a local Florida journalist and radio interviewer in the 1950s and 1960s
- He gained prominence beginning in 1978 as host of The Larry King Show
- This was an all-night nationwide call-in radio program heard on the Mutual Broadcasting System
- From 1985 to 2010, he hosted the nightly interview television program Larry King Live on CNN
- From 2012 to 2020, he hosted Larry King Now on Hulu and RT America
- He continued to host Politicking with Larry King
- This was a weekly political talk show which aired weekly on the same two channels from 2013 until his death in 2021
- King was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 19, 1933
- He was one of two children of Jennie (Gitlitz), a garment worker who was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Aaron Zeiger, a restaurant owner and defense-plant worker who was born in Kolomyia, Austria-Hungary
- His parents were Orthodox Jews
- King attended Lafayette High School, a public high school in Brooklyn
- King’s father died at 44 of a heart attack
- This resulted in he, his mother, and brother going on welfare
- King was greatly affected by his father’s death, and subsequently lost interest in his schoolwork
- After graduating high school, Larry worked to help support his mother
- From an early age, he desired to work in radio broadcasting
- After his 1987 heart attack, King founded the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, which paid for life-saving cardiac procedures for people who otherwise would not be able to afford them
- On August 30, 2010, King served as the host of Chabad’s 30th annual “To Life” telethon, in Los Angeles
- He donated to the Beverly Hills 9/11 Memorial Garden, and his name is on the monument
- On September 10, 1990, while on The Joan Rivers Show, Rivers asked King which contestant in the Miss America pageant was “the ugliest”
- King responded, “Miss Pennsylvania. She was one of the 10 finalists and she did a great ventriloquist bit … The dummy was prettier”
- King was a judge for the September 8, 1990 pageant
- King later sent Miss Pennsylvania, Marla Wynne, a dozen long-stemmed roses and a telegram apologizing for his remarks
- In 1997, King was one of 34 celebrities to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl
- This letter was published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested the treatment of Scientologists in Germany, comparing it to the Nazis’ oppression of Jews in the 1930s
- Other signatories included Dustin Hoffman and Goldie Hawn
- In 2019, King was asked by Jacobi Niv, a friend who had in the past arranged for King to film various infomercials and promotional videos to film what King was told would be a conference video
- Niv gave King a list of scripted questions to read
- These were later edited into a video of comments by Russian journalist Anastasia Dolgova on the topic of Guo Wengui, whom Dolgova alleged had committed a number of crimes
- The video was edited to give the appearance of King and Dolgova having a live conversation
- However, the questions and answers were recorded separately and King, reading a script, was unaware of her responses, which repeated the line of the Chinese government on the issue
- Once King’s own production company saw the completed video, they refused to post it online and asked that it not be released
- Niv disregarded their objections and released the video independently on YouTube
- King’s family insisted that it be removed but once Niv took it down he found that it had been duplicated and gone viral on Twitter due to the efforts of what ProPublica alleges are Chinese government–run social media accounts
- As a result of the incident, King severed his relationship with Niv, saying he believed Niv took advantage of their friendship
- King was married eight times, to seven women
- He married high-school sweetheart Freda Miller in 1952 at age 19
- That union ended the following year at the behest of their parents, who reportedly had the marriage annulled
- King was later briefly married to Annette Kaye, who gave birth to his son, Larry Jr., in November 1961
- King did not meet Larry Jr. until the latter was in his thirties
- In 1961, King married his third wife, Alene Akins, a Playboy Bunny, at one of the magazine’s eponymous nightclubs
- King adopted Akins’ son Andy in 1962
- The couple divorced the following year
- In 1963, King married his fourth wife, Mary Francis “Mickey” Stuphin, who divorced King
- He remarried Akins, with whom he had a second child, Chaia, in 1969
- The couple divorced a second time in 1972
- In 1997, Dove Books published a book written by King and Chaia, Daddy Day, Daughter Day
- Aimed at young children, it tells each of their accounts of his divorce from Akins
- On September 25, 1976, King married his fifth wife, mathematics teacher and production assistant Sharon Lepore
- The couple divorced in 1983
- King met businesswoman Julie Alexander in 1989, and proposed to her on the couple’s first date on August 1, 1989
- Alexander became King’s sixth wife on October 7, 1989, when the two were married in Washington, D.C
- The couple lived in different cities, however, with Alexander in Philadelphia, and King in Washington, D.C., where he worked
- They separated in 1990 and divorced in 1992
- He became engaged to actress Deanna Lund in 1995, after five weeks of dating
- They remained unmarried
- In 1997, he married his seventh wife, Shawn Southwick, born in 1959, a singer, actress, and TV host
- They wed in King’s Los Angeles hospital room three days before King underwent heart surgery to clear a clogged blood vessel
- The couple had two children: Chance, born March 1999, and Cannon, born May 2000
- He was stepfather to Arena Football League quarterback Danny Southwick
- On King and Southwick’s 10th anniversary in September 2007, Southwick joked she was “the only [wife] to have lasted into the two digits”
- Larry and Shawn King filed for divorce in 2010 but reconciled
- They filed for divorce again on August 20, 2019
- King resided in Beverly Hills, California
- A lifelong Brooklyn Dodgers/Los Angeles Dodgers fan, King was frequently seen behind home plate at the team’s games
- King was previously part of an investment group that attempted to bring a Major League Baseball franchise to Buffalo, New York in 1990
- From his seven wives, King had five children and nine grandchildren, as well as four great-grandchildren
- Both of his children with Alene, Andy and Chaia, died within weeks of each other in August 2020
- Andy at 65 from a heart attack and Chaia at 51 from lung cancer
- King was a Jewish agnostic
- On February 24, 1987, King suffered a major heart attack and then had successful quintuple-bypass surgery
- Following this, King wrote two books about living with heart disease
- Mr. King, You’re Having a Heart Attack: How a Heart Attack and Bypass Surgery Changed My Life (1989) was written with New York’s Newsday science editor B. D. Colen
- Taking On Heart Disease: Famous Personalities Recall How They Triumphed over the Nation’s #1 Killer and How You Can, Too (2004) features the experience of various celebrities with cardiovascular disease including Peggy Fleming and Regis Philbin
- King related his heart attack experience in a film interview in the 2014 British documentary film The Widowmaker which discusses cardiology diagnostic tests
- King had received annual chest X-rays to monitor his heart condition
- During his 2017 examination, doctors discovered a cancerous tumor in his lung
- It was successfully removed with surgery
- On April 23, 2019, King underwent a scheduled angioplasty and also had stents inserted
- It was erroneously reported that he had suffered another heart attack along with heart failure; these claims were later retracted
- He returned to Politicking with Larry King on August 15, 2019
- On November 27, 2019, King revealed he had suffered a stroke in March 2019, and was in a coma “for weeks”
- He later admitted he had contemplated suicide following the stroke, telling Los Angeles television station KTLA, “I thought I was just going to bite the bullet. I didn’t want to live this way”
- On January 2, 2021, it was revealed that King had been hospitalized 10 days earlier in a Los Angeles hospital after testing positive for COVID-19
- On January 23, 2021, King died at the age of 87 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles
- King received many broadcasting awards
- He won the Peabody Award for Excellence in broadcasting for both his radio (1982) and television (1992) shows
- He also won 10 CableACE awards for Best Interviewer and for Best Talk Show Series
- In 1989, King was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, and in 1996 to the Broadcasters’ Hall of Fame
- In 2002, the industry publication Talkers Magazine named King both the fourth-greatest radio talk show host of all time and the top television talk show host of all time
- In 1994, King received the Scopus Award from the American Friends of Hebrew University
- In 1996, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Art Buchwald
- In June 1998, he received an honorary degree from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, for his life achievements
- He was given the Golden Mike Award for Lifetime Achievement in January 2008, by the Radio & Television News Association of Southern California
- King was an honorary member of the Rotary Club of Beverly Hills
- He was also a recipient of the President’s Award honoring his impact on media from the Los Angeles Press Club in 2006
- King was the first recipient of the Arizona State University Hugh Downs Award for Communication Excellence, presented April 11, 2007, via satellite by Downs himself
- King was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Bradley University
- King has received numerous honorary degrees from institutions as George Washington University, the Columbia School of Medicine, among others
- In 2003, King was named as recipient of the Snuffed Candle Award by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s Council for Media Integrity
- King received this award for “encouraging credulity (and) presenting pseudoscience as genuine”
- In July 2009 and again on February 2014, King appeared on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and on Conan respectively
- In December 2011, preceding a CNN Special on the topic, the Kings had a special dinner with friends Conan O’Brien, Tyra Banks, Shaquille O’Neal, Seth MacFarlane, Jack Dorsey, Quincy Jones, and Russell Brand where his intent to do so was reiterated, among other topics that were discussed
- King stated that his interest in cryonics was partly due to not believing in an afterlife or a higher power
- King said that he was an atheist and that he doubted religious claims, in part because of human suffering from natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina
- When asked what he would like his legacy to be, King, referring to himself, said, “His life led to more people having information that they didn’t have before, and he taught us a lot and we learned a lot and enjoyed it at the same time. He brought a great deal of pride to his business”
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