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"FacebookPinterest\n\nOurs is an undeniably cruel culture, most often in ways that are lazy and incidental. Although Larry King is thrilled to have become, as he'll put it, \"a broadcasting legend,\" deep down he wishes he had been a comedian. But more and more often these days he must endure being a punch line. At the end of Jimmy Fallon's first week on latenight TV, to offer a typical instance, Fallon's monologue included the following quip:\n\nCNN doctor Sanjay Gupta\u2026turned down the surgeongeneral job because he would have to take a pay cut.\u2026You have no idea how much money CNN pays him to keep Larry King alive.\n\nWhatever lackadaisical comedy this contains is carried by one notion alone: \"Larry King\u2026wow, he's old.\" And maybe by one question, too: \"Is he really still here\" Told of Fallon's gibe, King chuckles, but not, I feel, from any irrepressible bubbling over of internal mirth. Maybe one of the skills he's gathered over the same protracted, often derided time span\u2014one that has helped him thrive for so long\u2014is of instantly recognizing the least bad conversational option. In this instance Chuckle, don't protest too much, wait until you can carry on doing what you do.\n\n\"Yeah, I get it,\" he says. \"I'm old. You know, I'm used to it. I let it go by. My wife hates it. I'm really not bothered. It's like saying, 'Larry King has bad eyes.' It's a fact. Hey, if I had one wish, I'd be 36. I don't like being this age; I don't like being thought of as this age. I don't like when I get the ache and pain when I wake up in the morning. I don't like going to the bathroom three times a night, which every 75yearold on earth does.\" (He doesn't need to explain further, but he does: \"Because all prostates get bigger.\")\n\nKing himself never used to think he'd make it this far. His father died of a heart attack at 47. \"When I was a kid, I used to think I'd die at 47. When I was 45, I said, 'Two more years.' So I always thought I was on borrowed time.\" He survived a heart attack at 53, after which he jettisoned a load of bad habits but barely slowed down, and now, more than twenty years later, he still hosts an hour of live primetime cable TV most nights of the year. Of course, there are drawbacks. He doesn't like how aware you are that death is getting closer, or the realization that time goes unstoppably faster and faster, or the pain halfway up his thighs that never goes away, or the way he'll find himself taking a nap without ever planning to, or the awareness that his memory isn't always what it was, or having to acknowledge the truth of what Mike Wallace told him over lunch last year\u2014that you will no longer be able to savor feeling better tomorrow than you do today. But he's still never had a bad headache or a bad back. That's something. And he still feels up to doing what he does quite well. \"As Sinatra said once, there's a lot to be said for longevity. You can't last this long without having something, and that gives you a little bit of a pass. You can have a bad night that you couldn't have at 21. I don't think I have many bad nights, because I like what I do and I bring that to the stage, and I have the curiosity.\"\n\nBut each day when he gets the newspaper, the first thing he goes to after reading the sports pages is the obituaries. Not to read, just to compare. \"And the only thing you check is the headline and the age. Like, today in The New York Times, two 86s and a 90. Okay, good. The worst,\" he tells me, \"is a 71.\"\n\nSo Larry King is old.\n\nThere are many ways of illustrating that Larry King is old. Here is another: His father fought in the Russian Revolution. He was adult enough to bear arms in the 1917 conflict that led to the founding of the world's first Communist state. King doesn't even know for which cause his father fought, just that, growing up in Brooklyn, where his father owned a neighborhood bar and grill, there was a photograph of him in his Russianmilitary uniform. Larry has never been to Russia. He likes Russian pumpernickel, and that's about as far into exploring his roots he feels the need to go. He feels no impulse to needlessly board any airplanes to uncover his past\u2014or most anything else. \"I'm not what you would call a curious traveler,\" he says. \"I'm not that curious to see what\u2026Singapore looks like!\" He shrugs. \"You show me a picture. Like, we have a home in Utah\u2014my wife is Mormon. This beautiful house, in beautiful mountains, but there's nothing there. Provo, Utah\u2026there's nothing. I'm bored in a day and a half. And they'll always tell me: 'The mountains! Look at the mountains!' 'Pretty. Now what' You've seen one mountain, you've seen them all.\" King is well aware of what could seem like an apparent contradiction here and addresses it even before he can be asked: \"I don't know\u2014I'm intensely curious. I couldn't be an interviewer for fiftythree years and not be curious. But I'm not curious about things so much as I am about people.\"\n\nSo, sitting in Utah, what are you thinking isn't there\n\n\"Jews. Blacks. A sense of texture. They all look the same.\u2026\" He says this sitting on a sofa in his Beverly Hills mansion. \"I'd rather be here or New York.\" Each day in Provo, the local Albertsons grocery store receives what King believes are the town's only four copies of The New York Times. He has an arrangement, which involves the promise of an extra King dollar bill, that one of these copies be reserved for him. Even so, he's nervous enough about losing his lifeline to the outside world that he's there every morning at seven anyway, to make sure. He needs it. \"I mean, they're nice people, they're very nice to me, and I respect the family, and they do a lot of good for other people. I'm not a churchgoer. I used to go sometimes with my wife\u2014I don't go anymore.\" King has yet to become one of those who belatedly embrace faith before the final tally is taken. \"In fact,\" he says, \"the more I interviewed religious leaders, the less religious I became. Because they don't have the answers I need. I don't get the answer to why. Why is there a Holocaust And the answer I get is: We do not question the ways of the Lord. A lot of it\u2014I tend to agree with Bill Maher\u2014is superstitious. It's a nice thing to have. There are times I wish I had it. Like, I wish I were going somewhere when I die. Billy Graham used to tell me, 'You're very spiritual, and you are going somewhere\u2014don't question that.' So I hope he's right.\"\n\nAnd what if Graham is right, but wherever it is you end up going is just like Provo\n\n\"It'd still be better than being dead,\" King answers, but then he pauses, as though this is one reply he has carelessly blurted out loud without giving it the full consideration it requires. He now rocks his hand in equivocation, reweighing the delicately balanced alternatives before him: eternal nothingness\u2026Provo\u2026eternal nothingness\u2026Provo\u2026eternal nothingness\u2026Provo\u2026eternal nothingness\u2026Provo. \n\nTough call. Eventually, he concludes that his first answer was probably the correct one\u2014\"I'd rather be in Provo\"\u2014though he leaves the impression that Utah may only have prevailed by the slenderest of margins. And that a recount is never out of the question.\n\nAnyway, King's making other plans. He would like to be frozen: \"I figure if I'm frozen there's this little bit of a chance that whatever I'd died of they'd cure.\" He has yet to make the arrangements (there's something charming and admirably defiant about the way King, a man who nearly died twentytwo years ago, talks about such matters as though they are, for now, mere theoretical concerns and that the necessary practicalities can best be dealt with later in life), but he has asked his lawyer to look into it. He knows there's a place near Phoenix. He did some interviews about it years ago.\n\nHis wife, who is a country singer, hates this idea. As a Mormon, she devoutly believes he will come back, and he knows that as an unbeliever he will be retroactively baptized by her church in death. \"Strange to me,\" he says. \"I'll die, and at my funeral they'll baptize me. And I'm Jewish.\" He and his wife used to argue about such things, but he says he has now learned to stay away from it. \"You can't argue religion,\" he says. \"It's impossible. And I know I'm a good interviewer, so I could take anyone in that family. I could take the pope. Put him in a corner and he has no answer. He has no answer. But he has something I don't have\u2014belief.\"\n\nI mention to King something I half remember reading\u2014that if one chooses to be frozen, there are two different cryogenic price plans: one where they just freeze the head, one for the whole body.\n\n\"What would you do with just the head\" he wonders. \"Put it on someone else\" Still, he muses on what I've said and seems to come to a decision, albeit an odd and brilliantly nonsensical one.\n\n\"I'll do both!\" he declares. \"Give me both! Let's play it safe!\"\n\nLarry King's day begins at 6:30 a.m. He sees that his two young boys\u2014Chance, 10, and Cannon, 9\u2014get dressed, and then he drives them to school. After that he has breakfast at the Beverly Hills deli Nate 'n Al with his friends Herbie, Irwin, Asher, Sid, and others. (It's a menonly gathering, though occasional exception has been made for Barbara Walters, Madeleine Albright, and King's 49yearold wife, Shawn). Back home he checks the news, checks in with CNN, reads the five or six newspapers he requires each day, has lunch, talks to friends, picks the boys up from school at three, brings them home, then maybe plays a bit of catch with them. His CNN driver comes at four. At the studio, he'll go over the show, then go into makeup at five thirty and be live onair at six, ready to start asking.\n\nKing says he has never prepared a single question in his life. When he was on the radio for five hours a night, he didn't used to do any preparation at all\u2014he figures that he'll do the best interview if he doesn't necessarily know any more than his audience knows. Even now he often doesn't know who's on the show, or what that night's edition of Larry King Live is even about, until he arrives at the studio. At around midday the first time we meet, I ask about that night's show, and he simply shouts into the kitchen, where a man from CNN is lurking, to ask.\n\n\"We are doing the Chris Brown court case,\" King is told.\n\nHe nods. \"I'll get there an hour before, I'll read the notes, the notes will tell me he's a singer, what his hits may be, who the girl was, what he was charged with.\" (I ask him whether he knows who \"the girl\" is. He doesn't.)\n\nHe tells me that these days he has to work harder if it's a subject that interests him less. \"If it's a female singer who's 22 years old who's on drugs\u2026eughhhh. I much more care about the world, politics, the presidency, than about the woman who gave birth to eight children. That's interesting one time\u2026but three times But that's the nature of the beast. It's the world we live in. It's a world that totally boggles me. That that's a bigger story She has eight children and Obama announces his health plan\u2014and more people are interested in that\"\n\nAnd you're part of the vessel that makes it a bigger story.\n\n\"Correct.\"\n\nDoes that discomfit you at all\n\n\"It does. But you're faced with 'Hey! That show you did last night\u2014wow, you led the ratings.' And I forget what I did\u2014you forget easy. 'What did we do last night' 'Oh, the woman that got bit by the shark.' 'The woman that got bit by the shark You mean that beat the night before, when we had John McCain on' 'Doubled it.' The woman who was bit by the shark has no effect on anybody's life, but John McCain has an effect on your life.\" (King is speaking somewhat rhetorically here. In early 2008, for example, King's interview with John McCain attracted almost double the viewers that his show about shark attacks, and Pam Anderson, did.) \"You know what never got ratings\" King continues. \"BritainIreland. IsraelPalestine. Yes, in New York and L.A. The middle of the country They don't care. And that hurts me.\"\n\nThough King's show remains a sturdy part of CNN's primetime lineup, in recent years there have been various murmurings that Larry King's time at CNN is up, and that they wish to shunt him out and replace him with someone younger. These were quelled, for a while anyhow, last year when he was given a new contract until 2011. Not that he'd be happy to end then. \"If I don't get renewed, I will miss the next election, which would be very painful,\" he says. (He's known every president since John F. Kennedy, whom he says he first met\u2014and this seems to be how Larry King's life has always been\u2014crashing his car into one driven by the future president in Miami in 1958.) \"I keep getting nothing but reassurance from the network that they like me, I'm their fixture, and 'Yes, we have young people coming up, but you're still Larry King,' and it's nice to hear that. They tell me they admire my work, but I realize there are the Anderson Coopers. They're the coming thing. He's half my age. I've no jealousy at all\u2014I understand it.\"\n\nIf one day he has to go, he says, his dream job would be to go to PBS\u2014for the same money\u2014and be allowed to interview anyone he wanted. \"But I won't get that, so I hope to stay with CNN.\" He believes that Charlie Rose has the best job in broadcasting. \"He can interview ballet dancers and foreign leaders. I do neither. Well, we do some foreign leaders.\"\n\nThen there's comedy. One reason Larry loves giving speeches is that it allows him to make a live audience laugh. Later this year, he hopes to fill in for a couple of weekends at Steve Wynn's new Las Vegas hotel, presenting \"An Evening with Larry King.\" \"That will be the highlight,\" he says. \"Once you get that first laugh, you know you're going to have the best hour of your life. You're going to have a better time than them.\"\n\nStill, I'm not sure, at this late stage, comedy could replace anything. Talking one day about how relative happiness can be\u2014a subject he raises by mentioning how genuinely elated one of the murderous Menendez brothers seemed when he interviewed him, joyous because he'd finally been given a larger jail cell\u2014King gives three examples of things that would make him happy. The Dodgers' winning the World Series. His wife's Vegas engagement and her forthcoming CD being a big hit. And: \"CNN comes in and says, 'Let's sign through 2015.' \"\n\nLarry King lives in Los Angeles because of O.\u00A0J. Simpson. He moved here temporarily from Washington, D.C., for the trial and never left. Good things often come from bad things, he says, and recounts how Lenny Bruce said that J. Edgar Hoover should keep a picture of John Dillinger by his bed.\n\nBut you don't have a picture of O.J. by your bed\n\n\"I don't.\"\n\nHe could leave it at that\u2014clear, uncomplicated\u2014but that is not the Larry King way. Instead, he adds this: \"I like him. I knew him years ago when he played, used to interview him.\"\n\nYou still like him\n\n\"He's an enigma to me. Here's the enigma part: extraordinarily personable, bright, captain of every team he ever played on, never argued with a referee. Friends of his I know told me, never saw him raise his voice. Talk to his secretary\u2014best guy she ever worked for. Calm. Never stressed. Other hand: Something happened that night. It's terrible to kill anybody. But I don't know what drugs played a part. I do believe, knowing the American society, if he had fallen down that night, right there, thrown away the knife, said, 'I don't know what happened, I did it, I came here, she was with this guy, I went crazy, I had rage\u2014do what you want to me; I don't even ask for the mercy of the court.' The man's got a good record. Let's say he gets twenty years. Gets out in ten. He becomes the number one expert on rage. Writes a book. Finds religion. He's on Larry King Live: 'Here's O.J.'s latest book, Rage to Live\u2026' Becomes a respected member of\u2026\" King lets loose this flight of fancy so fluently and persuasively that for a moment it's hard to remember that it is one. \"So he's an enigma to me. So what do I do when someone I know does something crazy\"\n\nLike double murder\n\n\"Like double murder. I despise what he did.\"\n\nCan you still like him\n\n\"I can like him without forgiving him. It's a dilemma.\"\n\nDuring the trial, he created for himself a characteristically Larry King dilemma. He simultaneously involved himself in relationships with someone working for the prosecution (a spokeswoman for the district attorney) as well as someone working for the defense (a jury consultant). They didn't know about each other.\n\n\"I would see one at breakfast and then the next one I would have dinner with. And I would send notes to O.J. with his jury consultant, and then the other one would tell me about what Marcia [Clark] was doing. CNN loved this, by the way. But I never let it affect the story.\"\n\nI'm not suggesting it was illegal, but on a human level\u2026\n\n\"On a human level, it was a swirl. It was surreal. They were both nice, both pretty, both attentive.\"\n\nDid their personalities correlate with their side of the courtroom\n\n\"Yes. The prosecutor's side was very sprightly, more hyper, as would befit the job she had. The defense side was analytical. But they were both fun in their own way.\"\n\nKing rarely pushes his own views into interviews\u2014he is proud of how rarely he uses the word \"I\" onair. (This may be one reason that interviewees of such varied political persuasions have felt comfortable with him over the years\u2014though a habitual Democrat, he has had warm relationships with many top Republicans, including Richard Nixon, the elder George Bush, and Dick Cheney.) To find out what he thinks, it is easier to turn to his books. Of these, there are an unfeasibly large number. For some, he is merely the figurehead (The People's Princess, for instance, is subtitled Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, from Those Who Knew Her Best), but most of them, such as the new My Remarkable Journey, wallop along in what is unmistakably King's voice, even though he has sat down and actually written none of them.\n\nMany of them repeat stories, sometimes in different contexts to fit the themes of a different book, but some moments come only once. For instance, in King's fourth book, 1990's Tell Me More, he advances an unusual\u2014or as he puts it, \"quirky\"\u2014theory, \"that the sexual atmosphere in this country is affected by the aura of the White House.\"\n\n In which case, I wonder, how does he see the sexual atmosphere of the Obama era\n\n\"It's back,\" he says now. \"You want to have a young couple\u2014the Kennedys were of course the prime example\u2014in which the man is sleeping with his wife. The president of the United States is making love to his wife. I don't think you thought of it with Bush. It was not part of his persona. I don't think it even entered anybody's mind. You didn't fantasize about it. There wouldn't be jokes about him and Laura. There's already jokes about Obama, on the Internet and things. Clinton, you certainly have a sexual man, but you don't so much picture it with the wife as with others. Nixon, you didn't picture it.\"\n\nAnd how does that affect the nation\n\n\"Two little kids\u2026how did they happen Sex. They made those kids. So I think it pervades. This is something that you\n\n can't prove.\"\n\nIf you're right, is it good for America\n\n\"It ain't bad. There's nothing bad about lovemaking. There's no downside to it. As someone said, even when it's bad, it's good.\"\n\nThere has long been some confusion about how many times Larry King has been married, most of it down to King's spotty selfaccounting. If you include his first marriage, which was annulled (he doesn't) and the two marriages to the same woman as separate marriages (he doesn't), then by the account in his new book, the total is eight.\n\n Why do you think you have been married so many times\n\n\"I don't know the answer. I never lived with a woman [without being married to her]. In fact I would rarely sleep overnight at someone's house. I like going home. When I was single and went with a girl, I would be happy if she left my place or I left hers. I don't know. But I have been, in my opinion, in love three times in my life.\"\n\nIt's bad when that number is lower than the number of marriages.\n\n\"Correct. I never dwell on it much. I'm always amazed at people who are married fifty years. I think I'm more normal than the couple married fifty years. I think they've certainly made more compromises.\"\n\nBut maybe that's what a successful marriage is\u2014a great amount of compromise\n\n\"Who wants to live with that every day My wife is perennially late; I am always on time. It's crazy to me. I am punctual, punctual. And one night, we had a terrible argument about lateness, which I think is the only thing in the marriage we argue about, and I'm downstairs sitting with her father, who's been married fifty years, and he says, 'Would you get divorced over something like that' I was, 'I could.' He was, 'In my marriage, I've made so many allowances.' I don't want to make allowances.\"\n\nKing nonetheless says that he's softened somewhat over the years. He and his wife largely exist on different schedules. She'll stay up late reading, maybe till three in the morning, and often when he wakes to go to the bathroom, he'll take the book away, lift the glasses off her nose, and turn out the light. She'll sometimes sleep until twelve.\n\n\"Twelve!\" he exclaims. \"I've never slept past nine o'clock in the morning. I don't want to miss anything.\"\n\nAt 65, king was surprised to discover he was to be a father once more. At 66, he was surprised again. (He also has three grown children.) Though he still seems to live his life in the same mad rush that has characterized most of his adult life\u2014\"How do you change your nature\" he wonders aloud\u2014this time around, he is taking the opportunity to dote on his kids. And, naturally, worry about them. When we first meet, he is guiltridden over his plan to take them out of school the following week so that they can attend the Dodgers' training camp in Phoenix. (For Chance's tenth birthday, King has arranged for him to throw out the first pitch against the Diamondbacks.)\n\nWhen Bono was on Larry King Live a while back and they were talking about their children, Bono told King, \"I bet you my boys are tougher than yours.\" King instantly retorted, \"I'm Jewish\u2014bet my boys are smarter.\"\n\n\"That was done for humor,\" King tells me when I mention this.\n\nYou didn't mean it\n\n\"Oh, I meant it, too. I'm very competitive, as, for example, when they play baseball.\n\nI am a fanatic. I should not be allowed in the game.\"\n\nThere is something very telltale in these last sentences. King surely knows that there is a story I am on the verge of asking about, and so, either deliberately or instinctively, he is the one to bring it up, to somehow take control, to defuse. It's a pattern I see in other, heavier matters we discuss. Perhaps he has learned lessons from watching half a century of politicians lying themselves into trouble. He almost knocks you over in his haste to get out an apology or a confession before you could even begin to make anything approaching an accusation. When I later point out some contradictions in his various accounts of his past, he sounds so contrite, and nice, that I find myself feeling kind of bad\u2014bad enough to feel the need to point out that surely this is the kind of thing he would put to someone he was interviewing. \"Yeah,\" he says, \"but if they said, 'I'm sorry I did it, and I shouldn't have done it,' then where am I going to go with that Do I hit them over the head\" And that is the effective and wise way in which he deals with almost anything potentially awkward.\n\nAnyway, in March of last year, Larry King was thrown out of his son's Little League game for arguing with the umpire.\n\n \"The umpire made a terrible call against my son's team,\" King recalls. \"It was a call at second base. The guy was clearly out. My son made the tag. He didn't even reach the base. It would have ended the game right there. And the umpire made no call. I said, 'What' He said, 'I didn't see it, so if I didn't see it, he's safe.' All I said was,\n\n'You\u2026are\u2026out\u2026of\u2026your\u2026mind.' And he said, 'You are out of this game.' He threw me out, and he told me to go back to CNN. I had to leave the field. I couldn't stand behind the fence in the outfield and watch.\" He pauses. \"Beverly Hills Little League\u2026\"\n\nHow angry were you\n\n\"As angry as when I was a kid and there was a bad call at a Dodgers game. But this was my son. And I would do anything.\"\n\nAfterward, did you feel like what you did was a mistake\n\n\"It was not a mistake. The umpire was wrong; I had a right to argue. I had no idea it would make the press. Newspapers! What the hell I'm a father, I thought it was a bad call, they threw me out\u2014that was a story That's incredible to me.\"\n\nThere was one kind of story I had heard about Larry King that I could imagine no dignified way to bring up. It is something alluded to in various snarky recesses of the Internet and which I had also been confidently told by people who had heard it from other people \"in the know.\" But surely it was unaskable.\n\nThen I read Moon over Manhattan. I'm not sure many people are aware of Larry King's 2003 novel (a collaboration, as always\u2014this time with mystery writer Thomas H. Cook). Moon over Manhattan is a farce whose central character is a leftwing media pundit called Arthur Vandameer, a man with a cable show who faces a battle for ratings as newfangled tastes infect the world. (Some of these tastes are referred to in the text. There apparently exists a band called Butthole Surfer [sic].) Arthur is a man who has various health niggles, described in details that sometimes seem gratuitous. (This reader did not expect that the breezy, implausible action would have been interrupted by the term rectal itch.) And unlikely as it may seem, central to the plot is Arthur Vandameer's persistent flatulence\u2014or as the book insensitively puts it, \"explosive bowel syndrome.\"\n\nIn light of the meanspirited reallife whispers I had heard\u2014that King had an unfortunate flatulence problem, that he had a fan under his CNN desk to blow soiled air away from his interviewees, and that he had a \"fart button\" that he could press to silence the live audio whenever he had to let rip noisily\u2014the depiction in this work of fiction seemed remarkable. Surely even the most reckless advocate of King's preemption technique would not put this in a novel, let alone use it to afflict an aging TV host, if it truly reflected an uncomfortable truth about his life. But if it isn't true, then what an insidious rumor, what a casually malicious way to demean someone, especially in his later years. It would seem almost ruder not to allow him to address what people are snickering about behind his back.\n\nThat, anyway, is how I justify it to myself, as I first refer to his novel's story arc, then continue:\n\n There seems to be this Internet obsession about you and flatulence. Do you know about this\n\n\"I have no idea. I don't know.\u2026There was a New York Post article years ago\u2014they had an insider at CNN in the New York bureau\u2014said that. Have I had flatulence in my life Sure. Is it a common thing No.\"\n\nPeople say you have a special fan in the studio\u2026\n\n\"That was the funniest thing I ever heard.\"\n\n\u2026and that there's a button you press so that, if you make a noise, you can block it out on the air.\n\n\"I have no idea what you are talking about.\"\n\nI probably would have considered it too embarrassing to bring up, but in your novel it is the central comic theme.\n\n\"Yeah. But it's nothing I do more than any ordinary person would do. And when I do do it, it always feels good. It never feels bad. But I don't do it a lot, and I don't have a fan. And maybe once in my life have I done it onair\u2014I have no memory of doing it onair.\"\n\nHe doesn't seem much bothered by any of this\u2014neither the rumors nor my bringing them up. Following this discussion, King amiably digresses about how, though most days he gets a fiveminute sneezing fit, he has never sneezed onair. And how much it annoys him that characters in the movies and onstage never seem to go to the bathroom. And about the time he moderated an event with Norman Schwarzkopf where a 6yearold asked, \"General, when you're fighting a war, how do you go to the bathroom\"\n\n\"As to flatulence,\" he says, \"I've no idea where that came from.\"\n\nA sideline in Larry King's life that he has embraced with enthusiasm and seeming effortlessness has been appearing as Larry King in movies and on TV, from Ghostbusters (\"Hi, this is Larry King. The phonein topic today: ghosts and ghostbusting\u2026\") to an apian version of himself in Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie. As ever, King seems fairly relad as to the context in which he is used. Most recently he appeared in an episode of 30 Rock that was even named after him; when we speak, it has been broadcast, but he has yet to watch the copy they have sent him. When I wonder about the ways in which the story line\u2014Tracy Jordan is being interviewed on Larry King Live when a financial crisis erupts, and King simply questions Jordan about it, as though an addled celebrity's views and advice on such matters are significant and noteworthy\u2014may be poking fun at him and his show, he says, \"I don't mind that\u2014that's what it is. It was fun to do. And the money you get from it is nice, but that's extra. I didn't know what I was getting paid till we were finished.\"\n\nYou get a decent check for something like that\n\n\"That was very decent. It's not a hundred thousand dollars, but you can go out and buy a small car.\"\n\nBeing Larry King has served Larry King well. When a list of the many famous people who lost money with Bernie Madoff emerged and King's name was on it, his PR spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, stepped up to explain that King's were \"not substantial losses.\" I'm not sure whether it reveals more about the world of PR or about the robust state of King's finances to learn that the actual figure involved\u2014well, the figure according to his last statement, anyway\u2014is $2.8 million. \"There was a time when we were almost going to give him everything,\" says King. \"In fact, Morgan Stanley, who I invest with, those guys used to tell me, 'This guy is amazing.' I never met him, never talked to him. We'd get the monthly statement. He was kind of like a mystery man. He'd turn down people. My brother said, 'Can I get to invest with him'\u2014he turned him down. I think that added to the mystique.\" King mentions that the man who got King with Madoff, New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon, lost $700 million. \"Freddie says he's not angry,\" King says, \"he's betrayed.\" King himself seems more than sanguine about the loss of what he says is maybe \"10 percent of my net worth.\" In fact, even as one of Madoff's marks, he confesses to a sneaky regard for such a great con man. \"There's a part of me,\" he says, \"if he didn't do it to charities and Elie Wiesel, it's kind of admirable.\"\n\nAnyone familiar with King's colorful and messy past1 may be less surprised at these sympathies. I ask him about it:\n\nAs a young man, you had quite a taste for cutting corners and maybe an eye for the easy score. Where do you think that part of you came from\n\n\"I haven't selfexamined it much, but I think it came from the ability to get away with things. And that came from, I was the kid without the father. I noticed my mother would go to school and talk to the teacher if Larry did something bad, and I'd get out of it. [Later] my talent would get me out of it. I never in my career was called into a general manager's office to be berated for what I did on the air. I'd be called in for 'This furniture store's calling\u2014you owe money' or 'This man is calling, saying that you've been seeing his wife.' That I got. But I was liked. And so I think I took advantage of that.\" If he doesn't act this way now, it may only be because he had no need. \"As my friend Herbie eloquently says, 'People don't change, circumstances change.' No reason for me to do it now.\"\n\nSo you're still the same guy, with the same impulses, but circumstances insulate you from the downside now\n\n\"Correct.\"\n\nThough his legal troubles and financial woes seem well behind him, King does have an odd history when it comes to how several stories he has told about himself have stood up to examination. He likes to say, \"Sometimes I can't believe my life\"; occasionally, it is a problem others have shared. Most notoriously, there is an anecdote he told widely in the early years of his fame, and at length in his first book, about a youthful trip to New Haven involving cheap ice cream and some impromptu political campaigning. In the version he would tell back then, one of his accomplices on the trip was one of his teenage peers in Brooklyn, the future baseball legend Sandy Koufax. In 1991 someone\u2014a writer for The Washington Post\u2014bothered to call Koufax to check this out, and Koufax told him that he hadn't known King until later and that he had never even been to New Haven. King's reaction, when confronted with this at the time, is described as by turns indignant, defensive, and humble.\n\nWhen I ask him about it, he says, \"I should never have done that. I used to do it just to improve my own ego, but it wasn't Sandy.\"\n\nI ask him why on earth, if he knew that, would he keep repeating it, and even put it in print. Surely, he knew that one day it would come back and embarrass him.\n\n\"I didn't think about it,\" he says. \"I think it was risktaking. I think I did it just to aggrandize. It was a mistake. I'm sorry I did it, and I wouldn't do it again.\"\n\nPerhaps this tendency has something to do with why, in the introduction to his new book, My Remarkable Journey (which, fascinatingly, contains the New Haven story, now with Koufax stripped out of it), he writes that \"the memories on the following pages may not be exactly the way they happened.\u2026But their general essence is correct.\"\n\nStill, even the \"general essence\" clause seems problematic at times. Take the story of Larry King's son Larry King Jr. This is the father's account as related in My Remarkable Journey: Soon after he first moved down to Miami and became a radio deejay, a woman called Annette became his second wife. (He says that Annette insisted on marriage: \"She could be very controlling, and I was never good at saying no.\") They never lived together, barely saw each other after the wedding, and were soon divorced; King never told anyone they had been married and, until recently, never publicly acknowledged that he had been married one more time than people believed. More than thirty years later, when he was told that a lady from Miami named Annette was on the phone, he knew immediately who it was. She told him that she had lung cancer and was dying. She had some other news, too. As King tells it in his book:\n\nHer words began hitting me all at once. \"You have a son. He's getting married. I want you to know him before I die. No, I &amp;gt; insist that you know him before I die.\"There's always a possibility that any woman you've been with has gotten pregnant. But more than three decades had passed since we'd been together. I sat there, blindingly amazed. That's the only way I can describe it. I can't tell you much more about the early part of the story because I wasn't there for the first thirtythree years of it. So I'm going to have Larry King Jr. fill in what I never knew.\n\nFair enough, even though the story Larry King Jr. tells fits uneasily with this, given that he used his father's name, would identify himself to people as his father's son when they asked, and worked in radio and TV in Miami, where his father first became famous, and even for a time was onair during his father's second stint in the city. But there's a more clearcut problem. In 1997, four years after Annette's phone call, the elder King was interviewed by Vanity Fair, and at first he told them pretty much the story above\u2014that Annette's call at the end of her life came out of the blue. But when pressed further, his account shifted. He then explained that Annette had actually called him when she was pregnant to tell him that she was having his baby and had also called back after the birth to say, \"I've named him Larry King Jr., and he looks just like you.\" As King told Vanity Fair, \"I knew he was out there somewhere.\u2026\"\n\nI ask him about this discrepancy.\n\n\"I semiknew,\" he says to me, and repeats that she did tell him about the baby and its name and that they had also spoken after the birth. So he says that he did know he had another son out there, but \"I blanked it out.\" He explains to me that occasionally he'd bump into someone and they'd say, \"I saw your son,\" and he'd realize from some detail or other that they didn't mean his eldest son, Andy. So from that, too, he knew. \"But incidents three years apart,\" he rationalizes. \"I didn't do anything. He was grown.\"\n\nIt is not his fathering that seems so curious\u2014these days he's close with Larry King Jr., who runs his heart foundation, and he rhapsodizes about his rediscovered son's fine personal qualities\u2014but his relationship with the truth.\n\nMaybe you could argue that this is something that might easily happen to a man who has lived so much of his life live onair, for whom the past\u2014whether imperfect or glorious\u2014has already raced by, already been broadcast, and can't be rewound or reedited. While others waste their time pondering whatever discrepancies they sniff in such a man's exhaust fumes, he's already on to the next show. Except that Larry King also loves the past\u2014he loves its stories, and in particular he loves his stories. I can't quite work it out. It doesn't seem quite like a recklessness with the truth, or a wild disregard, or a weakness for deliberate dishonesty. It is more like a clumsiness. Maybe the best way to describe it would be as a carelessness. Grand sins and great virtues, these tend to betray their roots, but there can be a kind of carelessness within a man that defies explanation.\n\nThere is a slightly embarrassing moment when I call Larry King about ten days after our first meeting and ask him about that show he did on the Chris Brown\u2013andRihanna case.\n\n\"I didn't do that,\" he says. \"I was off that week.\"\n\nI have to politely insist; it takes a while.\n\n\"I'm trying to remember,\" he says.\n\nI tell him he definitely did the show that night, because I saw it.\n\n\"Huh,\" he says. \"See what happens When you work every night of the year for fiftythree years, you forget.\"\n\nWaning memory surely plays its part, but also don't discount King's ability to clear his mind of each show as soon as it finishes. He goes offair at seven o'clock and leaves CNN with such efficiency that, whether he is meeting his wife and sons in town or back at his house, he's usually sitting down to dinner by seven thirty.\n\nOur conversation is interrupted by young Chance\u2014who walks over to the phone and puts me on hold so that he can speak to his father, an act that is immediately countermanded. \"He put you on hold!\" King splutters, amused and appalled, and I can hear him talking to his son. \"Get over there! Ten years old! Boy, when I was 10, I didn't have a hold button.\u2026\"\n\nA few minutes later, King tells me how calm he feels when he goes live on the air:\n\n\"The easiest time of my day is six o'clock western time, nine o'clock eastern. That's the easiest time. And when I did both radio and television, then I would have wonderful hours, because I would have five hours plus the television\u2014a quarter of my day I controlled. We can't control our lives\u2014I can't control that my son is bouncing a baseball on a piano. I can't control that my wife's getting dressed, she's going to church, and the other little boy is in the shower and the nanny is missing. The dog is outside, and they're running around. I can't control any of that. And that adds a lot of hectic to my life. But at six o'clock tomorrow night\u2026no problem. Because there will be no boy banging a ball on a piano. There will be no nanny. The light goes on, I'm in control. So that's the easiest part of my day. Absolute easiest part of the day.\"\n\nSo why let it go If ever he must leave, he has suggested Ryan Seacrest as his eventual successor. \"I like his personality,\" he says. \"He's extraordinarily likable, and he doesn't get in the way. He's a generalist. Hard to find in today's media.\" (I think King's perfectly sincere, but some cynics may suspect that proposing Seacrest as the best alternative is the most brilliant strategy to keep his job.) Meanwhile, people will keep looking for signs that he is slipping. They'll replay the clips in which, when the Jon Stewarts or Stephen Colberts come on the show, they almost seem to be taunting him: ridiculing him but hiding their ridicule just out of his sight. Where he sometimes stutters or seems to betray some momentary confusion as the show swirls around him. The moment during a recent Beatles special in which he called Ringo Starr \"George\" (for which Paul McCartney showed him little mercy). Even the funny slips may count against him\u2014I was watching an episode of Larry King Live where he signed off with the words \"I'm Larry Kling\u2026Larry Kling! I don't even know my own name!\"\n\nA few years back, when asked whom he most admired, Larry King offered a surprising answer\u2014J.\u00A0D. Salinger. The object of admiration: the most famous recluse of our era. The admirer: a man who has been live on national media for nearly every single day of the past forty years.\n\n\"That's true,\" says King. \"But of course, I wasn't reading him as a recluse.\"\n\nKing read The Catcher in the Rye in his early twenties, when his name was still Larry Zeiger and he was working at UPS, dreaming of getting into radio, and couldn't put it down. Holden Caulfield's thoughts were his thoughts. It was the book that made the greatest impression on him (though Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus was up there, too). King recently wrote Salinger a letter explaining this: \"I guess you've heard this so many times, but you might like to know that you have one more admirer that you may not have known you had.\u2026\" King wrote the letter after a friend of his at Morgan Stanley, who likes to take on impossible challenges, had gone to Salinger's New Hampshire home on King's behalf to see if Salinger would be interviewed. Salinger's wife came to the window: \"They had a long talk. She said, 'He's totally deaf now, and he wouldn't ever do an interview.' \" But she suggested King write, so he did. Just expressing his admiration (\"\u2026one of the greatest pieces of writing in the history of writing\u2026\"), asking for nothing. (So far, nothing given.)\n\nAnyway, even if Salinger improbably, miraculously announced his intention to appear on Larry King Live, the show's host knows that in many ways it wouldn't even be considered that much of a scoop.\n\n\"I guess all the young people wouldn't know who I'm talking about, would they\" he sighs. \"If you're looking for a demographic\u2026\"\n\nBut, I say to Larry King, there's more to life than demographics.\n\n\"I wish,\" he replies.\n\nEven by his own account, the troubles that King has managed to get himself into\u2014including at least one bankruptcy\u2014have been many and various. It was a particularly strange series of events that led to his biggest crisis. It's a complicated tale, even in the versions King has offered over the years. In the late '60s, while he was a star of Miami radio and TV, King fell in with a rich businessman named Lou Wolfson. Around the same time, King had gotten to know the New Orleans attorney general Jim Garrison, who was investigating the Kennedy assassination and needed money to continue his work. (Garrison's digging would provide much of the material for Oliver Stone's JFK, in which Garrison would be played by Kevin Costner.) For some reason, a convoluted arrangement was made whereby Wolfson would fund Garrison, but the money to do so would be passed in cash installments via King. At one point King\u2014who, despite his success, was habitually in debt\u2014needed some money for the tax man, and he maintains that he asked Wolfson if he could use the Garrison money. Meanwhile, Wolfson was under investigation for stockmarket manipulation and asked King if he could get the new president, Richard Nixon\u2014whom King knew quite well from interviewing him\u2014to intervene. King actually spoke to Nixon about the case but for a time lied to Wolfson about the success of this approach. Wolfson eventually was sent to jail, and when he got out he moved for King to be charged with larceny for stealing the Garrison money he'd used for the tax bill. Though the prosecution was eventually dropped, the scandal following his arrest was such that King was publicly shamed, lost all of his jobs, and didn't work in the media for several years.On the subject of his longlost son, My Remarkable Journey offers an even stranger detail. While most of the book is in King's voice, there are occasional firstperson passages from King's friends, family, and associates. In the book's introduction, King says that he won't read these passages until the book comes out: \"So the funny thing is, when I pick up this book, I may be just as surprised to learn about my life as you.\" One of the many things Larry King Jr. says when his father hands over the narrative to him in the book is this:\n\nI had my birth certificate. I also had a letter that my mom had given to me, saying it was from my father. It was typed on letterhead from the radio station he worked at. I don't know if my father wrote it or not. My mom probably wrote it, because it was typed. But the letter held me together in moments when I wondered, &amp;gt; Who am IIt basically said, \"I've made mistakes in my life. But you were not a mistake. I may not be with you, but you'll always be my son. Be good to your mother.\" I'd reach for that letter in tough times.\n\nThe elder Larry King truly seems to know nothing about this when I bring it up. At first he seems to be confirming that he did write the letter. \"She may have asked me to do something like that. She must have called me and said, 'You're famous; he knows you're his father. I just don't want him to grow up thinking that you never think\u2026Please write a letter.' That's my guess. I have no memory.\"\n\nI point out that his son isn't sure that he wrote it. (It seems amazing that I am conducting this conversation between them by proxy, but there it is.)\n\n\"It was in my handwriting\" he asks.\n\nI tell him it was typed, and he changes his theory.\n\n\"Mother might have written it. I'm working on memory here. It's the kind of thing she might do. I'm kind of glad to hear that, though. I think it was a smart thing to do.\"\n\nEither way\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nChris Heath is a GQ correspondent. He wrote about Paul Rudd in the May 2008 issue."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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