Larry King

The Invention of Lawrence Zeiger

Lawrence Harvey Zeiger changed his name minutes before going on air because his boss at a small Miami radio station thought his last name was too ethnic. He saw an ad for King’s Wholesale Liquor in the newspaper and decided that would be his alias forever.

In 1957, he started out cleaning floors at WAHR radio and ended up covering morning shifts when an announcer was out. He had no prior experience, but his voice filled the airwaves with a natural ease that veteran Florida broadcasters took years to achieve.

And the gamble paid off.

The Microphone as a Shield

In 1985, he landed at CNN to host Larry King Live. The format was simple (a man in suspenders sitting in front of a world map), and the premise was to not overprepare the interviews to keep things fresh and live. King preferred to let curiosity guide the conversation in front of millions of viewers rather than follow a rigid script.

Still, his direct style didn't always win over New York's more intellectual critics. They accused him of being soft on politicians and too nice to criminals seeking redemption on screen. He didn't care, as long as the phone lines for live calls kept ringing.

For twenty-five years, he interviewed every U.S. president from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. He conducted more than 50,000 interviews over the course of his career across various media outlets.

Success didn't come in a straight line.

The Actor Who Always Played Himself

His screen presence was steady, but he almost always played himself. In 1984, he appeared in Ghostbusters, reporting on the ghost crisis in Manhattan. For decades, his face lent journalistic credibility to any Hollywood fiction that needed a touch of media realism.

He appeared in productions such as Enemy of the State in 1998, and lent his voice to Shrek 2 in 2004. In 2016, he had a role in the series The People v. O. J. Simpson, recreating the coverage of the trial that held the entire country in suspense in the 1990s.

In 1971, he was arrested on charges of grand theft following a financial dispute with a partner. Although the charges were dropped, his career in Miami collapsed, and it took nearly five years to regain the trust of top executives in the national industry.

He was married eight times to seven different women.

In January 2021, he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at the age of 87 from sepsis. His heirs launched a legal battle over a handwritten will that divided an estimated fortune of $2 million in liquid assets.