Larry King
The Legend
Still Living in Our Minds
Larry King was an American television and radio host whose
awards include 2 Peabody’s, an Emmy, and 10 Cable ACE Awards. He conducted more
than 50,000 interviews during his career.
Lawrence Harvey Zeiger, better known as Larry King, was
born on November 19, 1933, in Brooklyn. Born in Minsk, Russian Empire, he was
one of two children of Jenny, a garment worker, and Aaron Seeger, a restaurant
owner in Pinsk, Russian Empire. His parents were Orthodox Jews who immigrated
to America from Belarus in the 1930s.
King attended Lafayette High School, a public high school
in Brooklyn. King’s father died of a heart attack when he was nine years old.
As a result, the king, mother, and brother went on government welfare. The
death of his father greatly affected the king and he subsequently lost interest
in his schooling.
After graduating high school, King worked to support his
mother. He wanted to work in radio broadcasting since childhood. He was a WMBM
radio interviewer in the Miami area in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1978 rose to
host The Larry King Show, a nationwide radio program heard on the Mutual
Broadcasting System.
From 1985 to 2010, he hosted the late-night interview
television program Larry King Live on CNN. King hosted Larry King Now from 2012
to 2020, which aired on Hulu, Ora TV, and RT USA. From 2013 to 2020, he hosted
Politicking with Larry King, a weekly political talk show on the same three
channels. King appeared in television series and films, usually playing
himself. He remained active until his death in 2021 from complications of
Covid-19 and sepsis at the age of 87.
King married seven women eight times. In 1952, at the age
of 19, he married his high school sweetheart, Freda Miller. That union ended
the following year at the request of her parents, who reportedly had their
marriage annulled. He then briefly married Annette Kay, with whom he had a son,
Larry Jr., in November 1961. King didn't meet Larry Jr. until he was 30.
In 1961, King married his third wife, Alene Akins, a Playboy Bunny, at a nightclub named after the magazine. He adopted Akins' son Andy in 1962. The couple divorced the following year. In 1963, he married his fourth wife, Mary Frances "Mickey" Sutphin. In 1969, her second child Saya was born. In 1972, the two divorced for the second time. In 1997, Dow Books published a book by King and Chaya, Daddy Day and Daughter Day. Aimed at young children, it recounts each of their accounts of his divorce from Akins.
On September 25, 1976, King married his fifth wife, Sharon
Lepore, a maths teacher and production assistant. The couple separated in 1983.
In 1989, King met businesswoman Julie Alexander and proposed to her on the
couple's first date on August 1, 1989. She became King Alexander's sixth wife
when the two married on October 7, 1989, in Washington, DC. 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, but they remained single.
In 1997, he married singer, actress and television
presenter Shawn Southwick as his seventh wife. They married three days before
King underwent heart surgery to remove a blocked blood vessel in a Los Angeles
hospital room. The couple had two children: Chance and Cannon. In September
2007, on King and Southwick's 10th anniversary, Southwick joked that she was "the only wife to
have lasted into the two digits". Larri and Shawn King filed
for divorce in 2010, but reconciled and filed for divorce again on August 20,
2019. At the time of King's death in 2021, they were separated and engaged in
divorce proceedings.
From seven wives, the king had five children, nine
grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
King lived in Beverly Hills, California. A lifelong Brooklyn/Los
Angeles Dodgers fan, he was often seen behind home plate at the team's games.
He was previously part of an investment group that tried to bring a Major
League Baseball franchise to Buffalo, New York in 1990. Bernie Madoff lost $2.8
million.
King, who described himself as Jewish agnostic in 2005,
said in 2015 that he was a full-fledged atheist. Several times in 2009, 2011
and 2015, King said he wanted to undergo cryonic suspension after his legal
death. In 2017, he said, "I love being Jewish, I'm proud of my Jewishness,
and I love Israel."
On February 24, 1987, before successful quintal-bypass
surgery, King suffered a heart attack. Following this, he wrote two books about
living with heart disease. King described his heart attack experience in an interview
in the 2014 British documentary The Widowmaker, which advocates for coronary
calcium scanning to prevent heart disease and highlights the financial
conflicts of interest in the widespread use of coronary stents. He received an
annual chest X-ray to monitor his heart condition. In 2017, doctors discovered
a cancerous tumor in his lung. It was later successfully removed surgically.
On April 23, 2019, King underwent a scheduled angioplasty
and stents were inserted. A heart attack was mistaken for a heart attack again;
These claims were later retracted. On January 2, 2021, it was revealed that
King had been hospitalized ten days earlier with COVID-19 at a Los Angeles
hospital. King's
widow Shawn Southwick-King told Entertainment Tonight that he had
recovered from COVID-19, but died of sepsis as a complication on
January 23, 2021, at the age of 87 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los
Angeles. The cause of death was sepsis, according to a death
certificate obtained by People magazine. It also lists two underlying
conditions that can lead to infection - severe hypoxemic respiratory failure
and end-stage renal disease.
Following a heart attack in 1987, King founded the Larry
King Cardiac Foundation, a non-profit organization that pays for life-saving
cardiac procedures for people who cannot afford them.
On August 30, 2010, King served as host of Chabad's 30th
annual "To Life" telethon in Los Angeles. He donated to the Beverly
Hills 9/11 Memorial Garden, where his name is on the monument.
[WATCH VIDEO HERE...]
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