To become an icon takes many different ingredients. Larry King had them all. To begin, there was that unmistakable appearance. Almost as though he had just stepped in from the bustle of a Wall Street trading floor, he looked like no one else on television: the business shirts, frequently with a white contrasting collar, double cuffed and rolled to the elbow; the ties, often vividly coloured and eccentrically patterned; the braces and of course those large and distinctive glasses, propped in front of those narrowing, inquisitive eyes.
Then there was his interviewing style. It's tempting to view a gig like hosting a chat show as straightforward; two people sitting on set having a genial chat about a few mutually agreed topics, throw in the odd probing question and off you go. Trust me, it is anything but – especially when the range of guests on your show is as wide as those on Larry King Live.
A ramble through some of the famous names during King’s quarter-of-a-century run on CNN illustrates his ability to switch gears from serious political newsmakers to flavour-of-the-month celebrities.
From Bill Clinton to Muammar Qaddafi, via Frank Sinatra, Snoop Dogg, Lady Gaga and Lebron James, King’s skill lay in his ability to gently reel in his subjects, play along with them, then wrongfoot them without them even realising it. Of course, that didn’t mean his guests couldn’t wrongfoot him too – who can forget the kiss on the lips from Marlon Brando at the end of their wide-ranging 1994 exchange?
Jeff Zucker, CNN’s president, summed up King’s appeal in his own tribute to the great broadcaster at the weekend. "His curiosity about the world propelled his award-winning career in broadcasting, but it was his generosity of spirit that drew the world to him," he said. This is a key point: King was naturally generous, and his interviews were warm and inviting. As a result, his show had the magical combination of not only being one everybody wanted to watch, but also one that anyone who was anyone wanted to be on.
What his style also meant was that, combined with CNN's vast global platform, Larry King Live was the perfect stage for unexpected conversations. Perhaps none was more significant than his 1995 interview with Israel's then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan.
This was not only an historic moment for the Middle East, but an eye-widening meeting of minds for the entire world. Seeing and listening to these three giants of the region together felt momentous in every sense, and the way their conversation pointed forward optimistically to a yearned-for peace was both uplifting and, it felt, authentic. Not only that – the kind of exchange that might normally take place in a heavily guarded, behind-closed-doors summit was taking place right before our eyes, beamed into millions of living rooms across the globe.
Of course, as we now know, Rabin was to be assassinated less than six months later, and Hussein’s life was claimed by cancer in 1999. Arafat, too, was to die with no long-term resolution to the Palestinian question in sight. Nevertheless, this was a fleeting moment that the door was held open for real change, and King’s show played a significant part in that.
King’s impact on CNN itself is hard to overstate. On hearing of his death, CNN founder Ted Turner said that waking up to the news “felt like a punch to the gut". He went on to describe King as one of his “closest and dearest friends and, in my opinion, the world's greatest broadcast journalist of all time”.
Turner hired King five years after he founded CNN. Poignantly, he underlined what he believed to be the great man’s impact on the network. "If anyone asked me what are my greatest career achievements in life,” he said, “one is the creation of CNN, and the other is hiring Larry King."
There were tributes from across CNN’s ranks this weekend on social media, with many echoing the same sentiment: King had time for everyone, he cared for his staff, he mentored and he made sure everyone taking their professional journey with him was more than just along for the ride.
King gave CNN a signature show that became appointment-to-view programming at a time when the network’s future success was by no means guaranteed. Given the talents of Ted Turner, I am sure CNN would still have thrived without Larry King, but I’m equally certain it would not be the same. Rest in peace, sir.
Becky Anderson is the managing editor of CNN Abu Dhabi and host of ‘Connect the World with Becky Anderson’
