Larry King was nothing less than an American institution, known for his tough, direct,
and fair interviews with heads of state, politicians, and movie stars. He was just as open and frank
about his tumultuous personal life. This is the tragic real-life story of Larry King.
Larry King wasn't always Larry King. He was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York, where
he spent his entire childhood and early adulthood into his twenties under his birth name of
Lawrence Harvey Zeiger.
His father Aaron ran a popular, working-class, neighborhood bar and grill. He had a close
relationship with his son Lawrence, which made the tragedy of June 9, 1943, all the
more terrible.
According to his book My Remarkable Journey, young Larry King was walking home from the
library when saw three police cars in front of his apartment building, hearing his mother
screaming as he got closer to his home. He was stopped by a policeman, who informed the
nine-year-old that his father had died of a heart attack. The elder Zeiger was only
44 years old.
As his father was the primary breadwinner for the family, which also included King's
younger brother, the family's economic situation became dire, and they had to enroll in welfare
programs to get by.
His father's death and its fallout sent the future Larry King into a spiral of sadness,
and his schoolwork suffered so much, for so long, that college became out of the question.
King managed to graduate high school and worked a series of odd jobs to support his mother
and brother before he decided to head to Miami and pursue his dream of working in radio.
“All my life I've dreamed of being on the radio. This was my… I never wanted to be
anything else but a broadcaster."
Larry Zeiger moved to Miami in 1957. By 1959, he had transformed himself into local star
Larry King. His endeavors in the media expanded to include multiple radio gigs, several TV
shows, and columns for three Miami newspapers. In short time, King was earning a comfortable
living, but he blew a lot of his income at the horse track, and also overspent in attempts
to keep up with his free-spending celebrity friends who frequently visited and performed
in Miami.
One prominent friend was a money man named Lou Wolfson, who financed a King talk show
in the '60s. That arrangement fell apart when Wolfson was investigated — and then convicted
— for stock fraud.
King, in his position as a media figure, had become friendly with the newly elected President
Richard Nixon, who offered to help get Wolfson exonerated. Nixon gave the case to incoming
Attorney General John Mitchell, who declined to take on Wolfson as a client.
But according to the Sun Sentinel, King told Wolfson that Mitchell had agreed to work the
case anyway, leading a thrilled Wolfson to give King thousands of dollars with which
to pay Mitchell's firm. Instead, King used that money to pay off some of his many creditors.
King later called this, quote, "one of the biggest mistakes of my life."
"Money, was -- y'know, we all have weaknesses of various stripes. Mine was the dollar."
King eventually came clean, but when Wolfson was released from prison in 1971, he filed
a legal complaint, citing theft of $5,000. King tried to pay back the money without facing
further consequences, but Wolfson didn't want it. Instead, King was arrested, and lost his
multiple jobs. The charges were ultimately dismissed, but the damage to his reputation
had been done. King had barely worked in media for four years before it all fell apart, and
it might have stayed that way too, if a new general manager hadn't signed on to the WIOD
radio station and offered him another chance at hosting a talk show.
Larry King was married a notable number of times -- eight times, to seven wives. Things
didn't work out over and over again, a pattern established in early adulthood with his first
couple of attempts at marriage.
King married for the first time in 1952 to Freda Miller, his high school sweetheart from
Brooklyn, barely after he graduated. A year later, the couple's parents forced them to
annul the marriage.
When he moved to Miami in his early twenties, he met a woman named Annette Kaye. As King
claimed In his 2009 memoir, not only was his wedding with Kaye a secret, the marriage was
too.
He wrote,
"I never told anybody about the first time I got married in Florida. Not even my brother.
There was no wedding party. I was this young kid, and I got into an affair with a beautiful
woman ten years older than me."
Annette was married when she first took up with King, and after the mother of three ended
her already problematic marriage, she told King that she'd ended that relationship because
of King and that, as a result, he should feel obligated to marry her. As King put it, quote,
"She could be very controlling, and I was never good at saying no."
Larry King became a radio star in Miami in the 1950s and '60s. During one broadcast,
he had a few Playboy Bunnies on the show, including a woman who brought her 20-year-old
cousin, and future Bunny, Alene Akins.
King wrote in his memoir My Remarkable Journey that he was instantly attracted to Akins.
The couple married a few months after King divorced Annette Kaye, but this marriage was
doomed, too, ending in 1963 after King formally adopted her young son Andy.
After they split, King introduced Akins to a friend, and they hit it off and moved to
Iowa. As King wrote,
"It was a blow to my ego, which might explain why I rebounded by marrying a woman who worked
at the radio station."
That marriage also didn't last. According to People, his fourth wife was named Mickey
Sutphin, and she was married to King for three years, during which time they had a daughter.
Sutphin reportedly left King for another man, and she took custody of the kid, formally
adopted by this new guy.
King soon found love again, this time remarrying Akins, who soon thereafter gave birth to their
daughter, Chaia. Nevertheless, King and Akins would split a second time, for good, in 1971.
Larry King had two major habits in his life: getting married and chain-smoking. In his
memoir, he admitted to a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. King smoked profusely from
the 1950s up until the late 1980s, when he was forced to quit by a major health scare.
In February 1987, he experienced a heart attack just after his 53rd birthday.
Also contributing to the frightening cardiac event was the fact that he worked long and
stressful hours, ate too many fried foods and desserts, and didn't get much exercise.
Even though his own father had died of a heart attack at age 44, King didn't think he was
at risk for one. Like many, he thought bad health was the kind of thing that just happened
to other people. He was so sure of his own fortitude that he ignored earlier warning
signs that a heart attack was coming, such as shortness of breath and chest pain, chalking
the symptoms up to nothing more than mere heartburn.
But that morning in 1987, he experienced stomach pain and an achy shoulder, and, after smoking
one more cigarette, he checked into a hospital in Washington, D.C., where doctors told King
that he was in the middle of a heart attack.
To bring King back from the brink, the hospital administered a blood clot-eradicating drug
that had yet to be approved by the FDA, a treatment that required King to sign a waiver
freeing the hospital of all liability should he die as a result of it. With little to lose
and everything to gain, he rolled the dice on the experimental treatment, which worked,
and saved his life.
If it isn't obvious by now, Larry King really liked to get married, particularly to blonde
women younger than himself.
King followed his second divorce from Alene Akins with a wedding to production assistant
and math teacher Sharon Lepore in 1976. They split up in 1983, after which King would wait
six years before marrying again. But when he found his next spouse, he acted quickly.
In the summer of 1989, King met Philadelphia-based businesswoman Julie Alexander. They went out
on a date on August 1 — and King proposed that evening. They were married in October
of that year, but the marriage didn't make it, possibly because the couple rarely saw
one another — Alexander remained in Philadelphia, while King remained near his workplaces in
Washington, D.C. They separated in 1990 and formally divorced two years later.
The next woman to steal King's heart, at least temporarily: B-movie actress Deanna Lund,
to whom the radio and TV host proposed after five weeks of dating in 1995. They split up
before the ceremony.
In 1997, it seemed like Larry King had finally found his happily ever after when he married
Shawn Southwick, a singer and TV host 26 years his junior.
While this relationship proved to be King's longest-lasting marriage, it wasn't particularly
peaceful. In April 2010, King filed for divorce in the wake of a National Enquirer report
that Southwick had engaged in an affair. But they didn't go through with the divorce — not
ready to split, the couple reconciled.
Six years later, they faced trouble again for the same reasons, with Southwick allegedly
carrying on a lengthy affair. Both King and Southwick denied any infidelity on either
of their parts and stayed married ... for a while. In August 2019, King once again filed
divorce papers.
A few months later, King told People that what ultimately destroyed the relationship
wasn't affairs. He shared,
"The age difference eventually takes its toll."
"Now, you know, not it hits me -- I'm 86, she's 60. And she's a young 60."
Larry King's health problems didn't end with his heart attack in 1987. The same year he’d
had his heart attack, he was also diagnosed with type-2 diabetes. 12 years later, he faced
a diagnosis of prostate cancer. Years later, he'd fight cancer once more.
In 2017, at the age of 83, King was diagnosed with stage 1 lung cancer. The cancer was so
new as to be asymptomatic, so King considered himself "lucky" that the routine X-ray had
spotted the tumor early on. King soon underwent surgery to get the malignant growth removed,
and he was back to work after just about a week of convalescence.
While working throughout 2019, King had a few severe health scares, including a stroke
which rendered him comatose, gave him amnesia, and took away his ability to use his left
foot.
The devastating, debilitating series of events led King to consider ending his own life.
"I thought I was just gonna bite the bullet. I didn't want to live this way. I didn't want
to live dependent on others."
Larry King was best known for his years of consistent television hosting work, but he
was a radio man first, and his success in that medium is what led to his entry into
the world of TV. In 1985, CNN founder Ted Turner asked King to take his act — one-on-one
interviews with politicians and famous people and inviting callers to ask questions, too
— to his still new and developing cable TV network.
The nightly Larry King Live became one of CNN's signature and most important shows.
History happened on the show, including Ross Perot announcing his upstart presidential
campaign there in 1992 and Middle East leaders Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin coming on
the show to discuss peace talks in 1995.
In 2010, it all went away when King announced that he would be ending the long-running series
later that year. He wrote in a statement,
"I talked to the guys here at CNN and I told them I would like to end Larry King Live,
the nightly show, this fall and CNN has graciously accepted, giving me more time for my wife
and I to get to the kids’ little league games."
Despite the classy-seeming exit, the reasons behind the end of Larry King Live may not
have been so clear-cut. According to The Wrap, the ratings for the show had dropped by 43
percent over the previous year. A CNN source also explained that other factors were considered
behind the scenes when it came to ending the show. The insider claimed,
"What brought this to a head was his messy personal life, and he's old — it's too much."
In addition to his many marriages over the years, Larry King also became a father five
times over.
He was dad to sons Chance and Cannon with Shawn Southwick, and also had a son named
Larry King Jr. with Annette Kaye in 1961 -- though he didn't actually meet Jr. until 1994.
King married Alene Akins two separate times in the 1960s. During the first marriage, he
adopted Akins' young son, Andy, and after they divorced and remarried, they had a daughter
together named Chaia.
Unfortunately, King's sprawling family was tragically touched by death twice in 2020.
On August 22, 2020, King announced via social media channels that both of his children with
Akins, Andy King and Chaia King, had passed away that summer. According to the statement,
Andy King passed after suffering a heart attack on July 28, while Chaia died on August 20,
not long after receiving a lung cancer diagnosis. After the deaths of his children, King wrote,
"Losing them feels so out of order. No parent should have to bury a child."
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