My Remarkable Journey (11 page)

I had that powerful moment, then I bumped into J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief who I later learned was spying on Dr. King,
at Joe’s Stone Crab. We got into a conversation and I mentioned that I was traveling to San Francisco for the first time.
Hoover asked me when. When I landed, an FBI agent was waiting. He showed me around the city for four days. When I say he showed
me around, I mean he showed me around. The agent was waiting with the car when I got out of the theater. He knew all the best
restaurants. That, I found out, is how J. Edgar Hoover handled public relations.

I had that experience, and then I was blown away on my show when I asked the police chief of Los Angeles, William Parker,
about the FBI. Parker was a no-nonsense guy. The police building in downtown L.A. is now named after him. Usually when I asked
police chiefs about the FBI, their comments were laudatory.

“J. Edgar Hoover is not a cop,” Parker said. “He’s the best PR man in the country. I’d put any one of my L.A. policemen against
any FBI agent on any investigation. They’re frauds and phonies.” Not long afterward, two FBI agents were at the station doors
asking for the tape.

One day, I was talking with generals selling the Vietnam War. Another day, I opened the mike to Abbie Hoffman, who once attempted
to stop the war by organizing a rally in which fifty thousand people tried to use psychic energy to levitate the Pentagon.
Israeli leaders like Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir stopped in while fund-raising. And then there were fierce protests against
me by Jewish listeners when I invited an Egyptian delegation on my show. As if an Egyptian point of view was unthinkable.

If you were living in Miami, I was everywhere you looked or listened. In 1962 I moved to WIOD, the largest radio station in
the area, and my interviews could be heard on weeknights from nine to midnight. I’d also climbed to the top of the ladder
in local television, leaving Channel 10, the coming-of-age ABC affiliate, and joining Channel 4, the CBS affiliate that dominated
the market. I now had interview segments at six and eleven every Saturday and Sunday evening. My Sunday shows were on each
side of
60 Minutes
, which actually bombed at its inception because it aired on Tuesday nights opposite
Bonanza
. One of the reasons it was moved to Sunday night was that it did well in that time slot in Miami. I was churning out my newspaper
column for the
Miami Herald
and speaking at events across the city. When William F. Buckley, a founder of the conservative movement, came to visit Miami,
he joked, “I can’t escape you.”

Again and again, my talent and clout kept me out of trouble. The station manager might call me in with complaints from the
husband of a woman I had an affair with. “Larry, you’re so good. Why do you have to do things like this?” But what could he
do? I was Mr. Miami. When the Dolphins arrived as an NFL expansion team and the first color commentator on the broadcast crew
wasn’t very good, who did management turn to in order to draw more listeners?
Hear Larry King, Sunday on Dolphin football!

My social life was as out of control as my finances. David Letterman has made fun of me for being married seven times to six
different women, and he didn’t know that it was really eight marriages to seven. I can’t explain it. But I can tell you something
I’ve always believed. What you’re like at twenty is not what you’re like at thirty. And what you’re like at thirty is not
what you’re like at forty. And so on. When you look at the world that way, three marriages in a lifetime might be healthy.
But no matter how you look at it, eight is not.

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 thirty-four. I had never
known such a thing in Brooklyn. Going out with a woman ten years older than me? Come-mahhhhn! But she was a mentor in a way.
It was crazy, and it was probably made more adventurous by the fact that she was married when I met her.

Annette had three kids. Her marriage was obviously not working out. After she got divorced, she told me that she’d done so
because of me and insisted that I marry her. She could be very controlling, and I was never good at saying no. We were married
at Broward City Hall. But I was young, and I wasn’t going to be boxed in. I never lived with her. I can’t remember seeing
her much after the wedding—maybe a couple of times. Divorce papers were filed as a matter of course.

One thing I’ve learned is that you can never plan to fall in love. You simply cannot say,
Today, it’s going to happen. I’m going to fall in love.
And if you do meet someone and it does happen, you can’t get out of it. Events may push you out of it. But
you
can’t get out of it. Nobody’s ever explained it. Shakespeare tried. The best I can do to describe the feeling is this: Falling
in love is when you meet someone and she says, “I’ll call you at six.” Five after six comes, she hasn’t called, and you’re
out of your mind.

That’s what it was like with Alene. I met her while I was doing a show at Pumpernik’s about Playboy Bunnies. She came with
her cousin. Alene was too young to be a Bunny at the time—the age requirement was twenty-one and she was twenty. But she would
become one, and I was attracted to her right away.

The only experience I had to compare it with at the time was what I felt for the Dodgers. When you develop an attachment to
a team, your emotional well-being is dependent on the actions of others. The Dodgers could make me very happy. Or they could
hurt me terribly—without their even knowing it. An innocent girl can do the same.
Oh, I’ll call you later.

The courting stage was not simple. Alene had a five-year-old son when I met her. That wasn’t a problem; Andy was a great kid.
And he made me feel like a little bit of a big shot. I’ll never forget the day the adoption became official. The judge asked
Andy if he liked his new name. When Andy told him yes, I felt a surge of pride I’d never known. All of a sudden I was telling
people that I had a child. I’ve always considered myself a good dad. I just wasn’t a very good husband. I was always off in
my own direction. Even when I was married, a part of me always felt single. Then again, this was not your
Ozzie and Harriet
kind of marriage. I’d step into the bathroom and find Bunny costumes hanging.

The Playboy Club was a new type of experience back then. The sexual revolution was getting under way. As a Bunny, Alene was
making three times my income in tips. She had a very low voice and didn’t talk a lot, and she came off very mysterious. I
may not have been very good at fidelity. But I was intensely jealous at the same time. Once, Alene came home and told me there
was a guy who came every day for lunch, sat at her table, and tipped her fifty dollars no matter what he ate. Playboy Bunnies
weren’t allowed to wear wedding rings, and he assumed she was single. The guy was shy, and obviously enamored of her. She
wasn’t sure how she wanted to handle it. I showed up the following day with a couple of friends and took over the next table.
“Hey, there’s the wife!” I shouted as loud as I could, and broke this guy’s heart.

It’s impossible to know what happens to that feeling over time. Where does it go? Alene and I divorced. After we were separated,
I introduced her to a guy who had a jazz show on the radio station, a sort of Pied Piper of the times, free love and all that
went with it, and he took Alene off to Iowa. It was a blow to my ego, which might explain why I rebounded by marrying a woman
who worked at the radio station. The marriage did not work out for long and to this day the woman wishes to remain anonymous.
I’m going to respect her wishes. But I can’t overlook something that’s difficult for me to talk about. We had a daughter.
When this woman fell in love with another guy, she asked that he be allowed to adopt the child. Outside of my time in front
of the microphone, my life was out of control, and I went along with the woman’s wishes. It seemed like it was the right thing
to do. So I did it. When Alene returned from Iowa, the sparks came back from wherever they’d been, and we married again.

Sometimes I wonder if the entanglements, the poor handling of money, and all the stress that came with it made me better on
the air. Was I scrappier? I’ll never know. The only thing I can tell you is that the microphone was my sanctuary. I couldn’t
screw it up and it was never going to stab me in the back. People could be calling me for money. My marriages might be dissolving
before my eyes. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. could be taken away from us all in the blink of an eye. But when
I stepped behind a microphone, I was in control.

My marriage to Alene did not work the second time either. But life is yin and yang. Sometimes great benefits come out of difficult
times. Alene got pregnant. I was driving on Biscayne Boulevard en route to North Miami General Hospital in 1967, when two
of the best sentences I ever heard on WIOD came over a newscast. “Bulletin just in. Larry King has a seven-pound, three-ounce
baby girl.” Happiness could have blown me straight through the roof.

I pulled in to the hospital lot, ran into the room, and a doctor was holding up a little girl. We called her Chaia. Alene
had loved the book
The Chosen
by Chaim Potok. And my mother’s mother was named Chaia. It’s like the Hebrew toast, “To life.” The loss of my own father
when I was young has always remained with me. Even after Alene and I divorced for the second time, I was a good absentee father.
I still have images in my mind of taking Chaia to the opening of Disney World and of her brother Andy smiling on the sidelines
during Miami Dolphins games.

Maybe it’s just the way I see the world. But as a tumultuous decade came to an end, two recollections stand out in my mind.
They speak to laughter and promise. Maybe it has to do with being born Jewish. No matter how difficult the times, comedy always
survives to triumph.

I had Mel Brooks on the night that we landed on the moon. Brooks is probably the funniest man I’ve ever met. There was nothing
better than his comedy album
2,000 Year Old Man.

I said to him, “OK, let’s play 2,000 Year Old Man. You’re two thousand years old. Tonight, we landed on the moon. What do
you think of that?”

“The moon is my favorite thing in the whole universe,” he said. “Nothing better than the moon. I worship the moon. The moon
is my friend.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because for four hundred years I thought I had a cataract. Then one day this guy named Irving said, ‘Isn’t the moon beautiful
tonight?’ And I said: ‘The wha—?’”

The other memory is from the beginning of 1970, when Don Shula was named head coach of the Dolphins. I was the emcee at a
welcome lunch. All the players were in the crowd.

We were on the dais and Don said to me, “Which one is Griese?”

He didn’t know which one was the quarterback, Bob Griese. I pointed Bob out, and Don asked me to have Bob come up.

So I had Bob come up.

“I want to sit with you and get working on the offense,” Shula said. This was in the off-season, months before practice started.

Griese said, “Great, how about next week?”

Shula said, “How about tomorrow?”

I knew then, this guy Shula was going to be something special. In time, he would mold the Dolphins into the only team ever
to have a perfect season. It’s still talked about thirty-seven years later in the sports world, and to anyone who lived in
Miami at the time it will remain as unforgettable as the moon landing.

But I wasn’t really a part of it. It was about the only time in my life I would ever ask myself,
What am I doing not there?

I used to joke, “Larry, you know how George Washington was the father of this country? You’re sort of the husband of this
country.”

He’s sensitive about it. The thing is, Larry is actually very traditional. He didn’t believe in living with women. He married
them.

So the multiple marriages can be explained in part by what happens when tradition meets impetuousness and restlessness. It
was leap before you look. There was nothing anybody else could do but watch it play out. Then it becomes,
What was that about?

To be honest, I wasn’t very surprised about all those wives. I’ll tell you why. First of all, Miami was a crazy place at that
time. It was the Las Vegas of America before Las Vegas. Sinatra was there. Jackie Gleason was there. In that culture, it was
much more accepted to see women and have relations.

Now combine that with the fact that Larry is in love with being in love. If Larry loved someone, instead of sleeping with
her, which would be the way most people would handle those situations, Larry married her. Strange as it may seem, getting
married that much is his conservatism. It’s sort of like the Elizabeth Taylor way of doing things—only I think he surpassed
Elizabeth Taylor.

S
ON

One thing you have to understand about my dad is that his life brought him an overwhelming number of choices. Just growing
up with him was like being in a fantasyland.

Whatever your fantasy was, it would come true. You want to meet Joe Namath? “We’re having dinner with him.” I’d go to see
Muhammad Ali at the Fifth Street Gym and he’d throw a jab at my head and kid around with me because he was a friend of my
dad. My dad would ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Whatever the answer, he could arrange for me to talk with
an expert in that field. He’d interview someone in aviation and they’d offer him free pilot lessons. He’d say, “No thanks,
but my son might like that.” Next thing you know, I had a pilot’s license. There were so many options presented. Life was,
“Here’s everything.”