My Remarkable Journey (22 page)

Before the trial started, I had breakfast with the Los Angeles district attorney, Gil Garcetti. My friend Asher remembers
that breakfast well. “We got him nailed,” Garcetti said.

Garcetti was right. O.J.’s glove and blood had been found at the scene. The evidence was overwhelming and the prosecution
had an open-and-shut case. But they lost it. They had some bad witnesses. Remember the prosecution’s DNA witness? Poor guy.
Dennis Fung. He was out of his league against the expert defense attorney Barry Scheck, and he got hung out to dry. Then there
was Mark Fuhrman—one of the first cops at the scene of the crime to collect evidence. He was made out to be a racist who might
have manipulated the evidence. It was great drama when F. Lee Bailey cross-examined Fuhrman, “marine to marine.” When Bailey
asked Fuhrman if he had used the word
nigger
in the past ten years, Fuhrman denied doing so. He obviously wasn’t aware the defense had a tape on which he’d made racial
slurs something like forty-one times. Bailey believed O.J. At least he convinced me that he believed him. Bailey and Johnnie
Cochran suckered the assistant prosecutor, Christopher Darden, into making O.J. try on the bloody glove that had been left
behind at the scene. O.J. had told Bailey that it wasn’t going to fit. It was a huge mistake for the prosecution. The glove
had been frozen and unfrozen several times during testing. And O.J. was wearing a rubber glove on his hand to avoid contaminating
the evidence when he tried it on. When the glove didn’t fit, it opened the door for Johnnie Cochran’s famous line to the jury,
“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Cochran and Shapiro weren’t speaking by the end of the trial. Shapiro didn’t like that Cochran played the race card in his
closing argument. I became very friendly with Shapiro. If I had to bet, I’d say that Bob thinks O.J. was guilty. He’d never
say. If he did, he’d violate every tenet of legal ethics. You can sense it in his body language, though.

One of the biggest surprises for me was how quickly the jury reached a verdict. After an eight-month trial, it was hard to
believe that the jury could come to a decision after only a few hours of deliberation. I thought it might take weeks just
to go over all the evidence… and then another hundred years to decide. I remember waiting for the verdict in my hotel room.
I looked out the window. Nobody was walking down the sidewalks. No cars were going down the street. Everybody was in front
of a TV.

Sid was with me. So was my executive producer, Wendy Walker. We all held hands as the verdict was announced. There was never
another moment in my life when I held hands like that. But there never was a trial like that.

When I heard the words
not guilty
, my first thought was disbelief. My second thought took me by surprise. It was,
Oh, shit. The trial is over. I’ve got to go back to Washington
. Then came all the images of the black viewers celebrating and white audiences in shock.

It’s hard to believe America now has a black president when I think about my show on the night of the verdict in 1995. The
writer Dominick Dunne was my guest for that show. He believed that the nation was so polarized that day that all the civil
rights advancements made over thirty years had been washed away.

There’s a guy I know who comes up with some crazy theories. One of his wilder ones is that Barack Obama would never have been
elected president if there had been no O.J. trial. His theory is that America was forced to see its own reflection on the
television screen when that verdict was announced, and it didn’t like the divide that it saw. Johnnie Cochran talked about
holding up a mirror to society in order to understand our differences. But it still seems like a stretch to me. Obama certainly
wouldn’t have been elected right after that trial. But maybe the Simpson trial was another event in a long continuum that
led to the change.

The night after the verdict, as we were finishing our show, O.J. called in. He hadn’t testified at the trial. Nobody had heard
from him in eight months. Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say. He was given a number with a special password so that
we would know it was really O.J. The strangest part about our conversation is that CNN wanted to cut the show off at its scheduled
end even though O.J. had just begun to speak. A taped O.J. special was all set to run. Wendy had to tell them, “You may have
a taped O.J. special. But we have O.J.”

After all this time, I can’t help but wonder what the outcome would have been if O.J. had stayed in the driveway after the
murders and screamed for the police. What if he’d stayed there with the knife in his hand until the police arrived and admitted
that he’d killed his wife and the waiter? If he’d just said, “I was in a rage and I lost it! I’m guilty. Punish me. I deserve
to die.” My theory on Americans and forgiveness is that if he’d done that, he’d be out of jail by now. He’d have done a few
years, written a book on rage, and gone on all the talk shows. O.J. would have become the number one rage expert and been
forgiven. He just wouldn’t have been able to smile ever again.

O.J. was never forgiven. He lost a civil suit to the families of the victims. And as I write this he sits in a jail about
ninety miles from Reno for forcibly trying to get back some of his sports memorabilia. He could serve up to thirty-three years.
Certainly, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. It was his property. Nobody was killed. He was convicted of kidnapping only
because in Nevada it’s kidnapping if you lock the door while you commit a crime. O.J.’s in jail for the wrong reason. But
maybe it’s the right reason if you go back in time and look at the big picture. The bottom line is, nobody cares.

It’s amazing how someone can be so important, then fade right before our eyes. For me, the trial became even more important
over the years than it was at the time. No O.J., and I might not have thought about moving to Los Angeles. You could even
make a case that I wouldn’t have my two youngest sons if it weren’t for O.J. That’s because I met the woman who would become
their mother in L.A.

Before Chance and Cannon arrived, though, there was a little surprise.

I
T WAS SO INNOCENT
. I was at CNN, sitting at my desk in Washington late one afternoon. I got a message: “Larry, a lady from Miami named Annette
is on the phone.”

I knew right away who that was. I’d never told anybody that I’d been married to Annette. Not even my brother. The only record
of the wedding was a document at Broward City Hall. I didn’t see her much after the wedding—maybe a couple of times. The point
is, I hadn’t spoken to her in what—thirty years? So I had no idea what this would be about. I picked up the phone and started
in on one of those “How are you?” conversations. But Annette was very direct.

“I have lung cancer,” she said. Annette was a big smoker. She used to outsmoke me. But I didn’t have time to react. Her words
began hitting me all at once. “You have a son. He’s getting married. I want you to know him before I die. No, I
insist
that you know him before I die.”

There’s always a possibility that any woman you’ve been with has gotten pregnant. But more than three decades had passed since
we’d been together. I sat there, blindingly amazed. That’s the only way I can describe it. I can’t tell you much more about
the early part of the story because I wasn’t there for the first thirty-three years of it. So I’m going to have Larry King
Jr. fill in what I never knew.

S
ON

Unless someone directly asked me, “Is Larry King your father?” I never told anyone who my father was.

I’m that way to this day. Not long ago, I was checking out at Hertz when the guy behind the counter looked at my driver’s
license and said, “Larry King?”

I said, “Yeah, no suspenders today.”

He just laughed.

I always remember the teachings of my mother. She said, “Be your own man. The minute you sell yourself as your father and
try to live off that, you’ll no longer be a man.” It was drilled in. She said, “I named you Larry King Jr. because it was
the right thing to do. You know who you are. There’s no disputing who you are. Your father may not be there or recognize you
when you want to be recognized. But deep down he loves you. There’ll be a day when he’s there for you. It’s my job to bring
you up.”

My mother and father met in 1958—about a year after my father came to Miami. She was in a bowling alley while he was doing
man-on-the-street interviews there.

She was nuts about my father. My mother used to love going to the movies. I guess they went to the movies a lot together.
So my dad, he made a bet with her. He was probably just kidding. He said, “I’ll bet you can’t go a week without a movie.”
It must have been around the time that their relationship ended, because she never went to a movie theater again. Never. Wouldn’t
set foot in one. Even later in life, when I said, “Mom, c’mon. Let’s just go to a movie,” she refused.

Isn’t that crazy—that kind of love? It was so strong that from the day they started dating to the time of her death, anytime
his name was in the newspaper she’d cut out the article and save it. I have huge boxes filled with clippings. When I asked
her why she did it, she said, “It was the best way for you to know what your dad was up to.”

Their relationship was over when I came around. I was born November 7, 1961. The divorce was official in 1962. My father married
again a year later.

My mom had three kids of her own when she met my dad. It must have been tough on her bringing up four kids by herself. She
worked two jobs. One at a cleaner’s. The other at a liquor store. I admired what she was able to pull off. My older sisters
helped raise me. As I grew up, my older brother went into the military, so I didn’t see much of him.

I never saw my dad, but I don’t think there was ever a time when his name didn’t come up. Today, he’s known around the world,
but in the late ’60s, he was Mr. Miami. I was a huge Dolphins fan and I would tune in to his sports show in the afternoons.
I’d listen to him announce the games on a transistor radio from my seat in the Orange Bowl and look up at him in the booth.

This may sound weird, but I think that was my connection to him. Did I wish I could sit in the booth with him? Did I wish
I could talk to him? Yeah. But as I listened, I felt like he was talking right to me. I put it in my head:
He knows I’m here
. Even though he didn’t.

When I was about nine, my mother remarried.

She’s no longer here to talk about it. But I think she did it to give me a male presence. Richard Love, whom she married,
a really, really nice guy, never tried to get in the middle. He would always say, “Your dad will be there for you one day.”

Then my dad’s life spun out of control. Front page of the
Miami News
:
LARRY KING ARRESTED
.

I was in fifth grade. Parents of kids at school were talking about it. As I grew older, the razzing started. Other kids would
say, “Your dad owes all this money. Why don’t
you
give the money back?” I wanted to defend him. But I didn’t know what to defend. Here I’d grown up not understanding why we
didn’t have a relationship, and now suddenly I was taking the heat for his difficulties. A lot was running through my mind.
I didn’t even know if he was thinking about me.

I had my birth certificate. I also had a letter that my mom had given to me, saying it was from my father. It was typed on
letterhead from the radio station he worked at. I don’t know if my father wrote it or not. My mom probably wrote it, because
it was typed. But the letter held me together in moments when I wondered,
Who am I?

It basically said, “I’ve made mistakes in my life. But you were not a mistake. I may not be with you, but you’ll always be
my son. Be good to your mother.” I’d reach for that letter in tough times.

Things got real bad at one point after the arrest, and my mother went to incredible lengths to protect me. She said, “Use
the name Larry Love for a while. When it calms down, you can go back to saying you’re Larry King.” My dad left town, and I
called myself Larry Love for several years. It seems crazy now, but my mom saw the world crashing down on me, and that was
her best plan.

When I reached an age when I could apply for my own credit card, I was turned down because of my dad’s credit problems. I
had to go to an office with my mom and say, “But I’m Larry King Jr., different Social Security number. That’s not me.” I hadn’t
tried to live off my dad, and I didn’t deserve the negativity off him.

I remember being told that I acted older than my age. Looking back on it, I probably didn’t have a choice. My mom was tough
on me, harder than some moms are with their children. But I don’t think I would have survived in business if not for my mother.
She built in me a heck of a foundation.

The first job I got was at McDonald’s. I made the sauce. The Filet-O-Fish. Moved to the fryer. Worked myself up to grill chief.
Handled the cash register. Then I got promoted to store assistant manager—which was huge. I got to wear a tie. My mother used
to come on Sundays. She’d sit for hours watching me work, beaming with pride. Her son was assistant manager.

Later on, McDonald’s put out an advertising campaign. They’d show a guy who was CEO of a company and he’d say, “My first job
was at McDonald’s.” I’m a classic example of that commercial. I can walk into a McDonald’s now, hear a certain beep, and know
they’re behind in Big Macs.

I was getting set to go to college in 1979. I wanted to go to the University of Miami. I’d always wanted to be a Hurricane.
I sat down with my mom and she said, “I just don’t have enough money to get you into Miami. But if you start at Miami Dade
Community College, and you can get your grades high, you can get a scholarship and then I’ll do everything I can.” I didn’t
know it until afterward, but she took out a second mortgage on our house to help me get into the University of Miami.