My Remarkable Journey (8 page)

I couldn’t have had a better first interview. There are people who are disappointed when they meet their heroes because their
heroes don’t live up to their expectations. But the Leo I met was the Leo I loved. At the end of the interview, I said: “Leo,
one thing I don’t understand. You didn’t know me. If you didn’t want to talk to me, why did you call me back?”

Leo said, “Your name sounded like it was somebody important.”

There’s no telling if I would’ve become who I became if I’d remained Zeiger. Would Tony Curtis have become Tony Curtis if
he’d stayed Bernard Schwartz? Would Frederick Austerlitz and Virginia McMath have been on movie marquees if they hadn’t become
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? We’ll never know. I can tell you one thing. If I’d been black or Latino, I don’t think my
career would have been allowed to take off at the time.

There’s another thing about my life that I should point out even though I can’t explain it. I’ve always been around famous
people and circumstances—even when it had nothing to do with work. I’ll give you an example. Shortly after I got to Miami,
I drove three disc jockeys from our little station to see Palm Beach. We had somebody’s convertible—a rinky-dink old car.
I was behind the wheel. We drove up along coastal route A1A, past these beautiful homes, on a magnificent Sunday morning,
clear as crystal. There were hardly any cars on the road as we turned onto Worth Avenue, and I was moving very slowly as we
looked around at all the stores. We were approaching a light, and because I was looking around I didn’t stop quickly enough.
The car bumped into a convertible in front of us—not hard—but the driver’s head bounced forward and then back. The guy got
out of the car and it was John F. Kennedy.

It was unmistakably John F. Kennedy. Only two years earlier, Adlai Stevenson had thrown open the vice presidential nomination
at the Democratic National convention and it came down to Kennedy and Estes Kefauver. Kefauver won. Which, it was said later
on, was lucky for Kennedy. Because he didn’t run on a losing ticket and was therefore in a better position to get the nomination
for president in 1960.

I’ll never forget. Kennedy walked over to us and said, “How? How could you hit me? It’s ten o’clock in the morning. It’s clear.
There’s nobody on the road. I’m the only car. How could you hit me?”

I said, “I’m sorry, Senator, would you like to exchange licenses?”

He said, “I’ll tell you what. Raise your right hands, all of you. Say, ‘I swear to vote for John Kennedy in two years.’”

We solemnly swore, and with a smile he drove off. But before he did, he said, “Stay a distance behind me.”

I’ll never know if the owner of a local restaurant intuited my ability to bump into famous people, or if he just liked listening
to my show. But Charlie Bookbinder had an idea that changed my life. Charlie’s restaurant was a Jewish deli called Pumpernik’s.
It was open twenty-four hours a day. But the hour after breakfast, between ten and eleven, wasn’t bringing in much business.
So Charlie got this idea to have me broadcast live from the restaurant. I’d do a morning show from the studio of WKAT between
six and nine, all the while promoting the fact that I’d be broadcasting live from Pumpernik’s between ten and eleven.

I had no idea how the switch from WAHR would develop my style. What really got my attention was the increase in pay. WKAT
was offering a hundred dollars a week!

I showed up at Pumpernik’s on the first day and found a sign in the window for
The Larry King Show
and an elevated stage. That was it. There was no producer. Just me. It turned out to be a wonderful breeding ground. Who
knew? I’d never really interviewed anyone apart from my one experience with Leo Durocher. Now I was interviewing anyone who
came over—waiters, customers on vacation, conventioneers. Anything could happen. There was no way to be prepared, because
I never knew who was coming over next. This forced me to think on the fly.

I mean, when was the last time you heard a plumber being interviewed? I can still remember doing forty-five minutes with one.
The guy said, “People don’t think about it, but plumbing is the key to your house. Without plumbing, your house can’t function.
Your bed falls down, you can sleep on the floor. But if your plumbing is screwed up, you need me. I make your house work.”

“Is there an artistry to plumbing?” I asked him.

“Definitely. What makes one fixture better than another? You have to size things up. Do you know why New York City has the
best water in the world? Because when they built the system years ago, they made it with copper. Copper is the best piping
you can have. Copper doesn’t rust. The water stays pure. You make sure copper is in your bathroom, and you’ll have much less
trouble…”

The specialness of an interview like that is how unspecial it is. It’s the essence of what I do. I’m an everyday guy, and
my interviews attract the everyday guy. But they also attract the everyday guy in people who can do things that are special.

After I’d done about two weeks at Pumpernik’s, the singer Bobby Darin walked in. He had trouble sleeping at night, and he
had been up at six that morning, listening to me promote the show. I loved “Mack the Knife” and the rest of Bobby’s music,
but, again, there was no way to prepare. I interviewed him for an hour, and it worked out great. He told me he was embarrassed
to have written “Splish Splash.” Afterward, we took a long walk down Collins Avenue. This was really an experience for me.
Little Larry Zeiger from Brooklyn was walking down Collins Avenue with the singer of a number one hit, and he was confiding
in me. Darin was born with a rheumatic heart. He was telling me that he knew he was going to die at an early age. That’s why
he worked so hard and tried to pack so much into his life. He knew he was on borrowed time. He wanted to do everything yesterday.

One of the newspapers wrote about Bobby Darin going on with Larry King at Pumpernik’s. Before long, Jimmy Hoffa walked in.
When you talk to plumbers, you make friends with teamsters. The Teamsters union was in town for a convention, and a few guys
I knew brought in Hoffa. Once Hoffa started to talk, the restaurant began to fill. Hoffa was a character. Tough as nails.

I asked Hoffa what kind of truck driver he was and found out he wasn’t a truck driver. He was a loader. Which is why, he said,
whenever he went in to negotiate a contract, the first thing management had to do was promise to heat the loading platforms.
He used to freeze his ass off at four in the morning loading trucks in Detroit. “If you don’t heat the loading platforms,”
he said, “I don’t talk to you.”

These are the sorts of things you learn when you don’t have time to prepare.

Hoffa said he never wanted to ride in the back of a limousine. These union leaders who go around holding straps, he said,
are no different from the guys running the corporations. He always rode in the front of a Chevrolet. He had a funny way of
referring to himself by his own name. He’d say, “Hoffa says.” When he did, I’d say, “King responds.” He had a good sense of
humor about it. When the show ended, I noticed that Pumpernik’s was jammed.

Soon, Danny Thomas and a bunch of famous people started coming around between ten and eleven. Saturday was children’s day
and people brought their kids in to be interviewed.

Pumpernik’s became
the spot
, and I became Mr. Miami. It wasn’t planned. I didn’t have a PR person. People liked me. Lenny Bruce and Don Rickles liked
coming by. Once Lenny came in wearing an outfit from the state prison.

Miami was one of the few places where Lenny didn’t have a lot of trouble with the cops. I said, “Lenny, why are you wearing
this?”

He said, “I like to wear prison uniforms.”

“Why?”

“I like to walk up to cops and ask them directions.”

“Why?”

“To see their reactions. Because you know what they’re thinking. The first thing they’re thinking is,
Is this an escaped con asking for directions?
The second thing they’re thinking is,
Nah, can’t be an escaped con. Why would an escaped con ask a policeman for directions?
Third thing they’re thinking is,
What if he’s a brilliant escaped con who thinks that I’m not thinking what he’s thinking?
”

And Rickles said, “Lenny, get a job.”

The Pumpernik’s hour was funny and loose, and that really started to come out in my early morning show between six and nine.
If I had stayed with it, I’d have ended up a major morning disc jockey like Imus.

One time during my show I was listening to the morning traffic report. The guy giving the report told drivers that I-95 was
backed up, so they should use Seventh Avenue. I thought, Well, he’s alleviating I-95. But he’s congesting Seventh Avenue.
So I invented this character to rectify the situation, Captain Wainright.

It was my voice, I just hit a control that distorted it and made it sound funny. So Captain Wainright came on and said, “I
just heard that traffic report, Larry. All you listeners, I want you to know that I-95 is open and clear. Get back on I-95.”
Then Captain Wainright gave a little laugh.
Heh, heh, heh.
Five minutes later, Captain Wainright came back on with that same laugh and said, “I got ’em backed up to Broward County.”

Captain Wainright was my alter ego, and everything a cop shouldn’t be. When Gulfstream Park racetrack opened, Captain Wainright
said, “Don’t go to Gulfstream. Bet with any Dade County police officer. They’ll take your bet. Leave your money where you
live.”

I’d get Miami’s state attorney Dick Gerstein on the phone and Captain Wainright would say, “Dickie baby, where are you? Today
is payoff day, and if you’re not in the office in five minutes, I’m going to call out the boys.”

Whenever I’d pass a detour sign where roadwork was being done, I’d have fresh material. “If you’re on I-95 and you turn toward
Miami Beach, you’ll see a detour sign,” Captain Wainright would say. “Disregard that detour sign. We’re on our way to take
it down. Go straight through it.”

A guy working for the city called me and said, “Larry, if we didn’t love you, we’d kill you.” Looking back on it, I probably
wasn’t doing anything different from when Herbie and I clogged the streets as traffic monitors in junior high. Only this time,
I didn’t have to go to the principal’s office. Now there were bumper stickers around town that read,
DON
’
T STOP ME, I KNOW CAPTAIN WAINRIGHT
.

Requests to speak at Rotary Clubs started coming. I would emcee the opening of every new movie theater. A small television
station gave me a weekly interview show. The
Miami Herald
gave me a column. I’d walk into Joe’s Stone Crab and stand at the end of the bar among the crowd as if I’d been on the waiting
list all night. The wait might be two and a half hours. Within five minutes, I’d hear, “Mr. King. Larry King.”

But it was a bus driver who would take me to the next level.

T
HERE ARE TIMES
when I watch reruns of
The Honeymooners
before I go on the air at CNN. They always give me a lift. Jackie Gleason has lifted me up from the day I met him.

One of my favorite episodes is called “Better Living Through TV”—and it’s a nice coincidence that I met Jackie around the
time I got my first local television show in Miami. The plot goes like this: Ralph and Norton come upon a kitchen utensil
that can do everything. Everything from core an apple to open an aluminum can. The Helpful Housewife Happy Handy, it’s called.
So Ralph and Norton decide to go on television dressed like chefs to sell this gadget. It had to be the first infomercial,
which shows you how ahead of his time Jackie was. Ralph and Norton were going to make a fortune selling the Helpful Housewife
Happy Handy.

Except that the producers bump their segment up, tell them they’re on in two minutes, and Ralph freezes before the camera.
Hummana, hummana, hummana… It takes him longer to core an apple during the demonstration than for Norton to do it the old-fashioned
way. When he tries to open a can, he slices his finger. By the end of the demonstration, Ralph has crashed down the whole
kitchen set. It’s still hilarious fifty years later. Which gets to the essence of Jackie. I remember Bishop Fulton Sheen speaking
at a dinner honoring Jackie. Sheen talked about children and humor, how children love to see something funny over and over
again. They could watch it a hundred times and never get tired. Then he turned to Jackie and said, “That’s what I say to you,
Jackie. We’re all children. Do it again. Do it again.” There was something about Ralph Kramden the bus driver that touched
not only every man of that social stratum, but everyone.

I met Jackie on a train coming down from New York. Jackie wanted to play golf all year round, so CBS agreed to move
The Jackie Gleason Show
to Miami. The press was invited to take the trip and I went for the ride.
And awa-a-a-a-y we go!

When we arrived, there was an official reception to welcome Jackie to Miami Beach. I was the emcee. Jackie and I got close
that night, and he started to listen to my radio show. Though he was fifteen years older, we had similar backgrounds and a
chemistry that made for good friends. We were both ethnic kids from Brooklyn. His father ran away. My father died. He didn’t
have a phone. I didn’t have a phone until I was fifteen years old. We both liked attention. Jackie once told me about the
time his mother took him to see a show. At the end, during the applause, Jackie turned around and faced the audience. He knew
in that moment that he preferred to look at the audience instead of the stage.

“You know,” he once told me, “there can be fifty people in this room funnier than me. But they can’t get up in front of a
camera. Because that takes something else.”

I said, “You’re telling me you have an enormous ego.”

“Of course,” he said.

“Are you conceited?”

“Confident.”

Conceited to Jackie meant someone who wanted the spotlight but didn’t have talent. When that light goes on, he said, that’s
my world. He saw that same quality in me. He liked the way I took control of a show, and I learned a lot watching Jackie.