My Remarkable Journey (9 page)

One night, we planned to go out to dinner after the filming of his show. I was standing offstage while he was doing a scene.
As the scene shifted to Norton and Trixie, he stepped off the stage and came over to me. “Call Raimundo,” he said. “Tell him
we’re coming over to eat right after the show.”

“Fifteen seconds…” a crew member alerted him.

“Tell him I want the soft-shell crabs the way I like them with the min—”

“Ten seconds!”

“With the minestrone soup, all right, and I want that fresh bread.”

“Five seconds, Jackie.”

“And tell them to make sure that fresh bread is well, well baked. NORTON!” And he stepped onto the stage at exactly the right
moment.

I’m thinking,
Whoa, does this guy know his stuff.
I’ve got a clock in my head just like Jackie had a clock in his head. You have to have that clock if you’re going to work
in radio. You tell me thirty seconds, and I know what thirty seconds is without having to look at my watch. But Jackie taught
me how to take command of that clock. He taught me how to have a presence. The confidence I got from watching him paid off
big time when my first television show came along.

A lot of radio people fail at television because they look at it as
Television! Oh my God, I’m on television!
They forget that it ain’t brain surgery. You’re just sitting at a table asking questions, only there’s a camera on you.

If you start laughing, people will see you crack up instead of just hearing you. Once, a guy in the radio studio took off
his clothes and was sitting there naked eating a banana. I looked over at him and lost it on the air. But there would have
been no difference if he’d been sitting naked and eating a banana off camera during a television show. I’d have laughed just
the same. The essential difference between radio and television is that there is no difference.

My first television show was weird, though. The show came on Channel 10 at midnight every Sunday and it had no time limit.
When the subject we were talking about was finished, the show ended. It gave me a chance to ask questions that you don’t hear
on my CNN show now. When I’m interviewing people now, it’s often for fifteen minutes or half of the hour. The open-ended time
frame of that first show gave me the chance to explore. For example, I might have asked Michael Phelps, the guy who just won
eight gold medals in the 2008 Olympics, “When did you start to swim? Did you like swimming right away? Did you ever think
of swimming as a way to make money? What about swimming in salt water?” You’d never ask those questions on a television show
now. Now it’s
bam
! “What was winning today like?”

It’s very different to have General Petraeus on and ask, “What’s happening with the surge?” than it is to ask, “Why did you
make the army your career? What do you like about it? What do you like about strategy? How good are the Iraqis as fighters?
How do you motivate an army?”

Naturally, I’d love to ask those questions if I had the time. That was the pleasure of that Sunday night show in Miami. I
could go as far as my curiosity would take me. Sometimes the show would go to 2 a.m. Other times it would end at 3. We took
calls, but we didn’t have the technology to broadcast them. So messages and questions were written down and handed to me for
discussion.

The first show was a debate about whether China should be admitted to the UN. I was placed at a table between two guys with
opposing viewpoints. Big mistake. Major blunder. Because I was sitting in a swivel chair. Every time I’d turn to the other
speaker, I couldn’t stop. The whole show, I was trying to stop myself. It was weird to be swiveling, and weirder to know that
I was being seen swiveling. I was further conscious of it because I had come to understand the power of television during
the Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate.

I heard that debate on the radio. My conclusion was that these were two intelligent guys who basically agreed. When I got
to the radio station to do my show, everyone was saying, “Oh, Kennedy mopped the floor with him.”

“What?”

“Kennedy destroyed him.”

They felt that way because they’d seen the debate on TV. Nixon looked drawn and gray, and wasn’t well made up. Kennedy was
in a sharp suit and stood more erect. It had nothing to do with the quality of what they said and everything to do with how
they looked. That’s when I realized television’s impact as a visual medium.

So I knew there was going to be no mistaking my swivel. The
Miami Herald
wrote something like: “In an age when the television talk show host is beginning to be prominent, we now have a new feature.
A swiveling, smoking host.” Someone at my radio station actually said, “It’s so different from any show we’ve ever seen. Why
don’t you leave the swivel chair in?”

Gleason watched the show and then came in to be interviewed as a guest. He arrived before I did, broke in to the general manager’s
office to find a couch, got a chair, found a different lamp. I can still see him standing on the set. “That don’t go, pal.
This goes here. That goes there. We’ll move this over here.” He went into the control room and prelit the set. What were we
going to do, stop him? He was an aesthetic genius. I wonder if there is anyone today who could come as a guest to a television
show and change the set?

And he was a great guest. He was a ponderer, a philosopher who grappled with his thoughts. He was curious about life and death.
He used to call himself a roaming Catholic. He was torn between the idea that you could go to a heaven where all would be
well—and the logic that defies that. He was interested in religious leaders and how they found faith. He had a lot of time
to think about these things because he was an insomniac. He never read novels, only nonfiction. A mind like his appreciated
good questions—and that might have been the core of our friendship.

The actor-director-novelist Peter Ustinov once told me he loved good interviews. When I asked him why, he said they made him
think about things he hadn’t thought about—that’s what a good interviewer does. My style meshed perfectly with Jackie. That
night, the show lasted for
five
hours.

When another local channel made a better offer and I moved, Jackie helped me out by doing a promotional spot for the new show.
“You’re all lucky,” he said. “Larry King’s coming to Channel 4.”

But one of the greatest things he did for me came from a simple question he posed. Jackie liked to make games out of questions.
The game one night was, What in your profession is impossible?

There was a doctor with us that night. The doctor said, “In my profession, they will never make blood in a laboratory. It’s
impossible. You can go ten million years into the future and you’ll see that blood will never be made in a lab.”

Jackie looked at me and asked, “What’s impossible in your profession?”

“Well,” I said, “I do a local radio show every night between nine and twelve. Frank Sinatra doing my radio show for three
hours on one night—that’s impossible.”

This was 1964. There was nobody bigger in the world than Frank Sinatra and he
never
did interviews. Sinatra was the only person I knew of at the time who would not return a call from the
New York Times.

Jackie immediately said, “Frank is performing at the Fontainebleau next week. What night is he dark?”

I said, “On Monday. He doesn’t work Monday.”

Jackie said, “You got him.”

I said, “What are you telling me?”

He said, “You got Frank Sinatra on Monday night.”

I said, “Look, if I’ve got Frank Sinatra on my radio show next Monday night, I’ve got to tell people. I’ve got to promote
it.”

“Promote it!” Jackie said.

So I went on my radio show that night and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, next Monday night we’ll have Frank Sinatra for three
hours.”

A station exec called me up the next day and said, “Are you kidding?”

I understood exactly where the exec was coming from. To give you an idea how remote the possibility of getting Frank on my
show was at the time, imagine that Vladimir Putin had never given an interview in the United States. Now imagine Barbara Walters,
Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, and Larry King asking and being turned down. And then one evening,
Putin agrees to do a local radio show for three hours. Well, this exec obviously wasn’t aware of Gleason’s definition of clout,
which is the best definition there is: “If you think you have it, you have it. If you think you don’t have it, you don’t have
it. And if you think you don’t have it, and you have it, you still don’t have it.”

I said to the exec, “Jackie Gleason told me we’d have him.”

“OK…” he said, but I could tell he didn’t believe it.

Friday came along. The exec called. He said the station was taking out a big ad in the
Miami Herald
on Monday. “Full page ad,” he said. “Gonna cost a lot of money. Here’s the problem. We’ve been calling the Fontainebleau
Hotel and leaving messages to confirm that Frank will be on the show. But Frank hasn’t returned any of our calls. We’re getting
a little nervous.”

So I said, “OK, I’ll call Jackie.”

I dialed up Jackie. “Jackie, they’re nervous at the station.”

Jackie said, “
Are you questioning me, pal?
I told you he’ll be there, and he’ll be there!”

“OK, Jackie,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

So the station ran the ad. Monday night came. Nobody went home. The secretaries—they all worked nine to five. They all waited.
Everybody at the station stayed.

It was five minutes to nine. No car. Nothing.

It was four minutes to nine. Three minutes. Nothing.

I was supposed to go on at five after the hour. At nine o’clock sharp, a limo pulled up. Out of the car stepped Frank’s PR
guy, Jim Mahoney, and there he was—Frank Sinatra. He came up the stairs. He said, “Which one’s Larry King?”

Timidly, I raised my hand. “Me.”

“OK, let’s do it!”

As we were going into the booth, the PR guy pulled me aside. He said, “I don’t know how you got him. But I’ll tell you one
thing. He pays me big money
not
to do this!”

I stepped toward the booth and the PR guy pulled me back. “Just one thing,” he said. “Don’t ask about the kidnapping of his
son.”

So I was thinking, better not ask about the kidnapping or Frank will walk off.

“OK,” I told the PR guy. “It’s none of my business.”

So Frank and I went in the booth. We sat down. The light went on. We were on the air.

Now a lot of talk show hosts would have said, “My guest tonight is an old friend—Frank Sinatra. Great to see you again, pal.”

That’s bullshit. I learned a long time ago never to lie to a radio audience—or any audience.

But you’ve got to understand, there was something in the air. The whole audience was wondering. Larry. Frank. Larry? Frank?
It didn’t make sense. Frank was at the top of the world. Larry was a local radio guy making $120 a week. How did he know Frank?

I wasn’t going to pretend that I knew him. So I was honest. As soon as I introduced him, my first question was, “Why are you
here?”

It was a good question. He had to tell me something, right? I think Frank appreciated the honesty.

He said, “I’ll tell ya. About a month ago, just before a closing night, I got laryngitis. Couldn’t sing. Couldn’t speak. I
didn’t know what to do. We had a packed house.

“So I called up Jackie Gleason. I said, ‘Jackie, will you come and do the show?’

“He said, ‘OK.’ So he came and did the show. It was wonderful. After the show, I walked him out to his limo, leaned in, and
whispered, ‘Jackie, I owe you one.’

“When I checked in to the Fontainebleau Hotel there was a message to call up Jackie. So I did. I said, ‘Jackie, it’s Frank.’
He said, ‘Frank, this is the one.’”

Well, Frank and I really got along. Frank was a great interview. Ella Fitzgerald had no idea where her voice came from. With
Louie Armstrong, it was: “I just play.” But Frank—he could break it down. I remember him telling me, “I lay there listening
to Heifetz play the violin. I didn’t know the song. I didn’t know classical music. I’d never heard the melody. And I’m crying.
And I said to myself, ‘What is he doing?’ Or, I’d watch Tommy Dorsey play the trombone. And his jacket wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t
move! And these amazing notes are coming out. All with that great breath control. I tried to ape that. How could I ape that
sound? How could I interpret that music? Could I make
you
cry?” Frank would think about things like that.

Frank became really comfortable during the interview. So, you see, there’s a lesson in being honest and remaining who you
are. In the middle of the interview, I said to him, “Frank, the thing between you and the press. Has it been overplayed? Or
have you been bum-rapped?”

He said, “Well, it’s probably been overplayed. But I’ve been bum-rapped, too. Take my son’s kidnapping…”

I looked over at the PR guy and thought he would faint.

Frank told the whole story of the kidnapping and how the press treated him!

Why? Because he felt comfortable. Years later—after we’d done many other radio and television interviews—he wrote me a letter
that included a sentence that would have made Jackie Gleason smile. It said, “What you do is you make the camera disappear.”

I became very friendly with Frank as a result of that first interview. After it was over, after three hours, he said, “Hey,
kid, you wanna come see the show?”

“YEAH!” I said.

“Come tomorrow night. You’re sitting ringside. Bring a guest.”

Now, I could choose any woman in town to go with me, and I knew I was going to get laid.
You wanna come see Frank Sinatra sing? We’re sitting ringside!
Could it get any better than that?

I asked this pretty girl I liked, and we went to the show. We were sitting right in front of the stage having a wonderful
dinner and listening to Frank Sinatra. It was great. But here’s the thing. In the middle of every show, Sinatra always had
a cup of tea and talked to the audience. I had no idea what was coming. All of a sudden, while he was drinking his cup of
tea, he said, “By the way, I don’t do interviews. But I want to tell you about a young man in the audience tonight. I owed
a favor to Jackie Gleason and Jackie introduced me to this guy and I did an interview with him and he was terrific. It was
a great interview. I want him to take a bow. You’re going to be hearing a lot about him. Larry King, stand up.”