Playboy Interview: Larry King

Even the President of the United States watches "Larry King Live."

King discovered that fact at an exclusive cocktail party before the 46th Annual Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner last March in Washington, D.C.

"Hey, Larry," said George Bush, "where'd you get that guy?" He was referring to the previous night's show and to King's first guest, a testy Black Panther who, though recently set free on a technicality after 19 years in jail, had lost none of his facility for answering questions with evasive rhetoric.

King answered Bush without missing a beat. "I don't get them, Mr. President. My producers do." Which, according to Larry King mythology, is true: He doesn't book his guests, nor does he prepare for his interviews.

"Well," Bush continued, "he was really something. Really something."

Here's what else was really something: When the President told King he would be leaving the dinner early ("I promised the wife we'd leave early," said Bush, "otherwise, she'd kill me")--after his own remarks and before King and political mimic Jim Morris entertained--King refused to let the President slip away.

"You gotta stay," he implored. After all, Morris would be doing Bush at length. "You really should stay, Mr. President. Just as part of ... the act."

Come showtime, King had prevailed. The President and the First Lady remained on the dais throughout.

That's the effect Larry King has on people. For five years, his hourlong "Larry King Live" has been the highest-rated show on CNN. His nightly radio call-in talk show has run on the Mutual Broadcasting System since 1978 and is now beamed to more than 360 stations. After three decades, Larry King has become America's bedtime story, its night owls' lullaby.

But, of course, listening to King satisfy America's lust for chat is not all sweet music. On the radio, he can often be curt with callers who ramble and pontificate. On TV, he sits close enough to the guest to intimidate. That may not be his purpose, but it's definitely part of the subtext. King requires total control. And it works. His fans love him not only for the wide range of guests--from Presidents to starlets to weirdos--but also for a style that falls somewhere between fluffy and forceful, yet is neither. King can be intense, often demanding, yet he is also clever enough to ask questions so obvious that they are both unanticipated by today's media-savvy guests and ultimately revealing.

According to King, the secrets of his success are simple, God-given gifts: enthusiasm, a facile glibness, a willingness to listen and an insatiable curiosity. He is a guy who just wants to know what the other guy knows.

Born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn, New York, he had a childhood plagued by tragedy: An older brother had died of a burst appendix, then his father died when King was ten. The family went on welfare and moved to a poorer neighborhood. Once a motivated student, King drifted through high school, skipped college and headed for Miami, where he quickly landed a morning discjockey job (it was station management who urged the name change just moments before King first went on the air). In 1960, when King was 26, he began to host a coffee-klatch interview show broadcast from Pumpernick's Restaurant, with guests ranging from Lenny Bruce and Jackie Gleason to Richard Nixon and H-bomb physicist Edward Teller. The show took off and King became a star.

Along with success came a lust for acclaim--and turbulence. King overspent, gambled and squired many of the area's finest-looking women. He married a Playboy Bunny, had a daughter, divorced, remarried the Bunny and divorced again when, in 1971, he was accused of stealing $5000 from a business associate, explaining he'd only taken the money, not stolen it. The matter was later dropped. He was $352,000 in debt on a $70,000 annual income. King declared bankruptcy. His station, WIOD, dismissed him and, lambasted by the press, King left town.

For four years, he wandered around the South, taking odd jobs, awaiting forgiveness. In 1975, he returned to Miami, was rehired by his former employers and quickly regained his popularity. He had soon acquired a newspaper column, a local TV talk show, a new wife and, courtesy of the Mutual Broadcasting System, a national radio talk show, a new wife and, courtesy of the Mutual Broadcasting System, a national radio talk show based in Washington, D.C.

By 1985, he was hosting "Larry King Live" for cable czar Ted Turner and, divorced for the third time, dating actress Angie Dickinson. Then his heart struck back and, on December 1, 1987, he went under the knife for a bypass.

King emerged from surgery chastened, mellowed and, ironically, in even greater demand: Among the many reported offers was the post-"Nightline" slot, with an option to take over the earlier show if Ted Koppel ever left. King stayed with Turner for a play-or-pay contract worth $800,000 yearly for five years--this on top of the income he receives from the radio show, the weekly column he writes for USA Today, the speaking fees and the books, which include "Larry King by Larry King," "Tell It to the King," "Mr. King, You're Having a Heart Attack" and the forthcoming "Larry King, Tell Me More."

Playboy asked Contributing Editor David Rensin (whose last "Playboy Interview" was with Eddie Murphy in February) to fly to Washington and spend a week questioning the man who, according to the "Guinness Book of World Records," claims to have logged more national radio hours than any other person alive. Rensin's report:

"Interviewing the interviewer can be the interviewer's dream. Throughout the three days King and I spent together, he answered my questions with energy and intelligence; he also made it a point not to repeat stories already on the record in his books. In other words, he helped me do my job.

"My first evening with King provided me with the best example of why he's so good at what he does, as well as of the kind of pressure under which he works. I entered the CNN studios for the evening broadcast of "Larry King Live" to find that all hell had broken loose: It was ten minutes before showtime, and the guests scheduled to open the program via satellite from CNN's Los Angeles bureau were nowhere to be found. Producer Tammy Haddad was trying frantically to pull in a provisional replacement--from anywhere.

"'Problem, Tammy?' said King nonchalantly.

"'Only that the bone-marrow couple haven't gotten to the studio yet, Larry,' she replied, then, in an aside to me, 'In all the years, no guest has ever not shown up.' King remained unfazed. He leafed through a copy of Rolling Stone, then a copy of Exposure, an L.A.-based lifestyle magazine for the young and trendy. He did a few toe touches and a long stretch. He stuffed a handful of jelly beans into his mouth. 'Well,' King said, finally, 'this is live TV. I'm going into the studio. I'm on in six minutes.'

"The guests finally arrived at 8:59:30. As Haddad hurried to have them miked, she turned to me and said, 'Things are usually calmer here.'

"And once the show began--when the final countdown had been made and the camera's red light blinked on--things did become calm. There's a certain smoothness to the way King operates; he makes his guests feel comfortable, humanized, listened to. And you know he's listening when, with the threat of a disconnect hanging humid in the air, he'll tell a caller, 'Get to the point, sir. Quickly.'

"So let's do just that."

[Q] Playboy: Let's take the first question straight from the cover of your best seller. Why should anyone tell it to the King?

[A] King: You get the benefits of a fairly long, live broadcast interview and a chance to tell your side of the story fully. And I'm going to hear it fully. It ain't going to be edited. It's not like Barbara Walters--sitting with you for four hours and it eventually comes down to twenty minutes on the air.

[Q] Playboy: You're not a Walters fan, then.

[A] King: There's a nonreal quality to her interviews, kind of a "Let's go sit on a rock; we'll take pictures together and I'll ask you about flowers" thing. We don't come away feeling, Boy, wasn't that something? Her strength is more who she gets than what she gets from them. And that's a disappointment. Also, I hear her lisp, so I'm not a fair judge. When I hear a lisp, I lose contact. It's Elmer Fudd. And some of the questions are inane. I liked her better when she did news interviews. The best I ever saw was with Sadat and Begin. She wasn't interested in who Sadat was sleeping with or whether he went to Spago's.

[Q] Playboy: What are your strengths?

[A] King: I'm intensely curious. I'm sincerely interested. I'm nonjudgmental. I like to know what importance the subject puts on an event. I am a pretty good communicator. I know how to tell a story. I have a good voice and a good sense of pace. All of this, by the way, I take no credit for. I'm not playing up. I don't know where I got that from. I know I didn't sit down and work at it. I don't ponder what I do. I don't even think I work hard. I just love what I do and it comes easily to me. This ain't brain surgery.

[Q] Playboy: What's more important: nailing a great answer or generating good will and retaining access?

[A] King: I never think of access or good will. I just want a good interview. I want guests to be informative and entertaining. I've never been concerned about someone's liking me tomorrow.

[Q] Playboy: Is it important that your guests trust you?

[A] King: Absolutely. [Points to a framed letter on his wall] There's a letter from Sinatra about his trust in me. My subjects know that I am not there to harm them.

[Q] Playboy: What do you do if you see them getting into hot water despite your well-intended questions?

[A] King: If it's a politician, I don't care at all.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] King: Because they're elected.

[Q] Playboy: So screw 'em?

[A] King: Well, not screw 'em. If you stand up for public office, then you're working under a different set of rules. Sinatra, for example, has never asked you for a thing. You don't have to buy his record or go to his movie or to his concert. But if I ask for your vote, and you give it to me, I have a higher public obligation to you.

Still, I don't want to see anybody really squirm. But some people you can't even help. I tried to help Raquel Welch when she said, "I'm going to take this through all fifty-two states." I said, "You mean the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico?"

[Q] Playboy: You've been at this game--doing radio and TV, writing for newspapers, publishing successful books--for more than thirty years. What does it feel like to sit in your chair?

[A] King: [Smiles] Something happens when the red light goes on. A juice takes over, and suddenly, everything else is tuned out. I've never lost that little jolt. Like Sinatra says, "You're standing backstage. You're seventy-three years old. It's the seventeen thousandth time, and the man says, 'And now...' and you still get that charge." Every day is a new day. Just yesterday, I talked with a famous Catholic priest who has written a hundred and ten books. Then I learned a great deal about a medical procedure I knew nothing about. Today, I'm going to meet a Hall of Fame baseball star. I get to pry into people's minds--and get paid for it.

[Q] Playboy: Then why not have even more fun and do a daytime show, like Geraldo, Oprah and Phil?

[A] King: I couldn't do a show with six people who have had a brutal thing happen to them, on a regular basis. I would go crazy. I like interviewing people who are more established, even if they are a rung below celebrity. I do people on the street, I do victims, but dealing just with human beings who've had intense problems--which is basically what daytime television does--wouldn't be expansive enough for me. I need a broader landscape.

[Q] Playboy: How do you rate the hosts of those shows?

[A] King: Geraldo is a good guy, a great friend, loyal to people who work around him. But the show's overproduced. Geraldo used to fill in for me before he started his own show. Everyone on the crew liked working with him. That says a lot.

[Q] Playboy: Oprah?

[A] King: She's an involved host. There's a lot of "I" in the show: "I've been there. I lost the weight, I gained the weight. You have the disease, I have the disease." I'm more impressed with her as an actress.

[Q] Playboy: Phil?

[A] King: I was on his show a couple of months ago. He introduced me by saying, "If I die and come back, I want to come back as Larry King." When I was in the hospital recovering from heart surgery, he came to visit me. Didn't make a big deal of it. He said, "I make more money than you, so my vote can be bigger than your vote, and my grandchildren will inherit more than your grandchildren. But I'd love to be doing what you're doing: on at nine o'clock at night and able to talk with a Congressman for a half hour and not have to do today's priest who slept with a choir girl." I thought that was very sincere.

[Q] Playboy: Should he move on?

[A] King:I'd like to know if he's ready. If I were handling Phil, I'd get him hired at CBS, have him do the CBS Morning News. There would be no co-host, just a newsman to interact with. I'd bet he'd do damn well, make it a three-way battle in the morning. But he couldn't make as much money.

[Q] Playboy: Sally Jesse Raphaël?

[A] King: White Oprah. I worked with Sally when she worked in Miami and helped get her the job there. Her advice show on radio is OK, but I don't like layman's advice.

[Q] Playboy: Jesse Jackson?

[A] King: Jesse's talk show won't make it. He's too used to being asked questions rather than asking them. To be a successful talk-show host, you must remove your own ego. And that's impossible for Jesse.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have booking conflicts with those other talk shows?

[A] King: No. My producers and Ted Koppel's producers often are shooting for the same guests. You try to get people first when they get to town. Koppel's audience is about twice as big, because he goes on at eleven-thirty and he has a larger universe. A lot of people would like to do Larry King Live because they usually appear by themselves. They don't have fifteen other people around.

But I don't focus on the competition. There's no other talk show on against me. I don't know that anyone would say, "Larry King got that guest ahead of me. Jesus Christ!" Nor do we say, "That fucking Ted Koppel."

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that you personally have nothing to do with bookings?

[A] King: Yes. I trust my producers. I'm not an expert on what people watch. But I'm in total control on the air.

[Q] Playboy: What's the world's best question?

[A] King: "Why?" And the world's worst question is "Did?"

[Q] Playboy: Part of the Larry King mythology is that you don't prepare for your TV or radio interviews. True?

[A] King: Yes. But nobody believes that. I read a lot, if that's preparation. I'm aware of what's going on in the world. Sometimes the producers give me blue cards [with information]. But I don't make specific preparations. I don't want to know the answers. I don't want to read previous quotes. I like just winging it. In fact, I physically couldn't do both my radio and TV jobs if I did prepare. I don't even know the names of the guests on my television show tonight.

[Q] Playboy: Oh, come on....

[A] King: That's not a boast; I just started that way. When I began on radio, broadcasting from a restaurant in Miami, I had no producer. Guests were whoever came in. I got comfortable with knowing less. I've discussed this with Mike Wallace. He prepares because he feels it's like a courtroom and that the good lawyer in a courtroom is never surprised--which is true. The great lawyer Edward Bennett Williams told me that if a lawyer hears something in a courtroom that surprises him, he has failed. I am the opposite. I like being surprised.

[Q] Playboy: Were you surprised when Donald Trump asked you on Larry King Live to please sit farther away from him because you had bad breath?

[A] King: That was funny. But you're taking things out of context. The first question I asked Trump was, "Is there a method to getting an edge in negotiations that you could relate to us?" And he said, "Larry, you have bad breath," and he physically backed off. He was trying to be funny. Then he leaned forward and said, "See, I now have the edge. You're thrown because I've commented about your breath." He made a very good point: Shock'em. But it didn't work [on the air]. Later, he told me he got more mail on that than anything he'd ever done in public. Critical mail. He had a good idea. He just chose a bad example.

[Q] Playboy: How do you get an edge on your guests?

[A] King: It's not a contest. It's an experience. I'm there to learn as much as I can while being entertaining. I never anticipate a guest's being hostile or lying. And I don't bring a personal bias to the interview.

[Q] Playboy: How can you not?

[A] King: Sure, there's technically a bias in any question you ask. The New York Times publishes "all the news that's fit to print." According to whom? According to them. But if you catch me using the word I once a year, that's a lot. It has no place. "I saw your movie." So what? "I read your book." Bullshit. Who cares about "I"? Saying "Boy, I loved your book. It was thrilling" is just jerking off the guest.

[Q] Playboy: Name your top five interviewers.

[A] King: Koppel is a great news interviewer. He has good pace, broad knowledge, curiosity about the world and is very involved in world affairs. Ted was raised in news and I was not. He told me once, and I think it's a fair description, that if we both came upon a fire and a fireman came running out, his first question would be "What caused this fire?" My first question would be "Why do you want to fight fires?"

Mike Wallace is the best of the hardhitting interviewers, because he's very bright and he has a crisp, wonderful voice. It always holds me. If I go through the room and he is on television, I stop. I like that little errant chip he carries and that little smile he gives the guest of almost disbelief. And I like the way he's prepared.

Bryant Gumbel. I get to see him in snatches, when I'm working out on my treadmill. He does excellent four-or-five-minute interviews, which are hard. You can't broaden into anything. It's easy to host a morning show, by the way. You bring in six guests, you ask them any little thing you want and then some guy does the weather. Everything is sitting there for you; all you do is move it along. Bryant's got his groove. But I want to know if he misses doing sports [full time]. If he were offered the CBS prime sportscaster spot, for example, I'm betting he'd do it.

Bob Costas is fourth. He has branched out and is well prepared. He's learning to ask shorter questions. He's curious, he's bright. He's not a dominant figure. He's got a very dry sense of humor and a nice edge to him. There's a little smartass, New York kid to him, and that's OK, too. He wears well. He's also the best baseball announcer alive.

And I'm the fifth.

[Q] Playboy: No women in your top five. Do you think there will be a female news anchor any time soon?

[A] King: If Peter Jennings had finished last in the ratings, ABC would have put Diane Sawyer in, because Roone Arledge loves her. Sawyer is a terrific journalist, but she can't do a celebrity interview at all. Personally, I like her. She's not an icy blonde, and, of course, I also got a wonderful three-page letter from her about how she watched my show every night and had learned a lot from watching it. [Smiles]

CBS might be forced to hire a female anchor if Rather left, for economics' sake: "Let's try something if we're third." That's the time to take risks. Mary Alice Williams is a terrific anchor, but NBC would never give her the lead slot. She's in her forties now. See, that's the difference: a young guy in his fifties, an older woman in her forties. It's interesting, isn't it?

[Q] Playboy: Haven't Jane Pauley's exit from the Today show and occasional substitute anchoring put her in the running?

[A] King: Jane will never be the six-thirty anchor. Not strong enough for the time period. Those are still male jobs, like morning-radio hosts.

You know, Deborah Norville is a pretty good anchor; I'm interested in what she says when she's delivering the news. She needs to sharpen her interviewing skills tremendously--she's a little too wordy and her hesitation shows. But if she came out and said, "This is what I want to do; I don't want to do cooking in the morning; I don't want to banter with Willard; I want to be an anchor," she'd have the best shot.

[Q] Playboy: How are you in off-camera situations; that is, are you any good interviewing household help and production assistants?

[A] King: [Laughs] I do so little of that. I don't hire anyone associated with the programs. All the producers have been hired by the executive producer. The maid who cleans my apartment was recommended to me by a service--I met her for a minute. I've never even fired anyone. I don't have to deal with those things.

[Q] Playboy: When your daughter, Chaia, was a teenager, you were a single parent. What about grilling the boys who wanted to take her out?

[A] King: Yeah, I would do that. And both guys she wound up seeing I didn't like. [Laughs] The problem is when it's personal. It's like negotiating for yourself. The great negotiator cares, but not that much. The great interviewer cares, but not that much. You care, but you don't crazily care; otherwise, you're emotionally involved with the guest. And if you're emotionally involved with the guest, then you're laying your heart out. And that ain't your role.

But if it's your daughter's guy, you're emotionally involved. You want him to be a young doctor who has all his eggs in a row. You don't want to hear--as her first boyfriend said--"I really don't know what I want to do." Oh, Jesus, there was a pain! I never got such a pain in my stomach--not even in a broadcast interview.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that the person you most wanted to interview but never did was Laurence Olivier. Now that he's gone, who's your next choice?

[A] King: Mikhail Gorbachev. If he would talk English.

[Q] Playboy: But he doesn't.

[A] King: Tip O'Neill swore that when he spoke to him, he spoke English. Gorbachev's too global now not to come on my show--and CNN goes into the Moscow cable system twenty-four hours a day.

[Q] Playboy: What would you like to ask him?

[A] King: Everything. Change. Growing up. The system. When he saw that things were wrong. Who was his mentor? K.G.B. Thoughts on America. Reagan. Raisa's role in his life. The future. Fidel Castro. Old guard, new guard. Was he surprised by Romania, shocked about Ceausescu? Tiananmen Square. Endless.

[Q] Playboy: Do you trust him?

[A] King: I have no reason not to. Lithuania is a bitch, but, hey, Panama was a bitch to us. We tend to think we own states around us. What if the Virgin Islands said, "We don't want to be a protectorate of yours anymore. Fuck you. Goodbye, America." We'd go there tomorrow.

[Q] Playboy: Any others?

[A] King: I'd like to look back on Castro's career with him. Ted Turner would set that up. I'd also like to interview Qaddafi. I like messianic people: dreamers and visionaries and wild guys. He'd be toughest to get.

[Q] Playboy: Those don't seem like guests who would take calls from the audience. Can you make an exception?

[A] King: Ted Kennedy wouldn't take calls. We taped him.

[Q] Playboy: How do calls work to your advantage?

[A] King: On radio, it's like having a hundred interviewers. Television is a little different--the calls are screened. Plus, it's exciting to hear American citizens talk with a former American President, no matter what they ask.

[Q] Playboy: Or a President's wife. When you spoke with Nancy Reagan after the publication of her autobiography, My Turn, she seemed ill at ease and evasive. And you didn't let callers pressure her.

[A] King: If a subject is apprehensive--if he is on a forced book tour, let's say--ain't nothing you can do. There's no law that says he has to talk. It's my responsibility as the host to do the best I can with the material at hand. I did the best I could. But I liked her and didn't expect to.

[Q] Playboy: Explain.

[A] King: I found her more moderate politically--a little spunkier--than I thought she'd be and, at the same time, a little weaker. I found a lot of humanness in her. I liked her sense of loyalty. I thought that was a very good sign. And I told her that after the show. All the years when the Reagans were in the White House, I was certainly not an admirer of her husband's Presidency and I tended not to like her. But, on the show, I discovered a fragility that I liked.

[Q] Playboy: How did she react to your honesty?

[A] King: She was very open and invited me to lunch. I had lunch with her and the President about a month after that, in Los Angeles. We talked only about show business. It was a hoot. And then she got him to do the show for a full hour.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anything you didn't ask the President during that hour that you'd want to ask him now?

[A] King: He probably knows less now about Iran/Contra than he did then. We're never going to know what he knew. He's too old now.

[Q] Playboy: How about other past guests? Any follow-up questions you'd like to ask those people? George Bush, for example.

[A] King: I'd ask him, "Do you like being the President more than having to face the decisions a President faces?" Kennedy liked the decisions; he didn't care much for the ribbon cutting. I'd ask Bush if he likes the problem solving as much as he likes picking up the wineglass at a state dinner.

[Q] Playboy: Dan Quayle.

[A] King: "How much do you think about being President? Every time Bush gets in an airplane, do you, deep down, really think about it?"

[Q] Playboy: Richard Nixon.

[A] King: "Do you think about what tomorrow will think? Or is that too abstract? What will be in Washington for Richard Nixon a hundred years from today? A statue?"

[Q] Playboy: Dan Rather.

[A] King: "Do you want to do this the rest of your life? Do you ever get the feeling, Dan, that someday it's going to explode?" If I told you one of the four major newscasters in America did something weird on his show last night, you'd think Rather before I finished the sentence. He has that image.

[Q] Playboy: Bernard Shaw.

[A] King: "Do you think, Bernie, there might be one day you'll go on a broadcast, loosen the tie, take off the jacket and say, 'Here, you mother--here's what I think'?"

[Q] Playboy: Sam Donaldson.

[A] King: "Do you regret doing PrimeTime Live? When you look at what is obviously a career mistake, how do you deal with it?" He is one of the best White House correspondents we've ever had, but if you want to work ten o'clock Thursday night, you've got to be show business. And there ain't one show-business bone in him.

[Q] Playboy: George Will.

[A] King: "What's the next game we're going to?" [Laughs] Actually, I'd like to know how he feels about being a Republican writer who is persona non grata at the White House. In fact, the only one Bush doesn't like. So what is it like to have gone from being a major in at the Reagan White House to a major out?

[Q] Playboy: [Washington, D.C., mayor] Marion Barry.

[A] King: It's almost impossible to ask Marion Barry anything. He's not going to answer. Marion Barry is not going to tell you anything about himself. I've never met an addict who said he licked it. You can't lick it; it's a lifelong thing. But Barry doesn't view it that way. He thinks he has a political problem. That's a total cop-out.

[Q] Playboy: Do your callers ever get you off the hook by asking the tough questions? In other words, do you let your audience do the dirty work for you?

[A] King: Sometimes a caller will ask a question I would never ask. But I can be protective of my guests. I'll step in if I feel that the question is rude. The guest is a guest--he's in my home, on my show. "Do you beat your wife?" is rude; I'd cut that off. Each call is a judgment call, and I've got to make the judgment.

[Q] Playboy: You've been criticized for being rude to callers.

[A] King: Yeah, I think I am. I'm curt. The show is not a personal service. If I have a doctor on and a lady calls in and says, "I would like to give you my medical history to help you answer this question," I have to force that lady to get to the point at hand, or I'm going to lose the audience. I regard the caller as a person on the air. I ask myself, Is this person interesting? Is he keeping the pace going? Is the question good? Is he on the mark? If he's trying to be funny, is he funny? I have to make these decisions and make them quickly.

[Q] Playboy: When was the last time you wanted to throw a guest off the air because you were simply disgusted with the person?

[A] King: I didn't like George Wallace the first time we spoke. His attitudes were so racist. This was in the Sixties, when he was governor of Alabama and didn't want "them nigras" in school. Racism is the number-one thing that gets me up the craw. But I've never thrown anybody off the air.

I used to complain about guests. And I would be sarcastic. But my temper surfaces less since my heart attack. When I get that feeling, I take a deep breath, suck it in, say, "It ain't the end of the world. This, too, shall pass." And forget it.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel when you discover that a guest has lied to you?

[A] King: I don't feel personally betrayed. I don't take any of these shows personally. Besides, they're not out to fool me, just the viewer or the listener. So there's a sadness about it.

[Q] Playboy: When you are certain that there is a big gulf between the subject's image and reality, as in the case of Gary Hart, how do you handle the interview?

[A] King: Hart's a good example, because he fools himself. He does not conceive of having done something wrong. That's a much more difficult challenge to an interviewer than someone deliberately trying to fool you. Hart has an attitude problem similar to Nixon's, which is, "Hey, it happened to other people. J.F.K. did it and you didn't pick on him." You can't change that person.

[Q] Playboy: So what do you do?

[A] King: I'd try to get him to where he can see that what he did was wrong. What's sad about Hart is that he never learned that screwing around ain't the thing. It's the lying. People aren't mad at Marion Barry because he took drugs. A lot of people take drugs. But don't lie. I've discovered that if you tell the truth to people, you can have it all. I don't care what you did. But if you lie, once they get hold of it--[Claps his hands and smiles wickedly] That's Hart's mistake. Also, he said, "Follow me around." So, hey, baby, fair game.

[Q] Playboy: Would you call yourself a good judge of character?

[A] King: I think I'm pretty good. But there's also a naïveté to my questions. When someone's lying, I suppose I can sense they're uncomfortable, that they'd rather not have been asked that particular question. Hmmm. That's very interesting. I don't know how examining I am.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] King: I tend to believe. I watch the Secretary of State, the politician, the candidate answer the question--like on Meet the Press--and if the politician says, "I was not at the meeting that I was accused of being at," I tend to believe him.

No one's ever asked me this question. It's a very good question; and a good question is one that forces you to think.

[Q] Playboy: You've logged so many hours on TV and radio. Are you ever terrified about slipping up and inadvertently saying something stupid that will provoke a national controversy?

[A] King: No, though occasionally, I get a little terrified in the last hour of my radio show, when I'm tired, of falling half asleep and making a nonsensical statement. Like, if someone called and said, "Hitler was a great guy," and I said, "I agree." [Laughs] But I trust my instincts.

[Q] Playboy: Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek probably trusted theirs, too.

[A] King: You have to think a certain way to goof that way. I could never say "nigger" on the air, because I don't say nigger. I could never do the joke that [Republican nominee for governor of Texas] Clayton Williams did, comparing bad weather to rape--saying that if it's inevitable, the only thing you can do is "relax and enjoy it." I could say "fuck" if someone got me mad. But I could probably beat that rap.

[Q] Playboy: Suppose you sensed that your interview subject were about to make a major faux pas. Would you go for it?

[A] King: Oh, yeah, I'd go for it. Sure. They're saying it, you follow it up. Koppel tried to get Campanis off the hook. You try the first time, especially if you realize they've reached some place in life. So I'd repeat the statement. "Are you saying whites are smarter than blacks?" And then if they repeat it, it's their ball game. But give them the right to say, "I didn't mean that." In Campanis' case, I think Koppel followed up because it looked to me like Al might have been a little drunk, and when you've got that situation, you've got to be careful. You're totally in control then. You can do anything you want to when someone is drinking.

But beyond that, no. A story's a story. I do not want to watch someone bleed. But, on the other hand, I'm not there to totally cocoon and protect someone.

[Q] Playboy: Whose fifteen minutes of fame have already gone on too long?

[A] King: Jessica Hahn's, Jimmy Swaggart's, Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker's. Trump is too rich to have it go on too long, because he can affect too many things, though I don't know that a Donald Trump love story is going to be as big in August as it was in January. Donald is dating: So what? After a while, we want a new Donald.

[Q] Playboy: What guest surprised you the most by being nothing like your expectations?

[A] King: It's not so much that he was great but that I was prepared to hate him and wound up really liking him: G. Gordon Liddy, the madman of Watergate. He's totally honest. He's a maniac, and I love maniacs. If I were in prison, I would like to be in prison with him.

[Q] Playboy: What did you ask him?

[A] King: "Did you really plan to kill Jack Anderson because of what he was writing?" He said, "Absolutely." I said, "What if a group of people are planning to kill you for the same reason?" He said, "Fair game."

[Q] Playboy: Moving from a maniac to your boss, what was it like interviewing Ted Turner?

[A] King: He's better than most. Well, no, he's not a great guest. You've got to work a lot with Ted. He's to the point, so you've got to be on the money. But I love his mental processes. He's the classic maverick.

Ted's surpassed the heads of the networks at being well known in America. I'm always wondering what he's going to do next. He's a dynamic risk taker. His one fault is that he tends to be cheap. If Ted can save a dollar, he'll save a dollar. If it takes four hundred thousand dollars to keep you, he'll never give you four hundred and ten thousand dollars. You won't get a surprise check or a Christmas bonus from Ted Turner. Yet he'll spend six hundred and forty-two million dollars if that's what it takes. That, to me, is a weakness.

[Q] Playboy: How does Turner compare with Trump?

[A] King: Trump's on the front page because he likes the front page. Turner doesn't need the front page. Trump does. Why? You would think Trump's richer than Turner. He's not. They're both worth about one point eight billion dollars, according to Forbes magazine. But Turner's crazier than Trump. He's more of a risk taker. He has been involved with more women than Trump. Trump has a marriage that broke up and three kids. A very normal American life. A lot of guys have marriages with three kids, and they leave them at the age of forty. Doesn't that happen a lot? Turner had five kids, left the [second] wife and eventually went after Jane Fonda.

[Q] Playboy: Got any relationship advice for Ted and Jane?

[A] King: I like Jane. She's spunky. They probably share the same politics. Ted has become very liberal. Economically, it would make a lot of sense. She has a lot of causes, Ted has causes and he would put the money behind the causes. That's a good marriage. And they certainly are attractive together.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of liberal politics, another favorite of yours is New York governor Mario Cuomo. He's also a close friend. Is it tough interviewing friends?

[A] King: Yes, because you hate to ask questions you know the answers to.

[Q] Playboy: How about one we don't know the answer to: Is he ever going to run for President?

[A] King: He's running.

[Q] Playboy: Really? Has he confided in you?

[A] King: No. But we spent an-exciting hour together on the show recently. He's on a different plane. I think he finally sees that he is well suited for the job, that no one in the party is grabbing the key. There comes a time when you think you're ready, and I think Mario thinks he's ready. He's had two terms as governor. He'll no doubt win a third. He sees that he can have opinions that are minority opinions, such as on capital punishment, and still retain a high degree of credibility. People like him. But it's hard to go more than eight years in any one office. Mario Cuomo ain't gonna be sitting there for eleven years in Albany.

[Q] Playboy:Is George Bush afraid of Cuomo?

[A] King: I don't think Presidents are afraid of anything. You're President. You know the clout that Presidents have. Certainly, he'd rather run against Dukakis than against Cuomo. But once you're elected President, hey. The best line about Michael Dukakis is similar to one Casey Stengel once said. Elston Howard was the first black player on the Yankees, and Stengel said, "We finally get a black player and he can't run." Well, we finally get a Greek-ethnic candidate--without emotion. The only Greek American who's not emotional is Michael Dukakis. He tossed that away. He had the Presidency.

[Q] Playboy: Last time Cuomo was on your show, he seemed almost--for lack of a better word--saintly, with his message of erasing negativity in the world.

[A] King: Mario Cuomo is the only politician I've ever met who can give a three-minute answer that will move the homeless, the blue-collar worker, the white-collar worker and the Yale professor--and hit them all at different levels while answering the same question. He has a unique ability to touch a lot of nerves simultaneously.

[Q] Playboy: Have you asked him about the public speculation that someday the press might dig up some third cousin four times removed who is in the Mafia?

[A] King: He's got a short fuse about that. But if Cuomo had this skeleton in his closet--even if he didn't know it was there--I think the press would have found it already. I don't think he worries about it.

[Q] Playboy: Frank Sinatra is another person constantly alleged to have Mob ties. Ever ask him about it?

[A] King: I've asked Mafia leaders about him. Most of the time, they just deny knowing him and say they like him. [Grimaces] That just drives me up the wall.

But here's a great story that will answer your question. For years, I had accepted the rumor that Sinatra's Mafia connections got him the role in From Here to Eternity. And so, apparently, did Mario Puzo, as we remember from The Godfather. But I never asked Frank about it--though I asked him about The Godfather. He hated the book. Then one night, I'm interviewing Eli Wallach, and I said, "Have you ever turned down a role and then regretted it?" And he said, "Yeah, I got the part of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. We're out in California, we're ready to shoot and Tennessee Williams called me. He said, 'Eli, I'd like you to do The Rose Tattoo.' I had an affinity for that play. So I went to Jerry Wald, the producer, and I said, 'Listen, I know I'm signed. I know we're ready to shoot, but can I get out of it? Can I go do The Rose Tattoo?' And he said to me, 'Well, Sinatra did a very good read of this. You won it, Eli, but he was a close second. So OK.' " So I asked Sinatra, "When The Godfather came out, why didn't you announce that Eli Wallach originally got the From Here to Eternity role, and then gave it up? That you had to do a read, just like Wallach had to do a read?"

[Q] Playboy: What was his answer?

[A] King: "Fuck them. They don't know? I don't have to tell 'em. I don't have to explain anything." I've asked Sinatra about the press, though. He gave me the best answer I've ever heard about what's wrong with gossip columnists. Sinatra's definition: "Gossip columnists feed off the alleged or real misfortunes of people infinitely more talented than they are." Summed it up. No response is possible.

[Q] Playboy: Did he mention what he thought of his unauthorized biographer, Kitty Kelley?

[A] King: She's a schmuck.

[Q] Playboy: Do the media force-feed gossip to the public about who is sleeping with whom, who drinks, uses drugs? Or are we just getting the dirt we actually want?

[A] King: We have this need to get more. We can't even let Malcolm Forbes die in peace. Isn't that the worst of us? What is this recent Forbes story [about his alleged homosexuality] designed to do other than titillate? There's no purpose. I don't like that kind of thing. I respect people who remain above that. Like Roseanne Barr. She makes people laugh on television every week; all the rest is bullshit. Who an actor sleeps with has nothing to do with how he acts tomorrow. Absolutely nothing. Unless he thinks it does and wants to talk about it with me.

[Q] Playboy: How about tabloid TV? Do you think there's a place in the world for it?

[A] King: There's a place in the world for everything. My favorite thing in the world is the First Amendment. Do I like to watch tabloid TV? Sometimes. Do I like to watch re-enactments? Sometimes.

[Q] Playboy: Do you like to watch Maury Povich?

[A] King: I like Maury. He's a pretty serious journalist and was an excellent news anchor and a pretty good talk-show host. He's a mensch. Comes from good stock. But I'd like to know if he really likes what he's doing. I couldn't do a daily tabloid show for all the money in the world. All he's dealing with is people in trouble. That's like being a dentist. Maury's the dentist. Whoever they're covering that day is in the chair. Dentists come in and everybody's unhappy.

[Q] Playboy: As long as we're on the subject of media abuses, critics have called your USA Today column "incoherent, presumptuous neogossip."

[A] King: [Laughs] One guy called it fascist. Once a month, I run a thing called "It's My Two Cents." It's a stream-of-consciousness thing.

[Q] Playboy: What's your methodology? Do you jot notes, keep files for later use?

[A] King: I put the paper in the typewriter and I bang something out.

[Q] Playboy: Can you do it for us now?

[A] King: OK. Today's edition: "I never would have bet My Left Foot would win anything.... I'm sure the Canadiens are going to win the Stanley Cup.... No matter what the weather, to me, it ain't spring until baseball starts.... If the girl's still knocking you, she still cares for you.... I love the way USAir has painted its new planes." [Pauses] The press is the only place I've gotten a negative reaction. I can't understand it. I'll bet no one can start reading the column and not finish it. If I just gave you those first five, you'd definitely read number six.

[Q] Playboy: How come you didn't do the illfated USA Today TV show?

[A] King: One of my most spectacular mispredictions was about that show. I thought it couldn't miss. I was asked to be a part of it once a week--to do my column on television--for a lot of money. I thought Turner would easily let me do it. But he said he didn't want me to be part of a failure. He said, "That show has no chance. The success of USA Today, the newspaper, is based on the fact that this is a newspaper for people who get their news from television. It's sold in boxes that look like a television set. But now it's trying to be its own circle. It's a television show based on a newspaper that is based on a television show." And then he gave me a great analogy. He said, "It would be like CNN's starting a daily newspaper: CNN News. It doesn't make any sense. We're a television show for people who read newspapers. What are we publishing a newspaper for?" USA Today is trying to reinvent its own wheel.

[Q] Playboy: How have the media changed?

[A] King: Everybody knows everything now. We know about grosses; we know about rentals; we know about pictures and if they make money or if they don't. The decision is made in a weekend. We know if it's a hit or if it's a miss. We know who's hot; we know who's in and who's not. This is now a given. And I work for the guy who changed it all the most. Ted Turner made it global. We are infotainment freaks.

[Q] Playboy: What's the cumulative effect?

[A] King: We've lost our innocence.

[Q] Playboy: Is that bad, good or inevitable?

[A] King: Inevitable and bad. You can't do anything about it. When I was a kid and would sit up in Ebbets Field, I would look in the dugout and wonder what they looked like. What are they saying in the dugout? What do they do in the dugout? And I'd never know that world. Never. But now we know everything about everything.

Albert Brooks, a great friend and one of the funniest people I know, said it best one night at dinner. He said that twenty years ago, he was standing in line in Des Moines for a John Wayne movie with Aunt Mathilda and Aunt Gerte. Aunt Mathilda says to Aunt Gerte, "I hear this is a great movie." And Aunt Gerte says, "Yeah, John Wayne, Jane Russell. There's a lot of action. I think he winds up getting her. It's a wonderful story." Same two people, Mathilda and Gerte, same city--only it's today. They're in line for Clint Eastwood's new movie. "If they don't make the ten million this weekend, they don't equal the gross." "Yeah, but the foreign sales. They've got tremendous foreign sales. And Clint always does well in video. So they'll release the video early." "That's right. The video will probably come out within three months and they'll make their costs back. The director took five percent in lieu of fee."

By the way, here's the plus side to it: You can't have a Hitler anymore. He's on Larry King Live. Ted Koppel's got Tojo. "Tojo, what are you doing? You can't have a concentration camp. You can't hide." Gorbachev realized that. It ain't gonna work. The world's changed. So the pluses out weigh the minuses.

[Q] Playboy: And the changes we're witnessing in eastern Europe, Russia, South Africa....

[A] King: Television did it. Through TV, eastern Europe saw freedom. We opened the crack. Once we opened the crack, it's gone. You could have lied to eastern Europe about the bourgeois American. You could have lied to them about the poverty. But you couldn't lie to them about Americans' being able to stand in the street and say "Fuck you" to the President. We could hold signs and they couldn't. We could vote and they couldn't. And they saw that.

The plus side is also that the Noriegas, the Castros, the Bothas--they're gone. Tomorrow's guy is Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia.

[Q] Playboy: Was Nixon right when he said the media have too much power?

[A] King: You know, I don't know what "the media" is. In thirty-two years, I've never seen a collective media action. I have never seen a CBS call NBC and NBC call CNN and say, "We all got Gary Hart, guys. We'll meet together at six and we're all leading with this tonight." There has never been a media collusion. Look at how many nights different stories lead the news on different channels. This is easily one of the most competitive businesses there is.

[Q] Playboy: Even if there is no media collusion, Tell It to the King suggests that, at least with politicians, the situation is quite the opposite. You write about Reagan's drinking with Ted Kennedy, Goldwater and J.F.K. lusting after the same woman, etc. Is there a great truth underlying those stories that America should know?

[A] King: The great truth is, political people are in a game. They have learned about the nature of compromise. They've learned that when they reach the Senate and the Congress, they're all here in a company town. The Company is Government, and that're all working for the same person, and that person is the taxpayer, in the from of the Government. And they tend to develop friendships based on just being guys who happen to be in the same business. So, in other words, this is not Ford and General Motors and Chrysler. This is all Ford. When there are arguments, they're between the plant manager, who says, "Let's put a fin on this year," and the engineer, who says, "Let's round out the tail." But they all want to sell Fords.

However, in the media, we're out fighting for a story. Get that story, get that guest--and if I get that guest before you get him, I'm doing better. There's no reason for CBS and CNN to compromise.

[Q] Playboy: Let's move on. How surprised are you that your work has made you a celebrity in your own right?

[A] King: Everybody who's made it pinches himself and says, "Wow!" And if he says he doesn't, he's lying. Bush says it. Marvin Davis. Joe DiMaggio. Why? Because it was all a roll of the dice. After all, what is talent? That's subjective. Somebody had to like you. I once asked Stan Musial, "Stan, did you ever drive by that statue of you?" He said, "Yeah, sometimes at three in the morning, I drive by that statue. And I say, 'Wow! Coal miner's kid from Pennsylvania is looking at a statue of himself.'"

[Q] Playboy: How did you get started in the interview business?

[A] King: When I was five years old, I wanted to be Arthur Godfrey; I wanted to be Red Barber. Other kids wanted to be firemen or policemen. I would roll up the score card, sit in the last row at Ebbets Field and broadcast a game when I was ten years old. I used to go to watch radio shows. I wasn't sure what kind of announcer I wanted to be, I just wanted on.

[Q] Playboy: How did you settle on the talk-radio format?

[A] King: I was already a morning disc jockey doing a cut-up, hip, satirical show. Lenny [Bruce] used to come on and we would kid around: slow down records, change speeds, interrupt newsmen. We made a name for ourselves. We got written up in The Miami Herald. Then the owner of Pumpernick's Restaurant said, "I've got an idea for a coffee-klatch show, midmorning, in my restaurant, that I'd like you to host." The station said, "Would you like to make another hundred dollars a week?" Well, geez, I was making only ninety. My first day, May first, 1960, when I said "Good morning," introduced the guests and started asking questions, I knew this is what I wanted to do. And that show caught on. The Miami Herald said something like, "This is a better show at nine in the morning than The Tonight Show is at night." Everything since spun off from that.

[Q] Playboy: When did you become Larry King?

[A] King: The first day I went on the air. Ten minutes before I went on, I changed my name.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't you use your own?

[A] King: This was 1957. The station manager asked what name I wanted to use. I said, "Larry Zeiger." He said, "Zeiger, Zeiger, Zeiger. One, too ethnic. Two, people won't know how to spell it." Today, of course, there'd be no question that I'd use that name.

[Q] Playboy: Back up. Too ethnic in Miami Beach?

[A] King: He was thinking of my career. Anyway, he had the paper open to an ad for King's Wholesale Liquors. He said, "How about Larry King?" I said, "That sounds fine." Then I went on, sat down in the control room and I panicked. I faded the music and turned up the mike. And couldn't think of anything to say. I was scared and thought I was blowing it. My boss opened the studio door. All he said was, "This is the communications business." And he slammed the door.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do?

[A] King: What I would still do today: I said, "Good morning. I'm scared to death. This is my first day ever on the air. I've got a new name. I was just given this name ten minutes ago. I've just been hired. I always wanted to be in radio. I'm very nervous. I hope I do the right thing."

I was direct and honest and open, and I've been that way ever since. And I knew in ten minutes that this was going to be a lifetime high if I could swing it.

[Q] Playboy: How does your family feel about your changing your name?

[A] King: My brother introduced me at a speaking engagement once by holding up an American Express card and saying, "You don't know me, but my name is Martin Zeiger." My mother understood completely. Her son had gotten on the radio. The number-one wish of his life at the age of twenty-three had come true. The funniest thing I ever got from her was a birthday card that said, "Dear Larry King."

[Q] Playboy: Could you ever be a has-been?

[A] King: If it all crumbled and I'm looking to host a show in Toledo? I'd try to latch on to something in sports. I'd work for a team. Get a little older and be the public-address announcer at the ball park. Yeah, put me at the game. Nice, relaxed job.

[Q] Playboy: Do you love baseball so much that had the owners come to you after [former baseball commissioner Bart] Giamatti had died, you'd have taken his job?

[A] King: [Immediately] Yes. It's the all-time best job in the world. You go to all the games and you can make decisions that affect something you have an intense love for. If you're a control freak, like me, and you can control the number-one avocation of your life, why not take it? With one proviso: I'd drop the radio show; I'd keep Larry King Live. They wouldn't have gone for that, though.

[Q] Playboy: Much of the material in your books comes from things that happened off the air: private communications, conversations overheard. Is it ethical to include that information?

[A] King: Angie Dickinson told me, and she was right, "You walk a line where all those people love and know and respect you, and you should either not print or check with them before you print certain things." I agree with her. So in the upcoming book, we aren't leaving those stories out, we're just leaving out some names. In other words, we got a couple of great Barbra Streisand stories, told to me by an actor who worked with her. We just don't tell you who the actor is.

[Q] Playboy: Even so, how can you justify writing about Barry Goldwater's sleeping with a secretary on a business trip overseas?

[A] King: That was told to me by Senator George A. Smathers. Goldwater later told me that a couple of the facts were wrong. But he wasn't upset, because his wife had passed away. Had Goldwater's wife been alive, I would not have run that story. And today, if I were running it, I would call him and tell him I was running it.

[Q] Playboy: What about his kids' feelings?

[A] King: It is not unknown generally that Barry Goldwater liked the ladies. By the way, that is no retraction at all. I regarded the Goldwater story as a major plus.

[Q] Playboy: In what sense?

[A] King: A lot of people have an image of Goldwater as a hard-crusted, not funny, extreme right-wing, moralistic, prudish man. And he is the opposite of all those things. He just has different opinions. He has a sense of humor. He had a friendship with Jack Kennedy; I don't think people knew about that. And I think sometimes, with political figures, you're balancing history a little with those stories. I don't feel bad about it.

[Q] Playboy: How would you feel about a Larry King story's showing up in somebody else's book?

[A] King: That would be fine. I decided a long time ago, after having all that financial trouble and losing my job in Miami, that once I opened up and wrote about it, I was fair game. A friend of mine said, "You should try to live your life so that anything you do"--not say, because we say a lot of things--"could be on the front page of The Washington Post." I've really tried.

[Q] Playboy: Do you live more carefully now?

[A] King: [Sighs] I'm fifty-six years old, so I won't risk things now where I would have--impetuously--in the past.

[Q] Playboy: What things?

[A] King: I was a cocksman, if that's the term. I liked fooling around. If it was there, I would go for it.

[Q] Playboy: What was your first sexual experience like?

[A] King: On home plate at Grossinger's Hotel in the Catskills. I was a bus boy. I was seventeen. She was a married lady who was up there for the summer. Her husband would come up on weekends. She was making little eyes at me while I was putting butter on her plate during the week. And one Thursday or Friday night, she said, "Let's take a walk." We walked by the baseball field and had sex on home plate. [Smiles]

[Q] Playboy: A home run in every sense of the word.

[A] King: I wasn't very good. And then her husband came up the following weekend, (continued on page 151)Larry King(continued from page 62) and I had to put butter on his plate. I kept missing the plate, spilling the soup. I thought he knew.

[Q] Playboy: Ever have sex with anybody in an airplane bathroom?

[A] King: No. On a seat, but not sex. Seat fondling. Never sex. Sex on a train once, when I was first going to Miami. What an introducation to Miami that was. Twenty-two, going down to Miami to try to break into radio. Had eleven dollars in my pocket. Met this lady on the train. I guess she was about ten years older than me. I didn't have a sleeper, just a coach ticket. She had a sleeper, and I went there.

[Q] Playboy: How about on the radio?

[A] King: Never. The closest was Marilyn Chambers, when she took off her clothes and wanted to do it. Have heard stories about it; good stories about girls and latenight disc jockeys, but I never saw it or did it. I feel a responsibility toward my job. I take risks on the air, but not that kind.

[Q] Playboy: Are all of your friends men?

[A] King: All guys. For me, it's always been boy plus girl equals pain. I do have some non-sexual friendships with women now. Tammy Haddad, my TV-show producer; Angie Dickinson is now a friend. The list is growing. I've matured. I was always a feminist, in the sense that I never minded working for a woman. I wanted women to get ahead and supported women's causes.

[Q] Playboy: Do you really like women?

[A] King: I've heard that all my life: Do you like women? I don't know what that means. I have biases about political things, about food: I hate broccoli. Hate it. Bush is on the money. But I don't hate people: black people or yellow people or green people. And I don't dislike women, in general.

[Q] Playboy: Disc jockey Howard Stern once marveled at how a guy who looks like you has managed to score with so many women. Care to tell us how you do it?

[A] King: It's kind of funny for Howard to say that. He's quarterback of the all-ugly team. [Laughs] Having lost weight and thought about health and gotten rosier cheeks, I probably look better than I used to. I don't have jowls anymore and I don't have a rubber tube running around my waist. I stay in shape. I've always thought of myself as Arthur Miller--ish looking. But looks are probably number six or seven on the list of things women find important. The best thing I have going with women is a sense of humor. And voice. Never discount voice. [Deepens voice] Voice is a major turn-on. Also, I listen. I'm interested in what she has to say, and what she does.

[Q] Playboy: Is it any surprise to you that you've just mentioned a list of qualities startlingly similar to the ones that seduce your interview subjects?

[A] King: Must be.

[Q] Playboy: How did the press handle your relationship with Angie Dickinson?

[A] King: Made too much of it. We just dated. I lived in Washington, she lived in California. We went out to restaurants. That's what people do. We didn't do anything wrong. I wasn't married, she wasn't married, we never talked about getting married.

I met Angie on the air. We liked each other right away. We kissed on the air--she's the only person I've ever kissed on the air. It was a nice kiss. In fact, CNN has it. They made a picture of it. I had a lot of attraction for Angie, and I thought she had a lot for me. We just really hit it off. She's a terrific lady.

[Q] Playboy: Was it love?

[A] King: No. It was nice, but it wasn't fireworks. There's a big difference.

[Q] Playboy: How much does your new wife, Julie, care about your past?

[A] King: Unbothered by it. Julie has an extraordinary attitude. Anything that happened before July 1989, when we met, doesn't mean a thing.

[Q] Playboy: Julie knows that you've written about your past wives. If the two of you were ever to divorce, would you write about her, too?

[A] King: I'd write about her. She knows that I'm a pretty open person.

[As Playboy went to press, King and Julie were separating. King told us: "I don't know where it's going, or that it's over. I still have strong ties to Julie. I'm confused. I just don't know if I'm the kind of guy who should be married."]

[Q] Playboy: Are you happy with the level of success you've reached?

[A] King: I don't know. I'm regarded as successful. It's like Mario Cuomo says. "Governor of New York ain't bad." If you had come to me ten years ago and said, "Here's your life: You'll have four books published; you'll have won a Peabody Award, five Aces, been the commencement speaker at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons, been Broadcaster of the Year twice and had early radio tapes put in the Museum of Broadcasting; you'll be married to a forty-two-year-old, attractive blonde woman who's crazy in love with you and is very successful in her own right; you'll have a twenty-two-year-old daughter who's a senior in college; you'll work at CNN; you'll have a projected NBC show, a nightly radio show and a USA Today column. And that's it. Would you take that?" The answer: absolutely yes.

[Q] Playboy: But you still want more.

[A] King: Yes. And it's not about money, because I could pick up the phone this second and make more money--I have an out in the CNN contract. No, I want to do the Goodwill Games. I'd like to take the whole summer off and do baseball. I'd like to do Person to Person again, the way Edward R. Murrow used to do it, except with modern technology. And I don't talk about those things much. I don't go around saying I'd like to do those other things.

[Q] Playboy: You fear appearing dissatisfied?

[A] King: Yeah. Would someone read this and say, "Jesus, he wants a lot"? I don't want eighty billion dollars. I don't want to own the world. I just like doing what I do. I like being the transmitter. I would have liked to have been the guy who said, "Paul Revere! Where you riding? No kidding!" I wouldn't have wanted to be Revere.

[Q] Playboy: Would you feel comfortable it a show were called Larry King: Person to Person?

[A] King: Yep. It would be a snap. If you watch old tapes of Person to Person, you'll see that it wasn't a very good show. Murrow was mostly bored, didn't like doing it. All the questions were prepared. Every question on that show the subject knew he was going to be asked. Murrow did that show just to satisfy CBS, so they'd let him do See It Now. He and no interest in interviewing Roy Campanella. That show, done right, would be right up my alley.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it just a little arrogant to presume you could redo the show? After all, Murrow is a media saint.

[A] King: I'm a better interviewer than he was. He's the best newscaster I ever heard in my life, an absolute, flat-out hero to me, one of the great Americans of this century. I couldn't have done This Is Larry King in London. I might have described the blitzkrieg, but I couldn't have pictured it in words like Murrow did.

But I'm a better interviewer than he was. That's all. And I'm a better interviewer than Ed Sullivan was. I ask better questions. That doesn't mean anything. Ed Sullivan was a much better gossip columnist. I used to hear Ed Murrow do the noon news when he came back at the end of World War Two--The News at Noon, on CBS. His voice rivets through me still. But he was an ordinary interviewer, at best. And he didn't have great curiosity beyond news. I would fit Person to Person better.

And, of course, I'd change the rules. No prepared questions. [Smiles]

[Q] Playboy: Your life seems as if it's only getting better. Is there a scene from your past that you regret?

[A] King: I've never told this story. It happened when I was dating Alene, Chaia's mother. I was twenty-seven and she was twenty-one. She was a Playboy Bunny and outstandingly pretty. We're on our second date and we're driving down the street. There's a car obviously following us. I make a right turn, the car makes a right; I make a left turn, the car makes a left. I say, "That car is following us." And she says, "I know." I say, "What's the story?" And she says, "That's the former governor of the state of Florida, Fuller Warren." He would have had to be forty years older than she was. Famous governor. White hair. He'd been on my show a couple of times. I say, "Fuller Warren?" She says, "Yeah. I used to work in a restaurant. I met Fuller and we started going out. I just broke up with him." I say, "You're twenty-one and you went out with Fuller Warren? Are you telling me the former governor of the state of Florida is following me in a car?"

Well, I took him on a wild-goose chase. We drove everywhere. I drove up hills, down hills, beyond hills, around borders. I had him going, and I was enjoying it. And I pulled up in front of a police station, jumped out of that car and ran into the station, yelling, "I've got a maniac following me!" And he sped off. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. But that was a pompousassed, stupid thing to do to a poor old guy who had a crush on this young girl. And here's this whippersnapper young broadcaster taking him on a chase through town, stopping at a police station. That was an asshole thing to do.

[Q] Playboy: How do you picture yourself as an old guy? How do you want to go out?

[A] King: I want to go when I'm ninety, the way Malcolm Forbes went: lie down and take a nap. I don't want to be carried off a radio broadcast; I don't want to embarrass myself and fall down. I don't ever want to be infirm, I don't ever want to be in a wheelchair and dependent on someone else controlling my movement.

And, by the way, I'm sure that when I'm ninety, I'll say, "Please make it ninety-five."

[Q] Playboy: Let's wrap this up with the kind of question you might ask: Describe yourself in five words.

[A] King: [Long pause] Husband. [Long pause] Father. Broadcaster. Friend. [Long pause] Give me some words.

[Q] Playboy: Nope. You give them to us.

[A] King: [Long pause] Uh, fantasizer.

[Q] Playboy: Interesting. About what?

[A] King: Everything. I fantasize my life. When I was eight, I fantasized that I was already on the air. I was the Dodgers' announcer when I was twelve. Jeanne Crain wanted to sleep with me when I was eighteen. Joan Leslie was in love with me. But now, most of the time, I go to sleep hitting a home run.

[Q] Playboy: Wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform?

[A] King: Yeah. Sometimes an Orioles uniform. I used to be other people. Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Billy Cox. But now I'm Larry King. He's wearing number two, Leo Durocher's number. Hits a home run. Might make a great fielding play. And he's my age.

He'll probably be a designated hitter this year. Maybe he can't play the field anymore, but he can hit. He can always hit.

"We can't even let Malcolm Forbes die in peace. I don't like that. I respect Roseanne Barr. She makes people laugh every week; all the rest is bullshit."

"Like Sinatra says, 'You're standing backstage. It's the seventeen thousandth time, the man says, "And now..." and you still get that charge.'"

"She was a married lady who was up for the summer. One night she said, 'Let's take a walk.' We walked by the baseball field and had sex on home plate."