King, 76, said he will step down this fall from his nightly show. He reached his 25-year anniversary this month.
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 30, 2010; C01
Larry King was flying home from Akron three weeks ago, having just capped his 25th anniversary at CNN by interviewing basketball superstar LeBron James, when it hit him.
"You know," he recalls thinking, having also done sit-downs with President Obama, Bill Gates and Lady Gaga, "I ain't gonna top this. It's been a helluva run."
King announced Tuesday night that he is hanging up his suspenders as a nightly host, bowing to the reality of plummeting ratings that had eroded his stature as a television institution. "I'm glad it happened on my terms," he said in an interview. "I have mixed emotions. . . . A nightly show is a tough grind."
The onetime radio host has interviewed an endless parade of presidents, monarchs and celebrities using an average-guy-from-Brooklyn approach, one that felt increasingly old-school in an era of opinionated programs on the right and left. King lost nearly half his audience over the past year but said that did not persuade him to call it quits.
"You always feel bad when there's a ratings decline," he said. "I never felt any pressure. CNN never pressured me."
CNN President Jon Klein said that King initiated the discussions. "When you put the ratings in the perspective of 25 years of shows, they are insignificant," Klein said, adding that he is pleased King will continue to do periodic specials for the network.
King "really put cable television on the map," he added. "He was one of the first superstars of cable and got millions of Americans accustomed to tuning in to the higher channels. It's all driven by his passion for talking to people."
When King gave viewers the news at 9 p.m. -- boasting that his longevity had landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records -- he said more than once, "It was time." Such luminaries as Nancy Reagan, Diane Sawyer and Regis Philbin phoned in with congratulations.
The announcement that "Larry King Live" will end this fall comes as his seventh wife, Shawn Southwick, is recovering from a drug overdose. The couple had announced they were splitting up, but they now are attempting to reconcile.
"She's better now," King said. "It's been a rough go. We're working it out." He said his family troubles were not a factor in giving up the host's chair: "I'd have made this decision if I was divorced, single, married."
CNN has been under enormous pressure to boost its prime-time ratings, and speculation has run rampant that King might step down next year and be replaced by personalities ranging from Katie Couric to British journalist Piers Morgan.
Asked whether he had a short list of potential successors, Klein said: "There aren't an infinite number of people who could do this, but there are a number of them." He said he hadn't wanted to begin negotiations with anyone until King made a decision about his future.
The agreement on specials will enable King to fulfill the final year of his contract. "I didn't want to blow the last year of pay," he said.
Born Lawrence Zeiger, King got his start as a Miami radio host and eventually did color commentary for Miami Dolphins games. He launched a syndicated show for Mutual Radio in 1978, chatting up all kinds of guests from midnight until 5:30 a.m. When he joined CNN in 1985, it was the only full-fledged cable news network, and he essentially moved the call-in format to television. Comedians mocked his gravelly voice as he would intone, "Evansville, Indiana, hello."
He created the program in Washington, where he was a lunchtime fixture at the old Duke Zeibert's restaurant, but moved to Los Angeles a decade ago. King also survived a 1987 heart attack and quintuple-bypass surgery.
With his unadorned style -- basically perched in front of an oversize mike -- and nonconfrontational approach, King rose to international fame, sitting down with every president from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama. He was largely seen as a celebrity host until the 1992 presidential campaign, when his interviews with the candidates made television talk shows a new kind of platform for politicians seeking a broader audience. Ross Perot essentially launched his quirky candidacy at King's elbow by saying he would run for the White House if volunteers got his name on all 50 state ballots. Bill Clinton and the incumbent, George H.W. Bush, followed suit on the show. The following year, King hosted a debate on NAFTA between Vice President Al Gore and Perot, one of the most-watched events of the era.
As president, Clinton made three appearances in the first two years of his tenure, a novel approach that was sometimes criticized as a way of circumventing the press corps. "Larry King liberated me by giving me to the American people directly," Clinton declared.
King has conducted 40,000 interviews at CNN and even more in a half-century of broadcasting, with such luminaries as Tony Blair, Marlon Brando, Jackie Gleason, Mikhail Gorbachev, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey and Malcolm X.
But his relaxed style -- King wanted to make his guests feel comfortable, didn't read authors' books and never claimed to be a journalist -- seemed out of step with the partisan times. He was being hammered in the ratings by Fox News's Sean Hannity and, more recently, by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow. In the first quarter of 2010, King's audience declined to 771,000 viewers, from 1.34 million a year earlier.
"I'll try to brief him, but he really doesn't have any interest," Wendy Walker, his longtime senior executive producer, once said. "His theory is that if he's not surprised, he won't ask the right questions." King brushed off questions about his softball approach, calling himself "the Style section of CNN."
There were tradeoffs over the years. "I wasn't a fan of the tabloid stuff and you had to do that," said King, noting that he must have done 30 shows on the disappearance and slaying of Natalee Holloway. "I was not thrilled." But he said he understood why his staff pushed such stories: "They're in the position of people above them saying, 'We've gotta get the numbers.' "
Some critics derided the program as a relic, such as on a busy primary election night in May, when King's show was devoted to aging rocker Mick Jagger.
Combined with last week's announcement that former New York governor Eliot Spitzer and syndicated Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker will succeed Campbell Brown at 8 p.m. -- and Lou Dobbs's resignation last year -- the King announcement means that CNN will have undergone a complete facelift in evening programming.
King was strikingly upbeat about the future, saying he was now "liberated" and could do, for instance, sports commentary or a radio show with Ryan Seacrest. But he kept returning to the subject of his staff, including his producer, Walker.
King said he had just concluded a call with his team and will work to find them jobs. "It was sad," he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment