A King Who Can Listen

By STANLEY W. CLOUD WASHINGTON

Want to know how ambitious Larry King, the top banana of talk-show hosts, is? When King, born Larry Zeiger, was growing up in Brooklyn, New York, and indifferent about school, his father went to the principal and suggested that Larry's teacher install him as eraser monitor. Most kids would have been horrified. Eraser monitors come in early, stay late, get all dusty with chalk, get razzed by classmates. But little Larry Zeiger thought the job was a promotion. Sitting out there on the playground, pounding erasers together and choking on chalk dust, he thought he was on his way at last.

Now, after a half-century of hustling and scratching, after no college and hard knocks, after working as everything from mail-room clerk to racetrack flack, after six marriages, one annulment and five divorces, after being arrested for grand larceny, after declaring bankruptcy, after suffering a heart attack and undergoing bypass surgery, after all this and more, Larry King has finally arrived. His weeknight shows on CNN and Mutual radio are watched and listened to by more than 4 million people. A King interview nudged Ross Perot into the presidential arena. Another caused Dan Quayle to ruminate on what he might do if his daughter decided to have an abortion. Last week King questioned Henry Kissinger on the POW-MIA issue, while Perot was dickering with King's producers about using the show to announce whether he would re-enter the race.

If all that weren't enough, USA Today runs King's weekly column of plugs and random thoughts (some quite a bit more random than others). And last week a new King book -- When You're from Brooklyn, Everything Else Is Tokyo -- was published by Little, Brown. On the lecture circuit, King pulls in $35,000 an appearance, and his total annual income is well over $2 million. Says King: "I'm 58 years old, and I'm having the best year of my life."

As he speaks, he is standing on the balcony of his posh eighth-floor apartment in Arlington, Virginia. He waves an arm through the air. "Some view, huh?" he says in his famed Brooklyn baritone. Some view: first the Potomac River, then a panorama of marble. Directly ahead, in a precise line, are the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capitol. To the left is the Kennedy Center; to the right, the Jefferson Memorial. From his balcony King can also see the Watergate apartments, the home of his childhood friend Herbie Cohen, a successful lawyer and consultant. King used to tell a story about how he, Herbie and another Brooklyn teenager named Sandy Koufax (the Hall of Fame southpaw who pitched for King's beloved Dodgers) once drove to Connecticut to settle an argument about how many scoops of ice cream you could get in New Haven for 15 cents.

Good story. Funny, as King told it. He loves yarns and tells them all the time. Like the one about being made eraser monitor or the one about how Jackie Gleason helped him make a name for himself on Miami TV. His stories almost always feature some big-name celebrity. King's apartment walls are crammed with pictures of himself and famous stars. There's a framed letter from Sinatra that reads, "You're a good friend and -- unlike many others -- were not there to trap or ensnare me or to sensationalize in any way." There are pictures of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, George Bush. There's a story about every picture, about every name.

Some may even be true. The one about Cohen, Koufax and the ice cream, however, is not. Last year a Washington Post reporter checked with Koufax. The former Dodger said he'd never been to New Haven, and although he did grow up in the same neighborhood as King, they did not really become friends until they were adults. So why did King make the story up? Part of the answer may lie in that Brooklyn playground where the little boy proudly pounded erasers. King, the son of Russian-immigrant Jewish parents, was one of those kids who, if they don't like the way things are, imagine them to be better. Ask him about the Koufax business, and he shrugs and looks away. "I tell a lot of stories that are part fact, part history, part imagination," he says quietly. "It was just a story. I guess I told it so often that even I thought it was true."

Despite King's monumental ego, when he sits down in front of a microphone or camera to conduct an interview, he seems to undergo a personality change. Suddenly, his favorite subject -- himself -- is no longer on the table. "I don't consider myself a journalist," King says, "but journalism results from what I do." In other words, he doesn't try to elicit facts so much as feelings, emotions, motives. "I like questions that begin with 'why' and 'how,' and I listen to the answers, which leads to more questions." It works: when Perot on his CNN Larry King Live show last February sounded tentative about the possibility of running for President, King kept following up until Perot all but announced. "My earliest memory," King says, "is of asking questions: What did you do that for? Why did you do it?"

King's radio show has a "more comfortable" pace, as he puts it, and thus tends to make less news and to offer a somewhat less glittering roster of guests. But whoever his guests may be, King unashamedly plugs their books, records, movies, plays, whatever, as if they were his very own. Although he is a Democrat and self-described "Adlai Stevenson liberal," he stays reasonably apolitical on the air. "If I were to interview President Bush about his alleged affair," he says, "I wouldn't ask if he'd had one. I'd ask him, 'How does it feel to read these things about yourself?' "

Every morning at 9, having worked the previous night until 2 a.m., King climbs out of his king-size bed, dons a running suit and a pair of Mephisto athletic shoes, then paces briskly on a treadmill for 30 minutes. He has been doing this every day since his heart attack in 1987. He flips through six newspapers, eats a cardiologically correct breakfast, changes into his street clothes and -- with an 18-karat Cartier bracelet on his right wrist and a sleek, all-black Movado watch on his left -- descends to his apartment-house garage. There he climbs into his black Lincoln Town Car and drives across the Key Bridge to Georgetown, where he gets his thinning hair done by Bernard of Okyo.

When the familiar swept-back hairdo has been built and lacquered, King often drives downtown for lunch at Duke Zeibert's, one of the capital's last old- fashioned, macho places to be seen. From his usual table, he can quickly scan, and be scanned by, every patron who enters. For lunch he invariably has slab after slab of Streit's salted matzos, lavishly spread with light margarine, plus a lettuce-and-tomato salad. Between bites he waves to and chats with all the pols, power brokers and wannabes.

King has produced five books about himself, an autobiographical record that testifies both to his marketability and his storytelling gifts -- as well as to his ego. In his first book, published 10 years ago, before he had his national TV show, he wrote, "When I'm 58, I would like to have a newspaper column and be doing a one-hour radio interview show and a television talk show on a regular basis." Except that his radio show is three hours, those ambitions were fulfilled exactly.

It wasn't easy. His father Edward Zeiger died in 1944 when Larry was only 10. (His brother Marty was six.) His mother Jennie went on relief for a year and then got a job in a sweatshop. King had long dreamed of being on radio and after high school took a job in the mail room of a New York office building that also happened to house a radio station. Five years later, in 1957, hearing that Miami was a more promising venue, he caught a bus heading south, started pounding on doors and finally was hired as a disk jockey on WAHR. He changed his name to King and soon had his own sports show.

Not until he moved over to Miami's WKAT, however, did King begin doing interviews with celebrities and almost anyone else who happened by. By 1970 he was a local hit. He had a radio talk show, a TV interview show and a newspaper column -- and he was the color man for the Miami Dolphins. He played the horses a lot, drove Cadillacs and was married to a former Playboy Bunny named Alene while having affairs on the side -- "I felt that Larry King deserved to be seen with beautiful women." He was generally behaving, as he put it, "as if I . . . didn't have to live by the same rules others live by."

To prove the point, he was running up huge debts. He has admitted ripping off some of his wealthy acquaintances, notably Lou Wolfson, a Miami financier who in 1968 ran afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission. King told Wolfson he had influence with John Mitchell, soon to be Attorney General in the Nixon Administration. In fact, Mitchell had told King he wouldn't handle the case, but King, claiming Mitchell's firm was charging for legal services, was collecting thousands of dollars from Wolfson anyway -- and pocketing the money. King also kept a $5,000 payment that Wolfson had asked him to pass on to New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, whose investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination Wolfson partly financed. Wolfson went to prison, but, on his release, he filed a grand-larceny complaint against King, who was arrested by Miami police on Dec. 20, 1971. The charge was dropped three months later because the statute of limitations had expired.

Suddenly, King was out of luck, out of money and out of work. His marriage to Alene, which had produced a daughter -- King's only natural child, although he has one adopted son -- ended in divorce. (It had ended that way once before, but after several soap-opera twists, the couple had remarried in 1967.) King lost his TV and radio shows, his job with the Dolphins and his newspaper column. To make ends meet he did some free-lance radio work and later moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was a p.r. man for the local racetrack and did play-by-play for the old World Football League's Shreveport Steamer.

In 1975, when one of his former Miami stations, WIOD, offered him his old job back, he eagerly accepted. The next year he married for the fourth time. In 1978, by now $350,000 in debt, he declared bankruptcy and, lured by the prospect of a national audience, moved to Washington and launched The Larry King Show for Mutual radio. But even as King was regaining his balance, a new crisis was looming. He was somewhat overweight, was working almost all night, every night, and was chain-smoking cigarettes. In February 1987 he felt the chest pains of a major heart attack that would force him to shape up and slow down.

Now, despite a couple of more bad marriages, he is at the top of his form and the top of his game. Each evening during the week, he drives from his apartment to the CNN studio in Washington, whence Larry King Live originates. There, with the considerable assistance of his executive producer, Tamara Haddad, who screens his calls for pace and subject matter -- "Quickly, what's the question? No, I already got five people who want to ask that" -- King conducts the show that has made so much news this year. He famously does it with virtually no advance preparation, a technique he says helps him ask the kind of questions the people in his audience would ask. When the TV show is over, he drives to the Mutual studios for his radio show. His audiences seem to love him -- even when he is rough on them. Recently a caller to the "Open Phone America" portion of his radio show (for which calls are not screened) babbled incoherently for 30 seconds before King punched the button and growled into his mike, "How was he able to dial?"

Having fulfilled one personal 10-year plan, King in the next decade would like to ease back gradually and maybe do a little acting. He even dreams of taking a summer off to be a baseball announcer. But the man who was once a wide-eyed eraser monitor knows very well what got him where he is. "I never want to give up my TV show," he says. "If -- God forbid -- I ever became President, I'd keep right on doing Larry King Live from the White House."