Larry King was such a fixture on CNN, he almost left a suspenders-wearing shadow when he left with considerable fanfare in 2010. Piers Morgan hasn’t come close to matching his old ratings. And while King was criticized for occasionally doing lighter topics, it was nothing like what was brought by the Brit whose most recent broadcasting experience was host of “America’s Got Talent.”
King, too, got itchy in retirement. So at 78, he put together his own nightly interview show, “Larry King Now” that’s began running online at Hulu four nights a week last month, interviewing people from Seth Mac Farlane to Meghan McCain and Matthew McConaughey (also people with names that don’t begin with Mc).
King’s natural curiosity and direct, sometimes gruff manner are offset by his penchant for odd declarative sentence, or ability to be distracted by a picture of the microphone on the iPhone Voice Memos app before him.
“You know the history of that mic?” he began, eating into valuable interview time during a chat near his home in Beverly Hills. “In 1957, before you were born, this was the mic of use at all American radio stations. RCA Victor. And the beauty of it is it was directional. You could put that mic in the middle of this table and all of us could broadcast. Now there’s no microphone manufacturer in America.”
That said, it was time to interrupt and start my own questions.
Go ahead, Beverly Hills.
Did you miss it when you weren’t on the air?
I didn’t think I would. But it really hit me the night Osama bin Laden was killed.
I envisioned if I had been working that day. We’da gone nuts. We’d have the CIA and Panetta. We’d have had the Secretary of Defense. We’d have been scrambling around to get these guys on, we’d have had the guys who’d been at the table. We would have covered it for a week. I missed it.
I didn’t miss tabloid stories that you have to do but I never loved much. But I missed it. I missed the action.
Do you think you were pushed into that tabloid celebrity stuff a little too much at the end?
It was what it was. But I like what Ted Koppel said once. They asked him why are you doing Tammy Faye Bakker and her husband James Bakker on ‘Nightline’? And he said, ‘I give them Tammy Faye Bakker three times a week, they give me Iran twice a week.’”
I assume you don’t have such a trade off on your new show.
It’s wide open. We don’t have to check with people any more.
So who do you get?
We discuss it. We make a list. We go after them. That’s the tough thing: Deciding who people want to see. And I’m not the best judge. If it were up to me, I’d do sports four days a week. Because I’m a sports nut. First thing I turn to in the newspapers is sports. I had a wonderful time in New York we got two shows out of it, Matt Kemp and Mattingly. It was great. Going down in the dugout. The Mets and Dodgers. Wonderful.
You began this show in your own den before you moved it to a studio. What was that like?
At first I was apprehensive, and then I loved it. It felt so homey. It was my trophy room. It was like an ego room. It had wonderful mementos of a life in broadcasting. So it felt very comfortable. Then when we moved to this new place, it feels like the same thing. In fact I have people now say, you do all of this out of your house, huh? People think it’s the house. The set is perfect.
Are you doing a lot of pieces outside of the studio?
When we can, yeah. I went out to Regis’ house. It was a great hour.
Now that it’s deep in Presidential political season, what are your plans?
I hope we get right into it. I want to cover this campaign. We don’t have all the resources CNN has. But we are inviting the candidates.
Are they good guests?
One of the problems with politics, with some exceptions, politicians think about what will they think of this answer. So there’s a cutoff between the brain and the mouth. So when a politician says, ‘I’m glad you asked that,’ you know they’re not glad you asked that. And they’re thinking about what they want to say.
But then you have people like Barry Goldwater, George McGovern. There was no cutoff between here and there and they were the best.
And Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was the best. He’s the best politician.
“Larry King Now” offers new episodes Monday through Thursday online at Hulu and Hulu Plus.