My Remarkable Journey (19 page)

What was this? Weren’t all heart surgeons supposed to be Jewish? And I’ve got the Cardiac Cowboy. I would come to discover
that there are only two types of heart surgeons. Jews and Texans. There are no Protestant heart surgeons from South Dakota—they
just don’t exist.

Dr. Isom came over to me and began a little exam. You know, tapping the chest with two fingers.

I looked down, blinked, then looked again. He had half a right thumb!

How do you respond to that? Here’s a guy who operates on David Letterman and Walter Cronkite, and he’s got a stub for a right
thumb!

I said, “Dr. Isom, I’ve had this peculiar habit all my life and I can’t explain it. But when I meet people, I count their
fingers… and with you I get to nine.”

He smiled, and he told me how when he was a kid he grabbed a handful of branches while his mother was clipping a hedge. She
didn’t see him and accidentally cut off the top of his thumb. He said it made him a better surgeon because it helped him become
ambidextrous.

“Listen,” I told him. “I ask questions for a living. So I gotta know. What are you going to do tomorrow?”

“You sure you want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. We’re going to take a saw and open your chest.”

“BorgWarner?” I asked. “The saw in the commercial with the squirrels on the trees?”

“The answer to that question happens to be yes. Borg-Warner makes the saw.”

“Are the squirrels going to come too?”

“Then, we’re going to pull your ribs back, hook you up to the heart-lung machine, take your heart and move it so the heart-lung
machine can stand in for your heart, and then we’re going to take the veins from your legs and—”

“Enough! Enough! Enough!”

That night I had a dream that Dr. Isom cut off his other thumb while shaving. I woke up thinking I had an eight-fingered surgeon.

As they put me under, I didn’t see any great circle beyond. No white lights. No memories came to me. I was down for eight
hours.

It turned out to be a quintuple bypass.

Waking up was one of the great moments in my life. I opened my eyes and felt a little chill. I was under some blankets, and
the nurse said, “Mr. King, you did perfect.” I couldn’t have been happier.

Frank Sinatra had turned my room into a botanical garden. There were so many flowers that I didn’t have room for them. We
gave them to all the other patients in the hospital.

Angie Dickinson had flown in, and Bob wanted to let me know. “Guess who’s here?” he asked.

“Joe DiMaggio?”

Well, Bob
was
a sports agent.

Ted Turner paid a visit. That was great, because the first thing you think about when you have heart surgery is whether you’re
going to lose your job.

My spirits soared. It wasn’t long before I was walking up steps. A week later I was released. It was one of those perfect
New York winter days, just gorgeous. I walked back to Marty and Ellen’s house. On the way was an OTB. I walked in.

A guy turned to me and said, “Hey, I read about your heart surgery in the papers. How you doin’?”

“Fine.”

“Good,” he said. “Who do you like?”

You can only know how good a moment like that is after you’ve just had quintuple bypass surgery.

I spoke with C. Everett Koop many times after the surgery. I did events with him and introduced him at dinners.

“In your life,” he told me, “you’ll count your heart attack as one of the luckiest things that ever happened to you. You were
lucky in where you had the heart attack, lucky in the type of heart attack it was, and you were lucky to be fifty-three when
it hit. That’s a nice age if you’re going to have one. It means that if nothing goes wrong you’re going to live a lot longer.
And you had surgery with great doctors in a major hospital. If you hadn’t had that heart attack, you were on your way to a
major one. Sometimes what appears bad is, in fact, good.”

It would be years later before I found out how good.

We were waiting about eight hours. Then the doctors came and told us it was OK, that he was in recovery. They let us go in
to see him one at a time. They said, “He’s still unconscious. He can’t hear you, and he won’t respond.” So I just walked in
to hold his hand. He was wrapped up—he didn’t quite look mummified, but almost. He was hooked up to all kinds of machines.
I took his hand, leaned over, and said into his ear, “Dad, you made it. I love you. I’m here.” Then the hand I was holding
squeezed, real strong.

One of the things my dad has taught me is how to pick yourself up.

When Larry stayed in our home around the time of the bypass, it was the first time since they were boys that Marty and Larry
slept under the same roof. It was a great time to bond because Larry came out of his surgery absolutely joyful. “Oh my God!
I’m alive!”

The first couple of years that I was married to Marty, I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times I spoke to
Larry. Now we were having Chinese food every night. I can still remember. Larry would peruse the menu for twenty-five minutes,
order the chicken with cashews, and then not eat the cashews. He became family.

During Larry’s recovery week we went to see a screening of the movie
Broadcast News
. It was funny. When you have a bypass you walk around with a pillow to press against your chest because if you start laughing
it hurts like hell.
Broadcast News
was very funny. I remember the two of them in the car. Marty would say something funny. And Larry would be laughing and clutching
the pillow to his chest in pain and screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!”

To be honest, when Larry left after a week, I can remember Marty thinking that the tightness between them would never last,
that once Larry went back to his hectic life, it would go away. But it did last.

I had the same operation six months later. I remember the night before. They’d shaved my chest and I was taking a shower with
some medicated soap. I was standing in that shower and saying to myself, “They’re going to cut my chest open.”

You really realize how vulnerable you are in a moment like that.

Larry came up to be with us for Marty’s surgery. Ever since, they talk almost every day. It may be really quick. But they’re
always checking in with each other. Out of something really terrible came something really wonderful. It was a great gift
for both of them.

O
F ALL THE THINGS
I’ve ever wanted to do in broadcasting, there’s just one I’ve never done: moderate a presidential debate.

I moderated the Bush-McCain debate in the Republican South Carolina primary in 2000. I thought they were going to kill each
other. I’ve had leaders from Israel, Palestine, and Jordan on split screen. And I’ve hosted the first debate between a vice
president and an ordinary citizen, when Al Gore and Ross Perot went at it over NAFTA back in 1993. But a debate between the
Republican and Democratic presidential candidates has never come my way.

I don’t think Walter Cronkite ever got a chance to moderate any presidential debates, either. He would have been more famous
during his time than the two guys running. Years ago, someone said, “Larry King is a personality. We don’t want a presidential
debate to become
Larry King Live
.” That’s certainly a valid point. I don’t use Federal Election Commission rules on my show. Sometimes, one guest will say
something and I’ll just point to another guest for a response. I really just let it flow. So I can understand. But that doesn’t
stop the urge. It’s hard for me to watch a presidential debate without wanting to be there.

Asking people to go back and forth on the issues is what I do nearly every night during election season. You could make a
case that my CNN show has tackled the world’s major debates for almost twenty-five years. I sometimes wonder what it was like
at the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. They lasted for hours and had no moderator. Can you imagine
what would happen today if there were no moderator in a debate about abortion or gay rights?

I don’t know exactly when it started, but I’ve witnessed a huge change in attitude toward homosexuality. When I was a kid,
gay men were fairies and faggots. It was sport to say, “Let’s go to Greenwich Village and look at them.” Then I grew up and
became more open-minded. But my mind really expanded when I interviewed a hero in the Korean War who was thrown out of the
Army for being gay. He was removed even though he never engaged in sexual activity on the base. He met with his lovers off
base and on his own time. So he never broke any Army law. He sued, and the case was headed to the Supreme Court when the two
sides settled.

During the interview, he explained to me that he didn’t know why he was gay. There was nothing about his parents that might
seem out of the ordinary to heterosexuals. His older brother was married and had several children. But, for some reason, when
he was a kid he liked dolls. On the other hand, he also liked guns and uniforms.

As we spoke, a pretty girl came in to serve us coffee. She was wearing a miniskirt. When she walked out, he said to me, “Does
that turn you on?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Didn’t turn me on,” he said. Then he asked. “Do you know why it turned you on?”

“Well…”

“OK, she was wearing a short skirt. She had pretty legs. But let’s think about this.
Why
did that turn you on? The answer is, you don’t know. You grew up and you saw girls and you got excited. I grew up, saw boys,
and got excited. And neither one of us knows why. You don’t know why you’re heterosexual. You didn’t make a decision to be
heterosexual. You didn’t sit down and say, ‘Boys/girls? Boys or girls? I choose girls.’”

When he said it, an image came to my mind. I remembered when I was about eleven years old. My cousin Loretta was over at our
house for dinner. Something fell on the floor. I leaned down to get it and I saw right up Loretta’s legs. I was excited. I
had no idea why. What was it that made me feel that way?

So some guys must see a boy, get excited the same way, and not know why. It has to be a gene. You can’t alter it. You couldn’t
make me gay. It would be impossible. But I didn’t choose heterosexuality. And who in their right mind would choose being gay?
Let’s see. Do I want to make it in life? Sure, I’d like to shoot for the presidency. Should I be gay or straight? Straight
or gay?

I never forgot that interview. I would bring it up when I spoke with religious leaders like Jerry Falwell, and the point always
caught them off guard.

They would say they prayed for gay people. They would insist that being gay is an errant choice.

I’d say, “So these people choose to be gay? It’s a choice?”

“Yes,” they’d say. “These people have chosen to be gay.”

I would pause and ask, “Can you remember the moment when
you
chose to be heterosexual?”

I’d never get an answer.

A guy like Falwell would say, “Well, it’s normal.”

And I’d say, “What do you mean, it’s normal? To the gay person, being gay is normal.”

I’ve questioned nearly every religious leader on gay issues. Elton John came on the show and discussed his life in depth.
I remember talking with the actor Raymond Burr. He wouldn’t speak about being gay on the air. But over lunch he told me how
difficult it was back in the ’40s and ’50s.

When he was breaking into the movies he was hospitalized with an illness and needed an operation. He didn’t know how he was
going to pay the bill. As he was leaving the hospital, he found out the bill had been paid. Frank Sinatra had learned of his
predicament and taken care of it. The two had worked on a movie together. Burr wondered if Sinatra would have paid the bill
if Frank had known he was gay.

Personally, all I can say now is, Who cares if somebody is gay or straight? People should be free to love whomever they wish.

But I try not to let that come across on the air if I’m interviewing somebody in favor of gay marriage. I’ll give you an example.
During the 2008 election, when Californians faced a proposition on whether or not to ban gay marriage, about eighteen thousand
gay couples had already registered as married under state law. The campaign was charged and the public overwhelmingly voted
for a ban. Afterward, angry gay activists protested all around California. If one of those activists had been on my show at
that time, I might have said, “You lost fair and square. How does protesting help your cause? What are your legal options?”

I try to encourage people on both sides of an issue to see a bigger picture. Abortion is another example. I remember having
the vice president Dan Quayle on as a guest. Quayle is against abortion. I asked him, “What if your daughter came to you with
the problem all fathers fear? How would you deal with it?”

“I would counsel her and talk to her,” Quayle replied, “and support her on whatever decision she made.”

Next day, headlines!
QUAYLE WOULD GO WITH DAUGHTER FOR ABORTION
.

I wasn’t out to snooker him. I just wanted to make him think. Hypothetical questions are great for that. A lot of politicians
don’t like to answer hypotheticals because they’re forced to think in a different way.

I believe a woman has the right to make a choice. I don’t believe that society should tell a woman that she doesn’t have the
right to choose. But on the air, I might say to somebody in favor of abortion, “There are so many other avenues. Why not give
the child to a couple who aren’t able to have one? Why not give the baby to parents who would do anything for a chance to
raise a child? Why would you waste a life?” When I start talking like that, I can convince myself.

I’m totally against the death penalty. I believe that when you kill a murderer you’re committing the same act. But my main
objection to capital punishment is that there’s no redress of grievance. In all other cases, when the state makes a mistake,
it can say, “We’re sorry. Here’s some compensation.” The state can’t do that after it has executed someone.