My Remarkable Journey (23 page)

By this time, my dad had come back to town. I remember on New Year’s Eve I went out with a girl. We went to a restaurant and
danced. As we were driving home, I clicked on the radio and heard my dad say, “I’ll be here at the Dupont doing my show for
four more hours.” I drove the girl home, swung around, and went to the Dupont. I sat and watched him for the rest of the night.
Never approached him. Just watched him.

Part of me wanted to go up to him while he was on break and introduce myself. But I had such respect for my mother. She always
said he’d be there for me when the time came. That moment, it just didn’t feel like the right time.
I’m not prepared for this,
I thought.
He’s not prepared for this
. I just needed to be close. It was sort of like going to the Orange Bowl, listening to the game on the transistor, and looking
at him. It gave me that same comfort. Live from the lobby of the Dupont Plaza—that was the closest I’d gotten to my father
up to that point.

When I started school at Miami Dade, people said, “Why don’t you try out for the radio station?” I was outgoing and easy to
talk with. So I went in and tried out for a deejay spot on WMDS. I was told, “Kid, you’ve got what your dad has.” I never
really thought of it as a career move. I guess it kept me close to my dad. But it also put me in a direct line of questioning.
Now I was hearing, “Why doesn’t your dad talk about you?”

After two years at Miami Dade, I got my opportunity to go to the University of Miami. I announced the football games on the
campus station. Then, after an internship, I got a job at a local talk/news station—WNWS. My mom used to listen to me on the
air and take notes. She said she used to do the same thing with my father. She’d tell me to stop saying, “Uhhhhh,” watch how
you cut into the breaks, that sort of thing. Some of the people at the station knew my dad. I sensed it wasn’t going to be
long before we ran into each other. Then I got an all-night radio show. My dad was on Mutual at the time. So we were competitors
for about three months.

My mom said, “You know, it’s not fair that you’re introducing yourself as Larry King Jr. If you’re going to do this, you can’t
live off his name. You need to know you can make it on your own merits, not because you’re a Jr. Go back to the name your
father had before he started.” So I went on the air as Larry Zeiger.

I was just finishing up school when the television station where my dad’s career took off—WTVJ—offered me a job working behind
the scenes.

“How’s your dad doing?” people who’d known him would ask.

“He’s fine,” I’d say.

I was very good at deflecting. If someone said, “I know your brother, Andy,” I’d say, “Great, tell him I said, hi.” Where
was I going to go with that?

I was making eight dollars an hour at the television station, working my butt off, working weekends. I started asking myself,
“Do I really love this? Or am I doing this because I’m chasing something?”

I got offered a job at Southeast Bank, supervising a team of people. I thought,
Let me try management
.
This may be my path.
I was at Southeast when I got a phone call from my mother. She said, “You’re going to get a lot of questions today.”

“What’s going on?”

“Your father’s had a heart attack.”

“Is he alive?”

“From everything I can tell, yes.”

“I think I should go see him.”

“Your father’s just gone through a heart attack,” she said. “The last thing you want to do right now is pop up in front of
him.”

I did send a card to the hospital. I have no clue if he ever got it. It probably never reached him among all the other notes
from well-wishers. I just needed to do that.

I took a job with American Express in 1989. A big article came out in the
Miami Herald
about my father around that time. He mentioned all his children—but not me. It was like when my dad’s books were published.
I would immediately turn to the dedication page to see who he’d dedicated the book to. I wanted to see if I’d been mentioned.
But I never was. Those were private moments, but the story in the
Miami Herald
was public. It made me see how my life had changed. I was now working at a Fortune 500 company and stories like this affected
my credibility. When it appeared, coworkers at American Express started questioning if he was my father. When I said yes,
they wondered why I wasn’t in the article. I think by this time my mom was starting to get a little worried.

In 1992, before I got married, my fiancée, Shannon, and I put a wedding announcement in the paper. You know, father of the
groom is Larry King. Mother is Annette Kaye Love. A few days later, a letter came in the mail. Shannon opened it. The letter
was written in cut-out letters pasted on the page. It looked like a ransom note. It said,
WHO ARE YOU, REALLY
?

“How long have you had to deal with stuff like this?” Shannon asked.

“All my life.”

Then my mom found out that she was ill. She didn’t tell me at that point. But she had cancer, and I think she knew she didn’t
have much time left. It’s so clear to me now that her dying wish was to make good on the promise she had made to me when I
was a kid.
When the time is right, he’ll be there for you
.

She reached out to my father and got hold of him. I’d love to know what that conversation was like.

I hung up the phone, and some things started to make sense. When I was in Miami, people would sometimes come up to me and
say, “You’ve got a son who’s a great golfer.” I knew Andy didn’t golf. So it didn’t make sense. I would think for a second,
Do I have a missing son?
But then I’d dismiss it. The most amazing thing to me is that as well known as I was in Miami, nobody ever came to me directly
to ask about Larry King Jr. I never saw an article ever written about him. Never heard him on the radio. How was it that not
one person said to me, “Who’s this kid named Larry King Jr.?”

Who could it be? Did I have a missing son?

I called up Mark Barondess, my lawyer. Now, you know what the first thought of any lawyer is going to be.
What do they want? Is he really your kid? If he
is
your kid, he’s got a right to be in your will.
My lawyer wasn’t the only one thinking that way. I was dating Cindy Garvey at the time. She said, “Oh, they’re out to get
you. They’re gonna grab you for big money. Watch out!”

So Mark flew down to meet with Annette. Then he met with Larry Jr. Afterward, he called me up and said, “Look, if you want
to spend $750 on a DNA test, you’re welcome to it. But this is your kid. He talks like you. He laughs like you. He’s just
like you.”

So I called my friend Herbie. And, of course, Herbie said, “Let me handle this…”

In business, we do something called “on-boarding.” It’s the process of getting a new employee accustomed to your environment
so that he or she is ready to go as soon as they officially start. Herbie was on-boarding me. We met at the Watergate Hotel.

He did a great job of grounding me, saying, “Here’s your father. Here’s the pluses, here’s the minuses. Look, everybody makes
mistakes. There are times when things don’t work out.” Herbie was on-boarding me to help me understand my dad. At the same
time, he was checking me out so he could help my dad ease me into the family.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, many people would use a situation like this to get money from someone in my father’s position.
My mom wanted nothing from my father but for him to love me. My father couldn’t possibly have known that all my life my mother
had said to me, “Make your own money and never take a dime from your father.” He couldn’t have known that I had great mentors
at American Express and Intuit, and that my career was starting to rocket. But the fact that my mom was ill must have made
it easier for him to understand. There isn’t any amount of money that could resolve what drove my mother. My mom had poured
herself into me, and she wanted to know that my dad would be there for me now.

Looking back on it, there were things that I didn’t connect. My mom knew she was dying. But at that point, I didn’t. I didn’t
know why she was pushing this thing all of a sudden, after all these years. But as it unfolded, it seemed like the timing
was right. The reality is that my mother was just not going to die without this matter being resolved.

What must it have been like for him? I can still remember the night I was doing a radio show on a boat called the
Surfside Six
when Joe DiMaggio Jr. wandered by, and I asked him if he’d like to come on the air.

He said, OK, and it was unbelievable. He started talking about a father he never knew. He remembered being flown out as a
little kid to photograph a
Sport
magazine cover with his dad and then being flown straight back. His father was very remote. Joe DiMaggio was the first guy
on the Yankees not to have a roommate. The son decided to play football instead of baseball because he felt cursed by the
name DiMaggio. When he enlisted in the Marines, he called his father to tell him. His father said, “Good luck.” That was it.

Joe Jr. became very close to Marilyn Monroe. She took a liking to him. Marilyn became the tie between him and his father.
In the limo as they drove to her funeral, his father took his hand. It was the only time he ever remembered touching his dad.

I couldn’t believe that a father could be so remote. Yet in thirty-three years, I had never touched my son. What must it have
been like to be Larry Jr., to have this famous father who doesn’t acknowledge you? And a mother who kept everything under
wraps and floating along? That was Annette. Always in control.

If it was blindingly amazing to me, I can’t imagine what it was like for Larry Jr. His mother was gravely ill, he was about
to get married, and he was going to meet the father who never knew about him.

I went with my wife to meet him at my sister Chaia’s graduation from American University in Washington, D.C. It was just before
my mother’s death. That was a safe environment. There were a lot of people around. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t
know if we’d have this one interaction and that would be it. I didn’t know if it would end with us talking once in a while.
Or if it would be, “See you later.”

We hugged, and stepped back. He said, “How’s Annette?” It was like a time warp. The black hole was gone. You’ve got to remember,
even though I knew who he was, it was all from my mom’s perspective. I had never heard him say, “Annette.”

He asked about my brother and sisters. I had never heard him say the names Candy, Pamie, Ronnie. He told me about times he
had spent with them and asked me what they were like now. It just collapsed that whole thirty-three years of separation. It
validated me. Even though I knew about my father from my mom, I still needed to see him and hear him for myself. Up to that
moment, I’d lived my entire life clinging to a letter I believed my dad had written. But I had never heard the words come
from his mouth. It’s impossible to describe what it felt like when they did. All I can say is, I could feel my mother smiling.

Time disappeared, and I liked him right away. Annette had done a great job raising him. There is also a quality about Larry,
he’s so likable. You can’t
not
like him.

We got into a comfortable conversation about sports. It was like a lot of conversations about sports, but it was amazing because
now that we were up close I was seeing many of my mannerisms. When we’re really laughing hard we have a similar laugh. Our
body types are similar—our walk. Our legs. It all came from him.

It was surreal. Because I wasn’t just meeting my father. I was being opened up to another side of my family. I now had a very
caring and loving sister. She would fill in blanks about what it was like growing up around my dad. Filling in the blanks
in what I assumed must have been perfection, but in reality wasn’t always perfection. I had a brother. I had an uncle who
was blown away. He’d never heard about me, and he was trying to put pieces together. It was wild.

Some people wonder why I don’t seem to have negative thoughts about what happened. The way I look at it, I wouldn’t exist
if it weren’t for my father. So why be mad at him? OK, it wasn’t the perfect family situation. But I had a good childhood.
I know other people have other stories. You read about Tim McGraw not knowing about his father, Tug, until he read his birth
certificate. I feel blessed that I was balanced and comfortable in my own skin when we finally met.

When the night was over, I really didn’t need anything more. Whatever else that came after that first meeting would be gravy.
I was so happy, and I had no idea how good things were going to get.

T
HE THING IS
, I’d never married women who were much younger than me. Apart from Annette, who was older, the biggest age difference was
with Sharon, and that was about eight years. I was never attracted to young girls. Herbie had a funny line about that. He
said, “I could not wake up in the morning with someone who didn’t know who Adlai Stevenson was.”

One time I met a young girl who was doing makeup for a television shoot in Washington. She was very pretty. I said, “Hey,
you wanna go out? We’ll go to the Palm.” She was a modern girl and she offered to drive over and pick me up. It made more
sense because of where we each lived.

Chaia was staying with me at that point. She must have been eighteen at the time. I was in my fifties. When the girl got to
the apartment, I said, “Chaia, I’m just finishing getting dressed. Talk to her for a minute.”

Chaia came back gritting her teeth. “Are you crazy?” she said. “She’s twenty-two! She could be my friend!”