By Kim Palchikoff
Near the end of his life, at the age of 86, famed talk show host Larry King did a series of eight interviews on mental health that got little recognition.
King died January 23; he was 87. CNN, where he worked for 25 years, did a tribute to the radio star, with little mention of his series.
Called “Coping with COVID,” the interviews spanned the spectrum of topics from how to sleep better during the pandemic to how to implement self-care. Experts on his show talked about the importance of exercise and how to get along better with a spouse during these trying times.
After his January death was announced, I re-watched this series with a heavy heart. I’ve only had a handful of heroes in my lifetime, but Larry King was one of them. Known for his more than 50,000 one-on-one interviews over the course of several decades, he had an extraordinary talent for getting people to talk about their lives, worries, sorrows, achievements, losses, and what they most loved and feared.
Though his pandemic mental health series didn’t get much attention when he passed away, many of his former CNN colleagues pointed out his ability to get into his interviewees soul, and not just their minds. He was able to elicit conversations that were deep, insightful, and compelling. There was something in the way he posed questions that brought out the humanity in the guest.
Listening to Larry
I first heard Larry King in 1982, when he was a national radio star on the Larry King Show. I was 14 years old and living in a village in Baja California, Mexico with my hippie parents. The village was so small there was no running water, telephones, television or other kids to play with.
Most days were spent fishing, swimming, reading in the sun, collecting seashells, and wishing I was back in America, attending high school, going to football games and homecoming dances. As much as I came to love the Spanish language from speaking with other villagers, for the most part I was miserable.
There was also no electricity in our village save for a noisy town generator that ran from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. After the lights went out, I would take our family’s shortwave radio into my bedroom and listen to Larry King. I had no idea who he was, but after perusing various stations, I came upon his show and I was hooked. His interviews took me into worlds I never knew about, from professional boxers to beauty queen winners to soldiers living with PTSD. When he switched from radio to TV in 1985, I kept on being his number one fan.
Some interviews were pure entertainment; others were on the serious side. Since his appearance in the 1950s, he interviewed tens of thousands of American greats, such Dr. Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Bill Gates, Lady Gaga, LeBron James, Paris Hilton, Vladimir Putin and Margaret Thatcher and every sitting American president from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama.
With my interest in mental health, there were interviews I particularly remember, like the one with singer Chris Brown, who pleaded guilty to committing domestic violence on his girlfriend Rihanna in 2008. In 2015 he sat down with Grammy-nominated rapper Wale, to discuss Black men and depression. That same year he chatted up a U.S. Marine named Brad Fite on issues of PTSD and suicide among vets and healing from wars.
A voice in the night
When King died news anchors recalled trivia from his life, like the truck drivers who wrote him letters thanking him for keeping them awake at night while driving. They also recalled doctors on night duty who likewise sent notes, pouring out their thanks for getting them through their shifts. If I had known how to contact him, I would have sent him a letter myself, thanking him for getting me through my first year of high school, living in a village, one of the worst years of my life and introducing me to the art of the interview.
Thanks to Mr. King, in college I eagerly took a course on oral histories, where we were assigned to interview various people on a topic of our choosing. Unlike interviews for journalism, our oral histories were in the Larry King style — lengthy and eventually printed verbatim.
I chose to interview older women who had illegal abortions in the 1960s. They were sad interviews as the women recalled a time in their life that was frightening, dangerous and lonely. All were young at the time, in their 20s, determined to terminate a pregnancy they did not want. Some described the details of taking a bus to Mexico with an address for an abortion clinic they had heard about through the grapevine; one woman talked about faking a mental illness so that she could get a legal abortion in California. She lied and told a psychiatrist that if she had the baby, she’d kill herself and maybe the baby too.
In 2011 I received a grant from Nevada Humanities to interview Russian circus performers living in Nevada. Most of them lived in Las Vegas, where they performed on the Las Vegas Strip before the coronavirus led to the closing of the city’s many showrooms. Unbeknownst to most, there are more Russian circus performers living in Sin City than anywhere else in the world besides Moscow. This small community of more than 2,000 acting and retired Russian performers and their families is now a piece of modern Nevada history in the UNLV library alongside the many other oral histories with Nevadans over the years.
Interviews are important, not just to TV audiences but to cities and states who want to remember their history. Nevada’s oral history departments at UNLV and UNR have saved stories from everything on jazz musicians on the Strip to the October massacre in Las Vegas in 2017.
I thought a lot about Larry King as I sat down with my tape recorder to interview clowns and jugglers who now call Nevada home. Did I ask the right questions? Did I miss something? What would he have to say?
RIP, Larry King. You will be missed.
Kim Palchikoff is a social worker and mental health writer. Have comments? She can be reached at palchikoff@gmail.com.
