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  Put Your Dreams Away (For Another Day)

  I don’t like funerals, but Frank Sinatra had a great funeral.

  I sat next to Vic Damone and Nancy Reagan. There must have been about four hundred people in the Catholic church on Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills, the Church of the Good Shepherd.

  George Schlatter told funny stories. The casket was set in the middle of the aisle—not up in front of the altar. Anybody who walked in, walked by the casket. Frank’s piano player was behind the curtain playing all Frank’s favorites. Then, at the end, they dimmed the lights a little, put a spotlight on the casket, and played “Put Your Dreams Away (For Another Day).”

  That’s Life

  Which brings me to the story about how I met Frank. I’ve told it before, but it makes me feel young, so I’m going to tell it again.

  One of my mentors was Jackie Gleason. Jackie helped me out by doing promotional spots for my shows. Once he came in for my all-night television show and rearranged the set to make it more pleasing to the viewers.

  But one of the greatest things he did for me came from a simple question he posed. Jackie liked to make games out of questions. The game one night was, What in your profession is impossible?

  There was a doctor with us that night. The doctor said, “In my profession, they will never make blood in a laboratory. It’s impossible. You can go ten million years into the future and you’ll see that blood will never be made in a lab.”

  Jackie looked at me and asked, “What’s impossible in your profession?”

  “Well,” I said, “I do a local radio show every night between nine and twelve. Frank Sinatra doing my radio show for three hours on one night—that’s impossible.”

  This was 1964. There was nobody bigger in the world than Frank Sinatra and he never did interviews. Sinatra was the only person I knew of at the time who would not return a call from the New York Times.

  Jackie knew that Frank was performing at the Fontainebleau the next week. He asked me what night Sinatra was dark.

  “Monday,” I said. “He doesn’t work Monday.”

  Jackie said, “You got him.”

  I said, “What are you telling me?”

  He said, “You got Frank Sinatra on Monday night.”

  I said, “Look, if I’ve got Frank Sinatra on my radio show next Monday night, I’ve got to tell people. I’ve got to promote it.”

  “Promote it!” Jackie said.

  So I went on my radio show that night and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, next Monday night we’ll have Frank Sinatra for three hours.”

  A station exec called me up the next day and said, “Are you kidding?”

  I understood exactly where the exec was coming from. Frank had a publicity guy to make sure interviews didn’t happen.

  I said to the exec, “Jackie Gleason told me we’d have him.”

  “OK . . . ,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t believe it. Friday came along. The exec called. He said the station was taking out a big ad in the Miami Herald on Monday. A full-page ad that was going to cost a lot of money. The problem was, the business department had been calling the Fontainebleau and leaving messages to confirm that Frank would be on the show. But Frank wasn’t returning the calls. The exec was more than a little nervous.

  So I said, “OK, I’ll call Jackie.” I dialed up Jackie. “Jackie, they’re nervous at the station.”

  Jackie said, “Are you questioning me, pal? I told you he’ll be there, and he’ll be there!”

  “OK, Jackie,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

  So the station runs the ad. Monday night comes. Nobody goes home. The secretaries, who worked nine to five that day, all waited. Everybody at the station stayed.

  It’s five minutes to nine. No Frank. No car. Nothing. It’s four minutes to nine. Three minutes. Nothing. I’m supposed to go on at five after the hour. At nine o’clock sharp, a limo pulls up. Out of the car steps Frank’s PR guy, Jim Mahoney. Then comes Frank. He gets up the stairs and says, “Which one’s Larry King?”

  Timidly, I raise my hand. “Me.”

  “OK,” he says, “let’s do it!” As we were going into the booth, the PR guy pulls me aside. He says, “I don’t know how you got him. But I’ll tell you one thing. He pays me big money not to do this!”

  I step toward the booth and the PR guy pulls me back. “Just one thing,” he says. “Don’t ask about the kidnapping of his son.”

  So I’m thinking, better not ask about the kidnapping or Frank will walk off.

  “OK,” I told the PR guy. “It’s none of my business.”

  So Frank and I go into the booth. We sit down. The light goes on. We’re on the air.

  Now a lot of talk-show hosts would have said, “My guest tonight is an old friend—Frank Sinatra. Great to see you again, pal.”

  That’s bullshit. I learned a long time ago never to lie to my audience. But I just couldn’t start out like this was just any other night. There was something in the air. The whole audience was wondering. Larry. Frank. Larry? Frank? It didn’t make sense. Frank’s on top of the world. Larry’s a local radio guy making $120 a week. How does he know Frank?

  I’m not going to pretend that I know him. So I’m honest. As soon as I introduce him, my first question is, “Why are you here?”

  It’s a good question, right? He has to tell me something. Frank appreciated the honesty.

  He says, “I’ll tell ya. About a month ago, just before a closing night, I got laryngitis. Couldn’t sing. Couldn’t speak. I didn’t know what to do. We had a packed house.

  “So I called up Jackie Gleason. I said, ‘Jackie, will you come and do the show?’

  “He said, ‘OK.’ So he came and did the show. It was wonderful. After the show, I walked him out to his limo, leaned in, and whispered, ‘Jackie, I owe you one.’

  “When I checked into the Fontainebleau Hotel there was a message to call up Jackie. So I did. I said, ‘Jackie, it’s Frank.’ He said, ‘Frank, this is the one.’”

  Well, Frank and I really hit it off. Frank’s a great interview. He has all the characteristics that make up a great guest: Passion. A sense of humor. Anger. And an ability to explain what you do very well.

  The interview was going great, and Frank became really comfortable. I said to him, “Frank, the thing between you and the press. Has it been overplayed? Or have you been bum-rapped?”

  He said, “Well, it’s probably been overplayed. But I’ve been bum-rapped, too. Take my son’s kidnapping ...”

  I look over at the PR guy and I’m thinking he’s going to faint. Frank goes on to tell the whole story of the kidnapping and how the press treated him!

  Why? Because he felt comfortable. Years later—after we’d done many other radio and television interviews—he wrote me a letter that included a sentence that would have made Jackie Gleason smile. It said, “What you do is you make the camera disappear.”

  I became very friendly with Frank as a result of that first interview. After it was over, after three hours, he said, “Hey, kid, you wanna come see the show?”

  “YEAH!” I said.

  “Come tomorrow night. You’re sitting ringside. Bring a guest.”

  Now I could choose any woman in town to go see Sinatra with me, and I knew I was going to get laid. You wanna come see Frank Sinatra sing? We’re sitting ringside! Does it get any better than that?

  I asked this pretty girl I liked, and we went to the show. We were sitting right in front of the stage having a wonderful dinner and listening to Frank Sinatra. It was great. But here’s the thing. In the middle of every show, Sinatra always had a cup of tea and talked to the audience. I had no idea what was coming. All of a sudden, as he’s drinking his cup of tea, he says, “By the way, I don’t do interviews. But I want to tell you about a young man in the audience tonight. I owed a favor to Jackie Gleason, and Jackie introduced me to this guy, and I did an interview with him, and he was terrific. It was a great interview. I want him to take a bow. You’re going to be heari
ng a lot about him. Larry King, stand up.”

  Now, the girl and I are in the middle of dessert. I’m eating cherries jubilee. I have no idea that Frank is going to introduce me. In my haste to stand, I bump the table, the cherries jubilee goes flying and lands all over my white shirt and pants. There’s nowhere to hide. Cherries jubilee is very red. Sinatra starts to laugh. The band is laughing. The audience is laughing. The girl is laughing.

  It’s really embarrassing. But what can I do? I wipe myself off, and we enjoy the second half of the show.

  The performance ends and it’s time to drive the girl home. I know it’s going to be a good night. But after paying the bill, I have, like, eighteen dollars left in my pocket. I know I need three dollars for the car. So I leave fifteen dollars as a tip for the waiter. When I give the valet three dollars for the car, I have absolutely nothing left. But that’s OK. The girl has already invited me home.

  On the way, she says, “Oh, I don’t have any coffee. Why don’t we stop and bring home a couple of containers?”

  What am I going to do with this dilemma? I’m a big shot who just took her to see Frank Sinatra and I don’t have a cent in my pocket.

  So I pull into a Royal Castle. I tell her to wait in the car, that I’ll be right back. A few minutes later I come back to the car without anything.

  She says, “Where’s the coffee?”

  I say, “They can’t change a hundred dollar bill.”

  Baby

  My wife is always telling me to stop talking about Sinatra when I’m asked about music. I get her point. Stay current. Hey, I met Justin Bieber at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I’ve had dinner with Justin Timberlake. I met the Jonas Brothers when we did a show at the new stadium in Dallas.

  The thing is, when I met the Jonas Brothers, my name was running across the stadium’s scoreboard in letters fifty feet high. So it was different from when I had no money and wished I could get in to see Sinatra at the Paramount. Plus, I don’t have any stories about Justin Bieber and a pie fight. So I’m going to tell one more about Frank.

  The Way You Look Tonight

  Frank was a complicated guy. Complicated because he was not the brightest guy in the world, but in some areas, was extraordinarily intelligent. His lyrical interpretations were genius, but he was also right out of the streets of Hoboken. He took everything personally. He was a big-deal Democrat, but when Kennedy crossed him, he became a Republican. Sometimes you could cross him and not even know it. This story is a good example.

  Frank had finished a show in Miami Beach. This was back in the early sixties. He didn’t like to sleep and he headed over to the coffee shop at the Fontainebleau at four in the morning. Three pals were with him. They talked over coffee for a while, and then Frank decided he wanted a piece of cherry pie.

  He looked around for the waitress. No waitress. She was in the bathroom. So Frank walked over to the counter. There was a cherry pie in one of those clear pie displays—the kind that has a tray and a removable top to keep the pie fresh. Right in front of the pie holder was a guy sitting at the counter.

  Frank leaned across the guy, took the top off, and got the cherry pie. Realizing he’d brushed into the guy, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Get your hands off my shoulder,” the guy said.

  This was not the wisest response. The word was out that Frank was connected to the highest levels of the Mob. I once asked Don Rickles, “Supposing Frank asked me to do something and I didn’t want to do it?” Don said, “You got relatives still living?”

  The guy couldn’t have mistaken Frank for anybody else. There was no bigger entertainer in the world at the time. Frank looked him up and down. “What did you say?”

  “There’s nobody else at the counter,” the guy said. You didn’t have to lean over my shoulder to get to the pie. Keep your hands off me.”

  Sinatra picked up the cherry pie and hit the guy in the face with it.

  The guy slowly wiped it off. Then he reached for an apple pie and hit Frank in the face with it.

  The three guys at Frank’s table see this and very swiftly begin to make their way over. Only it doesn’t turn out like you’d think. Frank gets mad that his guys are interfering. Why is this any of your business? And he turns on his buddies. He and the guy at the counter team up and start smashing pies into the faces of Frank’s friends.

  The six of them got to every pie in the place and destroyed the entire coffee shop. Front-page pictures of the wreckage ended up all over the Miami Herald. They couldn’t reopen until late the next morning.

  With Frank you never knew.

  As long as we can remember the music, we will always be able to be young again. And if it seems like this chapter is going on and on, you’re right. That’s because I don’t want it to end.

  5

  Movies

  I’m often asked who’s been my favorite interview. There’s just no answer to that. I’m proud of so many of them.

  But a guy recently came at me from a different angle. What’s the one interview, he wanted to know, that I’m most asked about?

  It ain’t even close. The one where Marlon Brando kissed me on the lips.

  We were comparing that interview to the one I did with Al Pacino that aired as the show began its final two weeks. Then the guy asked, Would you be happy if the only work you’d left behind were your interviews with Brando and Pacino?

  No, I wouldn’t. What’s important to me is my body of work. But I understand where his question was coming from. It was really about legacy. How would I like to be remembered?

  My favorite way would probably be: Larry King. One hundred and eight years old and still going strong . . . But I think George Bush 43 had the best response to the legacy question. That is: “I’m not going to be here, so why worry about it?”

  The guy who asked about Brando and Pacino does make a good point. The interviews with those two actors will live on long after I’m gone. I doubt that many people are going to look back to see me ask Congresswoman Michelle Bachman about her views on immigration in the early part of the twenty-first century. But a hundred years from now, when people watch The Godfather and want to know about the actors, they’ll be able to find out through the archive of Larry King Live. So I know I’ve left a mark. There aren’t many places where you can find Al Pacino sitting for an hour and talking about what he does.

  Jay Leno told me it drove him nuts to watch my interviews with Brando and Elizabeth Taylor because his show always tried to book them and could never get them. There’s a reason that Pacino doesn’t do many interviews. Al doesn’t like to be seen on screen as himself. That way, it’s easier for the audience to suspend its disbelief when it sees him as Jack Kevorkian.

  It took me years to convince Al to come on my show—and he’s a friend of mine! When I say friend, I don’t use the word lightly. He was best man at my wedding to Shawn.

  I think the reason he came on as my show approached its close was out of respect for my body of work. We taped it in his backyard and held it for the last couple of weeks of the show because we wanted to go out with the greats. It was one of those interviews you didn’t want to end—like when I sat down with Nelson Mandela. But at the same time it was difficult. It was hard because, for me, friends are the toughest people to interview. You know too much. You’ve got to search for new areas. If I ask questions that I already know the answer to, then I’m acting.

  It wasn’t easy for Al, either. His girlfriend told me he was anxious the whole week leading up to it. Al is a quirky guy. If I’m going to see him perform on Broadway, he’ll want to make sure I have a ticket, but he won’t want to know what night I’m in the theater.

  My friendship with Al is easy to understand. We both came up poor, as street kids. Me in Brooklyn, Al in the Bronx. But Al is much more complicated than me. He’s been living inside many people. He’s been Jack Kevorkian and Frank Serpico. That’s different from acting out Shakespeare. He’s had to turn himself into people who are aliv
e, people who’d be watching him. And when he is acting Shakespeare, he has to choose which of the many different ways to play his role. I remember Charlton Heston telling me there are ten ways you could play Hamlet—from brave to psychotic. Me, I just show up on time and ask questions that pop into my mind. Al is constantly searching for ways to get inside these personalities.

  Brando once did some sessions at the University of Southern California in which he called acting “Lying for a Living.” “Isn’t that a good description?” I once asked Al. “Absolutely not,” he shot back. “I’m not lying at all. That’s who I am. I’m Al Pacino, but I’m also Shylock. I am Shylock.” Al thought the better the actor, the more truth you see, because the actor is letting himself out. The irony is, nobody let himself out better than Brando.

  Maybe the difference between Marlon and Al was that it came easy to Brando. Al has to work at it. People who have to work harder are amazed at people who don’t.

  I’ve talked to so many actors over the years and heard so many different approaches. I guess that’s why they make such a unique breed. You couldn’t find two guys who go about their work more differently than Clint Eastwood and Warren Beatty. Clint is a minimalist. What you see is what you get. He’s that way when you have dinner with him. He’s serious—the same way he acts and directs. He wants to do the take and move on. Which is the exact opposite of Warren Beatty. Warren is: Let’s try this. Let’s try that. Soon, it’s: Take 68!

  Then you had the sharp differences between old school and new. I remember talking to Franchot Tone, a wonderful actor out of the studio system who starred in Mutiny on the Bounty back in the thirties. Tone told me he never varied from the script. Whatever the script said, that was the way he acted. I asked him, “What if a fly landed on your nose during filming?” He said, “I would not brush it away, because brushing it away is not on the page.”

  Anthony Quinn couldn’t have been more different. As Jackie Gleason once told me: “Anthony Quinn doesn’t act—he marinates.” When they were doing Requiem for a Heavyweight, Quinn played the fighter and Jackie the manager. A scene came up that was supposed to take place after Quinn had just finished a long fight. Quinn didn’t feel up to filming it because he was too fresh. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he said. He ran around the block a few times, then came back winded and ready.