Getting and Giving

Not many people realize that the final show of Larry King Live was not really the final show. We taped a show that aired two days after the finale. It was among a series of favorites that filled out the last two weeks of the year and was called “The War on Cancer.”

The principal guest was a man who’d been told he had only twelve months to live . . . eighteen years ago—Mike Milken. The former junk-bond king is now known as the man who changed medicine. As the show unfolded, we ran clips showed Lance Armstrong, Colin Powell, Sheryl Crow, Olivia Newton-John, Joe Torre, General Norman Schwarzkopf, and others discussing the disease. Nobody knew it, but there easily could have been a clip of me among that group. You would have heard me describe what it was like to be laughing over breakfast with my buddies when a call came from my urologist, asking to see me face-to- face. That’s how I found out that I had prostate cancer. It was the start of 2010—yet another layer to the wildest year of my life.


Prostate cancer. Men react to those two words in different ways. Prostate cancer can be a very slow-growing disease. It doesn’t have to kill anyone. If it spreads, that’s when there’s real trouble. Robert De Niro’s father made the choice to watch and wait—and died when it quickly spread. De Niro was mad at him. When De Niro himself was diagnosed, he had surgery immediately. So did Joe Torre. Torre didn’t want any kind of cancer growing in his body—get it outta there!

My case was puzzling. Dr. Skip Holden maximized it and minimized it at the same time. It’s in an embryonic state, Skip said. You’re going to live a long time. If you treat this aggressively with radiation, who knows, you could live to ninety-five. It’s always good to get a second opinion. The other doctor I went to see is also top of the line. Dr. Alan Shapiro has an office not far from Skip’s. He’s got an Ivy League diploma just like Skip. He looked at the same test results as Skip. But he had a very different opinion. He told me the cancer was slow-growing and there was no reason to act on it. “For a man who is seventy- six,” he said at the time, “this is not a big thing for you to worry about. Especially when you consider the aftermath of radiation.

You’re not going to like that.”
The radiation treatment is accompanied by hormone shots. You know the old joke about the guy getting hormone shots: Not long after you take one, you want to go shopping. Basically, the treatment kills your cancer cells and your testosterone. Once the radiation starts, Shapiro said, there’s a good chance you’ll lose interest in sex for a while and maybe forever. Which way do you go? Or, as one survivor of prostate cancer bluntly put it:
“Would you rather have sex or die?”
If you’re fifty years old then it’s not a question. If I were fifty
I would wipe it out immediately. But at seventy-six? That’s when it’s tough. I asked a lot of questions. But ultimately, it came down to this: I’d like to give myself the best chance of seeing my two young boys graduate from college. So I followed Skip’s plan of action. I did the radiation five days a week over two months. It’s really easy: You lie down. They measure. They play a couple of Sinatra songs while a machine moves around your body and shoots. There’s no pain at all. Each session takes about seven minutes. I was told I’d feel tired. I didn’t. I had some trouble with bowel movements. You’re constipated for a while. You urinate a great deal. The strangest thing is when a girl in a miniskirt and high heels passes you on the street, and you don’t feel anything. It really is like that joke about how your get-up-and-go got up and went.

Something should be said for the wives of the men who have prostate cancer radiation treatment. They have to put up with a lot. I came through healthy. There was a quality of life missing for some time. But things are looking up with treatment. I’ll tell you what, though. Every time I read about someone dying of prostate cancer, I feel smart. There were some amusing moments along the way. A guy told our breakfast gang about the robotic device that had been implanted in his penis after his prostate had been removed. Push a button, and an erection goes up. Push again, and it goes down. His doctor joked that when he dies they’ll have trouble closing his coffin. It felt good to learn that down the road a man with test results similar to mine will no longer face a tough decision on treatment. A cutting-edge study has identified twenty-four types of prostate cancer. Some don’t spread quickly and can be left alone. Others are dangerous and have to be attacked immediately. Once a diagnosis process is perfected, each case can be dealt with accordingly.

One of the things Mike Milken wanted to do on the show was thank me for everything I’d done to help make medical advances like that possible. I have a hard time with compli- ments to begin with, but this really seemed like a stretch. What had I done?

Mike’s answer caught me off guard. He brought up the shows we’d done in the mid nineties highlighting the March on Cancer in Washington. After one of those shows, three thou- sand people called in to help. OK, that I might have expected. When General Schwarzkopf goes on the air and tells America that Saddam Hussein killed thousands of people in Kuwait but that prostate cancer kills more, there’s going to be a response. But I’m not the type of guy to look at the picture in dollar terms. Mike is.

Mike looked at the cancer research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. At the time of our first show, the annual budget was $14–$15 billion. Mike said the awareness that followed my shows helped increase that NIH budget to $29– $30 billion.

Think about the additional $15 billion a year, Mike said. Over ten years, between 2000 and 2010, that adds up to $150 billion. It also had a bandwagon effect because others put up money for cancer research as well. This increase in funding shaped the agenda for the battle against cancer in the United States. It used to be that 95 percent of men with testicular cancer couldn’t be cured. Now the cures for testicular cancer are highly successful. The death rate in prostate cancer has dropped from 43,000 a year in the United States before the first March on Cancer to 29,000 a year today. At this moment, twelve million people who once had cancer are living normal lives, in part because that research funding has led to medical advances.

There’s still a long way to go. Fifteen hundred Americans die each day of cancer. That’s the equivalent of four jumbo jets crashing every day of the year. Last year more money was spent on potato chips than was invested in the National Cancer Institute. Mike was using this last show to keep pressing forward. The way he sees it, the elimination of cancer as a cause of death is worth $50 trillion to the U.S. economy. Most importantly, his own experience has taught him that the greatest gift he can give someone is a life.

I went home that night and talked to Shawn about it. It all seemed abstract to me. The way I looked at it, if there is ever a cure for prostate cancer it should be named after Mike Milken. Mike and his work for faster cures, together with the researchers, doctors, and other medical professionals, are making the difference. What did I do? Put on my suspenders and ask a few questions.

Over and over, people thank me for these things. It always amazes me. I’ll tell you why and give you a classic example. Ryan Seacrest is a good friend of mine. Whenever he gets a chance, he talks about how generous I am. Sometimes he backs it up by telling the story about the day we met.

Now, I’m a pretty good storyteller. In fact, a guy in radio who’d heard Will Rogers once told me that I was the best storyteller he’d ever heard. I definitely can’t take that compliment. The story you’re about to read is better when Ryan tells it, so here’s Ryan’s version. After you’ve read it, you tell me how generous I am.

Ryan Seacrest

I was in the airport in Paris on my way back to Los Angeles when I saw Larry at the security gate. He was going through the metal detector. Thank you, God, I was thinking, this is my one shot!

I’d been a fan of his show for so many years. I’d wanted to meet him for so long. All I had to do was walk a short distance to ask if I could hang out with him and learn.

So I went over to him. He looked at me as if I were an agent for Homeland Security—like I was about to check his pockets and interrogate him.
“No, no, no,” Shawn said. “This is Ryan Seacrest. He hosts American Idol.”
“What do you do, kid?”
“Doesn’t matter what I do,” I said. “I just wanted to say that you’re an idol of mine. I really admire you.”

He looked me up and down. He was holding a big Louis Vuitton bag full of hardcover books. And he said, “I’m your idol?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you carry my bag?”
So I grabbed his bag and the three of us started walking through the terminal as if I was the other wing to Shawn. It was Shawn and her two husbands walking through the terminal at Charles de Gaulle.
We finally got to the lounge. Larry sat down.
Shawn said, “You comfortable?”

“I’m good,” Larry said.
“Good,” Shawn said. “I’m gonna go shopping.”
And Larry had this look like, Don’t leave me with this guy. I talk for a living. Now I have to make small talk with this guy at the lounge of Charles de Gaulle Airport?
She took off.
“So tell me about this show,” he said. This was in the early days. “What do you do?”
“It’s a TV show. We look for singing stars.”
“How often is it on?”
“Two nights a week.”
“I do my show every night.”
“I know, Larry, I love your show. I watch it every night.”
“I do it live.”
“I know, Larry. I started in radio.”
“You’re a radio guy?”
“Yeah.”
“My show is a radio show on TV.”
So we started talking about radio. He and I were starting to bond.

Shawn came back with sunglasses and purses. It was time to go. Once again, I grabbed the Louis Vuitton bag filled with hardcover books, and we headed toward the gate to board the plane. It was really hot. The plane was late, and Larry is not the most patient individual—he’ll admit to that.

Turned out we needed to get on a bus to get to the plane. This was new to Larry. He thought we should be boarding straight from the gate. “Shawn, why are we on a bus? Kid, why are we on a bus? We’re supposed to be on a plane. Ask the driver! Where are we going?”
“Larry, we take a bus to the plane. It’s no problem—”
“No, no, no. How long?”
“You want me to ask the driver?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Ask the driver how long.”
“Sir,” I asked the driver, “how long?”
“Ten minutes,” the driver says.
“TEN MINUTES!” Larry can’t believe it. “We’re supposed to be taking off!”

Finally, we got to the plane. The flight was delayed. I was trying to calm Larry down. Shawn was oblivious to all this. She’s used to it and she’s very patient. So the delay allowed Larry and me to bond a little more.

He said, “You know what? You ought to be a guest on the show.”
“I’d be honored. You want me to come in carrying the bag?”
“No, I’m serious. Be a guest.”
The flight was preparing for takeoff. I had to go back to my seat. I sat down, and next to me was a guy with body odor so bad that it literally pushed my hair back, which is some strong feat. So after the plane took off I went back to Larry and Shawn and said, “Sorry, I don’t mean to bother you. I’m not a stalker. But there’s a guy next to me with body odor, and I can’t deal with it.”
So Larry and I got a chance to bond a little more. We both like jeans. He wears jeans under the desk on his show. He liked my jeans. “I’ll send you some,” I said.
“Kid, zipper, not button. Because when you’re my age, you gotta get out fast.”
We bonded some more.

Larry said, “You know, there’s one night in the next couple of weeks when I’m not gonna be in town. Why don’t you host the show?”
This was going really well for me. I had gone from the bag carrier to a guest host, and we were midway through one flight.
“We’ll book somebody in the news,” he said. “Somebody who will make it comfortable for you, because you know, it’s live—”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
“It’s a full hour.”
“I’ve got that part. I’ve watched.”
“You watch my show? Oh, yeah, I’m your idol, that’s right . . .”

Of course, Ryan was embellishing a bit there. But let’s stop for a moment and take another look at that story. I’m at the airport. I meet a guy. I ask him to carry my bag. Then I ask him to work for me on a night I want to take off. He sends me jeans. For years now, he’s been sending me jeans.

And I’m a kind and generous guy?
Truth be told, it’s not all that much different from what happened with my cardiac foundation. I get a lot of plaudits for it. But let me tell you how it got started.

I went through heart surgery. I recovered. I was sitting down for lunch one day with friends at Duke Zeibert’s restaurant in Washington. This was 1988. Someone asked how much my heart surgery had cost. I had no idea. I didn’t know because the insurance company took care of all the bills. But it got me thinking. The thing about a bypass is that it’s elective surgery. You may have a severe blockage, but your insurance company isn’t necessarily going to pay for you to get it fixed. What happens if you can’t afford it?

Soon afterward I got a few people together, and we held a fund-raiser at a high school in Baltimore. That’s how the foundation got going. Then I met Shawn. She got involved. My son Larry Jr. became president. He has a great business background and he figured out ways to advance the process. Almost every day, the foundation gives somebody the heart surgery that he or she needs but can’t afford. And what’s my responsibility in all this? I get up with a microphone at fund-raisers and ask people to help. I phone recipients to tell them that they’ve been selected. Let me tell you something—that ain’t generosity. That’s pure joy.

I just don’t see myself as on the same level as Bill Gates, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, or Bono. Those people have shown fierce commitment. Think about this: Bill Gates and Ted Turner are nearing their goal of eradicating polio. They’re working to vaccinate everyone in the world who couldn’t get the vaccine before. And Warren Buffett has pledged billions so that the Gates Foundation can do even more. When I see Bono, I don’t see a musician. I see a man who’s changing the world. Talk about an amazing journey. He couldn’t even read music. He started a band. Then the guy who designs their album covers came up with the name U2. Bono thought a U2 was a submarine. They went with it. When Bono found out it was a spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union, he no longer liked the name. But the band caught on. He started doing Live Aid in the mideighties and ended up working at an orphanage in Ethiopia during a famine.

One night in Ethiopia he woke up in his tent to the sight of tens of thousands of people who’d been walking all night to get food. Sometimes their children arrived dead. I remember him telling me about a guy who’d brought a beautiful boy over to him and asked him to take the child. The guy said something like, “I know my child will live in your hands, but not in mine.”

Bono was astonished to find out that some African countries were paying more to the Western world to service their debt than the total of the aid that he was helping to bring in. He then started devoting his life to issues like debt relief for African countries and stopping the spread of AIDS. He speaks with presidents, prime ministers, and the pope as an equal in this process. Now, there’s a guy who merits a thank-you.

As does Eunice Shriver. She started the Special Olympics more than forty years ago. She did so out of sheer rage—rage at the way people with disabilities were being bullied. Eunice, Bono, Bill Gates—these are people who have committed their lives to making a difference. Me, I’m a guy who likes to remember the great riffs Lenny Bruce used to do about telethons. Telethons drove Lenny nuts. He’d pretend to be the agent searching for talent: “Get us the broad that cries! You know, the one that wept during the telethon for educational TV.” He did a whole bit on guys looking to start an organization just to make money from the telethons. “We gotta find a disease where there’s no chance of a cure. That way we can keep it rolling. You pay doctors to say we’re making advances. We set up a lab. The public loves test tubes! And if we have trouble getting talent for the fund-raiser, we’ll book radio guys who love to be on television.” I do have to admit that for me, one of the year’s most gratifying moments was our telethon after the earthquake in Haiti. It raised $9 million to help the victims. What made me most proud was my staff. We had never done a telethon before—and they put one together in about two days.

You couldn’t ask for anybody better to organize it than Wendy. Here’s all you need to know about Wendy and organization. Once, she got a phone call in the middle of the night saying she was being evacuated from her home because of fires in the San Diego area. She and her kids rushed out of bed. The kids started looking for the things that meant the most to them to take away. You know what Wendy was doing? Wendy was making the beds. She was making sure all the dishes were just right in the dishwasher. Only Wendy would make a house perfect for a fire. This is a woman who recommends that people create a color-coded schedule on their computers. Appointments for the kids are red. Work meetings come in blue. Personal engagements are green . . . I can make fun of this all day, but it sure comes in handy when you’ve got to put together a telethon. Lenny Bruce had no idea how complicated it is. You’ve got to line up the charities you’re going to work with. You’ve got to build sets. You’ve got to set up phone banks. You’ve got to book celebrities to man the phones. That means bringing in hair and makeup people for the celebrities. Every guest brings an entourage with a set of requests. Can’t forget the catering for all the entourages. The details are staggering. You’ve got to book the reporters on the ground. Get the graphics ready. Figure out what music to use. Lock in extra time from the network. Lay out when the commercials are going to air. Forty people on the staff made it happen. All I have to do is say, “And now, let’s go to Port-au-Prince and Sanjay Gupta . . "
But who do you think gets the credit?

When I saw the devastation in Haiti after the quake and I realized the help our audience was sending, I felt good. The sensation reminds me of a quotation from Abraham Lincoln that goes something like this: “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”

I don’t believe in God. I wish I had faith like Shawn and her father. Believers are in a no-lose situation. They’re either going to be in another, better place, and then they’ll know they were right. Or they won’t be in a better place, and they’ll never know it.

The writer Herman Wouk, an orthodox Jew, once told me:
“Even if you don’t believe, let me show you the genius of God.”
“OK,” I said, “What’s the genius?”
He said, “Saturday is my day of rest. I know that one day of the week, for twenty-four hours, I will have no tension, no pressure, no work. I won’t write a thing. I won’t hear, “Herman, we need this,” from the publisher. I take a breath. I do it for my faith. But you could do it just for a good way to live.” That’s hard to argue with. Plus, Herman obviously knows something; He’s ninety-five. For me, stepping up to a mike and helping someone in need is simply a good way to live. So I’m always happy to emcee the fund-raiser for the Las Vegas Cancer Institute. It gives me pleasure to know I’ve been part of a place where people under intense stress can get treated under blue ceilings that look like a peaceful sky. If I can help Larry Ruvo and the Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas that he dedicated to his father—of course I’ll be there. And I’ll be there for Bob Shapiro and the foundation named for his son Brent, who could have been saved from a drug overdose if someone at a party had called 911. Bob never stops thinking of his son, no matter what he’s doing. “I’m sitting here talking to you. I’m laughing,” he once told me. “But Brent is always on my mind.” He wants to make sure no parent ever has to feel that way. How could you not help? I’ve met the Dalai Lama a few times. When I interviewed him last year, he told me about his recent gallbladder operation. He made sure that everyone understood that he had no magical powers. He couldn’t wave the pain away. He saw himself as a simple man. But there was a clarity in his eyes. I believe that clarity came from basic compassion.

When I stop to think about all this, I think of the person to whom I’d like to dedicate this book. You’ve probably never heard of him. His name is Hunter Waters. He was a producer on my show. He started out as an intern and for ten years worked out of Washington bringing in political guests. The thing about Hunter is he always made me smile. Even when he called to tell me we had lost a guest, I was happy to hear his voice. Hunter got esophageal cancer. The thing about esophageal cancer is that you don’t usually notice the symptoms until stage 4—when it’s too late. Hunter passed away at the age of thirty- two, a couple of months after the final show. It’s hard for me even to think about it. When I do, I wonder why that $150 billion dollars of research over ten years couldn’t help Hunter. So you see, whatever good I’ve done in helping to stop cancer, it wasn’t enough. We can always do more.