Leaving

I ’m not sure which comes first—acceptance or belief. When you first realize you’re about to lose something that’s a part of you, it’s hard to accept. But even when you start to accept the loss, it’s still hard to believe.

I knew my show had only a few months remaining when I sat down last September to interview the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the third time. Yet as our final session ended, the words that left my mouth were: “We’ll pick this up next year . . .”


You don’t stop to think it’s the last time you might be interviewing President George Bush 41 when he lifts himself out of a wheelchair to greet you. His leg was shaking from a variation of Parkinson’s disease. He was eighty-six years old. What you do is talk about his plans to go skydiving.

Maybe my feelings about leaving can be traced back to my first memory of it—when my father left me. There was no warning. I was nine years old, walking home from the library carrying an armful of books. Three police cars were in front of my apartment. I started running up the steps when I heard my mother’s screams. A cop came down the staircase straight for me. He picked me up and the books under my arm went flying. The cop put me in a police car and told me that my father had died of a heart attack.

I was bewildered at first. But then another emotion set in. I refused to cry. I didn’t go to the funeral. I stayed home and bounced a spaldeen—the Spalding rubber ball we used to play stickball with—off the front stoop. Years later, when I mentioned to a psychologist how I had purposely recited prayers in synagogue in a way to provoke pity, he suggested that it might have been because I was angry—angry that my father had left me.
Of course, I now understand that it wasn’t my father’s fault. He certainly didn’t want to leave me. But the day he left probably had more impact on my life than any other. It may have seemed abrupt when I announced on my show in late June that I was leaving. But it was a process of evolution on my end. Looking back, there were several moments that foretold the change.

At the end of February, I got a call from my producer, Wendy Walker, and her top aide, Allison Marsh. They were elated. They’d just landed an interview with the head of the Toyota Motor Corporation, Akio Toyoda. There was no bigger story in the news at the time. Toyoda was testifying before Congress after the recent surge of accidents and deaths caused by unintended acceleration stemming from defective parts. “It’ll be his only interview,” Wendy said. “He doesn’t want to be interviewed by anyone else.” I should have been happy. I’d been asking for a show on this topic for weeks. Not only were Wendy and the staff delivering—they were doing so big time. It doesn’t get any better than booking the guy who runs the company. But there were a couple of catches. Akio Toyoda wanted to do the interview face-to-face. And since he was testifying in Washington, that meant I had to get on a plane in L.A. the following morning to get there on time. CNN flies me private, so the plane was no problem. But there were personal issues. Not many people were aware, but I was fighting off prostate cancer at that point. I’d also had a stent placed in one of my arteries to open up a blockage. Doctors had advised me to take it easy and avoid stress. But that seemed almost impossible. I was going through a rough patch with my wife, and there was tension at home that we were trying to work out. Shawn has a history of migraine headaches and was not feeling well on the day Wendy’s call came. I didn’t want to leave her. Plus, I’d be flying off, coming right back, then flying to Washington again a few days later for my cardiac foundation fund-raiser. Something inside told me it was all too much.
“You can stay in Washington and do the show there until the fund-raiser,” Wendy suggested. Wendy was going to take care of everything. But that would mean waiting around and being away from Shawn and my two young boys for a few days. I didn’t want that, either. “Akio Toyoda is going to be testifying before Congress all day,” I told Wendy. “It’s all going to be taped and he’s going to be on every news channel. It’s not like people aren’t going to see him answering questions. I don’t think I need to go.” Wendy must have been stunned. She’d been producing my show for seventeen years. I’d never turned down an interview of this magnitude before. Apart from my heart problems, I’d never called in sick. From the moment I got my first job as a deejay in Miami Beach, everyone at the station knew that if they needed to take a shift off, all they had to do was call Larry.

Larry would fill in. I could never get enough of the microphone. In my free time during those early days I had a second job announcing at the dog track. Then I took on a newspaper column and a local television show. On top of that, I’d speak for pleasure to audiences at the Rotary Club or Knights of Columbus. As the years passed, I took on even more. Back in the mid-’80s, I’d finish my CNN show in Washington, drive to Virginia to do my all-night talk-radio show on the Mutual net- work, get some sleep, then write a column for USA Today during the day—and then help raise money for my cardiac foundation to get heart operations for people who couldn’t af- ford them. I was always prepared to work. Since the day I went on the air, I’ve never gotten drunk. I worked fifty-three straight days after 9/11. I often went to the studio to tape shows on Saturdays and Sundays. Shawn always wondered why we could never just get in a car and drive up the coast for a week. It seemed like a nice idea. I’d never say no. But we’d never make the trip. I guess the truth is that there was no microphone in the car. I think it was Woody Allen who said that 80 percent of life is showing up. Whenever CNN needed me, I was always there. On top of that, I hardly ever say no to anyone. On one level, the absence of negativity is probably a reason why guests feel safe around me. That’s why they’re comfortable enough to open up. But never saying no can also be a huge fault. Ten people can ask me to do a favor at the same time on the same day, and I’ll agree to all ten requests. I just don’t want to let anybody down. Naturally, that’s caused me to let down the people I didn’t want to let down in the first place, and has got- ten me into trouble over the years. But I just don’t have it in me to deny anyone anything. Fifty-year-old women I’ve never met approach me at breakfast with modeling portfolios and ask if I can help them get a job in fashion. Yoga instructors show up with stretch mats and ask me to speak at their classes. Men with stashes of foreign bonds that for some reason they can’t cash ask me if I know people who can help. Why me?I’m always asking as I step out after breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s deli. But I know why. It’s because I can’t say no. That’s why my friend Sid Young sits next to me at breakfast. He says no. Sid, and my lawyers. Suddenly, I’m saying no to an interview that Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey would like to have? After my staff worked overtime to pull it off? At a time when the network’s ratings were falling behind Fox and MSNBC, and negotiations were about to begin on my next contract? I went to dinner with some friends that night but didn’t feel like eating. After a while, I wanted to throw up. I left early, went home, but couldn’t sleep. I tried to do a little reading, and finally dozed off. When I woke up it was just after midnight. Yeah, I thought, Akio Toyoda is going to be testifying all day. Yeah, he’s going to be all over the news. But I might get more out of him. A senator only cares about how the hearing affects American car owners. He has an agenda. I don’t. I’d ask questions a senator wouldn’t consider. “Your grandfather started the company. What do all these troubles mean for you when you are in front of your friends?” His answer to this question is going to be very different from the responses that everyone will see on clips from the hearing. There are inter- esting things that can come out of this interview, I thought, and the best way to get those answers is face-to-face.

I went to the bedroom and looked at Shawn. She was sleeping peacefully. She seemed to be feeling better. Now my mind was really starting to fly. I could take the kids to school. Then, if I flew out at ten in the morning, I’d get to Washington around five thirty in the afternoon. I could do the show, jump back on a plane to L.A. and be home by 1:30 a.m. That way I could take the boys to school the next morning.
What was I thinking? This is a piece of cake. I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I called Wendy. It was 2:26 a.m.
“Hello! Wendy, it’s Larry!”
“Larry . . .”
“Listen, if you can reach the Toyota people, tell them I’ll do it.”
We talked some more and then I got a few hours’ sleep.
When I awoke and opened the New York Times it said: Snow possible in Washington. I didn’t care. I got some chewing gum for the flight. I was all set. Then I looked at my phone and saw a message to call Wendy.
The heart physician Dean Ornish had told her sometime before that I needed to avoid stress. She didn’t want to put any more on me. She said she’d try to make the interview happen by satellite—and she did. It worked out well, got big play, and everybody was happy. But looking back, I realize: For the first time, I’d said no. The tension in my marriage kept building. I’ll get into this later on. I definitely want to clear up some misconceptions. But for now, I want to focus on how I came to leave my show and the ups and downs that came with it. So I’ll stick to the basics.

On the morning after opening day at Dodger Stadium, we got into a loud argument outside the house. I had made a mistake, and Shawn found out about it. The mistake—whether big or small—is nobody’s business. It’s between Shawn and me. I just wanted to move past it and get on with our lives. That’s how I deal with mistakes. My friend Sid was with me. I got so upset that I just wanted to get away. We weren’t exactly in Tiger Woods territory, but in driving off I nearly ran over Sid’s toe. It’s impossible to know how Shawn felt. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. We both filed for divorce. But there was no sense of relief. It was a miserable day. I was exhausted and didn’t know how I could do the show. Willie Nelson was the scheduled guest. He has a great line about divorce: “It costs so much because it’s worth it.” But it wasn’t amusing that day.

I felt hollow as I went to the studio. Then the lights came on. It always amazes me what happens when the camera starts rolling. No matter how low or tired I feel, I shoot right up. I have no idea where this energy comes from. But there’s noth- ing in the world like it. Willie and I had a great hour. We sang “Blue Skies.” Shawn had recorded with Willie, and—shows you where my mind was—we talked about the two of them singing together in the future as if the divorce filings had never happened.

That night was one of the worst of my life. I was in a hotel room only a couple of miles away from my home but it felt like I’d abandoned my sons. Chance had just turned eleven. Cannon was nine—the same age I was when my father died. Garth Brooks says that every curse is a blessing and every blessing’s a curse. That night, I think both Shawn and I understood exactly what he meant. It was a sleepless night that didn’t seem to end. But I think it made us both realize that we didn’t want to leave our kids. We didn’t want to leave our home. And we didn’t want to leave each other. I just wanted the funny, smart, and beautiful woman I married twelve years before to reappear and the arguments to stop. Millions of couples in America have gone through the same process and emotions. But getting things back together is not easy when you’re on worldwide television and you’ve been married seven times before to six other women. That last fact alone gives late-night comics an irresistible punch line. Look, I’m not going to deny that I’ve made some mistakes along the way. But Shawn and I had been married for twelve years. That ain’t small potatoes. I have a good family. Somehow facts like that get lost when a celebrity marriage has trouble. The simplest act—like coming together to watch our sons play a Little League baseball game—became surreal. One night shortly after the divorce filing, there were at least sixty paparazzi snap- ping away at my bewildered kids as we tried to walk through the darkness to our cars. Shawn’s mother got knocked over. Cannon started crying. Shawn put Cannon on her back to protect him, threw a jacket over his head and ran down a hill with cameras flashing all around them. If I had known this was going to happen, would I ever have entered the lawyer’s office? It took us a while to rescind the divorce papers and work things out. In the meantime, a bad vibe circulated. There’s a line between mean and funny. It felt like many of the late-night jokes crossed to the wrong side. The tabloids and Internet sites had a field day. The problem with the tabloid attention was that it set another dynamic in motion. The mainstream press started to examine CNN’s declining ratings. I was a symbol for the network, and the writers were beginning to wonder if time had begun to pass me by. It’s only natural for your staff to fight back to improve the ratings. The easiest way to do that is to book tabloid-style stories. If I disliked tabloid shows in the first place, imagine how I felt doing them when my own marriage had become one. The situation might have continued spiraling downhill if not for one saving grace: The twenty-fifth anniversary of my show was approaching. President Obama, Lady Gaga, LeBron James, and Bill Gates were lined up as guests back to back. Another show was assembled to look at the best moments over a quarter century. It was an amazing week, and it changed the energy and the conversation. Flying back home from the White House I was on a high. That’s when everything seemed to come into focus. In a single week, I’d sat down with the president of the United States, the hottest stars in music and sports, and a billionaire who was changing the world through philanthropy. Was it ever going to get any better that that? Or was I looking at a future of shows with fifteen reporters and analysts who’d never met Sandra Bullock all talking about her marital problems in order to prop up the ratings?

It was a year before my contract was up—the time we traditionally start working out a new one. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Ted Turner were still running the network. Ted hired me in less than twenty-four hours, and I’m sure the meeting would have been completely different. He’s an extremely loyal guy and he would have figured out some way— any way—to keep me in front of the microphone. Negotiations were always swift and ended in three-, four-, or five-year contracts. But the Ted Turner who hired me back in 1985 had the only cable news game around. The network’s execs twenty-five years later—Jim Walton, Phil Kent, and Jon Klein—were competing in a different world. If I had to compare myself to a ballplayer as I entered the meeting, I’d identify myself with the New York Yankees short- stop Derek Jeter. I was getting older. I hadn’t had my best year. But there were some high moments. I was associated with the network the way Jeter is with Yankee pinstripes. The backdrop to my show is one of the most recognizable images in the world. Attendance might have been down, but CNN was making a nice profit—just like the Yanks. And some of the reasons for the decline in my show’s ratings were not my own. The show leading in to mine was having a difficult time and the host ended up leaving in the middle of the year. It’s no different from baseball:

If the player batting before you is hitting .350, you’re going to see better pitches and have a higher average. I didn’t have the benefit of a large audience rolling into my show. This may be a stretch, but to continue the analogy, CNN was asking me to sacrifice my numbers by moving a base runner along. Joy Behar started out as a guest on my show, then guest hosted. She’s funny, got a great spirit, and she was given her own show on CNN Headline News in my time slot, nine o’clock. I get it. The idea is to bring in as many viewers as possible and make the most money for the network. That’s corporate America. The guys at Pontiac try to beat the brains out of the guys from Buick even though they both work for General Motors. Believe me, nobody was happier than me to see Joy’s mounting success. But fair is fair. I’m sure that on some nights viewers were curious about Joy and her guests and clicked the remote to her show.

My own network was cutting into my ratings and then won- dering why they were falling. The bottom line is, just as I’m sure Jeter wants to play for as long as he can with the Yankees, I wanted to stay with CNN. Over and over, the execs had told me, “You’re here as long as you like.” I figured I would be. My thoughts going into the meeting were simple. Maybe we can just lighten the workload a little and tone down the tabloid stuff. The execs at CNN are very much in the position of base- ball executives. They have to compete on the field and simultaneously prepare for the future. If they don’t, they fail. Fail, and they get fired. So they have to protect themselves in a way that Ted Turner didn’t. Ted was the owner. Ted cared more about money than ratings. If you said to Ted, which do you prefer, to be first in the ratings and make 1 million or be third in the ratings and make $1.3 million? He’d say, give me the $1.3 million. CNN was doing very well. It was making more money than Fox. But it was easy to see management’s point of view. Broadcasting is not the same as it was in 1993 when 16 mil- lion people tuned in to the debate on my show between Vice President Al Gore and Ross Perot. The market has been fractured and tastes have changed. People are tuning in to cable news now not so much to get educated as to be entertained and have their own political opinions reinforced. A host like Bill O’Reilly uses his guests as props. One of the Nate ’n Al’s breakfast gang once said that if Glenn Beck could get Kleenex as a sponsor he’d weep on cue four times a day. CNN’s execs were competing in that world—and their prime-time guy was about to turn seventy- seven. Their prime-time guy would never beat down his guests.

Their prime-time guy didn’t want to do the tabloid stuff. They made their proposal. It was not for the multi-year contract I was expecting. Maybe I felt something that every player who’s been on the all-star team feels when the days of the long-term contracts end. Whatever happened to “You’re here as long as you like”? Maybe broadcasting had changed, but there were still a lot of people who wanted to see me do what I do. I know this because I hear from them every day. They prefer to see people they’re curious about candidly talking about their lives. They aren’t interested in the shock and gossip tabloid stuff.

But hey, the bottom line is, if the host ain’t happy, we’re all just spinning our wheels. There was some back-and-forth between CNN, my agency, and my lawyer, Bert Fields. Bert came to me and said, How about this? You’ll work a few more months until they get a re- placement. You’ll be paid the full final year of your contract. And then, for three years after that, you do a series of four specials a year on mutually agreeable subjects. The specials would be for less money than I was making at the time, but it was still good money, and I’d be a free man. I could work for other networks. I could do commercials. I could do the one-man comedy show onstage that I’d always wanted to do. I would no longer have to clear anything with CNN. Their only condition was that during the period of the agreement I couldn’t work for MSNBC or Fox.It sounded good. I’d be able to spend more time with Shawn and the kids, I’d still be with CNN, plus I could do things on my bucket list. At the same time, it sounded sad. Not only would I be leaving the show, but forty people I really cared about would be losing their jobs. I thought it over. It felt like the right way to go. Wendy got a hold of the comedian Bill Maher. He moved an engage- ment so he could be my guest the night I announced my decision to leave. The toughest part was saying goodbye to the staff. They were losing their jobs and they were crying for me. It was good to have Bill as a guest. Humor always helps. Soon after he heard the news, Colin Powell called to wish me well. He passed on a piece of advice that had been passed on to him by a brigadier general: “When the subway gets to the last stop and is getting ready to go back, it’s time to get off the train.” He said I got off at the right time. The calls and good wishes from so many friends were incredibly uplifting. For months the press had been wondering: Has time passed him by? Now the response was: Oh, no! What are we losing? But it felt awkward when people started to congratulate me on my retirement. Retirement? Who said I was retiring? Retiring to what? I started to wonder what I was going to do when the show did end. I’m a creature of routine. What happens when there’s no Wednesday night? There has to be a Wednesday night, because I’m a productive fellow. Thinking about no Wednesday night started to make me depressed. A psychologist told me that I was sitting shiva for my show. Shiva is the traditional ritual in Judaism used to comfort relatives of the deceased. The show was not dead yet. But it felt like the family was gathering. A few weeks after the announcement, something happened that I’d never seen before. A free-agent basketball star got a one-hour prime-time special on ESPN to announce whether he would stay with his team or leave for another city.

I wasn’t able to watch LeBron James’s decision live. My own show was on up against it. But I did get to see it on tape. It was a lesson in how not to leave. I was surprised because of what I’d seen in LeBron a few weeks before when I spent the day at his home in Akron. I found him to be humble, very bright, and a good conversationalist. There was a moment that really stood out. We were walking to the basketball court he has outside his house to shoot some hoops when he told his son, “Larry King is in my house. If you would have told me that Larry King would be in my house when I was a kid, I never would have believed it.” He wasn’t buttering me up. He said it after the interview—not before. It was sincere and respectful. Which was the opposite of the way he came off when he announced his decision on live television.

LeBron grew up about half an hour away from Cleveland. He’d played his first seven years in the NBA for the Cavaliers. He’d carried the team on his back to the NBA finals. Cleveland hadn’t won a championship in any sport since 1964, and he was seen as a savior. LeBron was beloved in Cleveland and celebrated almost everywhere else. Nobody could hate LeBron James. If you paid good money to see your team play against LeBron, and he beat you with a last-second shot, you weren’t mad. You were grateful that you were in the arena that night to see him make that shot. Then he went on the air and said, “I’m taking my talents to South Beach.” He wasn’t even going to be playing in South Beach. He was going to play in Miami—on the other side of the bay. By saying those two words, South Beach, he implied girls, bathing suits, hip. Everything that isn’t Cleveland. So it came off as a put-down. The broadcast had been arranged by LeBron to raise money for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. But by the end, the world saw people in Cleveland burning his jersey. It was the first topic of conversation at the breakfast table at Nate ’n Al’s the next morning. Nobody denied LeBron had every right to move. He was a free agent, and he shouldn’t be told where he had to work. Ask any basketball player where he’d rather be in January—Cleveland or Miami—and it’s not hard to guess the answer. Given the emotional ties, you’d have to call LeBron’s decision courageous in many ways. But the way LeBron left made you wonder if he should have stayed. It also made me wonder how people leave, and how I would when the time came.

When Walter Cronkite came on my show at the age of eighty-six, he was wearing his CBS cuff links. But he was not happy when the network made him give up his anchor spot be- cause of a rule that enforced retirement at sixty-five. Dan Rather left CBS in anger after forty-four years of service. This after his reportage on a story about George Bush 43’s Air National Guard service was attacked. The president of CBS told me that everything Dan reported was true, he just didn’t have original documents. Dan got a bum rap, and he filed a $70 million lawsuit against the network that was thrown out of court. I’m sure that’s not the way he wanted to go. George Bush 43 has had a classy and gracious departure.

He’s been uncritical of the current administration and he wrote a pretty good book. He was honest enough to admit that when he made his decision to invade Iraq, it was more in- stinctive than intellectual: Damnit, I’m going to go. His ap- proval ratings are higher now than when he was president. Bill Clinton hated to leave the White House. During Bush’s inauguration, Clinton was hanging around the podium. He just did not want to leave. The honesty in that makes me smile.

I remembered Harry Truman walking to the train station after Eisenhower was inaugurated. There was no Secret Service protection for former presidents at the time. Truman just said goodbye and got on a train like a guy who had finished a day’s work and was going home. That’s dignity. Sometimes the end can be confusing. There’s a story about the comedian Milton Berle getting called up to take a stage bow at a late age. He could barely walk to the stage. But as soon as he did, he started telling jokes. He did four minutes—had the crowd going wild. My friend George Schlatter was watching and he called Berle the next morning. “Ruth,” he said, when Berle’s wife picked up the phone, “last night Milton was just wonderful.”
Ruth said, “He came home and was just sick about it.”
“Why?”
“He could only remember four minutes of material and he had to get off.”
Berle thought he’d bombed because he couldn’t go any longer.
Maybe leaving is hardest on athletes, because they seem to get old so much sooner than the rest of us. Why did Willie Mays have to stay that extra year? Nobody wants to see Willie Mays drop a fly ball. I have great respect for Jim Brown and Sandy Koufax. Jim was maybe the best running back ever in professional football. He left at the height of his career on his own terms to make movies—and he became a star. Boy, did Koufax do it with style and grace. He had arthritis in the elbow. The doctor said, We could treat you, and you could pitch. But any one pitch might leave you with no use of your left arm. That wasn’t worth it to Sandy. He never had the surgery, he simply left, but he still throws batting practice at spring training. I remember when Michael Jordan left. I was one of the emcees on the night his statue was unveiled in front of the Bulls’ arena. Michael had conquered everything that had been set in front of him in basketball and was leaving to see if he could succeed at baseball. All great athletes, Tommy Lasorda says, have enormous faith in themselves. But not many would try to switch sports at the height of their career. It was cold that night, and we had to wait until the crew threw it to us from inside the arena. While the two of us were standing by that statue, Michael said, “I hope I can hit.” That was a gutsy decision.

Maybe the best farewell ever was Lou Gehrig’s at Yankee Stadium. The whole thing must have been bewildering to him, because it was inexplicable to everyone else. He was a hulky guy and all of a sudden, he started to lose it. My cousin Bernie told me he’d swing and you’d expect the ball to fly out of the park but it would only be a pop-up. Nobody knew anything about his disease before he got it. That’s why it became known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. I was eight years old and didn’t hear his famous speech. Most people remember the speech scene from the movie about him starring Gary Cooper. But when you go back and listen to the actual speech in its entirety, it’s surprising. It’s much longer than you think. Gehrig was rather shy and not known as an eloquent man. But he spoke quite a bit about the disease, about his teammates, about hearing from the hated New York Giants. He was eloquent when it counted. Given his situation, his words are about as good an exit as you can make: “I consider myself the luckiest man alive.” Then I thought of the worst way to go. Oddly enough, the guy who came to mind was a guy I once replaced—Walter Winchell.

Never again in the history of the media will anyone be what Winchell was. Young people don’t know him, but there’s never been a more powerful journalist. He had a radio show every Sunday night that all of America listened to. He also wrote a gossip column that was syndicated in about five hundred newspapers. In New York, everybody would buy the Mirror and turn to his column on page eleven. He must have had eight million readers a day. He invented words. If a famous couple was going to have a baby, they were infantesimizing. He discovered stars. He hurt them. Ninety-nine percent of what he reported was true— because anyone who tipped him wrong about a celebrity divorce never got in his column again. He used to ride with police squad cars at night to get stories. Louis Lepke, the gangster who ran the Italian mob’s hit squad, Murder Incorporated, turned him- self in to Winchell. He was afraid he would be shot in the street. Through a source, he said, “I will surrender only to Winchell.” And it was Winchell who brought him in. Franklin Roosevelt courted Winchell, gave him entrée to the White House. Roosevelt realized Winchell’s power and used it. So did FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Winchell became so big they made a special law to stop him from tipping stocks. What started to derail Winchell was an incident involving Josephine Baker, the black singer and performer. She went to the Stork Club with some friends, got a seat, but the waiters wouldn’t serve her. She’d call after them, and they’d keep walking by. She got mad, and news of the incident hit the press. Everybody started to rap the Stork Club. One of Winchell’s friends owned the Stork Club, and Winchell came to his defense. In doing so, he labeled Baker a Communist. That started his descent. Frank Sinatra announced that he would go to the Stork Club only if Abraham Lincoln made the reservation. When Roosevelt died and Truman became President, Winchell’s access to the White House ended. Papers started to drop him. I was the guy who replaced him at the Miami Herald. Down, down, down, he went. It couldn’t get sadder. Toward the end, he’d type a column, mimeograph it, and hand it out on street corners.

We began to think of guests for my last shows. So many wonderful and accomplished people were considered for the last two weeks. Many accepted. Some were unavailable. In the end, the lineup worked out almost perfectly because the guests reflected nearly all the subjects that had been discussed on the show during the past twenty-five years. World events. Politics. Film. Crime. Music. Money. Medicine. Technology. The media. In fact, the show’s final two weeks made the perfect table of contents for this book. Each day seemed like another chapter.

But when it came time to think about the final guest, there was one name that immediately came to mind: Mario Cuomo. The former governor of New York was the best speaker of our time and a good friend of mine. He came to the hospital when I had heart surgery. He invited me to spend a night at the Governor’s Mansion. He and his wife danced in a conga line at my seventieth birthday party at Sammy’s Romanian restaurant on the Lower East Side. So we called him. We said: December 16 is our last night. You were the first guest, you be the last. We’ll fly you out. Mario accepted. But then on his show, which led into mine, Eliot Spitzer said something uncomplimentary about Cuomo’s son, Andrew. Andrew was running for governor of New York. Even though Spitzer followed up by giving Andrew his endorsement, Mario never forgave. He canceled. Maybe in his mind he was thinking, This is familia. Hit my family, and you hit me. It must be like The Godfather.

But why hold it against me? I didn’t do anything. Let me work this out, I thought. I called him. I knew that if I could get him on the phone, I had him. But he didn’t take the call. I left him a long message. Nothing. We tried Andrew. Nothing again.

It was perplexing. Morning after morning I left breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s wondering: Why? And that’s the thing: There were still unanswered questions.

I remembered an interviewer at a radio station who quit and shifted to management. When I asked him why, he said, “I’ve asked every question and heard every answer.” Not me. After fifty-three years, I’m still not out of questions. Either events bring them up or they just keep popping into my head.

Why do people close their eyes when they sneeze?
Do we still make razor blades in America?
Why don’t you laugh when you tickle yourself?
Which made me wonder: What was I going to do with all my questions when I no longer had a show to ask them on?