Next, on Larry King. . . THE WHOLE WORLD! : Why Is He So Darn Popular? Howard Rosenberg Had a Few Ideas and Thought He Should Call and Bounce Them Off Larry. . . Everybody Else Does.

“Larry gets better every year,” declares famed media critic Ross Perot in a CNN publicity kit packed with Larry King endorsements. “I’d want to be on ‘Larry King Live’ the night I announce my candidacy,” says hallucinating Henry A. Kissinger. “This is like dancing with Fred Astaire,” says twinkletoes House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia. “The road to the White House these days runs right through Larry’s studio,” says roadrunning Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas.

Although the 1996 election is a year away, you know the campaign is up and going by the number of presidential hopefuls who already have raced to “Larry King Live.” About to turn 61 and still heady on high-octane memories of his epic 1992, the host is typically revved up and ready.

The issue is not what makes Larry run, though. It’s what makes others run to him. Friendly fellow, you say. Fun to be with, makes you laugh, goofy wardrobe, yadda yadda yadda. No argument here. He is also no threat, though, avidly passive as host, at times wearing his guests’ footprints on his chest beside his trademark loud ties and suspenders.

Thus, do they ever run to King’s 11th floor CNN studio in Washington, a stunning, empowering VIP cattle call that gives his talk show a thundering resonance far out of proportion to its U.S. audience. Although peaking in 1993 when an estimated 11 million Americans watched Perot and Vice President Al Gore debate the North Atlantic Treaty agreement on “Larry King Live,” the show typically attracts about 1.2 million homes an evening. Many of King’s dittoheads are probably within the Beltway, where a favorite pastime of newsmakers is watching other newsmakers, and where anything quoteworthy on his show gets magnified and then bellowed to the rest of the nation via newscasts and newspapers. Because CNN is beamed to about 200 nations, King may have more followers internationally than even global syndication queen Lucille Ball. In the United States, though, his audience is a mere tumbleweed on the TV prairie; ABC’s “Nightline” and Ted Koppel regularly gain more viewers and more respect from fellow journalists. Yet it’s King whose half-hour show more consistently grabs the biggest headlines and headliners. You don’t learn from an hour on the telephone with Larry King anything deeper than what he learns from his subjects in a typical hour of “Larry King Live.” What you do learn, though, is that he remains as pleasant to interview as he is pleasant to those he interviews, even when knowing that his questioner has repeatedly berated him in print for being too much of a patsy on the air. For being too amiable when he should be tough. For sitting on laps and in hip pockets. For hanging out on his show with too many of his creme de la newsmaker guests the way late-nighters schmooze and rub shoulders at cocktail parties.

Earthy, Brooklyn-bred King surveys his panoramic, huge realm of good fortune and sees no problem, the view from Mount Rushmore looking just fabulous to him. “I know you criticize me sometimes, which I never understood,” he is saying, genially.

The gracious guy does understand that he is “no jugular guy” and declines the invitation, thank you very much, to be one for his critics or anyone else. “Don’t watch me if you want jugular,” he says. No student of anatomy, in fact, King couldn’t find his way to the jugular even with a compass, track dogs and body map. On occasion he gets as close as the pectoral, but he usually gets hopelessly lost somewhere in the vicinity of the elbow and turns back.

It wouldn’t matter except that King matters. When he flies to Orlando, Fla., to moderate a Nov. 17 debate among candidates in the next day’s straw poll for GOP presidential hopefuls, it will be another anointing of him as personal talk-show host to America’s political gentry. His television career is so sunny these days that he’s sizzling in his own success. And with 18 months of O.J. Simpson shoved out of the way just in time for the election, 1996 here he comes, top hat and tails, just like Fred.

Only recently, reports King, crazylegs Gingrich himself forecast on “Larry King Live” that if retired Gen. Colin L. Powell decides to take a sabbatical from Olympus and parachute into the race for President, “obviously, he’s gonna announce it on your show.” Obviously. To King, it figures. Makes sense. “It’s live, it’s nice, it’s comfortable,” he says, making six nights a week of “Larry King Live” sound more like a satin boudoir than a talk show where the power elite drop by to cuddle up with America.

As King cuddles up with them. How else to label shrinking the professional distance between interviewee and host by addressing most guests by first names? King doesn’t understand the beef. “Look, I get on a first name basis. To me, it’s a friendly tone. If anyone resented it. I would change it. Take Al Gore. I know Al Gore 18 years. He used to come on my radio show at midnight. I’ve had CNN call me up and say: ‘You gotta call him Mr. Vice President.’ But Al Gore likes to be called Al. Mr. Vice President he doesn’t like.”

The coziness doesn’t end with first name-calling, given the way King likes to play the game with both sides sitting in the same dugout and guzzling the same Gatorade. Some of the biggest names on “Larry King Live” are also its hosts, an incestuousness surely unrivaled by any other news-oriented talk show on TV. “Gore has hosted,” says King. “Perot has hosted. Dole has hosted. [Sen.] Chris Dodd [D-Conn.] is hosting. [Simpson defense attorney] Bob Shapiro is hosting when I take a few days off in November. John Kennedy [Jr.] is gonna do it one night.” Again, King sees no breach of ethics or even a conflict. Guest, shmest. Host, shmost. “One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other,” he protests.

There’s more. King has been captured toadying up to some guests in yet another way that makes you grimace. Not long ago, satellite dish owner Brian Springer assembled a documentary from signals plucked from the skies during the 1992 election campaign, pictures and sound of revealing private chats among people about to appear on TV but unaware the camera and mike were live. One was King, who was captured in unguarded moments with some of his most-famous guests in the minutes preceding his show and during commercial breaks.

There he is during a break in his 90-minute forum with Clinton and Gore, who had interrupted their bus tour campaign to be with him, advising Gore that he and his running mate should spend more time outside the bus because “you guys are so good on media.”

There he is privately telling Perot: “You sit best in debates, cause you don’t have any baggage. You could elevate it. Every time they talk about something silly, you could say, ‘Come on, what are we wasting time. To me, you sit very effective. You could affect, have a great effect on this election.”

There he is selling his boss, Ted Turner, to Clinton. “He would serve you. I’d call him after the election. Think about it.”

And there he is, finally, touting himself to Gore as moderator for a coming candidate debate. King: “You have input, they have input, Perot has input?” Gore: “That’s correct.” King: “Boy, right up my alley, that stuff is right up my alley, no one would get an edge. I’d be fair.”

To his many fans, he already is, especially when compared with those heathens in the rest of the media.

Big institutions make fat targets. So when Americans in ever-growing numbers shout, “Throw the bums out,” the demonized “bums” in their cross hairs include not only government types, but also media incumbents, the mainstream press they have come to mistrust and view as forces of darkness who twist, slant and bend news to their own self-serving agenda. When, of course, they are not fabricating it.

To what degree this cynicism is justified is debatable. What does gain consensus, though, is that no one has nourished or benefited from disillusionment with traditional media in the ‘90s--it’s a chicken-or-egg kind of thing--more than King. Because of the way he conducts his show--asking questions that often can be flicked away like lint--the host of “Larry King Live” is warmly regarded by many as the trustworthy, non-predatory tapir of hosts, a clear channel through which guests can directly address and be addressed by the people. He’s scrupulously fair, in other words. Equally easy on everyone. Call it interview deregulation. In effect, here’s the mike, go for it. It’s yours. No middle jerk to rebut or interfere with the message, no bothersome reporters with prickly follow-up questions--just King, his callers, the night and the music.

It’s not that he’s an inanimate object, just that he’s rarely a formidable one when it comes to challenging guests who, in the interest of informing the public, could use some challenging. King leaves booking to his producer and CNN. And most of his guests have earned no lacerating, of course. King’s benign, intimate environment works deliciously--and you thank the heavens for him--when the subject is a warm or poignant human-interest story, or a glamorous Hollywood bauble suitable for gawking, or a chatty show business celebrity with no agenda broader than promoting a “project” or floating some inside dish about a fascinating aspect of the industry. They talk, King listens, you’re rapt. When political philosophy, public policy or some other meaty topic is on the table, though, a higher level of probing is demanded than someone casually poking at it with a spoon.

Forget the jugular. Even a feint toward the collarbone would work, or a little pricking of blood from the finger. But . . . uh-uh.

“Why should I be rude?” King asks, appearing to equate aggressiveness with disrespect or vulgarity. “I’m not good when I get into a pissing match. I did it once with [Alabama Gov.] George Wallace. It’s just not my style.” It’s not that anyone is suggesting that he mug his guests, however. What he calls rudeness and “a pissing match,” others might define as basic good journalism.

King fires back with his familiar mantra. “I never went on television and said I was a journalist. I have a manner that works for me. I couldn’t be what I’m not. I don’t like personal interviews that begin, ‘I was wondering.’ You never hear that from me. I ask good questions, though. I am not a Pollyanna. But if you turn on my show, 99% of the time the guest is gonna be talking. They know that the host doesn’t think he knows more than they do.”

The host of “Larry King Live” proudly calls himself an “infotainer,” a seamless hybrid of information and entertainment. “You’re an infotainer,” he said to me. “We’re all in the infotainment business. The Los Angeles Times puts color pictures on the front page. Why? It’s infotainment. If you don’t do interviews as an infotainer, you’d lose people instantly. I want good responses. I want to cover lots of subjects. I want to keep you watching. If I get into a long biblical discourse, if [Nation of Islam leader] Louis Farrakhan gets into a four-minute answer, you’re gone. I don’t want you to be gone.”

Nor his guests to be gone. King staying on their good side is critical to “Larry King Live.” A show that relies so heavily on a thick Rolodex of image-minded luminaries can thrive only if they are treated so tenderly that they entertain the idea of returning again and again. In this arena, irritate anyone and you’re dead. As such, Dole has sat with King 26 times, Perot 21, former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo 17. “So what?” King argues. “Koppel wants people to come back. Letterman wants people to come back.”

In a decade of “Larry King Live,” it’s amazing that only Sen. Ted Kennedy has refused to come back, King himself acknowledges. “It was four or five years ago, and I hear through surrogates there was some kind of agreement that I wouldn’t ask him about Chappaquiddick, and I didn’t know that and I asked him about it.”

King says he informs himself through newspapers, but that “tons of research would encumber me.” Thus, freed from the shackles of preparation (he says his questions are always impromptu), he usually appears to be winging it. Yet the infotaining Larry King, who during his show once took an embarrassing wet one on the lips from Marlon Brando, is also obligated at times to assume the role of journalist by virtue of some of the other guests he interviews, instead of lobbing them mostly softballs that are swiftly sent into orbit. Is it Larry the “info” or Larry the “tainer” who was questioning “Al” about Clinton Administration policy or interviewing “Newt” about GOP plans for Medicare reform? His take on a recent exchange with Gingrich--in which he confronted the speaker on a point, then yielded--is a clue to King’s thinking. “I felt he did not answer that point, and if you were watching, you knew that. But stretching it more then could become a fight.”

On his show, even glancing blows constitute a fight, one reason that getting on “Larry King Live” is a top priority for the power elite and other celebs. “At the end of this year, I would say it’s Barbara Walters and us who have the best guests,” King says. Others would disagree. It’s King. Flat out. No contest.

Not that everything always goes his way. Take O.J. Simpson, for example. If Simpson was going to sit down with anyone after his acquittal--his reported plans for reaping a pay-for-view fortune having gone south--it was going to be Larry King. Had to be. Needed to be. CNN knew it. King knew it. The Beltway knew it. He deserved it, earned it, nurtured it, chewed on it, surely counted on it. It was King, after all--with CNN using his show to pile on Simpson guests like logs on a fire--who gave this case a slower, longer burn than perhaps anyone else on TV. It was King and his pride of O.J. carnivores who, week after week, feasted on the story, and when there was nothing left to devour, gnawed on the bones. It was King whom Judge Lance Ito invited into his chambers when Larry dropped by the trial one day. It was King who, during that courthouse visit, was hugged by Deputy Dist. Atty. Marsha Clark and was personally lauded by the Juice himself, as King later recalled for TV Guide:

“As we were leaving, the bailiff opened the door to the courtroom. O.J. yelled, ‘Larry!’ I walk in; I know all the guys. I shake hands with Bob Shapiro. O.J. tries to lean forward to shake hands, and the guard says, ‘Sorry, Larry, you can’t shake hands with a prisoner.’ Then O.J. says, ‘Thanks for being so open-minded.’ ”

King was open-minded, too, he says, when NBC, not “Larry King Live,” was granted Simpson’s first sit-down interview, even though it was King’s show that Simpson initially had called to deploy a few self-serving sound bites after being acquitted of murdering his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald L. Goldman.

“I probably felt we were gonna get it,” King says about the interview that wasn’t. “But once I realized that Don Ohlmeyer [NBC’s West Coast president] was such a close friend of O.J.’s--Don had called me frequently to complement me on how fair we had been about the case--I didn’t feel bad at all. It was very logical.”

And very temporary, as Simpson later canceled his scheduled TV meeting with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric for reasons that remain murky, making his phone-in with King, who happened to have Simpson lead defender Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. at his side when the call came, his only official public comment in the first days after the trial.

King said he had his producer earlier give Cochran the show’s number to pass on to Simpson in hopes that he would call, but that the actual call, coming late in the hour, surprised both King and the defense attorney. If only that moment were at the end of a bungee cord that King could yank back. In retrospect, while he had his man on the line, King now wishes he had asked The Question when Simpson said he was hanging up. About the gloves, the shoes, the bag, the blood, the hair, the inexplicably darkened mansion, the wife-clobbering or any other loose ends still lingering? Not quite.

King: “When O.J. said, ‘I gotta go,’ I shoulda said, ‘Where?’ ”

Coulda said, shoulda said. It’s what King’s critics have been saying about him for years in measuring his chatty chumminess on CNN against his undeniable magnetism, the ability to regularly draw famous, powerful talking heads to “Larry King Live.”

King had been a major name in broadcasting for years, first as host of a national radio show, then heading his present TV series that premiered in 1985 with then New York Gov. Cuomo as its first guest. Even before the ‘90s, King had emerged as a star on CNN at a time when the network’s own reach and influence was dramatically spreading. Then came the Perot Moment, a seminal event that lifted King even higher, when Perot responded to his host’s light coaxing by launching his 1992 presidential bid on “Larry King Live.” That began a stampede of candidates to King, and soon such other major TV venues as “CBS This Morning” were holding King-style candidate forums.

It was on “Larry King Live” that year that the Clinton/Gore ticket first appeared as a unit, where President George Bush questioned Clinton’s patriotism, where Vice President Dan Quayle said in response to a question from King (who occasionally does nick a guest) that he would reluctantly support his own daughter if she became pregnant and chose to have an abortion.

Fourteen presidential candidates, CNN says, passed through the “Larry King Live” turnstile in 1992. If you weren’t watching King, you weren’t watching the campaign, something noted in a political cartoon distributed by the Copley News Service. It showed America’s founding fathers about to sign the nation’s first articles of government, with one of them asking: “Are you sure we can do this without debating it first on Larry King?” No wonder that King boasted privately to George Bush at his televised forum with the President on the eve of the election: “What a night, what a finish, what a year for me. It’s unbelievable. Changed the world.”

And look out this year if Powell does enter the Presidential race and makes the announcement on “Larry King Live.” Picture it: The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his host. One seated, the other standing and saluting.