Larry still King of the one-on-one interview

LOS ANGELES — “Welcome aboard,” said Larry King, the great American interrogator. I had come to watch him at work, which was also to watch him at play.

He was taller than I’d expected from TV, where he tends to slouch in his chair or hunch over his desk while he conducts his interviews, of which there have been several tens of thousands over what, next May, will be 60 years in the talking business.

At 82, King, whose “Larry King Live” was a top-rated weeknightly staple of CNN for a quarter-century, is now a man of the internet. Having unsuccessfully retired from broadcasting in 2010, he was back just two years later with the thrice-weekly “Larry King Now,” which lives on Ora TV, an on-demand digital network King created in partnership with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. More than 650 episodes have been made so far and are available through Ora’s own site and via the streaming service Hulu.

King is a chimerical figure: part newsman, part entertainer, part personality and part ordinary troubled human. With a career that has encompassed radio, television, print, personal appearances, social media and the internet, you could call him serially multi-platform.

“I’m amazed at how long I’ve been doing this,” King said. “I’ve been distributed by a phone line, cable, satellite, internet, but I am basically doing the same thing I’ve always done, sat down and asked people questions.”

I am a late-arriving Larry King fan. In his omnipresent prime, he was such a part of the landscape that he was easy to miss. In his post-CNN, online incarnation — which feels more essential, maybe, because it’s less “important” — I have come to appreciate just how good he is at what he does, which is to say how much what he does is an expression of who he is.

All King needs to do his work is a table and a couple of chairs, and he’s shot episodes in New York, Park City, Utah and London. But home base is the Ora studio, an efficient digital mini-complex in a converted church rectory in Glendale, Calif.

“If you want to talk over here we can start whenever you want,” King said from the makeup chair. Everything in the studio was two steps from everything else.

“The makeup ritual,” said King. “Ever since Miami.” That’s where he got his start, in radio, on May 1, 1957.

Does he get any kind of pleasure from it?

“No. Mostly it’s someone touching your face for 10 minutes,” he said. But he had kind words for the makeup artist, and for his young Ora crew.

His phone rang. He uses a flip phone, he likes to point out. He doesn’t like smartphones, because he sees his friends and relations ruled by them. Believing himself to have an addictive personality — he smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for years, until a heart attack got him to quit, and says he is “addicted to work” — he does not want to go down that road.

If he doesn’t have quite as powerful a platform at Ora as CNN provided, he has no trouble finding interesting, suitably celebrated people to talk to. Visitors in his fourth season — the fifth begins this month, with no break to speak of — have included Dan Rather, 50 Cent, Tim Tebow, Eve, Stephen Hawking, Wendy Williams, Robert Redford, Marcia Clark, Joanna Newsom, Tracee Ellis Ross, Grace Helbig and Spike Lee, with panel shows on HIV/AIDs, social media and “the state of faith.”

The show is friendly — adversarial journalism is famously not his style, notwithstanding his sometimes prosecutorial delivery — but energetic. That is not to say it’s lightweight. As King’s fellow host and friend Craig Ferguson told me via email, “Larry is disarmingly charming and clever. He pretends to be gullible as he allows you to make a horse’s ass of yourself. This is a technique I’ve seen him use to devastating effect on pompous (individuals) over and over again.”

Finished with makeup, King went to the set, inspired by his “trophy room” at home. The musician Moby was to be his guest; King had not heard of him. A young producer knelt down beside him and gave a minute-long class in Moby 101, then left King with a couple of pages of notes. It isn’t unusual, when interviewing unfamiliar subjects, for the host to preface a question with, “I understand that,” “I’m told that,” or “There’s a note here.”

Afterward King declared the interview a success. “I like talking to people I’ve never met before. I had no idea who Moby was. I liked him a lot. I liked his thought process; he was fun, he was transparent.”

Was that a typical briefing?

King said that it was and that it had a lot to do with how he started as an interviewer, hosting a midmorning show from a Miami restaurant. “I couldn’t prepare because I didn’t know who was coming. I shun too much preparation. I don’t want to know the answer to a question I’m going to ask. I like to be surprised.”