Free My Remarkable Journey by Larry King Page B

to speak at Rotary Clubs started coming. I would emcee the opening of every new movie theater. A small television
     station gave me a weekly interview show. The
Miami Herald
gave me a column. I’d walk into Joe’s Stone Crab and stand at the end of the bar among the crowd as if I’d been on the waiting
     list all night. The wait might be two and a half hours. Within five minutes, I’d hear, “Mr. King. Larry King.”
    But it was a bus driver who would take me to the next level.

Chapter 7
Jackie & Frank
    T HERE ARE TIMES when I watch reruns of
The Honeymooners
before I go on the air at CNN. They always give me a lift. Jackie Gleason has lifted me up from the day I met him.
    One of my favorite episodes is called “Better Living Through TV”—and it’s a nice coincidence that I met Jackie around the
     time I got my first local television show in Miami. The plot goes like this: Ralph and Norton come upon a kitchen utensil
     that can do everything. Everything from core an apple to open an aluminum can. The Helpful Housewife Happy Handy, it’s called.
     So Ralph and Norton decide to go on television dressed like chefs to sell this gadget. It had to be the first infomercial,
     which shows you how ahead of his time Jackie was. Ralph and Norton were going to make a fortune selling the Helpful Housewife
     Happy Handy.
    Except that the producers bump their segment up, tell them they’re on in two minutes, and Ralph freezes before the camera.
     Hummana, hummana, hummana… It takes him longer to core an apple during the demonstration than for Norton to do it the old-fashioned
     way. When he tries to open a can, he slices his finger. By the end of the demonstration, Ralph has crashed down the whole
     kitchen set. It’s still hilarious fifty years later. Which gets to the essence of Jackie. I remember Bishop Fulton Sheen speaking
     at a dinner honoring Jackie. Sheen talked about children and humor, how children love to see something funny over and over
     again. They could watch it a hundred times and never get tired. Then he turned to Jackie and said, “That’s what I say to you,
     Jackie. We’re all children. Do it again. Do it again.” There was something about Ralph Kramden the bus driver that touched
     not only every man of that social stratum, but everyone.
    I met Jackie on a train coming down from New York. Jackie wanted to play golf all year round, so CBS agreed to move
The Jackie Gleason Show
to Miami. The press was invited to take the trip and I went for the ride.
And awa-a-a-a-y we go!
    When we arrived, there was an official reception to welcome Jackie to Miami Beach. I was the emcee. Jackie and I got close
     that night, and he started to listen to my radio show. Though he was fifteen years older, we had similar backgrounds and a
     chemistry that made for good friends. We were both ethnic kids from Brooklyn. His father ran away. My father died. He didn’t
     have a phone. I didn’t have a phone until I was fifteen years old. We both liked attention. Jackie once told me about the
     time his mother took him to see a show. At the end, during the applause, Jackie turned around and faced the audience. He knew
     in that moment that he preferred to look at the audience instead of the stage.
    “You know,” he once told me, “there can be fifty people in this room funnier than me. But they can’t get up in front of a
     camera. Because that takes something else.”
    I said, “You’re telling me you have an enormous ego.”
    “Of course,” he said.
    “Are you conceited?”
    “Confident.”
    Conceited to Jackie meant someone who wanted the spotlight but didn’t have talent. When that light goes on, he said, that’s
     my world. He saw that same quality in me. He liked the way I took control of a show, and I learned a lot watching Jackie.
    One night, we planned to go out to dinner after the filming of his show. I was standing offstage while he was doing a scene.
     As the scene shifted to Norton and Trixie, he