A King Who Can Listen: LARRY KING

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Want to know how ambitious Larry King, the top banana of talk-show hosts, is? When King, born Larry Zeiger, was growing up in Brooklyn, New York, and indifferent about school, his father went to the principal and suggested that Larry's teacher install him as eraser monitor. Most kids would have been horrified. Eraser monitors come in early, stay late, get all dusty with chalk, get razzed by classmates. But little Larry Zeiger thought the job was a promotion. Sitting out there on the playground, pounding erasers together and choking on chalk dust, he thought he was on his way at last.

Now, after a half-century of hustling and scratching, after no college and hard knocks, after working as everything from mail-room clerk to racetrack flack, after six marriages, one annulment and five divorces, after being arrested for grand larceny, after declaring bankruptcy, after suffering a heart attack and undergoing bypass surgery, after all this and more, Larry King has finally arrived. His weeknight shows on CNN and Mutual radio are watched and listened to by more than 4 million people. A King interview nudged Ross Perot into the presidential arena. Another caused Dan Quayle to ruminate on what he might do if his daughter decided to have an abortion. Last week King questioned Henry Kissinger on the POW-MIA issue, while Perot was dickering with King's producers about using the show to announce whether he would re-enter the race.

If all that weren't enough, USA Today runs King's weekly column of plugs and random thoughts (some quite a bit more random than others). And last week a new King book -- When You're from Brooklyn, Everything Else Is Tokyo -- was published by Little, Brown. On the lecture circuit, King pulls in $35,000 an appearance, and his total annual income is well over $2 million. Says King: "I'm 58 years old, and I'm having the best year of my life."

As he speaks, he is standing on the balcony of his posh eighth-floor apartment in Arlington, Virginia. He waves an arm through the air. "Some view, huh?" he says in his famed Brooklyn baritone. Some view: first the Potomac River, then a panorama of marble. Directly ahead, in a precise line, are the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capitol. To the left is the Kennedy Center; to the right, the Jefferson Memorial. From his balcony King can also see the Watergate apartments, the home of his childhood friend Herbie Cohen, a successful lawyer and consultant. King used to tell a story about how he, Herbie and another Brooklyn teenager named Sandy Koufax (the Hall of Fame southpaw who pitched for King's beloved Dodgers) once drove to Connecticut to settle an argument about how many scoops of ice cream you could get in New Haven for 15 cents.

Good story. Funny, as King told it. He loves yarns and tells them all the time. Like the one about being made eraser monitor or the one about how Jackie Gleason helped him make a name for himself on Miami TV. His stories almost always feature some big-name celebrity. King's apartment walls are crammed with pictures of himself and famous stars. There's a framed letter from Sinatra that reads, "You're a good friend and -- unlike many others -- were not there to trap or ensnare me or to sensationalize in any way." There are pictures of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, George Bush. There's a story about every picture, about every name.