Who were Larry King’s 7 wives: A complete list

There has been a lot of hub-bub surrounding Larry King’s recent separation from Shawn Southwick, putting the talk show host in line for his 8th divorce.

That’s means Larry has as many divorces as Jon and Kate have children! I did the math, and figuring in Larry’s age, that averages out to a marriage every 37 years! (Heh heh! That was for you Conan!)

If you’re like me and have more than a second-grade education, you’ve probably figured out that the number from the title of this post (7) doesn’t add up to 8. That’s because Larry married one of his wives twice, that being Playboy model Alene Akins, who is pictured with Larry here in 1972:

Here’s the Larry King ex-wives time line, with children and a few other pertinent tidbits of information thrown in:

1st Wife: Frada Miller (married 1953, annulled 1953)
High school girlfriend.

2nd Wife: Annette Kaye (1960?)
Very short marriage that lasted less than a year. Larry divorced Annette while she was pregnant with Larry King, Jr. who was born in 1961. Annette didn’t tell Larry he had a son until she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer over 30 years later. Larry King, Jr. was eventually put in charge of Larry Sr.’s heart disease foundation.

3rd Wife: Alene Akins (married 1961, divorced 1963)
Playboy bunny. Mother of Chaia and Andy. Stay tuned…

4th Wife: Mickey Sutphin (married 1964, divorced 1967)
Mother of daughter Kelly

3rd Wife again: Alene Akins(married 1968, divorced 1971)
Second time around with Alene

(Non-marriage-related) 1971: Larry King arrested! (From NNDB.com) “In 1971, he was arrested for grand larceny, and pleaded no contest to passing a bad check. The particulars remain muddled and unproven, but it’s alleged that King tried to sell his influence with Richard M. Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell to a convicted stock swindler named Louis Wolfson. After these odd events he was off the air for a few years, and worked as an announcer at a race track.”

5th Wife: Sharon Lepore (married 1976, divorced 1983)
Production assistant and former math teacher.

Serious Girlfriend: Angie Dickinson. The couple dated for five years from 1983 to 1988

6th Wife: Julia Alexander
(married 1989, divorced 1992)
Larry King sued Julia for slander after their break alleging Julia had broken a legal agreement prohibiting her from talking about their marriage publicly. The case was settled in 1994 but the court documents were sealed.

Girlfriend: Rama Fox (engaged 1992, broke up 1994)
Minister in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, made famous by Arianna Huffington. Rama met Larry when he was judging a Florida beauty contest she was participating in back in 1968. The couple broke up after Rama agreed to testify on ex-wife Julia Alexander’s behalf. Larry King later sued Rama for slander after she claimed in Washingtonian magazine that she broke up with Larry, not the other way around. (Read all about that HERE) In the book Reputation: Portraits in Power Rama is quoted as saying, “Larry has to have relationships upon relationships, so he always has a place where that stimulation is going on.” … “Larry is astonishing in the things he finds to lie about and deny. To me, he’s a sports liar.”

Girlfriend: Deanna Lund (engaged 1995; broke up 1995)
Actress famous for her role in the television series Land of the Giants

7th Wife: Shawn Southwick (married 5-Sep-1997, separated 14-Apr-2010)
Mother of sons Chance of Cannon. Mormon. Married twice previously, including public relations executive Michael Levine. Larry adopted her son Danny Southwick.

There you go! Did you notice that every woman Larry King has been married to that I was able to find a picture of is/was a smoking hot slender blond? Does anyone out there know if any of the women not pictured here were brunettes?

I’ll end things with an excerpt from the afore-mentioned book Reputation: Portraits in Power:

“I don’t think he feels guilty about anything,” says someone who knows King very, very well. “That would imply he was capable of understanding what he’d done. . . . If he were capable of knowing what he’d done, people would hate him a lot more.” Instead, King has a way of making all his transgressions seem as harmless as his blue suede shoes. And perhaps you have to have a special vulnerability to be taken in by Larry King, whether in business or in love. But it’s interesting to note how neatly the common picture of King – as an easygoing, somewhat hapless man who poses no threat except the professional one of running a toothless interview show for newsmakers – inverts reality.