I'm jealous of Larry King.

No, really, I am. Not of his family life or his sartorial choices (he's too pigeon-shouldered for those suspenders), but of his interviewing skills.

You heard me. As a guy who's done his fair share of celebrity interviews over the years, to the point where I'm starting to forget who I've spoken to and when, I've always marveled at how Larry was able to get the people who came into his studio to open up and get personal with him.

In the olden days of magazines, reporters would have to hang out with their subjects for weeks on end, or delve deeply into their subjects' lives via research and reporting in order to get so personal. King, on the other hand, managed to do it in just under an hour, when the only research he may have is a few quotes and what the subject's next project was.

Now that King has decided to semi-retire, that style will be hard to replicate. How was he able to do it?

He made his guests comfortable. Let's face it; to many, Larry is the doddering but curious grandfather people always liked talking to. And he used that perception to his advantage. He never, ever put his guests on the spot as soon as they sat down. Often he opens with a question about their latest project or what they've been doing lately. He gently leads them to the point where he can ask them open-ended questions about real feelings they have as opposed to canned PR-approved answers. To some, those questions were softballs. But to those who really knew his methods, those were his way to get people to relax.

In this clip from 1988 -- part of a larger tribute CNN did in 1998 -- King got the usually-reluctant Frank Sinatra to open up about all sorts of topics. Notice how close he gets to Ol' Blue Eyes; it looks like a Hoboken kid talking to a Brooklyn kid more than a legend talking to a talk show host:



He knew when to let a guest ramble. Many an experienced interviewer will tell you that sometimes the best part of the interview happens when you just sit back and let the subject talk. It's counter to how many of us were trained, especially if we have to do a quick turnaround -- get the pertinent info, make it quick, keep the source on topic. But Larry never needed to do that; he had an hour, there was no transcribing or quoting or other reporting to do, so he had the luxury to let his guests shine or sink via their own words.

A good example of this was when he spoke to Celine Dion right after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. He asks a pretty straightforward question to open, then lets Dion ramble for almost three minutes before asking another question. And her answer is one for the books:



He also knew when to cut a guest off. To many viewers, it sometimes seemed like Larry wasn't paying attention to a guest. And sometimes, especially in later years, he might have been. I mean, I'd probably check out mentally too as Kristen Stewart stumbled through a treatise on her hair color or her pets, or Taylor Swift talked about dating a Jonas brother.

But don't confuse that kind of inattentiveness with the times he cut off a guest mid-sentence in order to get to his next question. He often had a good idea of when a ramble would be good TV and when it wouldn't. In the famous Ross Perot / Al Gore NAFTA debate in 1993, Larry not only cut off Perot when he got too crazy -- much to Perot's consternation -- but he also let the two debaters get into it with each other, something you rarely see in televised debates these days:




Believe it or not, he did ask tough questions. If the subject was in the news or controversial, most of the time, Larry did ask the questions people wanted to be asked. This is something that he did more earlier in the show's run, but when he needed to, he'd go through all the contentious points that got his guest to his studio in the first place. In this clip of an interview with John and Patsy Ramsey in 2000, he started a segment by asking them about revelations in a book that was written about the murder case of their daughter, JonBenet:



He did it on live television. Interviewing people on TV isn't easy. We here in the print and online world can take a boring 45-minute interview, grab the best quotes from it, and print them to make the subject look like the most interesting person in the world. But on TV, especially in a live setting, you need to ensure that the interview will be immediately compelling and hold people's interest. And Larry King was able to do that better than just about anyone, night after night, for 25 years. I'm sure whoever they get to replace him will be good, but he won't quite have the same Larry King style. And that will be missed.