To the shock of America, Katie Couric admitted she shared an intimate evening with Larry King. Yes, the bespectacled, suspender wearing, grandfatherly TV-news journalist who is 23 years Couric’s senior.
On last night’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Couric recounted in striking detail about the Italian dinner date she went on with King 26 years ago in Washington, DC.
After dinner, King drove them back to his apartment where he tried to put the moves on her. “So we sat there and what can I say, he lunged,” Couric said (to the delight/horror of everyone watching probably.)
Couric explained the bizarre meet-up: “I was about 30 years old and I was in this period of my life where I [thought], ‘I’m going to go out with anybody who asks me because you learn something any time you go out with a new person.’”
Still reading? Apparently, the date started off with the fellow journo picking up a leather-skirted Couric in his Lincoln Town Car and driving her to an Italian restaurant.
“They put us right next to each other like they do with all the men and their ‘nieces,’” she said.
King, who had just had a quadruple bypass, ordered veal poached in chicken stock, “which was hot,” Couric joked.
After having a “nice enough time,” they left the restaurant together. Noticing that King wasn’t driving towards her home, she recalled saying, “‘Larry, where are we going?’ And he said, ‘My place.’”
“I was like, ‘Oh mother of god.’ I was like ‘Dear, Cosmo what do I do?’ I was only 30, I could not figure out how to extricate myself from it.”
Once inside his apartment, which was “covered with proclamations [to] Larry King Day, keys to every city in the country,” the veteran newscaster made his move towards her, which she quickly rebuffed.
“I started laughing a little because the whole situation was like out of a bad Lifetime movie. So I said ‘Larry, you’re such an interesting, nice man but I would like to meet someone a little closer to my age. He said, ‘That’s okay cause when I like, I really like.’”
Per Couric, King has a totally different recollection of the evening.