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Katie Couric once went on a date with Larry King.
Yes, you read that right.
The daytime talk show host appeared on Thursday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! and spilled the details on their — one and only — date.
Couric, now 56, was 30 when she went out with King, who is 23 years her senior, when both were living in Washington, D.C. At the time, Couric basically was agreeing to go out with anyone who asked in the belief that it could be a learning experience.
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So he picked her up at her apartment and took her to K Street for dinner.
“It was at one of these Italian restaurants where they put you right next to each other like they do all the men and their ‘nieces,’ ” Couric said. “We had a nice enough time and we’re going home, and I see that we’re going over [Arlington] Memorial Bridge — and this is not the way to my apartment. I said, ‘Larry, where are we going?’ And he said, ‘My place.’ Oh mother of god.”
Couric said that his apartment was covered with honors he’d received, like “Larry King Day” proclamations and the keys to various cities. “That was sexy,” she quipped.
She continued: “So we sat there, and what can I say? He lunged … and I started laughing a little bit because the whole situation was out of a bad Lifetime movie. I said, ‘Larry, you are such a nice man, but I would like to meet someone a little closer to my age.'”
Quipped Kimmel, “Yeah, someone not from the Paleolithic era.”
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Couric said that King’s memory of the date is different from hers. In his version, she said, he couldn’t come upstairs to her apartment because of her roommate. But, Couric added, she didn’t actually have a roommate at the time.
(Incidentally, King told his version of the story on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2009, claiming that Couric’s roommate at the time was Wendy Walker, who later became King’s executive producer. “Nothing happened with Katie and I,” he said.)
In other strange-but-true dating adventures revealed by Couric, she told Kimmel that Michael Jackson once requested a date with her. The two met when she was hoping to interview him, and he later asked a mutual acquaintance to see if she was interested in going out.
“Can you imagine going to my daughters, who were 8 and 4, saying, ‘Honey, I’m going out on a date with Michael Jackson’?” she said. “But I’m sorry, I didn’t just have dinner with him because that would have been a fascinating conversation.”
