Larry King Goes for the Gold

Approaching Guinness Book of Records territory as he files for his eighth divorce, 76-year-old Larry King still has a way to go before dethroning the champion of serial monogamy, Tommy Manville, who married 11 women 13 times in the last century.

Heir to an asbestos fortune, Marrying Manville became a cultural icon, but in those days, money alone was enough to make him appealing to "gold-diggers." During one divorce, he uttered the only memorable quote of his life, "She cried, and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook."

King, on the other hand, is one of the 21st century's most prolific talkers and, more important, listeners--an aphrodisiac quality for women, according to the conventional wisdom about his grandfatherly sex appeal.

Be that as it may, King is going against the trendiness that has made him so successful by pursuing divorce in a time of recession that makes it financially painful to break up, according to a recent Washington Post report about couples "waiting out the downturn" before putting their marriages into the hands of lawyers and courts.

Meanwhile, CNN's star will be hiding his pain tonight by pairing up with Willie Nelson in a duet of "Blue Skies," with his future far brighter than the fate of Tommy Manville, who was turned into a national joke by such wits as Billy Wilder, who wrote a movie script about him, "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife" in 1938, and then upped the ante two decades later in "Some Like It Hot."

In that classic, Joe E. Brown as Osgood Perkins III relentlessly pursues Jack Lemmon in drag to marry him, setting up one of the best movie punch lines ever.

After revealing that he's not a natural blonde, smokes all the time and can't have children without discouraging him, Lemmon finally pulls offs his wig and yells, "I'm a man!"

"Well," says Osgood, "nobody's perfect."

Larry King, who keeps spotlighting the Cinderellas of "American Idol," should be able to sympathize with that.