'Whorehouse' playwright Larry L. King dies

Larry L. King, a writer and playwright whose magazine article about a campaign to close down a popular bordello became a hit Tony Award-nominated musical "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" and a movie starring Burt Reynolds, died Thursday. He was 83.

His wife, Barbara Blaine, said King died in Washington, D.C., after battling emphysema.

He wrote in a good ol' boy vernacular style similar to other Southern authors such as Roy Blount and Charles Portis. King wrote two musicals, five plays, 14 books, a few screenplays and hundreds of magazine articles, for which he won an O. Henry Award in 2001.

"King's strengths are his energy and wit and his integrity not to compromise the fundamentals. He rings an American bell," Norman Mailer once said.

"Writing looks much easier than trapeze work, I know, until you sit before a typewriter long enough to realize it won't speak back unless spoken to," King once wrote.

King came to Washington in 1954 to work for a newly elected congressman from El Paso. A journalist from West Texas, he had planned to remain on Capitol Hill for about three years and then go to work for a newspaper.

He wound up staying in politics as an aide in Washington for 10 years.

His experience produced a bestseller in 1978, "Wheeling and Dealing: Confessions of a Capitol Hill Operator." He said President John F. Kennedy's assassination caused him to re-evaluate his life. King quit politics and headed to New York where he taught, worked on books and freelanced for magazines.

King was not shy about his battles with alcohol and kicked the bottle decades ago. "If you're not out getting drunk, and waking up with hangovers and having fights with people, there's a lot of time to write," he said in 1987.

King wrote his most famous piece, about the Chicken Ranch brothel in 1974 for Playboy magazine, took the $3,000 and thought no more about it. But Peter Masterson, a Texas actor, saw the article and thought it would make a great play. He and King got together with songwriter Carol Hall, another Texan, to create the smash musical. Tommy Tune was the director and in charge of musical staging.

The movie version starring Dolly Parton and Reynolds was less than a smash with critics, including King, who thought Hollywood had ruined the story and turned it into a sex romp.

As a humorist, he had a jaundiced affection for the folks he wrote about. "I would say Larry was a man who had a lot of fun with life. He had a twinkle in his eye," his wife said.

In the late 1980s, King had some success with his play "The Night Hank Williams Died," a pungent yet poignant tale of lost loves, missed opportunities, unfulfilled expectations and fatal mistakes that made it Off-Broadway. It was set in 1952 at a bar and Williams' music wails from the jukebox as a colorful group of characters try to find meaning with coarse Texas humor.