By James Wolcott
Vanity Fair
April 2011
If you’re going to go in, go in big. Mount your ego on monster-truck tires and plow ahead. This is how Piers Morgan, answering destiny’s Tarzan call, geared himself up for the mission of filling the creaking throne of CNN’s prime-time institution Larry King, who was retiring after a long, long reign as cable news’s premier celebrity interviewer and kibitzer. King had seen all the giants come and go—from Marlon Brando to Anna Nicole Smith—and now it was time for him to go, too, up into the bat belfry. It was time for new blood, a change of attitude, a bold reset. Piers Morgan was made to measure. He had attitude in spades. Not for him an Eve Harrington show of faux humility, the glistening hope that America would accept him into its heart, adopt him as one of its own. As befits the Season Seven winner of Donald Trump’s tragic charade party Celebrity Apprentice, Morgan adopted the master of major lip as his mentor-model, talking himself up as if ready to take his rightful place in the Manhattan skyline, a landmark head. Like Trump, Morgan practiced pugnacity for maximum P.R. effect, announcing that Madonna would be banned from his show and baiting her as an old gray mare that ain’t what she used to be: “Lady Gaga is half her age, twice as good-looking, twice as talented, and twice as hot.” Morgan also reveled in Twitter slap-fights, boasting that he would mop the floor with doubters and detractors such as John Schiumo, the 24-hour cable news channel NY1’s prime-time news host, whom he warned, “You’re like Stephen Baldwin and Vinny Pastore—they thought they were big shots in NY too until I wiped them in Celeb Apprentice.” Yes, those were quite a pair of titans he toppled.
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