Without question, Arsenio Hall was a shooting star.
He flashed across the firmament of late-night TV in the early 1990s like an unstoppable force—one that might even take down the mighty Johnny Carson.
The flame burned bright but fast. Arsenio was gone from late night a little over five years later.
But his run made a big and lasting impression. His show is still remembered for how it changed the vibe of late night and brought on stars, especially in rap and hip hop, who had not been seen anywhere else on television. And moments on the show were among the most memorable in American public life during that era:
When Bill Clinton, presidential candidate, appeared and blew some respectable jazz on sax; when Magic Johnson appeared and discussed his HIV diagnosis; when Louis Farrakhan appeared and ignited a loud and fevered reaction.
Hall himself is fondly remembered for the kick of that late-night run. He has maintained a much lower show-business profile in the years since, though he did take a stab at recreating the magic in 2013 with a comeback late-night show, in syndication as was the original. It lasted one season.
As he turns 70, a memoir makes sense, and Arsenio has delivered one, inevitably called Arsenio, appropriate because Hall has earned his one-name-only celebrity, like Oprah, Madonna, and—certainly in late-night circles—Conan. Like them, there’s only one of him.
The book is very much in the voice of the comic: a little earnest, a little jargony, some warmth, some anger, a lot of deserved satisfaction, and a lot of names. It recounts an early life as a would-be magician-turned-standup who idolized Carson and put on shows for the neighborhood kids in his basement in Cleveland.
The switch to comedy brought him to Chicago, and eventually LA. There he worked the then-mecca, The Comedy Store, where he met legends like Richard Pryor and Jay Leno.
Leno has a recurring role in Arsenio’s book—and life. An early mentor and friend, he became a one-time bitter rival at the height of late-night competition, then returned to the role of mentor and friend later in Arsenio’s career.
The early tale of childhood ambition leading to show-business success is highly familiar, though clearly Arsenio’s place as a ground-breaking, dynamic late-night host of color gives him real distinction. That period, when he rode high through the night and the thick, relentless pressure of the Johnny-Dave-Jay axis, dominates the narrative of the book.
What Arsenio gets completely right is the rush of sudden, spectacular stardom. He was a definitively hot act in the first years of his late-night show. Not just a favorite of the Black community, he scored big with young viewers of every color.
Certainly, his analysis that he was hosting a party every night is accurate. It was loud and boisterous, and there was nothing else like it on television. He brought on stars Carson likely didn’t know, let alone book—like Dr. Dre, LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, and even Prince, at the height of his fame.
His friendship and collaboration with Eddie Murphy, of course, gets a lot of attention.
On some details, Hall skims the surface rather than diving deep into the events. Notably: He pitches the notion that Pat Sajak’s late-night show, which was introduced at CBS a week after his own launch, was a potentially fearsome competitor. Even some CBS executives at the time thought Sajak was disastrously misplaced as a late-night host.
Arsenio ran roughshod over Sajak and dispatched him quickly enough.
And he clearly shook the NBC executive suite by putting in a serious challenge to Carson. Arsenio actually had a (passive) hand in Carson’s decision to retire when he did.
Leno’s then-manager, Helen Kushnick, eager to force Johnny out, planted a fake story in the New York Post that NBC, worried about Johnny losing younger viewers because of the Arsenio threat, was getting ready to dump him.
It wasn’t literally true, but true enough that NBC was noticing Arsenio’s numbers with the younger audience. Carson pulled the plug himself three months later.
That decision set up Leno’s ascension—and Letterman’s move to CBS. Suddenly, two hosts a generation younger than Carson, both with network backing, were ready to challenge Arsenio’s syndicated stronghold. Letterman coming to CBS was especially ruinous because CBS affiliates that had abandoned Sajak for Arsenio came flooding back when Dave lit up late night.
But Leno came on the air first, and Arsenio set himself up to run roughshod over his old pal Jay as well.
Weeks before Leno’s debut as Tonight Show host, Arsenio memorably told Entertainment Weekly he was going to “kick Jay’s ass.” And compared him metaphorically to the basketball coach’s son, whom he and his mates embarrassed on the court.
In the book, Arsenio says the slams were meant as a joke, that he was playing a wrestling character. But after the magazine issued a cover story with Jay’s rebuttal, Arsenio wrote a letter to the editor blowing the whistle on Jay, calling him “two-faced” for still acting as a friend, but “commenting very negatively about me and the show” to other people.
He also accused Leno of passing on a rumor to the press that Arsenio was telling Black celebrities to boycott The Tonight Show, a story he found “racist and insulting.”
The enmity, for a time, anyway, was real. It spilled over into a nasty booking war initiated by Kushnick, which wound up costing her the job of executive producer of Tonight, a moment of high drama in late-night history, which Arsenio chooses to omit, though it verifies he was up against some potent competitive forces.
Of course, people writing autobiographies get to choose what they want to say about their own lives, and Arsenio has patched things up so thoroughly with Leno that he can report that Jay attended his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony alongside Annie Hall (no, not that one—this one is Arsenio’s mom).
The book comes to a bit of an abrupt end. It explores very little of Arsenio’s post-phenomenon career. The effort to restart the party with a new late-night TV entry in 2013 is not even mentioned.
The good stuff was what happened during those first three or four years of super-heated fun in late night that was the Arsenio Hall Show.
He gets full credit for one truly big splash—and anybody can tell you, that’s infinitely better than none.
Arsenio: A Memoir is now available in bookstores and online.
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Ironically one of Arsenio’s favourite tagets…Byron Allen