Hotter than Hall

can success make arsenio happy? can anything?

It's Hall or nothing

No one else will do

It's Hall or nothing

You'll be mine before I'm through

--Hall or Nothing, by Arsenio Hall

You can hear the song five nights a week, plus reruns on weekends. It's the song that Arsenio wrote to kick off his talk show--but what you don't hear on TV is that the song has lyrics to go with its partytime groove, lyrics that a pissed-off Arsenio wrote after he read a review that said he wouldn't have a career without his buddy Eddie Murphy.

That's typical. The Arsenio Hall Show is unquestionably the liveliest, and probably the hippest, late-night party on television. ("He attracted a new audience," suggested The New Yorker, "the one radio stations refer to as urban contemporary, people who would usually be somewhere else on a week night--out.") But while its 30-year-old host hugs his guests and grins ear to ear and slips from the king's English to ghetto patois and back again, he keeps a lot of other stuff to himself. He doesn't talk about the way he still smarts from criticism and feels embattled by fame, or the struggle it took to become the first black success in a field that's intrinsically conservative and historically lily-white. "The suit on the kid from the ghetto," says Arsenio, "is part of the tightrope walk I do."

Tonight, the Ron Rinker suit's a soft gray striped, the shirt white, the tie a metallic-silver-and-blue-gray print. With a gleam in his eye, Arsenio stands in front of the audience and starts talking serious trash about one of his favorite recent targets: "I read today that La Toya Jackson just announced that she's gonna hold a concert in the Soviet Union," he says. "That sounds like a hostile act, if I've ever heard one. ... The Russians love their vodka. I hope they got enough of it around. They gonna need a lotta vodka when La Toya starts singing."

The crowd erupts into the kind of rhythmic barking--"Roof! Roof!"--that has been popular in black dance clubs for a decade, especially since George Clinton's 1982 smash Atomic Dog. (Tonight, one group of white kids apparently hasn't been listening closely enough, lustily shouting, "Ooo! Ooo!") But the minute Arsenio or any of his guests drops even a mild showbiz platitude, the audience automatically applauds, as if by talk-show rote. Several times a night, this hip party turns into the Jerry Lewis telethon, with an effusive, gushing Arsenio leading the cornball love fest.

So the tightrope-walking host faces the crowd with the split personality, finishes his monolog, confers briefly with his producer, Marla Kell Brown--who tells him how he's doing on time and suggests topics he may want to raise during the upcoming segment--and then sits down in his chair to bring out guests. There's no desk, no phony cityscape through phony windows, no co-host, no potted plants.

"I'm trying to do a new thing, do something different," is how he explains it. "I don't want to do The Pat Sajak Show, which appears to me to be the second-string guard waiting for Magic Johnson to pull his hamstring. He's got the desk, he's got all his Lettermanisms, he's got a guy [bandleader Tom Scott] who looks like Paul Shaffer. ... It's like, stop it! There's no room for this greatest-hits show. We have it already."

As a result, he says, he refuses to prepare snappy (continued on page 224)Hotter than Hall(continued from page 145) comebacks to stories he knows his guests will tell, the way many talk-show hosts do; or to use plants when he goes into the audience, the way he says Sajak does; or to prescript interviews, the way it was done when he was a guest on Joan Rivers' show.

"That's bullshit," he says. "Sure, sometimes I'm going to have a guest, a Joe Isuzu, who's gonna come out and I'm gonna think, This motherfucker ain't funny, this ain't goin' nowhere, I could be canceled before the next commercial. But I'd rather leave it up to my improvisational abilities."

On this particular week night, Arsenio tries out his improvisational abilities on John Forsythe, without much success. This is the kind of interview that lets you understand why some publicists are wary of letting him interview their clients. The rap on Arsenio is that while he's lively and entertaining when he's talking to his friends or people he admires, he can be uninterested and woefully unprepared with other guests. For some reason, this happens most often to white pop musicians: When singer David Crosby appeared on the show, Arsenio asked him if he had any plans to get Crosby, Stills and Hash back together. At that time, a new C.S.N.Y. album was moving up the top 20.

With Forsythe, Arsenio lapses into uneasy pauses, awkwardly tries to steer the conversation to horse racing and doesn't listen. At one point, Forsythe describes jockey Willie Shoemaker as "my friend." One minute and 58 seconds later, Arsenio asks, "Have you met Willie?"

"You do what you have to do," says Arsenio after the Forsythe interview. "It was a booking condition: I was told, 'Make sure you let him talk about his tribute to Willie Shoemaker.'"

"I think Arsenio gets away with a lot because he's sweet," figures Marla Kell Brown, a petite blonde in her late 20s whose suburban-Chicago upbringing makes her an unlikely but crucial collaborator. "People see this sexy guy who knows how to dance, and they think he must be a wild partyer. But he's really just a sweet kid, a preacher's son from Cleveland who's not kidding when he says he stays home every Saturday night and watches Showtime at the Apollo."

•

Arsenio on the set, Arsenio with Eddie, Arsenio in Coming to America, Arsenio on magazine covers, Arsenio in Amazon Women on the Moon, a life-sized cardboard cutout of Arsenio: The offices of Arsenio Hall Communications, Ltd., are decorated with lots of pictures of the guy who pays the bills, but none are quite as striking as the one that has been delivered just before lunch on this summer morning. It seems that singer Luther Vandross enjoyed a recent show, cut a picture of Arsenio out of Essence magazine and ordered a huge cake with that picture reproduced in icing.

Arsenio looks at the cake and shakes his head in amazement. "Man, it's nice to get the support of people you respect," he says softly. "Because you definitely get the pressure and the criticism of enough people for enough things."

The comment injects a somber note into a celebratory moment--but once again, that's Arsenio. He's a contradiction not just on the air but in person, too: unfailingly friendly and talkative but wary of outsiders. And surrounded by a formidable gauntlet of publicists and shifting ground rules: "You can sit in on production meetings with Arsenio as long as you don't interrupt him or ask him any questions during those meetings."..."Actually, some of those meetings have to be private."..."Arsenio told you it was OK to hang around and sit in on his meetings for the rest of the day? Well, he didn't really mean it. He's too busy to have you around. You'll really have to leave...."

"I don't trust people," says Arsenio flatly. "That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the guy who's been through the incidents where your best friend who you love like a brother fucks your girl, so I'm kinda bitter. The only person I've ever gotten close to, or let get close to me, is probably Eddie. And there may be five people in the world who've ever visited me."

In fact, he turned down Barbara Walters because he couldn't bear to let Walters and her film crew into his house. So this office, which once belonged to Bing Crosby, is as close as you get: black-and-gray high-tech furniture, bookcases full of mementos and toys and CDs; a black drum set in the corner, a TV monitor hanging from the ceiling tuned to the Black Entertainment Network and, everywhere you look, pictures of Arsenio.

"Somewhere, I gotta draw the line and say, 'You can't have none of this,'" says Arsenio, sitting behind his big curved desk in his sweat pants, T-shirt and backward baseball cap. "And I draw that line when I go home, with my love life and my home life. You can make up all the shit you want: You can say I'm fucking Mary Frann in the ear on Tuesdays. Whatever. But the reality, I won't give you any of that."

So he talks about his work. Or, rather, he seems to talk mostly about the criticisms of his work, delivering monologs that, regardless of what questions set him off, wind up on the subject of reviewers who panned him or people who didn't believe in him or friends who betrayed him.

"I'm a pop talk-show host for the MTV generation," he says. "When the show started, there were fifty-year-old journalists sitting around, saying, 'He did a monolog, and he didn't mention Gorbachev. He did stuff about George Michael.' And it's like, 'You have that other show. Please, old men, go watch it and leave me alone.'

"And don't be mad at me if Cher doesn't come out and call me an asshole. That's not the show I do, either. Don't be mad at me if, instead of making fun of show business, I say 'I love it.' I love the people, I love the gig, I love the business. I grew up standing in front of a mirror pretending I was one of the Temptations. I can't wait to have 'em on."

He's well aware, he says, that people make fun of his boundless enthusiasm, that comedians joke about how he went to the hospital "to have a smile bypass." He can name the people who've made fun of him on the air: David Letterman and Paul Shaffer; Dennis Miller from Saturday Night Live, who responded to an ovation with "Oh, stop it, you're gonna make me feel like Arsenio Hall"; even Pat Sajak, "though how in last place you have the nerve to form your mouth to do a job about me, I don't get it." He talks about Art Buchwald, who is suing Paramount, claiming that it stole his ideas for Coming to America. He mentions Willis Edwards, the president of the Beverly Hills/Hollywood chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., who said Arsenio wasn't hiring enough blacks and later filed a $10,000,000 libel and slander suit against him.

So, as he sits in his office, Arsenio Hall seems embattled. "People only see this side where you come out and do this hour for them," he says. "They say, 'Oh, Arsenio, thanks for entertaining us, thanks for being a nice guy, thanks for making me smile.' If they only knew the obstacles that I have to hurdle. Everybody wants something, everybody's fucking with you, everybody's unhappy about something."

For a minute, TV's hot new talk-show host looks positively overwhelmed by it all. "If they only knew," he says sternly, "what I had to go through."

•

On stage 29, Rick Astley is singing Ain't Too Proud to Beg, and Arsenio is listening. Astley's a young white British singer and not the kind of guy you'd think of as Arsenio's cup of tea, but he sounds sorta black--and besides, he's doing an old Temptations song, and we know what Arsenio thinks of the Temps.

So as Astley runs through the song, Arsenio hangs out on the fringes of the stage and keeps half an eye on the singer, who later says he's doing Arsenio's show because "obviously, at the moment, it's the hippest show." At the same time, though, Arsenio scans the dozen or so guests who've gathered just out of camera range, looking for Larry Blackmon from the funk group Cameo. Arsenio has created an alter ego, an enormous rapper named Chunky A, and Blackmon is going to help out now that MCA Records has signed Chunky. "Forty pages of contracts that don't have my name on 'em," says Arsenio with a laugh.

His impending musical career, he admits, is mostly tongue in cheek: After all, this is a guy who knew, even when he was a kid banging away on a drum set, that music was a sideline and talk shows were his destiny. An only child who nonetheless slept on the top of a set of bunk beds--"I was a very lonely kid"--he grew up in a lower-class area of Cleveland. His folks split up when he was five, and at the age of 12, living with his mother, he announced that he was obsessed with Johnny Carson and wanted one day to guest-host The Tonight Show.

It was considered a pretty dumb aspiration: Kids in his neighborhood were supposed to grow up to work in an auto plant or a steel mill or tend bar, and at best, Arsenio was encouraged to follow his dad's footsteps and become a Baptist preacher. Instead, he stayed home and watched television, or practiced his magic, or played his drums until money ran short and his mom had to sell them. And when he got into college--first Ohio State University, then Kent State University--he majored in communications.

"At the point of graduation," he says, "I'm thinking weatherman. What do you usually do when you have a communications major who's silly? He becomes a weatherman."

But he couldn't find a job, so in the late Seventies, he moved to Chicago and began doing stand-up comedy. He remembers those days with some embarrassment: His routine consisted of "things off the Richard Pryor album and dumb things that I made up myself." He talked about the Village People: "It's a mystery. You think these guys are gay?" He imitated the Bee Gees, to show how singers don't enunciate anymore. And he told other jokes that he doesn't like to think about. "It was," he says, "terrible."

His big break came when he scammed his way into emceeing a charity show that included singer Nancy Wilson, who was due to play in Chicago the following week but who didn't yet have an opening act. He bought a white-polyester John Travolta--style suit for the show, but Wilson liked him anyway, took him on as her opening act, paid for his 1980 move to Los Angeles, set him up in the guest room of her manager's house, showcased him at the prestigious Roxy Theater and got him gigs opening for friends of hers such as Aretha Franklin.

One by one, he achieved the goals he was setting for himself: to open for somebody, anybody, to open for somebody famous (he opened for everybody: Aretha, Tom Jones, Wayne Newton, Tina Turner and Patti La-Belle), to work the main room at the Comedy Store. He hosted Solid Gold, co-hosted the disastrous Thicke of the Night, appeared in Amazon Women on the Moon and on at least one occasion sneaked onto the set of The Tonight Show, stood on Johnny's mark, sat at his desk and imagined he was the host.

And in 1987, he was given the reins of The Late Show after Joan Rivers' talk-show challenge to Carson's dominance had collapsed. His assignment was simple: Take over a failed show for 13 weeks and try not to lose too many viewers. "It was a situation where, for two people, it just meant everything," says Marla, who was brought in to produce the show on the strength of her stints with Regis Philbin, P.M. Magazine and the game show Win, Lose or Draw.

Arsenio and Marla tossed out the desk and made things funkier, and the ratings improved. But afterward, he began work on Coming to America, deciding that he'd rather do one movie a year than five TV shows a week--until the night he went on The Tonight Show to promote Coming to America.

"I'm sitting there," he remembers, "and I'm looking at Johnny and watching him do his thing, and it was like.... Did you ever make love to a woman and it was real good? Real good? And then, years later, you're not with her, you see her and you remember how good that pussy was?" He grins. "And you think, Oh, shit, she used to put ice cubes in her mouth and.... And, oh, that noise she used to make.... That's what sitting at the Carson show was like.

"And during the commercials, Johnny started talking about being a magician when he was a kid, because he'd heard I was a magician, and that made me think of something else. It was like, Wait a minute: Johnny was a drummer, Johnny was a magician. You were a drummer, you were a magician. It looks to me like this is just supposed to be.

"It was the worst interview I've ever done," he adds with a laugh. "I was terrible that night, because I was elsewhere. But I decided on the air, while doing the worst interview of my life, that I was gonna do my show again."

•

Arsenio Hall and Eddie Murphy were on their way to Hawaii. And time after time, fans would tiptoe around Eddie and then barrel up to Arsenio, slap him on the back and ask him to do that funny thing he did on the show just the other night, remember? One lady asked for Arsenio's autograph, left, then returned and whispered, "I don't want to disturb Mr. Murphy, but tell him I love his work." Arsenio is always "Arsenio," and Eddie is always "Mr. Murphy."

"With him, it's like he's this big movie star," says Arsenio. "They see him once a year, and he's fifty feel tall. With me, they think they know me. The way they come up to me, you'd think that they slept with me every night."

He leans back in his chair and laughs. Two hours ago, Arsenio finished taping that night's show, and later, he's due at a recording studio to work on the Chunky A record. For now, though, he's unwinding in a fashionable Thai restaurant on L.A.'s Melrose Avenue--and sure enough, all through his soft-shelled-crab appetizer and duck entree, there has been a steady stream of admirers and autograph hounds. 8:26 p.m.: "Are you Arsenio Hall? I like your show...." 8:39: "Charles Evers is my daddy and Medgar Evers is my uncle, and you're fabulous...." 8:43: "I hate doing this, but I'm a big fan. Could I just get your autograph?" 8:49: "Can I have your autograph? Can you get us seats to your show?" 9:03: "I never talk to anybody like this, but I just think that you should continue what you do...."

To all appearances, Arsenio is enjoying the attention. (Otherwise, of course, he would hardly have chosen to meet at a restaurant guaranteed to attract the kind of folks who watch his show.) He's unfailingly gracious, scribbling page-long notes along with his autograph, constantly reassuring fans that they're not disturbing" him and repeating one line again and again: "Thanks for watching the show."

"I know a lotta people in this town, and I've seen a lotta them just go crazy," he says quietly, between interruptions. "You can get too much into how many houses and how many cars and how many girls. And you can start thinking, Hey, this is happening, let's do some coke and get my dick sucked in the Jacuzzi.... It's real important not to get too into being Hollywood and too far away from what you were when you made it."

Of course, he knows it's silly to pretend he isn't a guy from Hollywood--or, at least, a guy from Cleveland who has achieved his goals in Hollywood. "It's kinda weird," he says. "For a guy who's always telling kids, 'Be the best that you can be, strive to be number one,' my goal this year was to be number two. And I'm glad to be number two, 'cause I'm number two to the baddest to ever do it. Ain't nothing wrong with being Magic Johnson, when you see Michael Jordan play."

So he achieved this year's goal. What next?

He hesitates. "It's weird, bin I'm afraid to tell you. I read in this book how people sometimes keep their goals in their heads, so if they fail, the pain's lessened. But it said that you should stand up and take a risk and say it. So, to be totally honest with you, I want a Grammy and a gold record for Chunky. And I want a People's Choice award as a talk-show host. I don't want an Emmy, I don't want an Oscar, I want a People's Choice award. I don't know if they have a category for it, but I want the people to say, 'He's the baddest motherfucker on late night.'"

In the meantime, of course, he wouldn't mind more respect and less criticism. As he finishes his dinner, Arsenio begins talking about his latest controversy, a public feud with Spike Lee. It started when Spike appeared on the show and Arsenio accused him of unjustly criticizing other black entertainers. A few days later, Lee made bristling comments to reporters about Arsenio. Arsenio's reply was succinct: "The next time my name comes out of his mouth, I'm whipping his ass." It was, Arsenio volunteers, "the wrong way to handle it."

Still, he keeps returning to Lee's criticism. "He accused Eddie. He said any man who makes a billion dollars should demand more black participation at Paramount. And I said, 'Standing on the outside doing She's Gotta Have It, you don't understand the big leagues. If Eddie went in and told [Paramount chairman] Frank Mancuso to do something, he'd tell Eddie to fuck off.' I've seen Eddie go in and demand things, and they've said, 'Fuck off.'

"What I'm saying is, it takes time to get things. And you can't demand them: You have to slowly show the need, show that it makes money. 'Cause the bottom line is, there's not as much racism in this town over 'You're white and I'm black' as there is over 'Show me green.' Trust me: The biggest racists in this town will give you anything you want if you show them a profit."

From another table, a group of diners catch Arsenio's eye and yell across the patio that they love his show. "Thanks for watching," he yells back, beaming. And then Arsenio Hall--embattled celebrity that he may be--sits back in his chair and thinks about how he has shown that a hip black host can find a late-night talk-show audience and, yeah, make a lot of green for the money men. And for a few minutes, he doesn't seem so battle-scarred after all.

"I was told by black people, 'Hey, I watch you and I love you, man, but lemme tell you, white man ain't gonna give it up to you,'" he says with a satisfied nod. "But America, white America, is watching me. It's like a scary dream, that people are choosing this black kid from Cleveland"--suddenly, the grin becomes a little slier and sharper--"over the legendary host of Wheel of Fortune."

Just as suddenly, he gets serious again. "You know," he says, "I'm big in Mobile, Alabama. My friends say, 'Yo, man, they wouldn't even let us ride the fucking buses.' But times have changed, and I'm on the bus now. Man, I'm driving the motherfucker."

"'Don't be mad at me if Cher doesn't come out and call me an asshole. That's not the show I do.'"