Word: halls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...addition to his tiff with Spike Lee, Hall has been embroiled in a feud with Willis Edwards, president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. When Hall's show began, Edwards complained publicly about the scarcity of blacks in key behind-the-scenes positions. (Hall's producer and director, as well as the vice president of his production company, are all white women.) According to Hall, after making the statements Edwards asked for a $40,000 contribution to his organization, a request that Hall told a reporter "sounds like extortion to me." Edwards denied asking for money...
...wonder Hall sometimes feels besieged. "My manager told me not to be angry, but I am," he says. "I give 110%. I resent the fact that ((for some white critics)) I have to be whiter to be a star. And then there are the jabs from my own people, the implication that I have to be unfair to whites to make + blacks happy. I am angry. I'm on a tightrope, and people are punching me from every direction...
When he was five, his mother walked out, taking Hall and moving in with his grandmother, who lived around the corner. Thereafter Hall's childhood was a disjointed and lonely one. "Teachers would write on my report card, 'Arsenio needs attention. Is there anything you can do about it?' " Yet his grades were good, and he avoided drugs in high school -- though he admits to a rebellious period as a senior. "You couldn't get close to him," remembers Marjorie Banks, his old Sunday school teacher and the wife of former Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks. "When you talked...
Show-biz stirrings came early. As a teenager, Hall hired himself out as a magician at parties and played drums and bass guitar in a couple of groups. He started college at Ohio University and finished at Kent State, where he majored in speech communication and played the lead in the musical Purlie Victorious. After graduation, Hall went to work in Detroit for Noxell, the makers of Noxema skin cream. But one evening after tuning in to a Tonight show segment, he decided the moment had come "to do what I'd been dreaming about." He quit...
...honing a stand-up act in comedy clubs. "Even then he seemed to have something extra," says Art Gore, a friend from those days. "He had a rapport with the people; he could adjust his comedy to fit the audience in the club." In 1979 singer Nancy Wilson hired Hall to emcee her stage show in Chicago. When she arrived late, he had to improvise with the audience for 20 minutes. It went well, and Wilson hired him as her regular warm-up act. Hall soon moved to Los Angeles and started picking up work opening for other singers, from...