PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1989: Arsenio Hall lifts the lid on wild late-night era: TV host’s strip club trips with Prince, his showdown with OJ Simpson, and how he got Bill Clinton to play his sax on air.
The new book paints a picture of a chaotic era in television where the line between on-screen success and off-screen excess was often blurred.
The Arsenio Hall Show ran for five years between 1989 and 1994 and featured hundreds of celebrities in what Hall hoped would be a house party on TV every night.
Hall made his show the home of hip-hop and helped break rappers like Snoop Dogg, Tupac and Ice Cube while musical guests included James Brown, Whitney Houston, and Luther Vandross.
The show would win two Emmys and lead Hall to star in hit movies like 1988 comedy, Coming to America, alongside Murphy.
It was an astonishing achievement for the son of a single mother from Cleveland, Ohio, who idolized the talk show host Johnny Carson as a child and began his show business career aged five doing magic shows in the basement of his building.
A switch to comedy and a move to Los Angeles paved the way for Hall to be offered a guest spot hosting The Late Show on Fox after Joan Rivers, the original host, bombed.
Impressed Paramount executives offered Hall his own show, making him the first black, syndicated late night host.
Arsenio was young, hip and cool, and consequently made Johnny Carson look very dated by comparison, and allowed Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Love, who had no love lost between him Carson, deliver the kill shot:
“Was it a coincidence that Johnny Carson stepped down as host of the Tonight Show after 29 years just three days after this segment aired on Saturday Night Live? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But this even making the airwaves on Carson’s own NBC network was a bit shocking. I was only 15 years old when this very funny SNL skit played and I even understood what it meant. Johnny Carson was going to be very pissed off by what he saw.”
