Arsenio Hall is taking readers back to the Hollywood of the 1980s and ’90s — and this time, he’s telling the stories himself.
Arsenio: A Memoir, released March 31, looks back at the comedian, actor and late-night host’s rise from a kid performing magic in Cleveland to becoming one of the most recognizable faces on television.
Long before the barking and fist-pumping audience of The Arsenio Hall Show, Hall was already dreaming about having a talk show. As a child, he staged his own version in a basement, putting out folding chairs for neighborhood kids, playing records and interviewing his friends.
His path eventually took him to Hollywood’s Comedy Store, where he crossed paths with some of the biggest names in comedy and learned from Richard Pryor.
Then came Eddie Murphy.
Hall and Murphy formed a friendship that would extend both on and off screen. Hall starred alongside Murphy in the 1988 hit Coming to America, playing Semmi as well as several other characters. He followed that with Harlem Nights in 1989.
But television would make Arsenio Hall a cultural phenomenon.
The Arsenio Hall Show debuted nationally in 1989 and offered late-night television something distinctly different. The younger audience, music, celebrity interviews and famous “Dog Pound” made the show feel more like a party than a traditional late-night program.
Hall also gave a national platform to artists and voices who weren’t always getting the same exposure elsewhere in late-night television.
Over the course of the show, his guests included everyone from Madonna, Prince and Tupac Shakur to Magic Johnson, Maya Angelou and Bill Clinton.
Those years — and the people Hall encountered along the way — provide plenty of material for his new memoir.
Hall writes about his friendships with Eddie Murphy, Muhammad Ali, Luther Vandross and Sammy Davis Jr.; his experiences with Richard Pryor; spending time with Prince; and the many celebrities who crossed his stage and his life.
There are also some stories that sound almost too Hollywood to be true, including Hall and Jay Leno helping rescue a family from a house fire and behind-the-scenes trouble that nearly derailed Coming to America.
But Arsenio isn’t only about celebrity encounters.
Hall also addresses one of the biggest questions surrounding his career: why he stepped away from The Arsenio Hall Show in 1994.
For years, the end of the original show has often been described simply as a cancellation. Hall uses the memoir to tell his side of that story and explain his decision to walk away.
After leaving the daily spotlight, Hall largely concentrated on raising his son and living a much more private life. He later returned for projects including Celebrity Apprentice, which he won in 2012, a revival of The Arsenio Hall Show in 2013, and Coming 2 America in 2021.
Now 70, Hall is looking back at all of it.
Arsenio: A Memoir offers a trip through a very different era of Hollywood — one told by someone who wasn’t simply watching it happen, but was sitting across from many of its biggest stars.
The 336-page memoir is published by Atria/Black Privilege Publishing and is available in hardcover, ebook and audiobook editions, with Hall narrating the audiobook himself.
