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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 to him, he'd see you and yet he didn't see you. His mind was always on something else."
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 his job the next day.
His climb up the show-biz ladder had few missteps. He moved to Chicago and began 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 Robert Goulet to Tina Turner.
In 1984 Hall landed a job that provided a strange foretaste of his current success: as Alan Thicke's sidekick on the much ballyhooed, short-lived Carson challenger, Thicke of the Night. Thicke remembers the young comic fondly. "I think I recognized that if anyone was going to be the Jackie Robinson of late night, it was Arsenio," he says. After the show flopped, says Thicke, "I know writers who removed my name from their resumes. Arsenio remained a friend in failure, and you learn to appreciate those people in a year like that."
Hall did not stay out of the talk-show ring for long. In 1986 he joined Marilyn McCoo as co-host of Solid Gold, a syndicated music show. Then he got a call from the Fox Network, asking him to be a last-minute replacement for Frank Zappa as fill-in host of The Late Show, which had just dumped Rivers, its original star. Hall's stint went so well that he was asked back twice the following week. Soon he was doing the program full time.
Hall's hip, high-intensity style increased the ratings of the troubled show, but it was too late. Fox had already decided to scrap the program in favor of a new late-night entry, The Wilton North Report. "I was able to do a lot of stuff because the Fox executives weren't watching," says Hall. "No one cared." When Wilton North was a quick failure, Fox asked Hall to return. But by this time his attention was elsewhere, notably in movies: he had just shot Coming to America, the first of a three-picture deal with Paramount. Hall turned down the Fox offer.