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March 3, 2000/26 Adar 1, 5760, Vol. 52, No.26
Making a difference is Hall's 'Deal'
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
Monty Hall guides a visitor past the fine artwork in the foyer of his Spanish-style Beverly Hills home, where you don't see a single memento from the game show that made him a TV icon.
People mostly remember Hall from "Let's Make a Deal," the landmark show that ran intermittently from 1963 to 1991, featuring prize-hungry contestants in chicken costumes or bunny suits vying to see what was behind doors number one, two or three. Audience members traded knickknacks for refrigerators, and strangers still chase Hall down the street.
Although "Deal" made the emcee a household name, his life's passion is less known to the general public - so much so that he wanted to call his autobiography, "There's More to My Life."
Hall has raised almost $1 billion for dozens of charities, at least half of them Jewish, from Israel Bonds to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to the Israel Children's Centers.
Today, three hospital wings bear his name, and so do two city streets, in Cathedral City, Calif., and in his native Winnipeg, Canada.
At age 78, Hall makes more than 100 appearances a year around the world, speaking and performing gratis at benefit shows, and enlisting the help of his celebrity friends.
"If you left it up to Monty, I wouldn't have a dime," Don Rickles teased on an A & E Biography of Hall. "I'd just be on a bus, doing everything for free."
Hall's roots go back two generations, to his Ukrainian maternal grandfather, David Rosenwasser. When Rosenwasser stepped off the train at Winnipeg, Canada, in 1901, he was greeted by "a big voice ringing off the platform in Yiddish: 'Are there any Jews here?' " Hall says. "This man took my grandfather home, where he proceeded to give him a hot meal and a hot bath, his first in months. The next morning he got my grandfather a rooming house, a $5 loan from the Jewish free loan society, bought him a pushcart, taught him the money system and showed him where the farmers brought in produce from the provinces. And my grandfather was in business."
Then there was Hall's mother, Rose Halparin, who tirelessly volunteered for Hadassah and other Jewish groups, though she often worked two jobs to help support the family. They barely scraped by. In winter, Hall loaded his bicycle with heavy parcels to make deliveries for his father's butcher shop, traveling to the far reaches of Winnipeg in temperatures that often reached 25 degrees below zero. He kept warm by pretending he was an emcee.
Only a near-miracle made it possible for Hall to complete college after he graduated high school at age 14. While scrubbing concrete steps at his menial job one day, Hall caught the eye of a young businessman who offered to pay for Hall's college education, as long as he kept an "A" average and promised to help someone else someday - among other conditions.
Hall then completed his bachelor's degree at the University of Manitoba, where he was student body president. He planned to go on to medical school but was twice denied admission due to a Jewish quota system.
While working at a local radio station, he helped lead a protest that eliminated the anti-Semitic policy. Hall was earning $40 a week in radio - twice as much as his father. He became determined to make it in show business.
All the while, he was also resolved to follow in his mother's philanthropic footsteps. In 1947 he joined the United Jewish Appeal, United Way and Variety Clubs International, a children's charity.
"I used to take a can of film, a tap dancer and an accordion player and go out to all the towns around Toronto to raise money for the Variety Clubs," says Hall, who is now the group's international chairman.
"It was the time of the blue laws, when everything was closed on Sunday, and I used to rent a movie theater on a Sunday night where we'd always get a crowd and fill the room for the free entertainment. Halfway through the movie, the tap dancer would dance, I'd make a speech and we'd pass around a pail to collect the money."
Hall was initially less successful in show business, he recalls.
Early on, a radio station owner insisted that the then-Monty Halparin change his last name to something "short and anglicized." Hall complied and continued to work in radio and TV in Toronto, and then found himself out of a job for a year in the mid-1950s.
Hoping to find work, he moved to New York without his wife, Marilyn, and children. He began sending disinterested TV executives "A Memo From Monty," an amusing weekly newsletter about his life, but stopped out of "sheer exhaustion."
Then, as an NBC secretary was about to take her umpteenth message from Hall, executive Steve Krantz got on the line wanting to know what had happened to the "Memo From Monty."
"You mean you actually read it?" Hall shouted.
"I love it. Let's have lunch," replied Krantz, who thereafter hired Hall to take over "The Sky's the Limit." The day after he moved his family to New York, "The Sky's the Limit" was canceled.
Hall persevered and in 1963 hit the big time with "Let's Make a Deal," which he co-created with partner Stefan Hatos. On the wildly popular show, he worked without cue cards, ad-libbing his way through deals and unruly contestants.
"They just jumped up and hugged me and kissed me," he recalls. "But sometimes they jumped up wearing a big box, which hit me under the nose, or with pins sticking out of their costumes."
Hall is now spokesman for an Internet version of "Deal," www.BuyBidWin .com, which has promised to raise money for charities. Hall and Marilyn, his wife of 52 years, focus mainly on family and philanthropy. The Halls have three grown children, Richard, Sharon and Broadway actress Joanna Gleason; and four grandchildren.
Why is Hall still compelled to fill his date book with charity events? "In my family, it was never a question," he explains. "You give back to the community.
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