Here’s What Happened to Monty Hall Before, During and After Hosting Game Show ‘Let’s Make a Deal’

A Launching Point

Another element about Monty that the critics just didn’t get, Adam continues, is the fact that he used the show as a launching point for charity work: “Being the host of a hit game show gave Monty a platform where he was in demand to host fundraisers and telethons, and he did every one of them that his calendar would allow him to do. His family kind of jokes that even when he took a vacation, they would go to Hawaii for a week and the first day of the vacation Monty was going to the local ABC affiliate to shoot promos. Then he was going to go visit a children’s hospital as a kind of a gesture of goodwill and would write a check for them while he was there. That’s what their vacation always looked like; they always turned into a philanthropic effort.”

As Monty pointed out to the Independent Press-Telegram in 1966, “When you have a job, you’re basically satisfying yourself, but when you’re doing charitable work, you’re doing something for someone else. You don’t have to wait for the ratings — you know instantly in your heart how you did. Community work is open to everyone. No one can fire you and every contribution is acceptable.” All of this went back to something that happened when he was a kid.

Early Days

He was born Monte Halparin on August 25 1921 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and had a tough time growing up with his family not having much in the way of money. Says Adam, “When he was a teenager, somebody gave him a break at a time in his life when he really needed one, and it came with a promise that he would do the same thing for somebody else. As Monty’s daughter put it, he simply could not say no to something. Monty had to write a check anytime he could, because he had made this promise and couldn’t bring himself to violate it.”

In Financial Straits

Providing more background, Adam explains that growing up Monty’s family was in such financial straits that there were months when the lights or water would be turned off. “His kids told me that that part of his life never went away,” he relates. “They said, ‘We lived in this very nice house in Beverly Hills and our dad would complain sometimes because he would look at the portion sizes at dinner and say, ‘Oh my God, you made too much food. It’s all going to go to waste.’ Or, ‘Don’t you dare walk out of a room and leave the light turned on.” So Monty was so accustomed to living poor that even when he had the money, he wasn’t spending that much. Monty looked at money in terms of what could be done with it and that inspired him to hold back as much as he could to give away later. He and his wife had enough money that they could go to a fine restaurant for every meal of every day, but rather than do that, they cooked at home. And that way they could write a bigger check for Variety Club or whatever other cause it might be.”

A Need to Give

As Adam reflects, Monty was something of a child genius and actually graduated from high school at the age of 14. Unfortunately, the family couldn’t afford to send him to college, so he started working to make some money. This is where Max Freed of the Hercules manufacturing company, and someone very big in horseracing, entered Monty’s life. “So Monty is on his hands and knees scrubbing the floors of a shop when Max Freed comes in,” he details. “He sees Monty and asks why he isn’t in school and is told that he can’t afford it. So Max Freed says, ‘Come to my office tomorrow and let’s talk about this.’ Next day they sat down and Max told him that he was going to pay for his college education, as well as his food and board — with two conditions. No. 1, Monty had to maintain an A average; he wanted to see his report card every quarter. And No. 2, he had to do this kind of thing for somebody else somewhere. So that’s where Monty’s need to give to others came from. He ended up going through college on this guy’s dime and it changed his life.”

Picking Up Side Jobs

Monty graduated from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Science degree, having majored in chemistry and zoology. His intent was to go on to medical school, but, as it turned out, quotas for Jewish students had been met so he couldn’t be admitted. Adam explains that while he tried to figure out what to do next, he picked up side jobs doing radio announcing. “In those days in smaller markets where they didn’t have a large pool to pull from, you did a little bit of everything,” he says. “So he acted in soap operas, he sang, he did play-by-play commentary for sports events, which he loved — he really loved calling hockey. And he made his way from Winnipeg to Toronto.”

Making His Own Path

As Monty told the Independent Press-Telegram in 1966, when he was 24 years old, he walked into his boss’ office in Winnipeg and asked for more money. “He opened a map,” Monty explained, “and said I had gone as far as I could here and challenged me to go elsewhere if I wanted to better myself. I was on a train inside a week, with one suitcase and $130. I went to Toronto and then New York nine years later. I had a wife and two children by then, but I walked the streets for six months. I sent a telegram to the head of one of the networks and challenged him to see me. He did. I wish I could say this got me a job, but it didn’t.”

Memo for Monty

Adam applauds an innovative thing that Monty did: “He began writing something called Memo for Monty, and the easiest way to describe it was it was the early 1950s version of a blog. He would sit down and just type this account of what he had done in the past week while he was looking for work. And then he began mailing it out to all the people that he couldn’t get job interviews from. So every single week all these people in broadcasting in New York were getting the Memo from Monty, and it was just chronicling the life of an unemployed guy. He was doing this as kind of an outlet for his own frustration and didn’t know if anybody was bothering to read what he was writing. He certainly didn’t think that anybody was. But then one week somebody called him up and said, ‘I didn’t get my Memo from Monty this week. Are you still writing it?’ This person was very concerned he hadn’t gotten a new ‘issue.’ So Monty was brought in for an interview and things starting coming together from there. He eventually got a job at NBC doing their weekend radio show.”

‘Monitor’

That show was Monitor, which Monty co-hosted on Saturday nights from 8:00 p.m. to midnight. Opines Adam, “Monitor was this amazing radio show that was like the last gasp of old radio. For 40 hours every weekend they would do a continuous radio show and pretty much everyone at NBC got a chance to co-host the show at some point. Monty did that for a time and then he sort of fell into game shows, hosting them at first before he began developing them himself.”

This ultimately led him to meeting and collaborating with Stefan Hatos, the two of them starting their own company and developing ideas. “The strongest concept they came up with was basically a collection of lots of little ideas from their old radio shows,” Adam says. “Monty had hosted a radio show in Canada where one of the employees had the idea that during the last 10 minutes of the show, Monty should go into the audience and ask people for things they might have on them and give them small prizes if they did. Like, ‘I’ll give you 50 cents for every stamp you have in your purse. Do you have a shopping list? I’ll give you a dollar for every item on that shopping list.’ That sounded like an interesting idea. Stefan had a similar idea, so they combined all of these little ideas that they had done on local, smaller shows from their past and came up with Let’s Make a Deal.

Creating a Pop Culture Institution

“That was in 1963,” he elaborates, “but they had a bear of a time getting it on the air, because every network executive they showed it to said the same thing: ‘What do you do for episode two?’ Because, again, the idea was, ‘Do you want the box or the curtain?’ The executives thought, ‘Who cares? Why are people going to watch this every day?’ And Monty said, ‘Well, it’s variations on a theme. We’re going to do more of the same every day, which is what a game show is.’ Finally, NBC took a shot at it and they put it on and it just ended up being one of the most successful things ever in game show history. And it became a pop culture institution that left a huge footprint.”

Building a Successful Game Show

Prior to its debut on NBC, Let’s Make a Deal went on a six-month tour, mostly because of the number of shows that had failed in its time period. At one point, Monty played to 12 people at a supermarket in Panorama City and a church knitting bee. “And we learned,” he said in 1965, “that everybody, no matter what age group, what sex, went for it. They went for it even though we were using make-believe money and make-believe prizes. By the time it debuted in January 1964, I was convinced of one thing: People love the trading bit. People love to gamble, to parlay nothing into something. A contestant could also walk away virtually empty-handed. It has to be that way otherwise greed would take over if they knew they couldn’t lose.

“I learned more about human reactions on that show than in a college psychology course,” he added. “A successful game show requires two things to really appeal to the viewers. They want to see how the contestant comes out and they get involved with playing along at home; they’re thinking, ‘Now if I was there, I’d do this or that.’”

Salesman Persona

Let’s Make a Deal stunned everybody by becoming an immediate hit and the audience absolutely fell in love with Monty. “He was a genuinely good guy,” observes Adam, “but he had that salesman persona when he was trying to talk the contestants into something, or making them second guess the decisions they were making. So there was intrigue there and something that you didn’t see on another game show.”

The other thing you didn’t see on other game shows was people dressing up in costume to draw attention to themselves, which was a hallmark of the show. And which was not a part of the original design. Adam details, “The origin of the costumes has been thoroughly documented over the years, because it was such an unusual gimmick that Monty was asked about its constantly. It made the roots of it rather hard to forget. In the beginning, the contestants for Let’s Make a Deal showed up in their Sunday best — the men donned suits and ties, the ladies wore nice dresses. One day a woman showed up with a sign on her neck with a short poem on it: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, I came here to deal with you!’

Making a Deal

“The sign delighted Monty so much that he picked the woman and made a deal with her,” he continues. “Evidently, a sizable number of future studio audience members watched the show that day, because in the coming weeks, an increasing number of people were coming to the studio still in their Sunday best, but with signs around their necks with a variety of messages on them. Let’s Make a Deal quickly became ‘that game show where the contestants wear signs around their necks.’ Well, if everyone has a sign around their neck, it’s a little harder to stand out, so eventually a woman showed up with a sign her her neck and a gaudy-looking hat. Monty was taken aback by the hat, and since it grabbed his attention, he picked her.

Audiences in Costumes

“In a matter of weeks, everybody in the audience had accessorized their Sunday best with odd-looking hats. Let’s Make a Deal was now ‘that game show where the contestants have signs around their necks and wear ugly hats.’ It just snowballed from there until contestants were showing up in full-blown costume; the audience was chockfull of ballerinas, hobos, Charlie Chaplins and Grouch Marxes, baseball players and kitty cats.”

Pure Dedication

This development didn’t initially please everybody. As a line gathered outside the studio for the taping of an episode, Stefan Hatos and Monty Hall received an irked phone call from an NBC executive who just arrived at the complex. “You need to stop this,” he said. “Have you looked outside? It looks like there’s a Halloween party on the sidewalk.”

“Stefan Hatos called a staff meeting,” Adam continues the story, “to announce that going forward, costumes would be banned and any audience member wearing a costume would be denied entry. A staff member raised his hand and asked, ‘Why?’ Hatos suddenly realized he couldn’t think of an answer for that. The staff member persisted: ‘Don’t you realize there’s never been a show like this before? People are dressing up and it makes the screen come alive.’ Stefan Hatos overruled himself and allowed the costumes to continue unimpeded. The staff as well as Monty would marvel in the coming years at how dedicated some of the contestants were.”

The End Was Near

As the years rolled on, so did Let’s Make a Deal, successfully moving from NBC to ABC (who made the creators a much richer-deal), but then it went up against a network-decided move that ultimately ended it. “And it was the result of a very specific big thing happening at a very specific moment in the game show world,” Adam emphasizes. “Let’s Make a Deal was doing fine for now and in 1975 it would have been on the air for 12 years. At that point, everything was great. And then CBS got the bright idea to expand The Price is Right from 30 minutes to one hour and it worked wonderfully as a one-hour show. Now I don’t want to call it a pissing match, but basically every network had to follow suit and expand their games to see if any of them worked. So you very briefly had hour-long Hollywood Squares, hour-long Wheel of Fortune and ABC did an hour-long Let’s Make a Deal.

A New Era

“Monty went to the network and said he was very against it, because he said, ‘We’re expanding it for the sake of expanding it. Thirty minutes is just right for our show.’ And what happened was they never told Monty it was happening; he found out from reading a press release and they basically had two weeks until taping and they had to figure out what they were going to do. Now here’s the problem with it: When The Price is Right expanded to one hour, they changed the format of the show and added a big wheel and turned the format into kind of a mini-tournament with the six contestants who won their way on stage and whittling it down to two to play the showcase again. So the genius thing that The Price is Right did was alter the format in such a way that it needed to be one-hour long. The other game shows just did one hour of more of the same. So Let’s Make a Deal just did more deals. They did one week of hour-long episodes and Monty was quoted as saying, ‘My impression was ABC wanted to punish us for the fact  that the hour-long format didn’t work, so they move the show to the noon time slot.’ At that point, noon was the death slot on the networks, because more and more of the local stations were beginning to do newscasts. At that point only half the country was able to watch the show and it was off the air by July 1976.”

The show would resurface over the years, sometimes with Monty hosting, but it was never the same, though Wayne Brady has been enjoying a successful run by molding it to himself rather than trying to do Monty’s version without Monty.

Big Dreams

Although disappointed by the turn of events, Monty had made no secret for a number of years that he was ready to move on. “I love the program,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1971, “and it’s been good to me and a lot of other people, but it’s exhausting. Other game show hosts, like my friend Peter Marshall of Hollywood Squares, simply show up, do their thing and go out and have some fun. Because of the demands of Deal, we can never tape more than two at a time and when we finished I collapse in my dressing room.”

Beyond that, Monty had dreams for himself far far removed from being a game show host. He wanted to act and host both variety and talk shows, and was frustrated it didn’t happen. That became evident with the publication of his autobiography, 1973’s Emcee Monty Hall. “That book paints the portrait of a man who hates hosting Let’s Make a Deal,” says Adam, “because at that point he’d been hosting the show for about nine years and was fighting a losing battle to do other stuff. So he talks a lot in the book about his frustration. One of the things his family told me was that that was not really their dad. That he loved hosting the show and was grateful for all the opportunities it provided him to do for charity and the book only reflected that moment in time.”

Other Work

The irony is that he did get the opportunity to act on sitcoms like That Girl (as a dentist) and The Odd Couple (two episodes as himself). Those were fine, but then there was serving as host of a pair of variety specials, The Monty Hall Smokin’ Stoking Fire Brigade and Monty Hall at Sea World, neither of which did well in the ratings. And he did get a drama in the form of the TV movie The Courage and the Passion, and came out of it disappointed. “Movie acting didn’t live up to my expectations,” he admitted to The San Francisco Examiner. “We were out in the desert standing around in the heat and sand and waiting and waiting. Then we’d do the same scene over 35 times. Acting is a director’s medium. Movies don’t allow much creativity for a performer. I discovered I like to perform for a live audience.”

He even got the opportunity to do that in the stage show High Button Shoes, but that, too, was not what he thought it would be: “No matter how well you’re received, no matter how great the applause at the end of the performance, it still means living in a motel room on the road.”

Life After ‘Let’s Make a Deal’

After Let’s Make a Deal he produced a number of other projects which, unfortunately, didn’t catch on. Neither did shows he hosted, Deal (1977) and It’s Anybody’s Guess. Although he worked here and there, most of the latter part of his life was spent involved in philanthropic work. “He stayed very active,” says Adam. “That need to do something was always there, but this was the world before Google. He couldn’t do research and find what causes might need him, which really bothered Monty when he thought somebody might need help raising money for charity. One of the things his children spoke very highly of was his willingness to keep going out and meeting people, even into his ‘80s. He and his wife kept expanding their world and meeting people. And they spent time with their grandchildren. By all account Monty really  loved being a grandfather.”

His Family

Monty married Marilyn Doreen Plottel on September 28, 1947, and the two of them were together until her death on June 5, 2017, just a few months shy of their 70^th wedding anniversary. They have three children, Joanna Gleason (a Tony Award winner), Sharon Hall Kessler, president of Endemol Shine Studios; and Richard Hall, an Emmy Award-winning television producer. Monty himself died of heart failure on September 30, 2017, less than four months after Marilyn’s passing. He was 96.

Lasting Legacy

As to the legacy of Monty Hall, Adam knows what Monty himself would like it to be: “I imagine that Monty would like to be remembered as the guy who raised billions and billions of dollars for charity and donated a ton of money out of his own pocket. And the legacy of Let’s Make a Deal is the impact that it’s had on language. You still hear people kind of intone it as a sarcastic phrase, ‘I’ll take door number three’ or something like that. It remains a part of the American psyche. The legacy is that it’s one of those rare game shows that became an institution. Even if you don’t watch Let’s Make a Deal, you know exactly what it is.

“One of the things that Monty proved, and this is kind of an argument that he got into with network executives over and over again, is that it’s in the presentation more than anything else,” he concludes. “It’s not the size of the prize, it’s what you do with it. It’s how you present and build it up. It’s who you are and how you interact with the contestants. The bottom line is that there’s a lot of sizzle that has to go with the steak, and Monty had the sizzle.”