TV game-show host Monty Hall dies

‘Let’s Make a Deal’ co-creator offered contestants choices.

Monty Hall, the genial host and co-creator of “Let’s Make a Deal,” the game show on which contestants in outlandish costumes shriek and leap at the chance to see if they will win the big prize or the booby prize behind door No. 3, died at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Saturday. He was 96.

A daughter, Joanna Gleason, confirmed his death. She said the cause was heart failure.

“Let’s Make a Deal” had its premiere in late 1963 and, with some interruptions, has been a television phe- nomenon ever since.

When Hall first roamed among the audience members who filled the “trading floor” in an NBC studio in nothing Burbank, zany Calif., about there them.swa

“They came to the show in the first week in suits and dresses,” Hall told the Los Angeles Times in 2013.

Within weeks, however, things had changed.

By one acco u nt, the turning point came when a woman in the audience, vying for Hall’s attention with hopes of being cho- sen as a contestant, wore a bizarre-looking hat.

Hall recalled it somewhat differently in 2013: The game changer, he said, was a woman carrying a sign that said, “Roses are red, violets are blue, I came here to deal with you.”

Whatever it was that opened t he floodgates, would-be deal makers were soon showing up wearing live-bird hats, Tom Sawyer costumes or boxes resembling refrigerators. Some simply waved signs pleading, “Pick Me.”

It was all for the chance to barter their way to a big prize. A woman might sell Hall the contents of her hand- bag for $150, and then agree to trade that $150 for what- ever was behind a curtain, or in a big box, in the hope that it was something valuable — say, a $759 refrigerator-freezer stocked with $25 worth of cottage cheese and a $479 sewing machine.

She could then compound her glee by being smart enough not to trade it all back for the old purse and whatever amount of cash Hall had slipped into it — maybe a hefty amount or maybe a measly $27. If she went for the deal that turned out to be a loser, she was, in the lan- guage of the show, zonked.

At the end of the show, the two biggest winners were given a shot at the Big Deal. They could trade their winnings for whatever was behind one of three doors: a new car, perhaps, or $15,000 in cash, or something worth less than what they had traded. All the while, the affable, smooth-talking Hall gave no hint of where the treasure might lie. “Monty had to be a very likable con man; he had to convince peo- ple to give up a bird in the hand for what’s in the box,” David Schwartz, the author, with Fred Wostbrock and Steve Ryan, of “The Encyclo- pedia of TV Game Shows,” said in an interview.

Hall had other responsibil- ities, too, Schwartz added: “He had to be a traffic cop, to get a decision out of the contestant without taking a long time. With his great abil- ity to ad-lib, he knew how to keep the show moving.”

Hall kept “Let’s Make a Deal” moving for most of almost 5,000 broadcasts on NBC, on ABC and in syndication. The show ended its original daytime run in 1976 on ABC. A concurrent syndicated nighttime version lasted until the next year. It occasionally resurfaced over the next decades and, after being off the air for a while, was revived in October 2009 on CBS, with Wayne Brady as host. That version is still on the air.

“Let’s Make a Deal” became such a pop-culture phenomenon that it gave birth to a well-known braintwister in probability, called “the Monty Hall Problem.” This thought experiment involves three doors, two goats and a coveted prize and leads to a counterintuitive solution.