Game show host always had a “Deal”

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF.» Monty Hall, the genial TV game show host whose long-running “Let’s Make a Deal” traded on love of money and merchandise and the mystery of which door had the car behind it, has died. He was 96.

Hall, who had been in poor health, died Saturday morning of heart failure at his home in Beverly Hills, said his daughter, Sharon Hall of Los Angeles.

“Let’s Make a Deal,” which Hall co-created, debuted as a daytime show on NBC in 1963 and became a TV staple. Through the next four decades, it also aired in prime time, in syndication and, in two brief outings, with hosts other than Hall at the helm.

An episode of “The Odd Couple” featured Felix Unger (Tony Randall) and Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman) as bickering guests on Hall’s program.

Contestants were chosen from the studio audience — outlandishly dressed as animals, clowns or cartoon characters to attract the host’s attention — and would start the game by trading an item of their own for a prize. After that, it was matter of swapping the prize in hand for others hidden behind doors, curtains or in boxes, presided over by the leggy, smiling Carol Merrill.

The query “Do you want Door No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3?” became a popular catch phrase, and the chance of winning a new car a matter of primal urgency. Prizes could be a car or a mink coat or a worthless item dubbed a “zonk.”

The quick-thinking Hall, with his sideburns and colorful sports coats, was deemed the perfect host in Alex Mcneil’s reference book, “Total Television.”

“Monty kept the show moving while he treated the outrageously garbed and occasionally greedy contestants courteously; it is hard to imagine anyone else but Hall working the trading area as smoothly,” Mcneil wrote.

For Hall, the interaction was easy. “I’m a people person,” he said on the PBS documentary series “Pioneers of Television.” “And so I don’t care if they jump on me, and I don’t care if they yell and they fainted — those are my people.”

His name and show remain part of the language. Typical is the quotation in a 2006 Daytona Beach (Florida) News-journal profile of a no-nonsense bail bondswoman who says, “I’m not Monty Hall and this isn’t ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ ”

With the wealth that the game show brought, he made philanthropy and fundraising his avocation. His daughter Sharon estimated that Hall managed to raise nearly $1 billion for charity over his lifetime.

Another daughter, Joanna Gleason, is a longtime Broadway and television actress. She won a Tony in 1988 for best actress in a musical for “Into the Woods” and was nominated for Tonys two other times.

Hall and his wife, Marilyn Plottel, married in 1947. She died earlier this year.