Seventy-five years ago today—years before Johnny Carson or his predecessors Jack Paar and Steve Allen manned the desk of The Tonight Show—an elegant actress and political player hosted the first show on late-night television.
Faye Emerson may not be a household name in 2024, but in the early 1950s, the so-called “First Lady of Television” was inescapable. She wasn’t just the star of The Faye Emerson Show, a series that ran on NBC and CBS between 1949 and 1951, but a frequent guest on variety and game shows. And when she landed the late-night chair, she was married to Elliott Roosevelt, the son of four-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“The amazing thing about her is that she excelled at them all,” Ron Simon, curator at The Paley Center for Media, told LateNighter of Emerson’s many TV projects. “That she was such a versatile performer and she was charming, sophisticated, and really smart that she could just enliven conversation. She was a trailblazer for all sorts of television.”
Emerson was a film actress before she became a femcee, as contemporaneous newspapers called her, but she never quite took off in Hollywood. Through the early 1940s, she appeared in bit parts for Warner Bros., playing nurses, waitresses, and telephone girls. Occasionally she scored a lead role, like the tough Dot Burton in 1942’s Lady Gangster. But after she wed Roosevelt, she and the studio agreed to end her contract early so that she could focus on her new role of being a politician’s wife. By 1946, Emerson had officially retired from show business.
But as it turned out, Emerson’s exit was premature. Two years later, she mounted her comeback with a starring role in a Broadway production of P. G. Wodehouse’s The Play’s the Thing and a hosting gig on NBC’s Paris Cavalcade of Fashions—where, as Simon says, “she was able to first break through” on television.
Her French fashion commentary paved the way for The Faye Emerson Show, an 11 p.m. talk show pitched as an “informative, informal show covering events from Hollywood to Hyde Park via Broadway” with “high-level guests.”
The 15-minute series often drew its topics from viewer letters, using an audience member’s query about, say, the best pet for their child as an opportunity to invite an animal expert with birds, dogs, and an orangutan onto the program. Cultural luminaries like Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, might show up to answer questions about breaking into publishing. Emerson’s old colleagues also dropped by on occasion. In one 1950 episode, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. demonstrated the differences between screen sword fights and real fencing with members of NYU’s collegiate team.
The Faye Emerson Show was also punctuated with multiple sponsor messages, delivered at the top, middle, and end of each episode. This was not unusual for early TV, when single corporate advertisers typically funded a series. Arnold Bread and later Pepsi sponsored Emerson’s program; she often invited her guests to join her for a Pepsi break, wherein she extolled the soda’s “wake up tang” and “more bounce for the ounce.”
On the small screen, Emerson was always poised, warm, and impeccably dressed. She became known for her V-neck evening dresses, which leering commentators joked put the “V in TV.” The comments on her cleavage were persistent enough that she addressed it on her show, inviting viewer feedback while arguing that the concern was overblown and that her TV wardrobe was suitable evening wear in any setting.
Though Emerson handled criticism with grace, she wouldn’t tolerate insults on her intellect. During a memorable 1951 mailbag episode, she read a letter from a man in Connecticut who bristled at her thoughts on the Korean War. “Better stick to the plunging neckline, Faye,” she read aloud from his letter. “Politics is not for little girls.”
Emerson, after conceding that the viewer had a right to his opinion, fired back, “I think politics is everybody’s business. And I’m not a very little girl, either.”
Though Emerson could be a firecracker, she also knew how to speak to her audience. During her heyday, television was still an unattainable luxury for most Americans. Only 12 percent of households reported owning a set in the 1950 U.S. Census, compared to the 95.7 percent of homes with a radio. And before her show expanded to a network series in 1950, it was simply a local New York broadcast. Emerson was beaming into wealthy city homes, the kind with closets full of the evening gowns and pearls Faye favored. They would appreciate looks at the ballet, presented by a well-spoken woman who had married into the Roosevelt family—and, following her divorce from Elliott, demurely shared news of her engagement to future Tonight Show bandleader Skitch Henderson at the end of an episode on antique automatons. Emerson already moved in these circles.
Yet Emerson’s elegance and expertise on seemingly any topic would ultimately hold her back as the medium evolved. While she was game for a lot, including the occasional sketch, she was not a stand-up comedian. As funny men with broad appeal claimed their own series, Emerson’s urbanity—and femininity—stuck out.
“Milton Berle wanted to become a member of the family, Uncle Miltie,” Simon reflected. “And I’m not sure if Faye Emerson, that was not her appeal to be a member of the family. There was something that she brought. She was a special guest of the family.”
After The Faye Emerson Show was canceled, its host moved on to Faye Emerson’s Wonderful Town, a series highlighting a different U.S. city in each episode. She later moderated book discussions on Author Meets the Critics and headlined a show with her new husband titled Faye and Skitch.
Emerson was not confined to her own sets, either; she appeared on panel, sketch, and quiz shows hosted by other emerging TV legends. Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner welcomed her onto Your Show of Shows, while Jack Benny roped her into a sketch with Frank Sinatra on his long-running program.
But almost as quickly as she shot to TV stardom, Emerson came back down.
In her book It’s the Pictures That Got Small, television scholar Christine Becker argues that Emerson’s increasingly blunt comments on politics and gender disparity were partly to blame, as they clashed with the era’s idea of a woman on TV. Her fluctuating weight and arguments with sponsors may have also contributed.
Emerson had largely disappeared from television and theater by the mid-1950s, and showed little interest in returning to film, apart from a 1950 noir, Guilty Bystander, which filmed entirely in New York. After her divorce from Henderson, she retreated even further from public life by moving abroad. She eventually settled in the small Spanish village of Deià, where she died in 1983.
Though her late-night talk show can seem like a strange relic of the genre, with its lack of a monologue or desk bits and frequent Pepsi jingles, Emerson had an enormous impact on the TV landscape. She not only broke ground for women hosts (Samantha Bee would surely admire her political savvy and spunk), but informed the male comedians that followed her.
Steve Allen, the first host of The Tonight Show, appeared on Emerson’s late-night program before he had his own. And even the current crop of Jimmys (and Stephen and Seth) might recognize the seeds of their own work in Emerson’s experimental swings, including an extended silent scene with Buster Keaton and explorations into UFOs.
“That early era where anything could happen and it was very experimental, and someone as gifted as Faye Emerson would become a major star is real interesting,” Simon said. “She was sort of creating a different vision of television.”
