Joyce Davidson

Joyce Davidson (14 April 1931 – 7 May 2020)

Career Davidson was a young housewife in Hamilton, Ontario when she entered a beauty contest and won $400 and a trip to New York City. Her contest victory led to her picture appearing in a few magazines. and said, "we're a little annoyed at still being dependent." Davidson was lambasted in the Canadian press and by many indignant Canadians for her comment. The CBC received angry phone calls from viewers, her show lost sponsors, Conservative Members of Parliament expressed their outrage to Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, and Davidson was suspended from the programme. A subsequent Gallup poll showed that 64% of Canadians disagreed with her, although only 48% of respondents considered themselves significantly interested in the royal visit.

In addition to losing her hosting position on Tabloid, her revenue from doing commercials on Canadian television also dried up and her children were taunted at school. According to Here’s Looking at Us: Celebrating Fifty Years of CBC-TV, Davidson also faced public criticism "for telling Pierre Berton in an interview that a woman who was still a virgin at age thirty was 'unlucky.'” She was hired to do commercials for Lux soap and by Westinghouse Broadcasting to be the sidekick of Mike Wallace on a new talk show he was hosting titled PM East/PM West. The host was Gore Vidal, and Dorothy Kilgallen appeared on most episodes.

Hot Line was a different show from Susskind's nationally known Open End talk show. Hot Line was the first television show to use the recently invented ten-second broadcast delay to amplify viewer phone calls on the air.

Late on Sunday night, 6 June 1971, an American talk show titled Joyce and Barbara: For Adults Only made its debut in syndication. The program fared poorly and disappeared several weeks later despite three advantages. Davidson's husband's nationally successful talk show served as a lead-in for it, her co-host was Barbara Howar and Bette Davis was the guest on the premiere.

In 1980, she returned to CBC to host Authors, a series of long-form interviews with Canadian writers. In 1981, Davidson went to India for three weeks to work on a documentary about Mother Teresa for PBS. Later in the decade, she co-hosted the ACTRA Awards on CBC Television. She divorced by the time she was 23. Davidson had a third daughter with Susskind. For many years, the couple lived with Davidson's three daughters in the United Nations Plaza building in Manhattan. They separated in 1984 and divorced in 1986 but had been considering reconciliation shortly before Susskind's death in early 1987.

After David Susskind's death, Davidson remained in New York until 1996. At that time she became one of the producers of the 11:00 pm local news on WSYX channel 6 in Columbus, Ohio. In 2000, she moved back to Toronto where her two older daughters lived, and she resided in the Manulife Centre. In later life, she suffered from Parkinson's-related dementia and moved to a long-term care facility around 2012.