I watched a lot of Emergency! as a child. My mom loved that show. I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed in bits of it now; it very much suffers from ’70s Establishment Television Syndrome. It tries really hard to be hip while at the same time being enormously square, and it criticizes certain things without understanding why they are what they are. I get that the paramedics and so forth are primarily dealing with drug use that’s gone wrong, but surely they should notice that, say, they don’t deal with a lot of medical problems from marijuana? Come to that, the health problems that would eventually kill Julie London were tied to smoking tobacco, which they didn’t exactly speak out about.

Julie London was the child of two vaudeville performers and had her first radio appearance at age three. She has any number of “soundtrack” credits, from Mad Men to Bridget Jones’s Diary to Tales of the City from her singing days. Despite having stage fright, she had a serious nightclub career for a while, during which she met and married Jack Webb. She did some minor screen acting, never really making it big at it. She was actually a million-selling recording artist. She said she only had a “thimbleful” voice but that it was “oversmoked” and therefore sounded intimate.

You can tell she remained close to Jack Webb even after the divorce, because when he went to cast his show about LA paramedics, he hired not just London but her second husband, Bobby Troup. Troup wasn’t one of the most important characters—I’d say he’s solidly at the top of the second tier—but the show doesn’t work without a strong actress in the role of Dixie McCall. She’s the heart of the show in a lot of ways, the bridge between the doctors and the paramedics, and she’s good at it.

Oh, the role can be frustrating. She does a lot of serving people cocktails and things. When Dixie’s got time off, she’s locked into a very specific view of femininity. From what I can tell, London would have been pretty well okay with that. But on the job, Dixie was tough and no-nonsense. She was extremely competent and extremely compassionate. In the pilot, she also makes it her job to persuade the hard-nosed doctor that paramedics are a good idea. And by extension convincing the audience of that.

After the show went off the air, she retired. She lived happily with Troup until he died. Indeed, it seems to me as though most of her life after the show involved remaining close to the people she knew from the show, and that’s sweet. Randolph Mantooth was close to her and her children. It wasn’t so much a show as a family, by the look of it, but it’s still a fun show. Far from perfect, but bonkers in that ’70s way that I’m strangely fond of. And it needed Julie London to work.

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