Most people who type the name Elaine Trebek Kares into a search bar are looking for a footnote — a quick answer to “who was Alex Trebek married to before Jean?” But Elaine’s life doesn’t fit neatly inside a footnote. Long before the world knew her as the first Mrs. Trebek, she was a small-town Ohio girl who talked her way onto a Toronto television set, built a business out of nothing, and later built another one, and then another. Her marriage to the future Jeopardy! host was one chapter in a life that had already been interesting before he arrived and stayed interesting long after he left. This is her story, told on its own terms rather than as a sidebar to someone else’s.
From Columbus, Ohio, to a Life Nobody Could Have Predicted
Elaine was born Elaine Howard in Columbus, Ohio, at a time when the idea of a Midwestern girl building a media and business career across two countries would have sounded like a stretch. What is publicly known about her upbringing is limited — her family has kept details about her parents and siblings out of the public record, which is itself telling. Unlike her famous second husband, who wrote openly about his childhood in Sudbury, Ontario, in his own memoir, Elaine has spent most of her adult life declining to become a public figure on her own terms, even while occupying a footnote in someone else’s story.
What is documented is that she pursued journalism at Ohio State University, a decision that suggests a young woman who already had her sights set on broadcasting or media rather than a conventional career path. That choice would eventually pay off, though not in a straight line and not without a few unconventional stops along the way.
The Playboy Bunny Years
Before she was known as a broadcaster, a businesswoman, or anyone’s wife, Elaine spent part of the 1960s working as a Playboy Bunny under the stage name “Teddy Howard.” It’s a detail that tends to surprise people who only know her as a footnote in a game-show host’s biography, but it fits the broader pattern of her life: she was someone willing to work in front of an audience and comfortable operating in industries that were, at the time, considered risqué or at least unconventional for a young woman from Ohio.
The Playboy Club circuit in the 1960s functioned as an odd kind of finishing school for a certain generation of women who went on to careers in entertainment, hospitality, and media. It gave many of them their first exposure to live audiences, structured schedules, and the performative discipline that later served them in broadcasting or business. For Elaine, it appears to have been one stop on a longer road rather than a defining chapter, but it’s part of the record and worth including honestly rather than glossing over.
Marriage to Louis Callei and the Move to Toronto
In 1963, Elaine married her first husband, Louis Callei. Public information about their courtship and the day-to-day texture of their marriage is thin, which is unsurprising given how little media attention either of them attracted at the time — this was years before Elaine would become a recognizable name through her connection to Alex Trebek. What is known is that the marriage lasted roughly a decade, that it produced a daughter named Nicky, and that at some point during those years, Elaine and Louis relocated to Toronto, Ontario.
That move turned out to be the hinge point of Elaine’s career. Toronto in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a genuine media hub for Canadian broadcasting, and it put Elaine in proximity to an industry she seems to have been drawn toward since her journalism studies back in Ohio. She started a promotion and party-planning business in the city, which gave her both an income and a foothold in the kind of social and professional circles that Canadian television relied on for talent.
Call Callei and a Talk Show Built on Boldness
Elaine’s break into broadcasting came when she joined CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario, as the host of a daily talk show called Call Callei. The show’s name leaned on her married surname at the time, and its content leaned on something else entirely: a willingness to talk about subjects that Canadian daytime television generally avoided.
The most notable moment from that era was a 1972 interview Elaine conducted with Xaviera Hollander, the Dutch author who had become internationally known for her memoir about working as a madam in New York City. The interview pushed hard enough against the era’s broadcasting norms that it drew a formal reprimand from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in early 1973. For a daytime talk show host in the early 1970s, provoking a response from a federal regulator wasn’t a minor footnote — it was a signal that Elaine was willing to host conversations most of her peers wouldn’t touch, and that her show had enough of an audience for the regulator to notice.
That single episode says a lot about who Elaine was at that stage of her life: not a passive personality riding a script, but someone actively shaping the content of her show and willing to accept the consequences of pushing boundaries. It’s also a useful corrective to the idea that her life is defined by who she married — years before she met Alex Trebek, she was already generating headlines of her own.
Meeting Alex Trebek
It was through Canadian broadcasting that Elaine crossed paths with Alex Trebek, who at the time was building his own career in Canadian television and radio, years before Jeopardy! would make him a household name in the United States. Both were working in and around the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s orbit, and their professional worlds overlapped enough for a relationship to form.
Elaine and Alex married on September 25, 1974. By that point, Elaine’s marriage to Louis Callei had ended, and she brought her young daughter, Nicky, into the new marriage. Alex, for his part, later wrote candidly about this chapter of his life in his 2020 memoir, The Answer Is . . . : Reflections on My Life, describing Nicky — then six years old — as “cute as all get out” and noting that his own mother, Lucille Lagacé, moved in with the family to help raise her. Trebek would go on to adopt Nicky, raising her as his own daughter even after his marriage to Elaine ended.
A Marriage That Ended Without Bitterness
Elaine and Alex’s marriage lasted through the back half of the 1970s and into 1981, several years before Alex began hosting Jeopardy! in 1984 — meaning Elaine was married to him during his rise through Canadian broadcasting and The Wizard of Odds, not during the years he became an American household name. What stands out about their divorce, based on Alex’s own later account, is how ordinary and unrancorous it was. He described the split as amicable, recalling in his memoir that the two of them settled things without lawyers, at a cost of roughly $320 in fees. They sold the family house, Elaine took the proceeds, and Alex took out a new mortgage.
That kind of clean, low-conflict divorce is not the norm, and it set the tone for the rest of their relationship. Rather than drifting apart or becoming estranged, Elaine and Alex appear to have maintained something closer to an extended family. Alex wrote that when his children with his eventual wife, Jean Currivan Trebek — Emily and Matthew — were in high school, Elaine gave them summer jobs. He also described annual family get-togethers, usually held at his and Jean’s house, that included Elaine. “There were never any problems whatsoever that made us curse each other,” he wrote, describing the extended Trebek family as close-knit and happy. It’s an unusual dynamic for a first marriage that ended in divorce, and it says as much about Elaine’s character as it does about Alex’s.
Building a Business: ScentSeal
After her divorce from Alex, Elaine didn’t retreat from public life or professional ambition — she built a business. She founded ScentSeal, a company built around packaging perfume fragrance samples, the kind of scented strips found in magazines and retail displays. It was a practical, product-driven business rooted in manufacturing and packaging rather than broadcasting, a notable shift from her earlier career in front of a camera.
ScentSeal expanded over time to include a solid polymer system used for food and beverage products, broadening the company’s applications beyond the fragrance industry it started in. The business proved successful enough that it was acquired by Arcade in 1995, giving Elaine a defined exit from a company she had built from the ground up. For someone who started her adult working life as a talk-show host and, before that, in front of Playboy Club audiences, building and selling a manufacturing-adjacent company represented a genuine reinvention — proof that her career wasn’t a single arc defined by television, but a series of distinct chapters.
A Life in the Arts
Beyond ScentSeal, Elaine has also been connected to the art world, associated with Gallery GO, an art gallery in Los Angeles. Her path from broadcasting to product packaging to fine art might look scattered on paper, but it reflects a consistent thread: a willingness to move into new industries rather than settle into a single identity. Where many people who brush against celebrity — even briefly, even decades ago — spend the rest of their lives being defined by that connection, Elaine kept building new professional chapters that had nothing to do with Alex Trebek at all.
Marrying Peter Kares
In 2001, Elaine married for a third time, to film producer Peter Kares. This marriage is the one that gave her the surname most people now search for — Elaine Trebek Kares, a combination that nods to both a decades-old first marriage’s public association and a current, lasting one. Unlike her earlier marriages, this one appears to have been genuinely collaborative from a business standpoint: Peter is reported to have helped start several of Elaine’s companies with her, suggesting a partnership that extended well beyond the personal into shared professional ventures.
The Kares marriage has, by public accounts, lasted far longer than either of Elaine’s previous two, and the couple has been based in Los Angeles. It’s the version of her life that gets the least media attention, mostly because it involves the fewest headlines — no talk-show controversies, no regulatory reprimands, no divorce settlements discussed in a celebrity’s memoir. It seems, from the outside, to be the quiet and stable chapter that followed a much louder first half of adult life.
The Family Alex Trebek Described
One of the more unusual aspects of Elaine’s story is how much of it comes not from tabloid coverage but from Alex Trebek’s own memoir, written and published shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer in November 2020. Trebek didn’t have to mention Elaine at all in a book largely aimed at reflecting on his career and his battle with illness, but he chose to describe her, their marriage, their divorce, and their continued closeness in warm and specific terms. That choice matters. It means the public record on Elaine isn’t limited to secondhand tabloid summaries — it includes direct testimony from the person who knew her best during a formative decade of her adult life, describing her not as an ex-wife to be glossed over but as a genuine, ongoing part of his extended family.
When Alex died in November 2020, he was survived by Jean, his wife of 30 years, their children Matthew and Emily, and Nicky Trebek — Elaine’s daughter, whom he had adopted decades earlier and continued to consider his own. Elaine’s presence in that story, even after nearly forty years of divorce, speaks to a rare kind of post-marital relationship: one built on mutual respect rather than lingering resentment.
Why Elaine’s Story Resists the “Ex-Wife” Label
It would be easy to write Elaine Trebek Kares off as a minor character in someone else’s biography, a name that only shows up in searches because of who she married more than fifty years ago. But that framing undersells a life that included a provocative Canadian talk show, a regulatory dust-up over a controversial interview, a manufacturing business built from scratch and sold for a profit, an ongoing connection to the arts, and three marriages spanning three very different chapters of adult life. Very few people connected to a famous spouse manage to build an independent identity with that much range, and fewer still manage to do it while maintaining a warm relationship with the family that spouse went on to build with someone else.
Her story also offers a useful reminder about how public memory tends to flatten people who intersect, even briefly, with fame. Elaine Trebek Kares has spent decades being introduced primarily in relation to Alex Trebek, when the more accurate framing is that Alex Trebek was one significant relationship in a life that started well before him and kept evolving long after their divorce. She was a broadcaster before she met him, a businesswoman after she left him, and by every available account, someone he considered close family right up until his death.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Elaine Trebek Kares? Elaine Trebek Kares is an American businesswoman and former broadcaster, best known publicly as the first wife of longtime Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. Before and after that marriage, she built a career that included Canadian television hosting, a manufacturing business, and later, work connected to the arts.
When were Elaine and Alex Trebek married, and when did they divorce? They married on September 25, 1974, and divorced in 1981, several years before Alex began hosting Jeopardy! in 1984.
Did Elaine and Alex Trebek have children together? No. Elaine had a daughter, Nicky, from her first marriage to Louis Callei. Alex adopted Nicky during his marriage to Elaine and continued to raise her as his own daughter even after their divorce.
Was Elaine Trebek Kares married before Alex Trebek? Yes. Her first marriage was to Louis Callei in 1963. That marriage lasted roughly a decade and ended around the time she and Alex married.
Who is Elaine Trebek Kares married to now? She has been married to film producer Peter Kares since 2001. The two are reported to have started several businesses together, and the marriage has lasted considerably longer than either of her two previous ones.
What did Elaine Trebek Kares do for a living? Her career has spanned several distinct phases: broadcasting in Canada, including hosting the talk show Call Callei; entrepreneurship, most notably founding ScentSeal, a fragrance-sample packaging company later acquired by Arcade in 1995; and later involvement in the art world through an association with a Los Angeles gallery.
Did Elaine Trebek Kares stay close with Alex Trebek after their divorce? By Alex’s own account in his memoir, yes. He described their divorce as amicable and said the two remained close, with Elaine giving his and Jean’s children summer jobs and the extended family gathering together regularly over the years.
Was Elaine really a Playboy Bunny? Yes. In the 1960s, before her broadcasting career, she worked as a Playboy Bunny under the pseudonym “Teddy Howard.”
What happened with her 1972 interview that caused controversy? While hosting Call Callei on CHCH-TV, Elaine interviewed Xaviera Hollander, the author known for her memoir about working as a madam in New York. The interview’s content led to a formal reprimand from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in early 1973.
Is Elaine Trebek Kares still alive? Public reporting from recent years indicates she has continued to live in Los Angeles with her husband, Peter Kares.
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