Clive Davis was 94 years old and still showing up. His pre-Grammy party at the Beverly Hilton was just a few months ago. Barack Obama sent a video message. Mr. Davis was in his Manhattan office up to the very end — his passion for music and the artists who make it never wavered, according to one of my dearest friends who served as his right-hand assistant until his death.
Davis died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He is survived by his four children.
His family put out a statement. Cause of death described as age-related illness. He’d been in the hospital in late May with a respiratory infection, went home June 4, and a rep said he was doing fine.
Those closest to Davis knew better. A source with direct knowledge of his final weeks told WEHOonline that Davis had continued coming into the office as recently as the last several weeks of his life — showing up as often as he could, which for most of his career meant almost always. He would go out to dinner most evenings, host brunches and lunches and attend shows. However, towards the end, he was spending less time going out and more time at home. The latest respiratory infection hit hard. To those around him, he was never Clive. He was Mr. Davis. And Mr. Davis had his finger on the pulse of music and pop culture literally to the day he died. But those who knew him best could see time was running short.
There was never any question, among those who knew him, about the life he’d lived. I had the privilege to attend his legendary pre-Grammy parties. There’s nothing else like it in the entertainment industry — the center of the universe for one night every February, the kind of room where you understood immediately why the name Clive Davis meant what it meant.
What Davis did for fifty-plus years was find artists before anyone else knew they mattered and then make them matter. Whitney Houston was a teenager singing in a New Jersey nightclub when he signed her to Arista. He stayed involved in her career until she drowned in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub in 2012. They’d talked on the phone two days before she died.
The list of artists Davis worked with is almost impossible to compress. Janis Joplin, whom he first saw perform at Monterey Pop in 1967. Carlos Santana. Bruce Springsteen. Aerosmith. Billy Joel, who was going nowhere until Davis signed him in 1973 and “Piano Man” changed everything. Aretha Franklin. Alicia Keys. Kelly Clarkson. He co-founded Bad Boy Records with Sean Combs. He signed Pink Floyd. The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir changed the lyrics of “Jack Straw” in concert to reference him. That’s the kind of footprint he left.
Davis came out as bisexual in 2013, in his memoir “The Soundtrack of My Life.” He was 80.
He wrote about relationships with men after two marriages to women, describing his first same-sex encounter as happening during the Studio 54 era. He said it wasn’t repression that kept him quiet for decades — it was the cultural attitude toward bisexuality itself. “There was an attitude, pervasive, that you were either gay, you’re straight or you’re lying,” he said at the time. “It’s not true.”
He pushed back on the idea that bisexuality wasn’t real. “You don’t have to be only one thing or another,” he said. “For me, it’s the person.”
Equality Forum named him one of its 31 Icons of LGBT History Month in 2015.
I’ve worked in this industry for a long time. I’ve met some remarkable people, had the privilege of calling some of them friends. But in a town filled with legends and icons, Mr. Davis stood head and shoulders above the rest.
Right after I got the news I asked Siri to play something Mr. Davis had a hand in bringing to the world, the first song that came up was “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” It seemed and sounded exactly right.
Thank you, Mr. Davis. Thank you for all of it, and for watching over our girl.
