Evelyn Davis’ tombstone reads “1929-forever” but this week she died.
Everyone, including the NYT, wrote an obituary, but since she was not male or a porn star or a Pokemon character or a road, her presence on Wikipedia is about what you might expect, although it’s hard to image how Wikipedia could possibly do justice to her character.
Davis was well known for trolling stockholder meetings and giving speeches dressed in various costumes calculated to make a point. She was able to gain access to White House press briefings because she was the publisher of “Highlights and Lowlights of Annual Meetings”, a newsletter costing $600 a copy, with a minimum purchase of two copies, that she arm-twisted executives into buying.
I have not been able to find any copies of “Highlights and Lowlights” online, but the internet archive has a copy of her 1975 testimony (p. 257) at a hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Improvements in Judicial Machinery of the Committee on the Judiciary. At the end of her statement she says, “Does anybody else have questions? I would like to answer questions. Are you afraid of me ?” Might this be the source of her third husband? “Her third marriage, to a retired economist she met at a Senate Banking Committee hearing,…”
This humble blog might be the most interesting, it has photos of all her tombstones, the names of all her ex-husbands, and the concentration camps her family stayed at during the war.
Her pranks were endless. She once nominated Ralph Nader, the author of the Corvair takedown Unsafe at any Speed, to be a director on the board of General Motors. But when she bought a car, it was a Jaguar, hand delivered to her residence at the Watergate Hotel by executive Bill Ford.
She appeared at meetings dressed in hot pants and once in a bandolier of bullets.
Ronald Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes used to seat her at the rear of White House press conferences behind some potted plants, but Reagan would end up calling on her anyhow.
No doubt more stories will emerge.
While most of the obits are carefully neutral in tone, you can find other stuff on the internet that portrays her as abusive.
“Davis’s tirades at the microphone can veer off on wild tangents about anything from her health woes to the physical attractiveness of corporate directors, and she often becomes abusive. ‘She can be amusing, but the dark side of her is when she says something hurtful, like ‘You’re no threat to me—you’re too fat,’” Steve Norman says. ‘She will wheel around and attack another stockholder as a ‘spiteful old drooler.’”
In 2002, former Eli Lilly CEO Randall Tobias said, “Her most lethal weapon is the fact that she does not care what anyone else thinks of her, and so she’s prepared to be rude, to interrupt, to be domineering, and to do essentially whatever it takes to command attention.”
She might have fit right in at Wikipedia.
Her voice is often described as having a “thick Dutch accent.” The only video I can find of her is from 2011, which seems to be the last year her newsletter was active. She would have been 82 in this clip.
Gender Desk 