Evelyn Y. Davis Dies at 89

Evelyn Y. Davis, a bigger-than-life gadfly shareholder and fixture at Detroit’s Big Three carmaker annual meetings for decades, has died at 89.

Davis often pushed for greater accountability by companies and their directors. In 1990, for example, she cajoled General Motors into dropping the practice of buying back stock at above-market “greenmail” prices to get rid of unwanted investors.

But Davis also craved publicity and put self-promotion and outlandish stunts ahead of almost everything else. She appeared at dozens of annual meetings per year, sometimes in odd costumes (she wore a bathing suit to GM’s annual meeting in 1970).

Davis was a master at demanding to present something to an annual meeting’s presiding chairman, thereby creating a photo op for obliging news photographers. She was not shy about trying to attract the attention of business reporters.

She was particularly chummy with auto company CEOs, addressing them by their first names and demanding that they personally handle her vehicle issues and next car purchases. Ford Motor Co. Chairman Bill Ford, who once obliged by delivering her new Jaguar sedan, describes Davis as “a force of life that could not be ignored.”

She inherited a portfolio of stocks from her father in the mid-1950s, attending her first shareholder meeting nearly 60 years ago. Before long Davis had become the most flamboyant member of a trio of corporate gadflies that included Lewis D. Gilbert and Wilma Soss. The three bedeviled auto industry chairmen, and those in several other industries, for decades. She owned shares in at least 80 companies.

Davis published an oddball annual newsletter, Highlights and Lowlights of Annual Meetings, using it to finagle a White House press pass in the 1970s and 1980s. Divorced three times, she issued press releases about her fourth marriage—and the divorce that followed a year later.