The corporate gadfly who shamed CEOs

Evelyn Y. Davis was the last person chief executives wanted to see at their annual shareholder meetings. As the self-proclaimed queen of the corporate jungle, the shareholder activist spent more than five decades hounding American companies for lower executive pay and greater transparency and accountability. Davis, who owned stock in more than 80 public companies, would travel to dozens of shareholder meetings a year, upending the stuffy proceedings with her antics. At a General Motors meeting in 1970, she stripped down to a bathing suit to get the board’s attention. The next year, she showed up at a Xerox meeting in hot pants and wore an ammunition bandolier at a 20th Century Fox Film event. In 1974, she jokingly nominated baseball star Hank Aaron for the board of United Aircraft. She told Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca he needed to lose weight. She’d do anything, she said, to get executives to pay attention to Main Street shareholders. “Institutional investors get treated like royalty,” Davis said. “Individual investors like peasants.” Born in Amsterdam, Davis “grew up in a home outfitted with 12 rooms, two maids, and one French governess,” said The Washington Post. But the family had Jewish roots, making them a target when the Nazis invaded during World War II. While her father, a prominent neurologist, was away lecturing in the U.S., Davis and several members of her family were imprisoned in concentration camps. After the war, her parents divorced and Davis went to live with her father in Maryland, said The New York Times. When he died in 1956, she began to invest her inheritance in corporations, also earning money from her annual newsletter, Highlights and Lowlights of Annual Meetings, for which she charged $600 a copy. Some executives subscribed hoping that if they did, “she would agree not to show up at the next year’s meetings.” “Though known as a gadfly, Davis spent decades pressing serious governance issues,” said Bloomberg.com. Her most successful campaign was getting General Motors to ban “greenmail”—inflated payments—in 1990 after GM paid H. Ross Perot $743 million for his stock, about twice the market value, in a deal to get him off the company’s board. Although Davis dropped the costumes as she aged, she never lost her flair for showmanship, trading barbs with Warren Buffett, calling Frank Blake of Home Depot “a phony,” and issuing press releases to announce her divorces (she had four). “Power is greater than love, and I did not get where I am by standing in line,” her tombstone reads. “Nor by being shy.”