Teo Davis

Teo Davis
Teo Davis and Ernest Hemingway at La Cónsula, 1959
Born	Timothy Logan Bakewell Davis (1951-04-18)April 18, 1951 Paris, France
Died	March 1, 2016(2016-03-01) (aged 64)
Occupation	Writer
Education	West Downs School Eton College (1970)
Period	1973–2016
Spouse	Diana Radway
Children	0

Timothy Logan Bakewell Davis (born April 18, 1951) was an American writer who worked in Hollywood from the mid-1970s until his death March 1, 2016, in Los Angeles, California. He was perhaps best known for having been the son of wealthy American expatriates in Spain who lavishly entertained celebrities and the literati, including Ernest Hemingway in a famous 1959 visit when the celebrated author struggled for sanity and survival as he was about to turn 60 and headed toward self-destruction.

Early life and education

The elder of two children, Teo Davis was born in Paris. His father, William Nathan Davis, of London and Madrid, was “a wealthy patron of the arts from Indianapolis and a graduate of Yale (1929)," according to a Hemingway signed letter to Davis dated March 31, 1942 and listed in a December 2013 Christie’s auction. His mother, Anne Bakewell Davis of Baltimore, was a distant descendant of John James Audubon, the French-born ornithologist, naturalist, and painter.

Davis grew up on the family's historic villa filled with Jackson Pollock paintings called La Cónsula in Málaga, the birthplace of artist Pablo Picasso on the coast of southern Spain. His younger sister Nena and he lived in a world of famous adults whom their parents often entertained, among them Noel Coward; Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh; the powerful English theater critic Kenneth Tynan and his wife, the writer Elaine Dundy; and Orson Welles. In 1959, the guests included Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway who would make La Cónsula their home for the summer. There was also a Hemingway posse of matadors, aficionados, pretty young women, and anyone the author invited along.

The Nobel laureate, who earlier in the 1950s had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Nobel Prize in Literature, was in Spain to write a series of articles for LIFE magazine about that summer's mano-a-mano bullfighting duel between the world’s two leading matadors at the time, Antonio Ordóñez and his brother-in-law Luis Miguel Dominguín. During that summer, eight-year-old Teo befriended the famed author staying at his home. The story of their friendship and of Davis' own tragic self-destructiveness in life was later told in the book Looking for Hemingway; Spain, The Bullfights and a Final Rite of Passage (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Praising the book as one of the best of 2016, Boston's NPR news station WBUR said Looking for Hemingway is "filled with famous cameos and the ghost of the Davis’ son, Teo, who haunts its pages." Did some of the demons bewildering the aging Hemingway take possession of the impressionable Davis child? As Davis' former brother-in-law Jay Radway of London was to say of him:

Teo was the most frustrating, alluring, self-destructive, multi-faceted, damaging personality I have ever known, very personally influential because omnipresent during our formative years eventually, briefly becoming a brother-in-law. I would describe him physically as Rasputin-like with his dark eyes, jet black hair and widows peak. He had great intensity, great humour and genuine interest in a wide range of literature. But he also had a weapon which he used very effectively but which in the end was at the core of his destructiveness: he could spot in an instant a person's weakness and use it to his advantage. You could see him doing it to others and feel it as he did it to you. He used it without mercy or shame, and I think his awareness that he was both willing and able to use it on the people closest to him led to his own premature destruction. His essentially good heart was destroyed by the devil he let in, leading to the addictions and alienations that ultimately finished him.

Among Teo Davis's childhood friends in the Churriana district of Málaga was the Tynan's daughter, Tracy Tynan, who years later would renew the friendship in Hollywood where she became a costume designer and writer. But in the 1950s, Tynan's mother Elaine Dundy worried about the seclusion of Teo and Nena Davis at La Consula. Dundy wrote in her memoir Life Itself!: An Autobiography:

"There were two semi-hidden little Davis children, a boy, Teo, and a girl, Nena, who lived on the other side of the villa in a nursery where the doorknobs were placed too high for them to open the door leading out."

When he was thirteen, Teo Davis left Spain to attend West Downs School in Winchester, Hampshire, and then Eton College in Windsor, England, from which he graduated in 1970. Then came a major disappointment in the 18-year-old's life: he failed to gain acceptance into the University of Oxford when other friends were admitted. Instead, Davis soon headed to America.

Career

In 1973, at the age of 21, Davis arrived in Texas, where he soon took a position as a general assignments reporter for the state's largest newspaper, the Houston Chronicle. Davis had no reporting experience nor could he even type, but he had an important Texas connection who arranged the job: Barefoot Sanders, former counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The following year he moved to California, where he became a partner in a small film‐production company and soon caught the attention of Hollywood director Walter Hill at a Hollywood Hills party hosted by Tracy Tynan. Hill:

I was very surprised how well he knew my films. Usually I don’t like to talk about a detailed analysis of my films, but he actually had a rather fresh approach. And if you know Teo, he’s a very engaging fellow, and so we got to be friendly, and I encouraged him to become a screenwriter.

But the screenwriting promise that Davis showed in flashes failed to materialize. He never had a screenplay produced, and his only professional credit in the industry was as an "additional photographer" in the 1977 British film Long Shot.

It was not a lack of talent that kept Davis from success as author Tony Castro, who knew Davis for over 30 years, wrote in Looking for Hemingway:

Teo maintained his rare ability to engage writers, directors, and producers who were always willing to take meetings with him because he could spin a pitch on his feet, the first step toward a deal. Invariably, however, he usually failed to deliver on any promise to develop the story for subsequent meetings. Those who didn’t know about Teo’s drug problems wrote off his mood swings of going from thoughtful brilliance to utter forgetfulness to something else, possibly symptomatic bipolar disorder. And he was often forgiven. That Teo even got so far as to pitch projects to established producers and directors spoke for what some friends thought was nothing less than sheer genius. Rod Hewitt, for one, had read Teo’s screenplay West Coast Slide, a modern L.A. crime story, and hailed it as "the best gangster screenplay ever written— and I’ve read them all." One of Teo’s first acquaintances in Hollywood had been longtime agent Michael Hamilburg of the Mitchell Hamilburg literary agency, who knew about the Davis family connection to Hemingway but found it difficult to believe Teo had a serious drug problem. Convinced the idea had merit, Hamilburg tried on and off for more than two decades to get Teo to write an account of Hemingway’s stay at La Consula. "I’m afraid it’s a book that Teo will wind up carrying to his grave,” Hamilburg finally conceded as he wound down his business in 2015.

Addiction

Davis's addiction to cocaine, heroin, crystal meth and other drugs became apparent to his friends in the mid-1980s and worsened over the years. There were several arrests for possession that friends and family helped him reduce in the California criminal justice system to alternative drug diversion counseling and rehabilitation programs. In one instance, he so charmed and impressed a drug center's professionals that they made him a resident counselor, even as he was a long way from ridding himself of his own addiction. Even as his agent tried getting Davis to focus on a book about his childhood with an aging Hemingway, Davis insisted on trying to write a memoir about his own life of decadence in Hollywood, tentatively titling the project Hollywood, Heroin, and Hookers. Castro:

The problem, I came to understand, was Hemingway. Outsiders saw Hemingway as a high point in Teo's life, an experience most people wished had been their own. Teo saw Hemingway as a symbol of how small and inconsequential his own life had been in the eyes of his parents.

“Did I ever make peace with my father? No, I don’t think that would have ever been possible,” he told me once while we were talking about fathers and sons. “My father wasn’t someone who would have ever acknowledged that there was something not perfect in his life. So, no, making peace with him wasn’t something that would have happened.” In Los Angeles, Teo was also too busy having a good time and helping his acquaintances and friends out of addiction or out of an impasse in their screenplays. Numerous writers privately credited Teo for breakthroughs in their scripts or in their careers, some offering him payments of thousands of dollars, which he always refused to accept. If they insisted, Teo invariably ended up using it for drugs.

“He blew one windfall after another,” said Hewitt. “His inheritance from his family? He blew it. Another inheritance? He blew that, too. An insurance settlement? He blew that as well. A million dollars inheritance, two million, whatever it was, or a hundred and sixty thousand dollar settlement. He blew all of it. There was just something inside him that drove him to fail on some level.”

Later years

Teo Davis died March 1, 2016. "Teo had been in frail health due to a destructive lifestyle that led to a failing heart, and diabetes," Nena Davis wrote in an online memorial she set up to remember her brother. "Despite the river of darkness that ran through his life, he was an extraordinary person, much loved, with many friends. May he always be remembered by his friends and family."

Davis' longtime friend Tracy Tynan wrote: "Throughout his life he struggled with substance abuse, but for the last two years he had been sober. Sadly, his addictions had left him with a myriad of health problems and on March 1, his heart gave out. He was a funny, smart, infuriating, unique guy. He will be greatly missed. As his friend, [Walter Hill], put it, ‘I am a better person for having known him."

Personal life

Teo Davis married Diana Radway, daughter of the Marchioness of Linlithgow of London and the late John S. Radway of New York, in January 1980 in Chelsea, London.Diana Radway was a graduate of Columbia University. Their engagement was announced in The New York Times. They divorced in 1981.