| Teo Davis | |
| Birth Name: | Timothy Logan Bakewell Davis |
| Birth Date: | 18 April 1951 |
| Birth Place: | Paris, France |
| Occupation: | Writer |
| Spouse: | Diana Radway |
| Children: | 0 |
| Period: | 1973–2016 |
Timothy Logan Bakewell Davis (born April 18, 1951) was an American writer who worked in Hollywood from the mid-1970s until his death on March 1, 2016, in Los Angeles, California.[1]
Teo Davis was born in Paris. His father, William Nathan Davis was a Yale graduate and patron of the arts from Indianapolis.[2] His mother, Anne Bakewell Davis of Baltimore, was a distant descendant of John James Audubon, the French-born ornithologist, naturalist, and painter.[3] Davis had one sibling, a younger sister named Nena.
Davis grew up at the family villa, La Cónsula in Málaga, where his parents often entertained celebrities and the literati, including Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway.[4] [5]
In the summer of 1959, while Hemingway was in Spain to write a series of articles for LIFE magazine about a bullfighting duel between Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín, he developed a friendship with the eight-year-old Teo. The story of their friendship was later told in the book Looking for Hemingway; Spain, The Bullfights and a Final Rite of Passage (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). [6]
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.[7] At eighteen, he applied to the University of Oxford but was rejected.[8]
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 but the job was arranged for him by Barefoot Sanders, former counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson.[9] The following year he moved to California, where he became a partner in a small film‐production company. 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.[10]
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. He was arrested several times for possession and sought help through counseling and other rehabilitation programs.
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.[11] Diana Radway was a graduate of Columbia University. Their engagement was announced in The New York Times. They divorced in 1981.[12] Teo Davis died on March 1, 2016.