At the end of 1999, as Arista was celebrating a record sales year, BMG executives tried to force Mr. Davis into retirement. Artists rallied loudly to his defense — “If Clive leaves, I leave,” Ms. Franklin told The Los Angeles Times — and a chastened BMG agreed to finance a new label, J, with $150 million. Mr. Davis would own 50 percent.
J got its name from Mr. Davis’s middle initial, which he shares with his three sons, Fred, Mitchell and Doug. They survive him, along with a daughter, Lauren Davis; eight grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and his partner, Greg Schriefer. Mr. Davis’s marriages to Helen Cohen and Janet Adelberg ended in divorce.
In 2000, Mr. Davis was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a nonperformer and, in his later years, he began to tend to his legacy. In 2002, he donated $5 million to endow the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, an undergraduate program at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts that prepares students for careers in the music industry; in 2011, he gave another $5 million, and the program was renamed the Clive Davis Institute.
His Grammy parties remained highlights of each awards season, attended by music stars and boldface names from business and politics. (Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, and Tim Cook, the former chief executive of Apple, were frequent guests.)
At the most recent party, on Jan. 31, Mr. Davis was introduced by a video message from former President Barack Obama, who said, “Most people don’t realize how much the music they love was shaped by one man.”
In 2017, just before the documentary about him was released, Mr. Davis, then 85, said in an interview with The New York Times that he was still hunting for hits for his artists.
“I still love it,” he said. “Whether it’s doing those albums, or doing my Grammy party every year, it’s a great feeling. I got into this totally by luck, and it’s just wonderfully fulfilling.”
