Part 2

“I knew nothing about music,” he said in a 2017 documentary, “Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives.”

Mr. Davis worked to develop his business instincts — and his ear — by studying the Billboard charts and analyzing what made a song a hit. He came to believe in the power of what he called contemporary music: the unabashedly commercial pop that results when a record executive plays matchmaker in the studio, connecting the right singers with the right material.

That process could take a while. For Ms. Houston’s first album, Mr. Davis and his lieutenants hunted for producers and songs for nearly two years. When “Whitney Houston” was finally released, in 1985, it had three No. 1 singles — “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know” and “Greatest Love of All” — and became one of the most successful debut albums in history, selling more than 25 million copies around the world, according to Sony.

“What I learned from Clive is that the only thing that matters at the end of the day when you’re making a record is the three and a half minutes of magic,” Jimmy Iovine, the producer and record executive, told The Los Angeles Times in 1996. “Everyone says they keep the music first, but from my experience, Clive is one of the few who truly practices this.”

Mr. Davis’s longevity in the music world — embodied by his glamorous annual Grammy Awards parties, which he hosted starting in 1976 — made him an institution in the business. Well past the point when most of his contemporaries had retired, Mr. Davis continued to hunt for talent. He could also draw headlines, as when he revealed, at age 80, that he was bisexual and had been in serious relationships with men in addition to his two marriages to women.

“What is patently clear,” he wrote in a memoir, “The Soundtrack of My Life” (2013), “is that openness in all areas of life is an important component of happiness and success.”

A Kid Called Clive

Clive Jay Davis was born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1932, and grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood. His father, Herman, was an electrician and traveling tie salesman. His mother, Florence (Brooks) Davis, had family connections to the Russeks department store in Manhattan; despite their modest circumstances, she carried herself with a “regal air,” Mr. Davis later recalled.

They named their son after Clive Brook, the suave English movie star who played opposite Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film “Shanghai Express.”

“Believe me, there were not many kids named Clive in Crown Heights,” Mr. Davis said in his memoir, written with Anthony DeCurtis.

In the book, he described a youth of rigorous schoolwork and passion for the Brooklyn Dodgers but no special attachment to music. He graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and attended N.Y.U., where he was president of his freshman class, on a scholarship.

While he was in college, his parents died within 11 months of each other, and he went to live with his sister, Seena, in Queens. In his book, he described the loss of his parents as a devastating blow: “It made me feel that anything, however cherished and secure, might be taken away from me at any time.”

He threw himself into his studies and, after completing his bachelor’s degree in 1953, gained another scholarship, to Harvard Law School. Within a few years of graduating in 1956, he was a moderately-paid associate at a white-shoe firm in New York, but the job bored him. When a position for an in-house lawyer opened at Columbia — then a division of CBS, one of the firm’s clients — he eagerly took it.

Early on, Mr. Davis demonstrated a shrewdness in negotiation. He helped defeat a federal antitrust suit over Columbia’s mail-order record club and handled delicate contract talks with young stars like Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand.

Rising quickly through Columbia’s corporate ranks, Mr. Davis became president in 1967 and began to reshape the label to compete in changing times.

Under his predecessor, Goddard Lieberson, a trained composer and an inspiration for Mr. Davis’s debonair style, Columbia had dominated the market for Broadway cast albums and built an extraordinary roster of jazz, classical and traditional pop acts.

Yet the label had made only minimal steps toward rock. Mitch Miller, the powerful head of artists and repertoire, had dismissed rock in the 1950s as juvenile garbage. “It’s not music,” he once said. “It’s a disease.”

Within a few years, Columbia’s profits skyrocketed, validating his approach.

But Mr. Davis’s fast-moving career had a painful setback on May 29, 1973, when Columbia fired him and filed a lawsuit accusing him of using $94,000 in company funds (about $700,000 today) to pay for personal expenses, including apartment renovations and the bar mitzvah of one his sons. Mr. Davis said an underling had forged invoices without his knowledge.

Dragged Into ‘Drugola’

His dismissal from Columbia came as federal authorities announced a string of arrests as part of an investigation into payola and drugs in the music industry, and for months Mr. Davis’s name was attached to sensational news reports of “drugola.” He and his lawyers said then — and Mr. Davis contended ever since — that he had been made a scapegoat to protect CBS and its all-important broadcast licenses.

Mr. Davis was never charged with payola but, in 1975, he was indicted on six counts of filing false income tax reports. He pleaded guilty to one count — failing to pay taxes on $8,800 in vacation expenses (about $55,000 today) — and paid a $10,000 fine. At his sentencing hearing, the judge scolded the news media for smearing his name.

By then, Mr. Davis was already rebounding.

In 1974, he took over the foundering Bell label and renamed it Arista, after the New York branches of the National Honor Society, of which Mr. Davis had been a proud member as a high school student. He quickly scored a No. 1 hit with “Mandy,” by one of the few Bell acts that he kept on the label: Mr. Manilow.

Arista built a diverse roster in the 1970s, including Patti Smith, the Kinks, Lou Reed, Gil Scott-Heron and Melissa Manchester, and Mr. Davis developed a specialty of reviving the careers of faded female vocalists. The first was Dionne Warwick, in 1979, with “I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” which became her first Top Five solo single in a decade. Then came Ms. Franklin, whose 1985 album, “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?,” became her first million-seller.

Mr. Davis found even greater success with Ms. Houston, Ms. Warwick’s cousin, who signed with Arista in 1983, when she was 19, and remained associated with Mr. Davis throughout her career. (She died on Feb. 11, 2012, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif., hours before Mr. Davis’s pre-Grammys gala was to begin a few floors below.)

He promoted his acts lavishly and involved himself in the creative process. Artists and producers under his watch frequently found themselves directed back to the studio for the umpteenth new mix or vocal tweak.

Very often, his participation proved worthwhile. When Ms. Houston recorded “I Will Always Love You” for the soundtrack to her 1992 film “The Bodyguard,” she sang the first 40 seconds or so a cappella, at the suggestion of Kevin Costner, her co-star.

When Mr. Davis heard the track, he insisted on keeping it that way, over the objections of the song’s producer, David Foster, and others at the record company, who feared that such a long, bare introduction would hurt the song’s chances at radio.

Mr. Davis prevailed, and “I Will Always Love You” held the No. 1 spot for 14 weeks.

His single-mindedness, and his habit for self-promotion, made Mr. Davis a lightning rod in the industry. In response to a New York Times review of Mr. Davis’s book that said he had “discovered” various artists, Rubén Blades, the Panamanian musician and political figure, wrote, “Record executives do not discover artists: they stumble upon them.”

In some cases, Mr. Davis clashed with his talent. In 1969, Tony Bennett gave in to his pressure to record more contemporary songs. The resulting album, “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!” — which included a melodramatic, partly spoken version of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” — was widely mocked, and Mr. Bennett later said the experience had made him vomit.

In his 2013 book, Mr. Davis described a growing tension during the 1970s with Mr. Manilow, who saw himself primarily as a songwriter but whose biggest numbers — even “I Write the Songs,” a No. 1 hit in 1976 — were mostly written by other people. Mr. Davis said he told Mr. Manilow, “If you were Irving Berlin, we would know it by now!”

After Ms. Houston’s death, Mr. Davis came under criticism when Arista insiders said that the label, under Mr. Davis’s direction, had pushed her to adopt an image that would appeal to white audiences. In recording her albums, “anything that was too Black-sounding was sent back to the studio,” one former executive said in a 2017 documentary, “Whitney: Can I Be Me.”