Shareholder activist, 82, gives it a rest

Evelyn Y. Davis is the world's most famous shareholder activist. She's also the most outspoken, the most outrageous, the most intelligent, the most confident, the most charming.

Just ask her.

"There's no other shareholder like me!" she declared in a recent interview.

For decades, Davis has been buying stock in big companies for the primary reason, it seems, of attending their annual meetings and turning them into her personal stage.

Simultaneously brash and flirty, she heckles chief executives, remarks on their handsomeness, yells at other shareholders and proclaims that she knows more than anyone else in the room.

So there was something missing this year when Davis didn't show up at any company's annual meeting. Not Bank of America. Not US Airways. Not Ford or Goldman Sachs or any of the dozens she usually attends.

Age has finally made her do what the most powerful CEOs in America couldn't: Give it a rest.

"I'm not so young anymore," said Davis, 82. And how were the meetings this year, without her? "It must have been awfully dull," she said.

The CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Macy's and Saks agreed that Davis brings entertainment value to shareholder meetings.

"Annual meetings are never boring when Evelyn Davis is on the scene," JPMorgan's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, said in a statement.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who has often found himself on the receiving end of a Davis tongue-lashing, presided over a calmer, quicker meeting this spring.

"Our annual meeting this year was shorter with less drama," Blankfein said in a statement. "Without Evelyn, it just wasn't the same."

Davis was especially cheeky in her younger days. Like at the General Motors meeting in 1970, where she showed up in a bathing suit to make sure she wouldn't get upstaged by Ralph Nader. (He didn't show.) In 1971, she wore hot pants to one.

Davis said she hopes to return to the meeting circuit next year. That is, if the earth doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012, as the Mayan calendar is said to have predicted. She's inclined to think it might happen.

"Oh well," said Davis. "There's no use to worrying about things you can't change."