Ralph Davidson, former Time Inc. chairman, dies at 86

Ralph Davidson, a media executive who carved a path to the top of Time Inc., the New York publisher of magazines including Time and Life, and who later brought his business experience to the arts during a brief tenure as chairman of the Kennedy Center in Washington, died Aug. 1 at his home in Washington. He was 86.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his wife, Lou Davidson.

Once described for his rugged confidence as a "nonsmoking Marlboro man," Davidson got his first position at Time Inc. in 1954 -- as an advertising salesman for Life -- by cold-calling the personnel department and asking for a job. He rose through the company ranks, becoming publisher of Time magazine in 1972 and chairman of Time Inc. in 1980.

Davidson was the company's chairman of the executive committee before assuming his post at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1988. He succeeded Roger Stevens, the real estate investor and theatrical producer who was appointed by President John Kennedy in 1961 to lead the creation of a national cultural center in Washington, and who had been the only chairman to lead the Kennedy Center since it opened on the Potomac River in 1971.

Davidson had served on the board of the New York City Ballet and as chairman of the Business Committee for the Arts, and he had done fundraising for the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. But seemingly from the outset, he encountered the impression that he lacked the artistic background needed to run a high-profile cultural institution.

"When I took this job, I made it perfectly clear right at the outset that I was not a theatrical entrepreneur, impresario, whatever the word is," Davidson told The Washington Post in 1988. "I said, 'If you're looking for someone with a theatrical background, then you're talking to the wrong person. But if you will take me on the rest of my track record, then you're talking to the right person and we'll go from there.' "

Ralph Parsons Davidson was born Aug. 17, 1927, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After the death of his father, an engineer, he grew up with his mother and stepfather in Los Angeles.

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Davidson served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II and received a bachelor's degree in international affairs from Stanford University in 1950. He later spent time traveling in Europe, eventually finding employment with the CIA in North Africa, he told The New York Times.

Davidson said that when he called Time Inc. in search of work, he piqued his interviewer's interest with recollections of his postwar, post-college Jeep trip across Europe and beyond. ". . . So you never know what it is about you that's going to intrigue somebody."