I have just discovered this website. Wonderful pictures of Teo & friends and Nena and Diana.

Teo was a waste of space worthy of an entire book. Suffice a few words from me. I have no axe to grind. We had a lot of fun. I never expected my $600 back (!!) or the thousands more in kind. His magnetism was extraordinary, I have never known the like before or since. And it was hugely effective on both sexes. He could manipulate the most gorgeous, adorable, intelligent woman into his bed. And he could persuade a man to contribute at least a piece of whatever he needed, usually money but maybe a house or a job or an entré. He was simply brilliant at it. As prepared as you were to say no! before meeting, he almost never left with nothing.

Teo was great entertainment and he read a lot so there was usually some meat to the fun. He could effortlessly host a dinner table in LA, NY, London or Torremolinos - and whoever picked up the tab went home, usually with one of Teo's girls, having loved the evening.

You could say that Teo gave as good as he got. Harmless really, unless he got invloved with your sister. And he married mine.

Teo and Diana were 7 and 6 when we all met in Curhiana the summer of 1958. I was a year older. Nena, Teo's sister,
was Diana's age. Our mother was 33, tall, blond, fun, beautiful. American from Cincinnati, she had separated from our father and rented a pretty house with a pool across the street from the Davises. It was a perfect scenario. We kids could play all summer while Teo & Nena's parents did their grown up entertaining with the addition of a fabulous single woman.

it was all so successful that our relationships became fixed. When Judy married an Englishman the following year, we kids were sent to schools in Hampshire, Teo & Nena joining us. Teo attended West Downs, a first class Winchester prep school, then Eton. Nena and Diana found their way to Heathfield. Teo was the fox in the chicken coop. Think "Passionflower Hotel". Through Nena and Diana, Teo was omnipresent, meeting all the girls he fancied and ably handling every challenge they presented. some came to Spain. Diana, Eva, others. Teenage fun. Teo had name cards printed which he handed out to pretty girls on the beach: "Teo Davis Productions - London, Paris, Torremllinos" Paris because it was the city of his birth.

Summers were spent back at La Consula where his parents entertained a social/literary/glamour A-List that included Swifty Lazar, Harry Kernitz, Ted Basset, AE Hotchner, Kenneth Wagg, and their close friends Jeannie Belville, Judy, Robert Throgmorton...Bill appeared at the pool every day around 1PM, when Ted got back from golf, to kick off the backgammon with Philip Martin, huge jug in hand brimming with Bull Shot, three inches of black pepper swirling in vodka and beef consomé.

A glorious fish lunch with wonderful conversation was followed by a restorative siesta before we all scrambled to the bullfights in Malaga. This was the mid-sixties, the last days of Ordinez, El Cordobes bursting on the scene.

After the corrida we sometimes gathered for drinks on the roof of a Malaga hotel where that day's esteemed toreador might be persuaded by us kids to remove his shirt so we could marvel at his chest wounds while someone inestimably glamorous like Mel Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn's husband, conversed with the adults.

Back at La Consula, two hours of bridge, gin rummy and backgammon kept us ticking over before dinner at 10PM on the upstairs terrace listening to Swifty's wild Sinatra stories. Annie always had everything beautifully organised. Bill was the perfect host, a great listener, intervening rarely but with effect. The two of them presented a perfect stage for their friends, Teo, Nena and the young enjoying our intimacy with fame.

This was Teo's adolescent world.

I don't know when his relationship with Diana got serious. For many years it seemed to glide between friendship and romance. But while others came and went, Diana was in his soul as he occupied hers.

After Eton ("College" - which fooled Americans) Teo tried to join me and our friends the late Julian Hope (subsequently a hugely successful director of the Welsh Opera Company), Tom Sackville (later successful in politics as MP for Bolton West) and others from Eton to Oxford. Although he was clever he did not apply himself and it didn't happen.

So age 20 Teo went to America, finding a job at the Houston Chronicle. This was a relatively short stop on the way to LA where he persued Hollywood glory on and off the production set at Warner Bros. I spent 3 months with him in late 1979, sometimes sharing the house Diana rented from Kenneth Tynan, another La Consula habitué.

We had fun but nothing led anywhere and I had no business being there as his destructiveness had not long before killed his marriage to Diana, practically destroying Diana too. Teo's film career was in quicksand and he found ways to survive financially that were not conventional or particularly attractive. He had a wide young group of friends and hosted dinner parties at famous LA restaurants paid for by whoever had money. They were fun and I didn't particularly care as whoever paid he generally made sure went home with one of his attractive girlfriends.

I remember in particular a road trip to Las Vegas where he pulled up in the desert, freaking that he had left his coke drying in the oven of his unlocked apartment. After a hasty phone call we headed on to the Chicken Ranch.

He found a small apartment for me in Beverly Hills where he had his own plans for entertaining. One night he persuaded a famously beautiful English actress to come for dinner to discuss breast insurance. Another evening he enjoyed a coke-fest with 2 sisters after the opening of Apocalypse Now.

I left LA for New York which I understood better. Teo reappeared occasionally, finding his way back to Xanadu, the house in Amagansett which I rented to George & Freddie Plimpton in the '70's. Teo beat George handily at Scrabble. George liked him and instinctively understood Teo's life and his qualities, his virtual fame.

I saw Teo little if at all from around 1985 onwards.

Teo was the most frustrating, alluring, self-destructive, multi-faceted, damaging personality I have ever known, very personally influential because omnipresent during our formative years eventually, briefly becoming a bother-in-law. I would describe him physically as Rasputin-like with his dark eyes, jet black hair and widows peak. He had great intensity, great humour and genuine interest in a wide range of literature. But he also had a weapon which he used very effectively but which in the end was at the core of his destructiveness: he could spot in an instant a person's weakness and use it to his advantage. You could see him doing it to others and feel it as he did it to you. He used it without mercy or shame and I think his awareness that he was both willing and able to use it on the people closest to him led to his own premature destruction. His essentially good heart was destroyed by the devil he let in, leading to the addictions and alienations that ultimately finished him.

Please forgive my errors and brevity. I write this some 30 years on. I have no ill feeling. Just memories, distant but alive. I am pounding it out in rough as the sun sets by a pool at beautiful finca of a friend in Mallorca.