Edna Lillich Davidson; Led Literary Salons in L.A. for 4 Decades

Edna Lillich Davidson, the seemingly ageless grande dame of literary salons in Los Angeles for more than 40 years, has died.

Eloquent and elegant, Davidson came from an era when ladies believed that if you told someone your age you would tell them anything. She would gently deflect impertinent questions trying to pin down her birth date, and after her death her friends did the same. She was believed to be in her 90s.

Davidson died April 14 at a nursing home in Los Angeles, according to her estate’s conservator, Paul Dreher.

From 1955 to 1997, Davidson brought together a group of about 100 women and occasionally a few men for monthly salons at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Each event featured several authors and, just as important, a lunch served with proper linen and an attention to service, perhaps ending with a nice baked Alaska.

But that does not begin to describe the full experience of an Edna Lillich Davidson salon, for she was at heart an entertainer. She swept into her events in Loretta Young style, always in a long gown, and she would deliver her book reviews with a dramatic flair and musical accompaniment. Her programs would always include her singing a Broadway tune, or a song by Schubert or Wagner. No one went away bored.

Doug Dutton, whose Dutton’s Bookstore in Brentwood for many years sold the books by featured authors at the salons, said this week that the first time he saw Davidson come on stage in a diaphanous gown, “She floated out, and welcomed, with a kind of warmth nobody has anymore, people to the group, and then she broke into a song rendition of all of the parts of ‘My Fair Lady.’ ”

Dutton said Davidson would introduce authors with “extraordinary grace and good taste and sweetness” but also insist that they keep to a 12-minute time schedule.

“But I think she always let Ray Bradbury go over,” Dutton said.

Bradbury, reached at his home, chuckled at that story, acknowledging its truth.

“She was her own special person,” he said. “She put together a very wonderful group of people to lecture and people to come to the lectures.”

Bradbury said Davidson reminded him of a Helen Hokinson cartoon, referring to the New Yorker magazine cartoonist who specialized in club women, theatergoers and other polite and amusing upper-middle-class denizens.

“She was in many ways the arch club woman of all time,” Bradbury said, meaning it in the kindest way.

Working with Davidson side by side was pianist Bob Mitchell.

Mitchell told The Times that Davidson, in her always-perfect diction, would introduce him as “Robert Mitchell, the concert pee-AHN-ist.” He laughed at the memory.

“I never regarded myself as anything but a hack musician,” he said.

Toward the end of their 30 years together, Mitchell wrote a song for Davidson whose lyrics included:

She has a glamour and an eloquence.

A sense of humor and elegance

Oh, Edna, no rhyme for Edna.

She’s wunderbar and magnifique.

A native of Philadelphia whose doting parents enrolled her in a school of dramatic arts when she was 12, Davidson dreamed of a stage career. But, she told Times writer Beverly Beyette in 1984, her family was Baptist and “Baptists didn’t take kindly to theater.”

She turned to teaching dramatics instead, studying voice and drama in New York City for a year. After returning to Philadelphia, she did monologues for forums at Old St. Stephen’s Church and eventually began teaching at a finishing school.

“We had the Biddles, the DuPonts, the Dukes,” she told Beyette.

She also taught speech and dancing to some of the city’s poorest children.

Davidson yearned to do some performing of her own, and she and a friend traveled around the East Coast procuring bookings for her at hotels, where she did songs and monologues in costume. She later took the show around the United States.

While in California, she met and married attorney Clifford Davidson and left her career for a time.

However, others soon noticed her amazing elocution, and she began presenting plays and giving talks on poise at the Friday Morning Club, which met in what later became the Variety Arts Club on Figueroa. For many years, she put together the Christmas play at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, which she and her husband attended.

Davidson’s husband died in 1979. She had no other survivors.

When she returned to the work world, she at first helped set up study groups in people’s homes.

Then one day, Davidson thought: “I have the music. I have the drama training. I’ve always loved books. I’m going to put it all together.”

She approached several hotels, landing at the Beverly Hilton.

Her first salon attracted 35 women who socialized, talked about books for an hour and then were treated to a musical program by Davidson.

Through the years, hundreds of authors appeared at the salons, from Bradbury to Irving Stone, Louis L’Amour and Jo-Ann Mapson.

Davidson carefully selected books of style and taste -- never anything salacious.

“She did a huge amount for the book world in her own unique way,” said author Carolyn See.

Besides conducting more than 300 salons at the Beverly Hilton, Davidson organized groups throughout Southern California and also gave occasional events to benefit two scholarships given in her name, one at Mount St. Mary’s College and one to a journalism student at USC.

Beyette said this week that after her profile of Davidson was published in The Times in 1984, the two became friends.

“She was easy to make fun of, which always annoyed me because she was this wonderful anachronism who insisted on proper grammar and proper dress. It was really kind of sweet,” Beyette said.

Dreher, who met Davidson through his work as assistant caterer at the Beverly Hilton, also ended up Davidson’s close friend.

“I know it’s an old cliche, but it’s so true: If you looked up the word ‘lady,’ it would be her picture,” he said.