Music Mogul - Clive Davis Comes Out of the Closet

Music Mogul Clive Davis has officially come out of the closet in his new memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life.

Clive Davis’ new memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life, is full of inside stories from throughout his famed career. But the biggest revelation is a personal one: For the first time, the 80-year-old record executive discusses his “bisexual life.”

Davis, who has been married and divorced twice, has never before publically addressed his sexuality. In a candid five-page section toward the end of the book, due in stores today, he writes that he first had a sexual encounter with a man during “the era of Studio 54.” “On this night, after imbibing enough alcohol, I was open to responding to his sexual overtures,” writes Davis, who says he had only been with women before. Being with a man, he writes, provided “welcome relief.”

After a period of “soul searching and self-analysis,” Davis separated from his second wife in 1985, and says that he went on to have simultaneous relationships with two women and a man. In 1990, he entered into a “monogamous relationship” with a male doctor, who is not named in the book. Although that relationship ended in 2004, Davis says he has been in a subsequent relationship with another man ever since. Davis writes that his coming out deeply affected his ties with one of his sons, Mitchell: After what Davis calls “one very trying year,” father and son worked out their differences, Davis says.

The bulk of Davis’ book – an overdue sequel to his now out-of-print 1975 memoir Clive: Inside the Record Business – is devoted to his interactions with a wide range of artists over nearly five decades. He recounts his early years with Columbia Records, some of which had been detailed in the previous book. In one particularly memorable scene, Davis attempts to talk Bob Dylan out of naming his new album Nashville Skyline (“It was not in any literal sense a country album”). He also relates how he told Bruce Springsteen‘s manager at the time, Mike Appel, that 1973′s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., needed a few more radio-friendly songs – which resulted in Springsteen adding “Blinded by the Light” and “Spirit in the Night” to the finished record.