Death at Gila Bend

"Howdy from the middle of nowhere," say the souvenir postcards sold in Gila Bend, Ariz. The tiny town (pop. 1,700) is a truckers' and traveling salesmen's way station along Highway 80, which ribbons through the cactus-dotted desert between Tucson and Yuma. But Gila Bend is not the middle of nowhere any more. Last week reporters from both Europe and the U.S. poured into town, thronging the bar of the local Elks' Club and pressing into a dusty little courtroom decorated with a painting of Wild Bill Hickok being gunned down in a Deadwood saloon.

The attraction was a real-life melodrama not unlike the scripts that have been shot on location in the desert around Gila Bend. An inquest was being held into the death of the young business manager of English Actress Sarah Miles. The manager, David Whiting, was found dead in Miles' motel room a month ago during the shooting of MGM's western, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. Pills and bottles were scattered around his body, and bruises and a bloody cut were found on his head. Miles and her co-star Burt Reynolds had originally declined to testify at the inquest. But Whiting's mother, Mrs. Louise Campbell of Washington, D.C., obtained a court order requiring their testimony.

Raffish. Miles' appearance was a star turn. Alternately sobbing and indignant, she seemed to transfix the courtroom spectators and the seven-person jury. Justice of the Peace Mulford Winsor IV, a plumber when he is not sitting on the bench, was so unnerved that he had to start the oath twice.

In earlier statements to the press. Miles had sketched a raffish portrait of her off-camera relaxations. She liked to have a few drinks with the film crew, or with the local wranglers. Whiting's attitude toward all this, she had said, had been jealously possessive. Once he had grabbed her by the neck during an argument over her socializing, and she had thrown a vase at him.

On the night of Whiting's death, Miles testified, she went to dinner in nearby Ajo, with other members of the company. Bored with the party, Miles persuaded Actor Lee J. Cobb to leave with her. After some time at a tavern, she stopped at Reynolds' room, then returned to her own at 3 a.m. There Whiting came out from behind a clothes rack and "got ahold of me and began throwing me about the room," hitting her on the face and head. Her screams woke Janie Evans, the nanny for her five-year-old son Thomas, in the next room, and Evans called Reynolds.

"Christ Almighty, you're a mess!" Reynolds quoted himself as saying when he saw Miles' cut lip, bloody nose and the lump on her forehead. "If I was not as mature as I am now, I would lay him out," referring to Whiting. Instead, Reynolds testified, he took her to his own room, where she stayed the night. Late the next morning, when Miles returned to her room--to get her birth control pills, she said--she found Whiting curled up in the bathroom.

The county medical examiner testified that Whiting had died of an overdose of drugs, including methaqualone, Benadryl and a Librium-type drug. However, a pharmacologist hired by Whiting's mother said that the amount of methaqualone in Whiting's bloodstream need not have been fatal. Left unexplained was how Whiting's blood came to be on a pillowcase, towel, tissues and the washbasin in his own room, as well as on a blue sweater he had apparently been wearing. Also unaccounted for were the severe cut on the back of his head and scratches on his stomach, chest and knuckles. The inquest was adjourned for a week awaiting a report from Dr. Thomas Noguchi, chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County. Whiting's mother, a white-haired woman in a woolen cap and fraying coat, attended the inquest and said she was unsatisfied with the testimony.

In some ways Whiting's life was as mysterious as his death. A former TIME correspondent (1968-1971) who grew up in Washington and graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Whiting, 26, loved to surround himself with Gatsby-like glamour and intrigue. Though not wealthy, he would lunch by himself with a bottle of champagne and fly to London to have a suit made--then fly back again the next week for a second fitting. When he became TIME'S Hollywood correspondent and began hobnobbing with stars, Whiting's fantasies became reality--for a time, anyway. During an interview with Miles he became infatuated with her and soon quit his job to live with Sarah and her husband, Playwright-Screenwriter Robert Bolt, in Surrey, England. Though his ostensible purpose was to write a book on Sarah, he made himself so useful that he became her business manager, factotum, and confidant.

Whiting's erratic behavior eventually annoyed the Bolts, and they tried to move him out of their lives. At this point, Sarah claims, he attempted suicide by taking an overdose of drugs, and they kept him with them. Whiting once wrote in a London magazine that Miles was the "greatest dame since Eve." The title of the article: Sarah Miles: The Cool Man-Eater.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.