The Corpse as Big as the Ritz

by Ron Rosenbaum

  One item was missing from the scene. Burt Reynolds told Sergeant Hinderliter that when he had been summoned by Sarah to look at the body, he had noticed a pill bottle clenched in one of David Whiting’s fists. He had pried it loose, Reynolds said, and rushed in to Sarah who was, by then, in room 123. He had shown her the bottle and asked her, “Do you know what these are?” She was too upset to reply, he said.

  The pill bottle disappeared. Burt Reynolds doesn’t remember what he did with it. He might have thrown it away in room 123, he said. He might have had it in his hand when he returned to 127, the room with the body in it. He remembers seeing a prescription-type label of some sort on it, but he doesn’t remember what the label said. The pill bottle was never found.

  And the pills on the arm: nobody seems to have explained the pills on the arm. David Whiting may have knocked some pills on the floor, but there would be no easy way for him to knock pills down onto his own arm while lying curled up on the floor. No one else in the case has admitted knocking them down onto his arm, or dropping them there.

  THERE ARE OTHER unanswered questions about the pills David took on his last night. Item Five on the list of Sarah’s drugs is a pill called Mandrax. Mandrax is the English trade name for the formulation of two drugs. One—the main ingredient—is Methaqualone, which is described in medical literature as a “hypnotic,” and as such occupies the drowsy middle ground between the barbiturates and the tranquilizers. The second ingredient in Mandrax tablets is a small amount of diphenhydramine which, under the more familiar trade name Benadryl, is marketed as an antihistamine and mild depressant.

  American drug companies sell pure Methaqualone—without the Benadryl—under several trade names, including the one which had become a household word by the time David Whiting died: Quaalude.

  The autopsy doctor found Methaqualone in David Whiting’s body. (There were 410 milligrams in his stomach, 7.4 mg. in his liver and .88 mg. per hundred milliliters—about 45 mg. altogether—in his bloodstream.) The doctor also found some Benadryl in his blood, along with half a drink’s worth of alcohol and “unquantitated levels” of a Valium-type tranquilizer.

  Where did that Methaqualone come from? Because of the presence of the Benadryl, it is possible to surmise that the pills David Whiting swallowed were Mandrax, rather than an American version of Methaqualone. Sarah Miles would later testify at the coroner’s inquest that she “believed” she found “a few”—she was not sure how many—pills from Item Five, her Mandrax supply, missing after David Whiting’s death. Sarah would also testify that she believed David Whiting no longer had a Mandrax prescription of his own because, she says, David’s London doctor had taken David off the drug. But if David Whiting did take Mandrax that night it still cannot be said with absolute certainty that the tablets he swallowed did come from Sarah Miles’s “Item Five.”

  Nor is there any certainty about the number of tablets David Whiting swallowed that night. Adding up the quantities of Methaqualone found in his stomach, blood, and liver, one finds a total of less than 500 milligrams. Since each Mandrax tablet contains only 250 milligrams of Methaqualone, it would seem that the residue of perhaps two, and no more than three, tablets was present in David Whiting’s system at the time of his death. But there is no data available on how long he had been taking Methaqualone before that evening, nor whether he had developed a tolerance or sensitivity to the drug.

  Was there enough Methaqualone in David Whiting’s body to kill him? The autopsy doctor, you will recall, found less than one milligram per hundred milliliters in his blood. According to one traditional authority—The Legal Medicine Annual of 1970—it takes three times that amount, three milligrams per hundred milliliters, to kill an average man. However, about the time David Whiting died, the literature on Methaqualone had entered a state of crisis. The Great American Quaalude Craze of 1972 had produced a number of overdose deaths, and, consequently, a number of new studies of the kill-levels of the drug. The results of one of those studies—summarized in an article in a publication called Clinical Chemistry—was making the rounds of the autopsy world at the time of David Whiting’s death. The Clinical Chemistry article challenged the traditional 3-milligram kill-level, and suggested that less Methaqualone than previously suspected could cause death.

  The Maricopa County autopsy doctor who first examined David Whiting cited these new, lower figures, plus the combined depressant effect of Benadryl, alcohol, and the “unquantitated levels” of another tranquilizer to explain why two or three tablets’ worth of Methaqualone could have killed David Whiting. He called the old figures “insufficient and antiquated evidence.”

  But affidavits from a leading pharmacologist and a leading forensic pathologist introduced at the inquest by David Whiting’s mother challenged the certainty of the original autopsy doctor’s conclusion, especially his willingness to abandon the traditional authorities. “These reports have not been established in the literature,” one of the affidavits said.

  So great is the conflict between the new and old figures that a certain small dose cited in the new study as a poisonous “minimum toxic level” qualifies as a “therapeutic dose” under the old system.

  These uncertainties placed David Whiting’s final Mandrax dose in a disputed netherland between therapy and poison, leaving unanswered the questions of whether he took the tablets to calm down or to kill himself, or whether he killed himself trying to calm down.

  SOME ITEMS FOUND IN DAVID WHITING’S TRAVELODGE ROOM (NUMBER 119):

  —fifty-nine photographs of Sarah Miles

  —a large leather camera bag stamped with a LIFE decal, four expensive Nikons inside

  —a six-month-old Playboy magazine, found lying on the bottom sheet of the unmade, bloodstained bed, as if he had been reading it while he waited for the bleeding to stop

  —a piece of luggage—a medium-sized suitcase—lying open but neatly packed on the other bed, as if in preparation for a morning departure and a two-day trip

  —two bottles of Teacher’s Scotch, one nearly empty, on the night table between the beds. Also a can of Sprite

  —an Olivetti portable typewriter with the ribbon and spools ripped out and lying tangled next to it

  —a book called The Mistress, a novel, the film rights to which David Whiting had purchased on behalf of Sarah Miles. He wanted her to play the title role.

  —a copy of a screenplay called The Capri Numbers, a romantic thriller David Whiting had been working on with an English actor. Sarah Miles was to play the part of Jocylin. In the screenplay’s preliminary description of Jocylin we learn that “this story will teach her the meaning of ‘there’s a vulgarity in possession: it makes for a sense of mortality.’”

  —a Gideon Bible. The Bible is not mentioned in police reports, but when I stayed in David Whiting’s motel room a month after his death, I looked through the Bible and found three widely separated pages conspicuously marked, and one three-page section torn out.

  The upper-right-hand corner of page 23 has been dog-eared. On page 23 (Genesis: 24–25) we read of, among other things, the death and burial of Sarah.

  The lower-left-hand corner of page 532 has been dog-eared. It contains Psalms 27 and 28—each of which is headed, in the Gideon edition, “A Psalm of David.” In these two psalms, David pleads with God not to abandon him. (“Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger…leave me not, neither forsake me.”) David declares he wants to remain “in the land of the living” but warns that “if thou be silent to me I become like them that go down into the pit.”

  The upper-left-hand corner of page 936 has been dog-eared. The Last Supper is over. Christ, alone on the Mount of Olives, contemplating his imminent crucifixion, asks God, “If thou be willing, remove this cup from me.” He prays feverishly (“his sweat was as it were great drops of blood”), then descends to his disciples, whereupon Judas betrays him with a kiss.

  Torn out of the Gideon Bible in David Whiting’s motel room are pages 724 to
730. Consulting an intact Gideon Bible, I discovered that those pages record the climactic vision of the destruction of Babylon from the final chapters of the Book of Jeremiah, and the despairing description of the destruction of Jerusalem from the beginning of Lamentations.

  “I shall make drunk her princes and her wise men,” says the Lord in regard to his plans for the rules of Babylon, “…and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep and not wake.” “I called for my lovers but they deceived me…my sighs are many and my heart is faint,” says the weeper in the torn-out pages of Lamentations.

  —Police found no suicide note.

  Four months after he moved into Mill House, her country home in Surrey, David Whiting threatened to kill himself, Sarah Miles told me. The threat was powerful enough, she says, to prevent her and her husband from daring to ask him to leave for six more months.

  Just what was David Whiting doing, living in the household of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bolt, Mill House, Surrey, anyway?

  At first he was just stopping off on his way to a European ski resort. Then he was staying awhile to gather more material for his Time story. His “angle” on this story, he told them, was going to be “the last happy marriage” or something like that. He did not believe in happy marriages, didn’t believe they could exist anymore, yet here Sarah and Robert Bolt had what appeared to be a happy marriage and he wanted to find out just what it was they had.

  Then David thrust himself into the Lady Caroline Lamb project, a kind of family enterprise for Robert Bolt and Sarah. When David arrived in the summer of 1971, Lamb was only a screenplay. Robert Bolt—the forty-nine-year-old playwright who wrote A Man for All Seasons and several David Lean screenplays—had written it, he wanted Sarah to star in it, he wanted to direct it himself. He was having trouble getting the money for it.

  As soon as David arrived he jumped in, started calling producers, money people, studios, agents. He whisked Sarah off to Cannes, rented a villa there for the film festival the better to make “contacts.” He went to work on her finances, clearing up a “huge overdraft” in Sarah’s account. He talked her into getting new lawyers, new accountants, new agents. He flattered Robert Bolt about his writing, Sarah about her acting. He quit his job at Time to devote himself to helping them make Lamb, he told them. He persuaded Sarah to make him her business manager, which meant he got ten percent of whatever she got. He persuaded Robert and Sarah to give him a salaried job in their family film company—Pulsar Productions Ltd. On the Pulsar stationary he became “David Whiting, Director of Publicity and Exploitation.”

  Lamb is a triangle. A year after he moved in with Robert Bolt and Sarah, David Whiting produced a publicity book about the film. This is how he describes that triangle:

  There is Lady Caroline, to be played by Sarah Miles: “On fire for the dramatic, the picturesque…a creature of impulse, intense sensibility and bewitching unexpectedness,” David wrote. “On those for whom it worked she cast a spell which could not be resisted…. Such a character was bound finally to make a bad wife.” She ends up dying “for love.” “And so at the end of her short life, she achieved the ultimate gesture which all her life she has been seeking.”

  Then there is her husband William Lamb, ultimately to become Lord Melbourne, the Whig Prime Minister: “A Gentleman, self-controlled and decent,” David wrote. “A capacity for compromising agreeably with circumstance… When Caroline threw herself into her notorious affair with Lord Byron, William refused to take it seriously…. He detected in Byron all that was specious in the poet’s romantic posturing…he was not jealous but his spirit was wounded.”

  And finally there was Byron: “He was a raw nerve-ridden boy of genius,” David wrote, “a kind of embodied fantasy…emerged from obscurity…born to nobility and relative poverty. With his pale face, extreme good looks and pouting expression…the public was entranced with the personality of its twenty-four-year-old author. Nevertheless,” twenty-four-year-old David Whiting added, his “divine fire gleamed fitfully forth through a turmoil of suspicion and awkwardness. His sophistication was a mask for shyness…. At the most elementary level he was a poseur.”

  Halfway into an interview with Sarah Miles I read her that passage about Byron from David’s book about Lamb, and asked her if that was, perhaps, David Whiting writing about himself.

  “I think he got that from Lord David Cecil, actually,” she said. “Most of it you’ll find is from other books, I’m afraid.”

  I tried again: “What I mean is, did he see the family he moved into at Surrey as a kind of reflection of the Lamb triangle?”

  “The Lamb triangle? I see what you mean. It hadn’t crossed my mind until you said it. Maybe you’re right. I hadn’t thought of it like that at all.”

  At this point I felt compelled to ask directly, and yet if possible with some delicacy, the question that had been on my mind.

  “It seems, uh, a probably fortuitous coincidence that this Lamb thing was going on at the same time David was, uh, well, what was your, what was his relationship, was he sexually possessive or…?”

  “Nope,” Sarah interrupted briskly. “Not a bit. You see, this is the area which is weird. He never made a pass at me, he never spoke of me sexually, it was just a sort of”—pause—“I don’t quite know how to put it—it seems so self-bragging, you know, to say the things he said—I can’t really, because I don’t really—I think he, he wanted to put me up there, because it would sort of excuse himself from any sort of reality. I think if he had really made an ordinary mundane pass and been rejected, it would have ruined this other image that he had. You know what I mean, I mean if at one time we really had had an affair, it would have probably been the best thing for David. I mean he probably would have realized that I was just an ordinary girl like the rest of them.”

  At this point I thought of what Sergeant Hinderliter had told me Sarah had told him on the afternoon of the death, about David Whiting “always wanting to f—— me all the time…”

  Now that statement did not imply that Sarah Miles had, in fact, slept with David Whiting. It did however raise the question in my mind about whether David Whiting had or had not ever made “a mundane pass” at Sarah, and I felt I had to ask her about it.

  “Sarah, uh, I feel I have to ask you this, it’s, uh, a difficult question,” I faltered, toward the close of the interview. “But, uh, this sergeant in Gila Bend told me that you told him that all David Whiting wanted to do…” I repeated what the sergeant had quoted her as saying.

  She skipped, at most, one third of a breath.

  “There have been some extraordinary reports from those policemen, I mean there really have.” She gave a small sigh. “I mean I don’t understand what this is about. Well I went back into the room, well, there’s a whole area in there the police were…very odd indeed, and I don’t understand, I mean that quote…. What time? When?”

  I told her when the sergeant said he heard it.

  “I mean, can you imagine, can you imagine me saying this to a policeman, that anyone in their right mind could say that….”

  “I can imagine you being upset and—”

  “But to say that! I’m terribly sorry but I’m not the liar in this case.”

  IT WAS NOT sex David Whiting wanted so desperately, Sarah told me, it was family. He’d never had a real family before, he’d told the Bolts. His parents divorced when he was a child, he’d hardly seen his father, who, he said, was some sort of director of Pan Am, a position which gave David the right to fly the world for next to nothing. He’d been a child prodigy, he told them, and his mother had sent him off to one boarding school after another. He’d had some unpleasant years in boarding schools. He was too smart for any of them, but they’d treated him badly. Once he said he had been forced to submit to a spinal injection to cure a “learning deficiency” because he’d been stubbornly pretending he didn’t know how to read. So painful was this spinal injection that he’d immediately picked up a volume of Shakespeare and started to perform from it just to
forestall repetition of the pain. He’d gone to the finest prep school in Washington, D.C., with the sons of the famous and powerful. He’d become an extraordinary ladies’ man among the debutante daughters of the famous and the powerful, he told them. He dropped names of his conquests.

  His pre-school classmates thought he would become President, he told the Bolts. But what he wanted to be, he told them, was the greatest producer there ever was. At an early age he had taken off from school to make movies in the Libyan desert and the hot spots of Europe. He had been the youngest man ever appointed full-fledged Time correspondent, but he had given all that up for Sarah and Robert and for what they could become under his management. He wanted to make Sarah the greatest star there ever was. For all that, he told them, but also for their home, and for the feeling of being part of a family at last.

  But after three months things started to go wrong in this family. David became dissatisfied with mere “publicity-and-exploitation” duties. He wanted to do more. Nobody understood how good he was, nobody gave him a chance to show how much he could do. He decided to show them. Without the consent of the producer of Lamb he arranged a deal to produce a movie of his own—a documentary about the making of Lamb. This didn’t go over well with the real producer. He made enemies. He started staying up in his room for days at a time, according to Sarah, worrying about his skin problem, his weight problem, his falling-hair problem, claiming all the while that he was working on scripts and deals, but failing to do his publicity work on time. Finally, according to Sarah, he was fired from his publicity job. She was the only one to take his side, she says. She kept him on as business manager, but both she and Robert suggested to David that he might be happier and get more work done if he moved out of their country home into Sarah’s London town house.

  It was at this point, September, 1971, according to Sarah, that David told them that if they ever forced him to leave their family he’d kill himself.

  She found it hard to take this threat lightly, Sarah says. Twice before she’d been threatened that way, and twice before she’d ended up with a dead body on her hands. Sarah tells the story of the first two suicides.