The Corpse as Big as the Ritz

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Later that same day I had a long talk with Mrs. Campbell in the coffee shop of the Travelodge Motel, where she was staying during the inquest.

  He was born in New York City on either August 25 or 26, she told me. “I’m not sure which is the right one, but I remember we always used to celebrate it on the wrong day.” She leaps quickly to prep school. “He did so well at St. Albans that he was admitted to Georgetown University on a special program after his junior year and…”

  When I asked her where David lived, and where he went to school before prep school, she cut off my question. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything. I prefer not to tell you.” She proceeded to attempt to convince me to drop my story on David Whiting and instead write an “exposé” of one of the Arizona lawyers hired by MGM, and “how these attorneys use their power and influence in this state.” She would give me inside information, she said.

  “It was always expected that David would go to Harvard,” she began again when I declined to drop the story and returned to the subject of David Whiting. “For a boy of David’s ability it was perfectly obvious he was headed for Harvard.”

  He didn’t make it. Something about too many debutante parties, and not quite terrific grades in his special year at Georgetown. David Whiting went to tiny Haverford College instead. He majored in English there and wrote an honors thesis “on F. Scott Fitzgerald or Hamlet, I can’t remember,” Mrs. Campbell told me.

  “there was a line from The Great Gatsby I do remember,” she told me. “That was David’s favorite book, and it’s a line I think applies to what I saw here today. It was about the kind of people who always have others around to clean up the mess they leave.”

  I later checked the Scribner edition of The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

  A FITZGERALD STORY of Sorts:

  She met him at Mrs. Shippens’ Dancing Class. Her name was Eleanor, and she was a granddaughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. He was—well, she never knew who he was, in the sense of family, but it was assumed that the dancing students at Mrs. Shippens’ were from the finest families of Washington, Virginia, and Eastern Shore society. He certainly acted the part. His name was David Whiting.

  When the male pupils at Mrs. Shippens’ reached a certain age, they were placed on Miss Hetzel’s list. Miss Hetzel’s list was a register of eligible males worthy of being called upon to serve as escorts and dancing partners at the finest debuts and cotillions.

  Eleanor met him again at a Hunt Cup weekend. She found him sometimes witty, sometimes amusingly pretentious in his efforts to be worldly. In November, 1963, she wrote him inviting him to be her escort at a holiday dance at Mrs. Shippens’. She still has his letter of reply, because of a curious device he employed in it.

  Centered perfectly between the lines of his letter to her were the unmistakable impressions of what seemed to be a letter to another girl. This ghostly letter in-between-the-lines was filled with tales of nights of drinking and lovemaking in expensive hotel suites with a girl named “Gloria.” Eleanor is certain there was no Gloria, that the whole thing was an elaborate fake designed to impress her, if not with its truth, at least with its cleverness.

  “He was always worrying about the way he looked—we’d be dancing or something and he’d always be checking with me how he looked, or giving me these, you know, aristocratic tips about how I looked, or we looked.”

  And how did he look?

  “Well, he was very fat at first, I think.”

  “Fat?”

  “Oh, quite tremendous. I mean pretty heavy. He’d make jokes about himself. But then all that changed. He spent a summer in North Africa and Libya with a movie production company. He came back from that summer looking much more thin and intense,” she remembers. “He came back and all he was talking about was taking over that movie company, and oh, he had great dreams. I remember taking a walk with him—we were at some party and we were both nervous, and we took a walk through this garden and he just went on and on, just—it was the first time I’d seen him thin and he was talking about how he was gonna take over that movie company, and how great he’d been and how he was going to be a producer…. He’d always talked about movies, he could name every movie and every movie star that was in them—I mean, some people do that but he was good, he knew them all.”

  She drifted away from him—“He was never my boyfriend or anything,” she says pointedly—and didn’t hear from him for almost two years when one day she got a phone call in her dorm at Sarah Lawrence.

  It was David Whiting, then a student at Haverford. “Well, I hadn’t seen him and I didn’t know where he was at school, and he said, ‘Will you come and see me, I’m at Princeton.’ So I took the bus down. I got there I guess about nine in the morning, and called him up and he said could I come over to the room—I didn’t know it wasn’t his room—so I walked in and he just poured this tall glass of straight gin and no ice and said, ‘Will you have some?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t really think I’m in the mood, I was sort of wondering what we’re gonna do today,’ and he said, ‘Well, I think we’ll stay in the room until tonight when we’ll go over to some clubs.’ I could sort of see the day’s program unfolding….”

  For the next two hours he tried to convince her to sleep with him. “It could be really boring the way he talked about himself so much and how his ego would be damaged if I didn’t sleep with him. I remember it was this scene of me sitting up, you know, every once in a while, and we’d talk and we’d stretch out and I’d say, ‘Well, I’m going,’ and he’d throw me down. And he finally got in a real bad mood, and I went.”

  “Did he ever admit to you that he was just posing as a Princeton student?”

  “Oh yes, at the end I think he did.”

  “Did he think he could get away with it?”

  “Well, I guess if we’d never left the room he could have.”

  SOME LAST EFFECTS OF DAVID WHITING: AN INVENTORY OF ITEMS LEFT BEHIND FROM HIS EIGHTEEN-MONTH CAREER AS HOLLYWOOD CORRESPONDENT FOR Time.

  —One 275-watt Westinghouse sunlamp. Left in a file cabinet in his old office in the Time suite on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, across from the “House of Pies.” “He used to come in after midnight and sit for hours with the sunlamp on—I don’t know if he was working or what,” the Time switchboard operator recalls. Once he didn’t turn it off. “I came in in the morning one day and I smelled smoke, and I checked in David’s office, and it was his sunlamp. He’d left sometime early in the morning, and he’d just put it in his drawer without turning it off. It was smoldering in there, he might have set the place on fire.”

  —One pocket memo book with the notation “Cannes No. 6” scrawled in Magic Marker on the front cover. From the same file cabinet. Not long after he had been transferred to the Hollywood job, David Whiting took off for Cannes to “cover” the film festival. A Paris correspondent for Time had been under the impression he had been assigned to cover it. There was some dispute. The Paris man filed the story. David Whiting took many notes. Interviews with producers, directors, starlets. Memos to himself. A sample memo to himself from “Cannes No. 6”:

  General Memo:

  –morn. look good

  –pics

  –people

  —One magazine story, written under an interesting pseudonym, for Cosmopolitan. The pseudonym is “Anthony Blaine,” a synthesis of Amory Blaine and Anthony Patch, the heroes, respectively, of Fitzgerald’s first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned. The Cosmopolitan story by “Anthony Blaine” is about Candice Bergen. He met her in Cannes in 1970. He fibbed about his age to her, he played the worldly bon vivant for her, he followed her to Spain where she was making a movie, he continued to see her back in Beverly Hills. He was possessed with her, he told frie
nds. He was just a good friend to her, she told me.

  —One box kite, still in the possession of Paula Prentiss. David Whiting was doing a story for Time about Paula and her husband, Dick Benjamin. The angle was going to be the idea of a happy marriage, he told them. He visited them a second time in their apartment in New York, and “there was a big change from the first time we met him, I could tell something was wrong,” Paula recalls, “that he needed something from us. He wouldn’t come out and say it, but we could tell, he’d sit and drink martinis and pop pills all the time. But we did have some good moments with him. I remember he brought us a box kite and he took us out on the beach and showed us how to fly it.” (The story about Dick and Paula never appeared in Time. It did show up in the November, 1971, issue of Cosmopolitan, under David Whiting’s real name. Cosmopolitan also published a David Whiting story about Sarah Miles, the one he had been “researching” when he began following Sarah around for Time. The story, published in December, 1971, is titled Sarah Miles: The Maiden Man-Eater and the subtitle reads: “She uses words that would make a construction worker blush, but from her they sound refined.”)

  —One list of all the girls David Whiting had ever kissed. “I walked into his office one day and he had his big debutante album out—it had all his invitations and dance programs, and dashing photos of David and the debs,” a woman who writes for Time recalls. “And he was working on a list he told me was a list of all the girls he’d ever kissed—just kissed, that was enough—and he was going to add it to the album I think.”

  —One Bekins Warehouse storage number, the index to the artifacts David Whiting left behind when he left for England. Included are some of his many Savile Row suits he decided not to bring back to London with him. “Let me tell you about his suits,” the friend who has custody of the Bekins number told me. “He used to fly to London—on his wife’s Pan Am card, of course—fly there on a Thursday to have a fitting done. He’d come back Monday, then fly back again the next weekend for the final fitting and bring back the suit.”

  —One copy of The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a battered, underlined paperback bequeathed to a woman he knew. Two passages have been cut out with a razor blade. One of the underlined passages: “I didn’t have the two top things: great animal magnetism or money. I had the second things, though: good looks and intelligence. So I always got the top girl.”

  A passage cut out with a razor blade: the fourth verse from a poem called “The Thousand-and-First Ship,” a Fitzgerald attempt at a modern version of Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”: “There’d be an orchestra/ Bingo! Bango!/ Playing for us/ To dance the tango,/ And people would clap/ As we arose,/ At her sweet face/ And my new clothes.”

  They checked into the Gila Bend Travelodge on Monday, January 29. At first David Whiting took the room adjoining Sarah’s. Hers was number 127, his 126; an inner door connected the two. He didn’t last there very long. Rooms 126 and 127 are in the section of the motel most remote from traffic. They could be reached only by walking back from the highway, past the Travelodge bar, past the length of the larger two-story rooming unit, all the way to the rear of the parking lot and around the back of a smaller, single-story row of Travelodge cubicles. The bedroom windows of numbers 126 and 127 face nothing; they look north upon miles and miles of cactus and mesquite waste. Closer at hand to numbers 126 and 127 is the Travelodge garbage shed.

  On Friday, February 2, four days after David and Sarah checked into these adjoining rooms, David was forced to move. Sarah’s five-year-old son Thomas and the nanny hired to care for him were arriving from England that evening. So, on Friday afternoon, nine days before his death, David Whiting moved out of number 126 and into number 119, a room across the parking lot in the two-story motel building.

  He seems to have chosen this place of exile with some care. The view, for instance, had two peculiar advantages. For one, the line of sight for someone looking straight out the bedroom window of number 119 runs straight across a short span of parking lot and then directly along the walkway in front of the row of rooms he left behind, right past the doors to numbers 126 and 127. No one entering or leaving Sarah’s room could escape the notice of an observer looking out the window of number 119.

  The other, more subtle advantage to this observation post had to do with the placement of the staircase. A broad openwork staircase of wood planks and iron bars descends from the second floor of motel rooms above number 199 and touches ground on the sidewalk in front of the room, forming a slanting screen in front of the bedroom window. Outsiders in the Travelodge parking lot can’t see through the confusing lattice of horizontal steps, diagonal banisters, and vertical railing supports to the bedroom window of 119 behind it. But someone peeking out from within the bedroom window of 119, from behind this sheltering screen, can see quite well, although at first it is something like looking out from within a confusingly barred cage.

  Sarah says she never knew where David had moved. She’d never bothered to find out, having no occasion to visit him.

  But she knew he was watching her. Keeping track of her movements. She’d return from a day on the set and as soon as she walked into her room, the phone would ring and he’d want to know what she’d been doing that night, and with whom.

  He had been acting extraordinarily possessive from the moment they arrived at Gila Bend. She hadn’t been prepared for anything quite like it. Before they’d left England he’d seemed in better shape than he’d been in a long time. He’d been working on a screenplay, he’d been going out with women, he’d been less obsessed with managing her personal life.

  “But as soon as we touched down in America he was back to square one,” she says. “He was the old David again.”

  Sarah speculates it might have something to do with the way she worked. “When I’m on a picture I’m—see, he had known me as a girl who lived in the country, who loved horses, and who lived a quiet life,” Sarah told the inquest. “When I get on a film I like to get to know everybody. The wranglers—I never met wranglers before. Christ, they’re marvelous people, you know. I mean I want to spend all my time with cowboys.”

  So Sarah went out at night. Going out in Gila Bend didn’t mean going far. It meant eating at Mrs. Wright’s Colonial Dining Room, next door to the Travelodge, then walking back across the parking lot to the Travelodge, then walking back across the parking lot to the Travelodge Cocktail Lounge for drinking and dancing to a country-and-western jukebox. For Sarah—according to Gila Bend locals who hung around with the cast and crew—going out meant dancing a lot, flirting, tossing off four-letter words in a merry way. (A Women’s Wear profile of Sarah, published a week before David Whiting’s death, features a picture of Sarah perched in a sex-kittenish pose on one of the black Naugahyde banquettes in the Travelodge Cocktail Lounge. The Lady with the Truckdriver’s Mouth is the title of the story.)

  Meanwhile David Whiting stayed in. At first she’d invite him to come to the bar with her, Sarah says, but he’d refuse and stay in his room and watch for her return. He kept to himself, remote from everyone but Sarah, and Sarah began keeping her distance from him. Waitresses at the Travelodge Coffee Shop recall David Whiting coming in alone night after night, sitting at the counter, and ordering, night after night, a shrimp cocktail and a club sandwich.

  During the day he’d haunt the shooting set in the desert, a dark and formal figure amidst the real and costumed cowboys and the casual MGM production officials. He’d have one of his Nikons with him, and he’d hover around Sarah clicking off stills. Or he’d have some papers he wanted her to look at, other papers he’d want her to sign. He began getting on the nerves of the MGM people. There are reports he’d been getting on Sarah’s nerves.

  The first big fight broke out in room 127 on the evening of Tuesday, February 6. The nanny was in the middle of it. Janie Evans is her name, she is twenty-three years old, dark haired, dark eyed, and rather sexy. She had been hired for this Gila Bend trip one week before Sarah and David left Engla
nd. Sarah had hired her on the recommendation of David Whiting, and there is good reason to believe that David Whiting and the soon-to-be nanny had been seeing each other before the hiring.

  In any case David and the nanny had mutual friends in London, and one of them was a woman named Tessa Bradford, and it was a curious story about David and this Tessa Bradford that led to the Tuesday-night fight.

  The nanny had been talking to Sarah about David. That winter in London, the nanny told Sarah, David had developed an obsession for Tessa Bradford. He had haunted her house, followed her car, called her at all hours, rented a Mercedes limousine to take her to the theater. After all this Tessa Bradford had dropped him, the nanny told Sarah. She had thought David was crazed.

  That Tuesday night in room 127 Sarah asked David about the story. He became enraged, rushed into room 126, dragged the nanny back to Sarah’s room demanding that she “tell the truth.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the truth? Why did you say it was a Mercedes when it was only a mini cab? Why did you say I kept phoning her, I only phoned her five times,” Janie Evans recalls him yelling.

  Then he turned on Sarah. He grabbed her. “He had her—his hand on her neck like this,” the nanny testified at the inquest, “wallowing her head backward and forward, and I shouted at him and Sarah pushed at him, and he went through the door and she threw a vase right after him…it didn’t hit him, it smashed on the concrete outside.”

  “He got upset that I didn’t get upset about him seeing another woman,” Sarah explains. “But I couldn’t take his private life seriously.”

  Other things started going wrong for David Whiting. On Wednesday, February 7, the producer of Cat Dancing, Martin Poll, approached David on the set. As usual David had been recording Sarah’s performance with his Nikon. Poll hinted strongly that David’s presence was not entirely welcome.