The Corpse as Big as the Ritz Read online

  The Corpse as Big as the Ritz

  Sarah Miles, Burt Reynolds, and that Dirty Little Death in the Desert

  By Ron Rosenbaum

  Copyright © 2016 by Ron Rosenbaum

  Sergeant Forrest Hinderliter of the Gila Bend (Arizona) Police had been up since two in the morning with a dead body and a shaky story. He’d found the body—a black man with a bullet hole in his back—lying on the floor in Apartment 44 of the North Euclid Avenue project at the western edge of town. He’d also found a woman there, and this was her story:

  She woke up after midnight to find a man on top of her, making love to her. She’d never seen the man before. She told him to get off and get out; she warned him she was expecting another man. A car pulled up outside and flashed its lights. A minute later the other man came through the door. Explanations were inadequate. In the scuffle a gun was drawn, a .38 revolver. A shot went off, the first visitor died.

  An accident, the woman told Sergeant Hinderliter, the gun had gone off by accident. An accident, the other man, the one who owned the .38, told the sergeant.

  Sergeant Hinderliter had the body tagged and carted off to Phoenix for an autopsy. He took statements until six thirty in the morning, then returned to the station house to check in for his regular Sunday tour of duty.

  He was drinking black coffee at Birchfields’s Café at six minutes past noon when the phone rang. It was Mrs. Steel, the station-house dispatcher, on the line. She had just taken a call from a man at the Travelodge Motel. There was a dead body in room 127, it was reported, an overdose of something.

  UP UNTIL 1965 Gila Bend showed up frequently in National Weather Summaries as having registered the highest daily temperature in America. One hundred twenty in the shade was not unusual. Occasionally Gila Bend was referred to as the hottest place in America.

  It was hot in Gila Bend, but not that hot, the Mayor of Gila Bend confided to me one evening at the Elks Club bar. Someone in Gila Bend had been doing some fooling around with the thermometer readings to make Gila Bend look a few degrees hotter than it was. In 1965, the Weather Bureau did some checking and put a stop to the matter. Since then Gila Bend has been just another hot place.

  There’s an old narrow-gauge railroad that runs south from the town to the open-pit copper mines near the Mexican border. The Phelps Dodge Corporation uses the railroad to run copper anodes from their foundries up to the Southern Pacific freight siding at Gila Bend. Hollywood Westerns occasionally use the railroad’s ancient steam locomotive and the cactus wastes surrounding the tracks for “location” work.

  On January 28, 1973, an MGM production company shooting The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, a high-budget, middlebrow Western starring Sarah Miles, Burt Reynolds, and Lee J. Cobb, arrived at Gila Bend. Forty members of the cast and crew checked into the Travelodge Motel on the eastern edge of town.

  THERE WAS NO pulse. The skin had cooled. Pale blotches on the hands, the neck, and the forehead suggested to Sergeant Hinderliter that death had come to the body several hours before he had. Rigor mortis, in its early stages, had stiffened the arms which were wrapped around an empty polyethylene wastebasket. It was twelve thirty P.M.

  The young man lay curled up on his left side on the floor of the partitioned-off “dressing-room” area of Travelodge room 127. His nose touched the metal strip which divided the carpeted dressing-room floor from the tiled floor of the bathroom. His feet stuck out beyond the end of the partition.

  The capsules were big and red. There were about a dozen, and most of them lay in two groups on the floor. Burt Reynolds would later testify he saw pills lying on top of the dead man’s arm.

  The sergeant wondered why the man on the floor had decided to collapse and die in what was clearly a woman’s bedroom: the vanity counter above the body teemed with vials of cosmetics, a woman’s wardrobe packed the hangers, a long brown hairpiece streamed across a nearby suitcase. As he stepped out to his squad car Sergeant Hinderliter felt a hand on his arm. The hand belonged to an MGM official.

  “He’d been drinking,” the MGM man told the sergeant in a confidential tone. “He’d been drinking, he swallowed a lot of pills, he took a bunch of pills and he was dead. He took an overdose,” the man said.

  The sergeant asked the MGM person for the dead man’s name and position.

  The name was David Whiting, he told the sergeant. “He was Miss Miles’s business manager. You see, that was Miss Miles’s room he was in. It was Miss Miles who found him, but…”

  “Where is Miss Miles?” the sergeant asked.

  “She’s over there in 123, Mr. Poll’s room, now, but she’s much too upset to talk. She’s had a terrible experience, you can understand, and…”

  “Yes, he was my business manager,” the sergeant recalls Miss Miles telling him a few minutes later. “He was my business manager, but all he wanted to do was f—— me all the time and I wasn’t going to be f——ed by him.”

  Sergeant Hinderliter is a mild-mannered and mild-spoken cop. He has a round open face, a blond crew cut, and a soft Arizona drawl. His dream at one point in his life was to earn a mortician’s license and open a funeral home in Gila Bend, but after four years’ study he dropped out of morticians’ school to become a cop because he missed dealing with warm bodies. In his off-duty hours Sergeant Hinderliter is a scoutmaster for Troop Number 204. He recalls being somewhat surprised at Miss Miles’s language. “Now I’ve heard that kind of talk sitting around with some guys,” he told me. “But I never heard a lady use those words.” (Later, as we shall see, Miss Miles denied she had used those words.)

  Miss Miles was stretched out on one of the twin beds in room 123, her head propped up by pillows. Her face was flushed, her eyes streaked and wet. She was upset, she told the sergeant, but she was willing to talk.

  I might as well tell you the whole story, she said.

  The sergeant took notes, and this is the whole story she told that afternoon, as he remembers it:

  It all started at the Pink Palomino café. There were a dozen of them there, movie people; they had driven thirty-six miles to the Palomino for a kind of pre-birthday party for Burt Reynolds who was to turn thirty-eight the next day, Sunday, February 11.

  She had driven to the Pink Palomino with Burt Reynolds, but she left early and drove back to Gila Bend with Lee J. Cobb. She had wanted a ride in Cobb’s impressive new car—a Citroën on the outside, a powerful Maserati racing engine within. Back at the Travelodge she proceeded to the cocktail lounge. She had one drink. She danced.

  It was close to midnight when she started back to her own room. Halfway there she decided to stop by and apologize to Burt for failing to return to Gila Bend with him.

  When she entered room 135, Reynolds’s room, she found a Japanese masseuse there too. Sarah asked permission to remain during the massage. The Japanese woman rubbed, Sarah talked. Around three A.M. she left and walked around the rear of the building to her own room. As soon as she stepped into the room, she told the sergeant, David Whiting jumped out of the dressing room and grabbed her.

  Whiting demanded to know where she’d been and whom she’d been with. She told him it was none of his business. He slapped her. She screamed. From the next room, the nanny Sarah had hired to look after her five-year-old son rushed into Sarah’s room through a connecting door.

  Sarah told the nanny to call Burt. David Whiting released Sarah and ran outside. Burt Reynolds arrived shortly thereafter and took Sarah back to his room where she spent the remainder of the morning.

  Sometime later that Sunday morning, it may have been eight o’clock, it may have been ten, Sarah left Reynolds’s room and returned to the nanny’s room, number 126. She spoke briefly with the nanny, reentered he
r own room to use the bathroom, and found David Whiting’s body on the floor. She gasped, ran back to the nanny’s room, and told her to call Burt.

  GILA BEND CORONER Mulford T. “Sonny” Winsor IV was still in bed Sunday afternoon when the dispatcher called him with news of the Travelodge death. He too had been up all night with the shooting death in the Euclid Street project. He had some questions. Had the dead black man, in fact, been a total stranger to the woman and the man with the .38, or had there been a more complicated relationship?

  Coroner Winsor—he is also Justice of the Peace, Town Magistrate, Registrar of Vital Statistics, and a plumbing contractor on the side—wasted no time with the second body, the one he found at the Travelodge. There was nothing in room 127 to suggest anything but suicide. He rounded up a coroner’s jury, including three Gila Bend citizens he found eating in the Travelodge Coffee Shop, and took them into room 127 to view the body for the record.

  Next Coroner Winsor looked for some piece of identification for the death certificate, some proof that the dead man was in fact David Whiting. He bent over the body on the floor and reached into the pockets of the dark trousers. Nothing. Nothing in the right front pocket. He rolled the body gently over to look in the left front. There—no ID, but a key—a Travelodge key to room 127, Sarah’s room, the room in which the young man died.

  Coroner Winsor decided to check the young man’s own room for identification. He ran back through the rain to the motel office, learned that David Whiting was registered to room 119, and ran back with a key.

  He saw bloodstains as soon as he crossed the threshold of 119. There was blood on the pillow at the head of one of the twin beds. There was blood on the bath towel at the foot of the bed. There was blood, he soon discovered, clotted upon wads of toilet tissue in the bathroom. There was blood, he discovered later, on a Travelodge key on the other bed. It was a key for room 126, the nanny’s room.

  The death of David Whiting suddenly became a more complex affair. Had he been beaten before he died? The coroner called the chief of police over to room 119. The chief of police took one look and decided to call in the professionals from the Arizona State Police. There was the possibility of assault, even murder, to consider now.

  SARAH MILES HAD a boil. The year was 1970 and Sarah Miles had come to Hollywood to do publicity for Ryan’s Daughter. She had two appointments that afternoon: the first at noon with the show-business correspondent of Time, the next at three o’clock with a Vogue photographer. It was the Vogue appointment which worried her: Vogue wanted to feature her as one of the three most beautiful women in the world, and there, on her cheek, was a stubborn boil.

  So she was not in an especially good mood as she sat in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, waiting for the man from Time to arrive. Nor had her mood improved thirty minutes later when he finally showed up.

  He wore a dark, three-piece English-cut suit, a luxuriously proper Turnbull and Asser shirt. He flashed a burnished-bronze hothouse tan. He removed a bottle from his suit coat, announced that it contained his personal Bloody Mary mix, and began the interview by discoursing at length upon the inadequacies of all other Bloody Marys. His name was David Whiting. He was twenty-four years old.

  The subject of Sarah’s boil came up. David Whiting confessed that he too had, on occasion, trouble with his skin. However, he told Sarah, he knew the very best dermatologist in Hollywood, and knew of an extraordinary pill for boils. Take one and ten minutes later, he promised Sarah, her boil would vanish.

  He disappeared for ten minutes and returned with a bottle of the magic boil pills. She took one. The boil lasted much longer than ten minutes. The interview did not. As she went off to be the most beautiful woman in the world for Vogue, she assumed she had seen the last of David Whiting.

  The next evening they met again. He requested the meeting, but despite his strange performance the first time, she didn’t turn him down. She was amused by his pomposity, intrigued by his intelligence. She began calling him “Whiz Kid.”

  A few days later she was sitting in the V.I.P. lounge of the L.A. airport awaiting a flight to New York when David Whiting showed up and announced that he was taking the same flight. He secured the seat next to her. The next morning in New York he showed up in her suite at the Sherry Netherland. He took a room on the same floor. She never encouraged him, she says, but neither did she tell him to get lost.

  Maybe it was the Vuitton luggage.

  “He always had to have the best,” she remembers. “All his doctors were the best doctors, his dentist was the very best dentist, Henry Poole was the very best tailor in London, everything with David had to be the best. If your agent wasn’t the very best agent, then you had to change; if your doctor wasn’t right, change, and he couldn’t understand me because nothing I had was the best…. He’d spend hours at a restaurant choosing the best wines…. Suddenly he’d say to me, ‘Do you have Vuitton luggage?’ and I honestly had never heard of it. I said what was that word, and he said, ‘Vuitton! Come on! Don’t pretend with me.’”

  She wasn’t pretending, she said. “It was funny. He was a joke in that he made people laugh. He was the sort of person you could send up… But David was the first person who awakened me to what was the best and what wasn’t the best.”

  Then came the Working Permit Crisis. There was panic in the Sherry Netherland suite. For ten days Sarah had been unable to appear on American television because her working permit had not come through. A small army of MGM PR people scurried in and out of her suite reporting new delays and new failures, receiving scornful tongue lashings from Sarah.

  “I began to get quite angry. I remember calling Jim Aubrey, the head of MGM you know, and telling him this is ridiculous, I’ve been here ten days, and this is ridiculous, all the money that’s being wasted through these silly, interminable delays. And David Whiting was in the room with all these others and he started going, ‘What’s the matter? What happened? What happened? Working permit? Good God!’ And he went straight to the phone and rang up a number and in half an hour my working permit arrived…. Literally in one telephone call I had a working permit which these other people hadn’t been able to get for ten days. And I sort of thought, hmmmm, that’s not bad….”

  Then there was the eye infection. “I came up with an eye infection and couldn’t go on the Frost show…and he said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll see to that,’ and he took me across New York to an eye specialist, who gave me special stuff that cleared up my eyes. He was terribly efficient in certain areas, really terrifically efficient. Then he’d go over the top. Whenever he’d done something good, he’d get euphoric, and he’d suddenly go higher and higher and higher until he suddenly thought he was some sort of Sam Spiegel-cum-President-of-America and he’d go berserk in thinking he was terrific.”

  He followed her everywhere in New York. He was going to get Time to do a cover story on her. He arranged a lunch with Henry Grunwald, editor of Time, for her. Things didn’t go smoothly. “You f——ed the whole thing up. You f——ed the whole thing,” David screamed at her when she reported back to him. He continued to follow her.

  A few days later he waved good-bye to her at Kennedy Airport as she took off for England, her country home, her husband, and her child. The next morning he knocked at the front door of her country home in Surrey. He was stopping by on his way to a skiing holiday, he told her. He stayed for a year.

  SERGEANT HINDERLITER DIDN’T see the “star-shaped wound,” as it came to be called, the first time he looked at David Whiting’s body. Nor had he seen blood. But when he returned to room 127, Sarah’s room, he was startled to see a pool of blood seeping out onto the tiles of the bathroom floor. The body seemed to be bleeding from the head.

  Sergeant Hinderliter found the “star-shaped wound” at the back of the head, to the right of the occipital point. The wound had apparently stopped bleeding sometime after death, and resumed when the coroner rolled the body over to search for identification.

  This �
��stellate or star-shaped contused laceration one inch in diameter…is the kind of injury we frequently see in people who fall on the back of the head,” the autopsy doctor would testify at the coroner’s inquest.

  “This, of course, does not preclude,” he added, “the possibility of the decedent having been pushed….”

  There were other marks on the body. Two “superficial contused scratches” on the middle of the abdomen. One “superficial contused abrasion” on the lower abdomen. Several scratches on the hands. There were “multiple hemorrhages”—bruises—on the chest and the left shoulder.

  “Would those be consistent with someone having been in a scuffle or a fight?” the autopsy doctor was asked at the inquest.

  “Yes,” said the autopsy doctor.

  But despite the suggestive marks on the outside of David Whiting’s body, the cause of death, the autopsy doctor concluded, was to be found within.

  A CATALOG OF THE VARIOUS DRUGS IN SARAH MILES’S BEDROOM AS COMPILED BY DETECTIVE BARNEY HAYES AND CHEMIST JACK STRONG OF THE ARIZONA STATE POLICE

  ITEM ONE: some pills, multivitamin preparation

  ITEM TWO: capsules, antibiotic drug

  ITEM THREE: capsules, Serax Oxazepan, for treatment of anxiety and depression

  ITEM FOUR: A—capsules of Dalmane which is a hypnotic and

  B—some capsules which were not identified

  ITEM FIVE: tablets, Methaqualone, which is a hypnotic antihistamine combination

  ITEM SIX: some capsules, Ampicillin Trihydrate, which is an antibiotic

  ITEM SEVEN: some further capsules which were not identified

  ITEM EIGHT: some pills, Compazine, a tranquilizer

  ITEM NINE: A—yellow tablets, Paredrine, which is a hypotensive and

  B—some gray pills, Temaril, an antipruritic and antihistaminic

  ITEM TEN: tablets of Donnatal which is antispasmodic and sedative

  ITEM ELEVEN: white tablets, a yeast

  ITEM TWELVE: a liquid, an anticough mixture