The Corpse as Big as the Ritz

by Ron Rosenbaum

  First there was Thelma. Thelma had gone through Roeder, the exclusive Swiss finishing school, with Sarah. Since then Thelma had gone through hard times and electroshock treatment. She’d read a newspaper report that Sarah had taken a town house at 18 Hasker Street, Chelsea; she showed up there one day and asked to move in for a while.

  Thelma stayed three years. She moved her young son in with her. Sarah gave her a “job” to earn her stay—walking Sarah’s Pyrenean mountain dog—but Thelma forgot about it half the time. At night, according to Sarah, “she turned the place into a brothel,” admitting a stream of men into her basement quarters. Finally, after Thelma had taken two messy overdoses, Robert Bolt came into Sarah’s life and told her she had to get rid of Thelma.

  “I told Robert if I chucked her out she’d kill herself,” Sarah recalls. “And Robert said, ‘Christ, Sarah, grow up. They all say that but not all of them do it.’ Robert got to arguing with Thelma one day and said, ‘Look, for Christ sake Thelma, can’t you see what you’re doing to Sarah? If you really mean business you’ll jump.’”

  Sarah asked Thelma to leave. Thelma jumped.

  Then there was Johnny. Sarah had been kicked out of her Chelsea town house because of the obtrusive behavior of her Pyrenean mountain dog. Sarah and Robert had married and were moving to a country home in Surrey. Johnny came along. He was a landscape gardener and owner of three Pyrenean mountain dogs. “I decided to sublease the Chelsea house to him. I thought it would be a very funny joke, having been kicked out for one, to move in somebody with three Pyrenean mountain dogs. That tickled me. I liked that,” Sarah says.

  Johnny was very well dressed, and told the Bolts he was very well off. “But I let him have it for almost nothing, he was a friend, we’d have him up for weekends, he was a very charming fellow, he was a queer but a very nice man—boy.”

  After nine months Johnny hadn’t paid a cent of rent.

  “Robert told me, ‘Sarah, you’re crazy to let this go on…. Go up there and get the money.’ So on a Friday I went up. The house looked lovely…he had a fantastic deep freeze, fantastic food, new carpets—he lived very high.”

  She asked him for the money. He said of course he’d give it to her—the very next day.

  The next morning, back at her country home, she received a telephone call from a policeman. “He asked me if I were Sarah Miles, and did I own 18 Hasker Street, and I said yes, and he said Mr. Johnny W—— has put his head in the oven, he’s gassed himself to death….”

  In mid-February of 1972, David Whiting moved into 18 Hasker Street.

  On the second day of March, 1972, David Whiting was rushed to St. George’s Hospital, London, unconscious, dressed only in his underwear, suffering from an overdose of drugs. After his release, Sarah and Robert took him back again.

  One evening later that year David Whiting was drinking in London with a woman writer who was preparing a story about Sarah Miles. He began confiding in her about his dream. Robert Bolt was nearing fifty, he observed, while he, David Whiting, was only half that age. He could wait, he told her, wait for Robert Bolt to die, and then he knew Sarah would be his at last. The woman writer seemed to think David Whiting was being deadly serious.

  NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE die in Gila Bend to support a funeral home. So when the autopsy doctor in Phoenix completed his work on David Whiting, he sewed the body back up and shipped it to Ganley’s funeral establishment in Buckeye—thirty miles north of Gila Bend—to await claiming by next of kin.

  There was some question about next of kin. David Whiting had filled in the next-of-kin blank on his passport with the name “Sarah Miles.” No other next of kin had stepped forward. For three days no one seemed to know if David Whiting’s parents were dead or alive. Finally on Wednesday the Gila Bend chief of police received a call from a woman on the East Coast who said she had once been engaged to David Whiting. Among other things she told the chief the name of a person on the West Coast who might know how to reach the mother. After several further phone calls, the chief finally learned of a certain Mrs. Campbell of Berkeley, California.

  On Thursday, February 15, a small gray-haired woman stepped off the Greyhound bus in Buckeye, Arizona. She proceeded to Mr. Ganley’s establishment on Broadway and introduced herself to Mr. Ganley as Mrs. Louise Campbell, the mother of David Whiting. She persuaded Mr. Ganley to drive her into Gila Bend to see the chief of police.

  There was trouble in the chief’s office that day. As soon as she walked in Mrs. Campbell demanded to know how the chief had located her. No one was supposed to know where she was. She demanded to be told who had tipped him off. The chief asked her about David Whiting’s father. She told him they had been divorced long ago. She told him that three weeks before David’s death the father had suffered a near-fatal heart attack and was not to be contacted under any circumstances. Her present husband, David’s stepfather, was spending the winter in Hawaii for his poor health and she didn’t want him contacted either. She said she wanted David Whiting’s personal property. The chief told her he couldn’t release it to her until after the completion of the inquest, scheduled for February 27. He agreed to allow her to select a suit for David to be buried in.

  “The chief opened up the suitcase and she grabbed everything she could and ran outside to the car with it, clutching it in her arms,” Mr. Ganley recalls with some bemusement…. “Oh, she went running from one room to the other in the police station and finally the chief said, ‘Get her the hell out of here, will you?’ She grabbed everything she could get before they could stop her. I was picking out certain belongings in which to bury him. She just grabbed them….”

  Ten days later, Mrs. Campbell reappeared at Mr. Ganley’s funeral home. It was nine o’clock at night. She was accompanied by an unidentified man.

  She asked Mr. Ganley to take the body out of the refrigerator. She wanted to examine it, she said.

  Mr. Ganley protested, “I said, ‘Well, lady, why don’t you take him into the County Mortuary…we don’t like to show a body like this, he isn’t clothed, he’s covered with, uh…he’s been in the refrigerator.’ She said, ‘Well, that’s all right.’”

  Mr. Ganley took the body out of the refrigerator and wheeled it out for Mrs. Campbell’s inspection.

  “She wanted to know if all his organs were there,” Mr. Ganley recalled. “She said, ‘Could you open him up?’ I said no, we won’t do that. Well, she wanted to know if the organs were there and I said well I presume they are.”

  A few days later Mrs. Campbell showed up at Ganley’s funeral home again, this time with a different man, whom she introduced as a pathologist from a neighboring county. Again she demanded that the body be brought out of the refrigerator for inspection. Again, with reluctance, Mr. Ganley wheeled it out.

  Mr. Ganley asked this pathologist if he had any documentary proof that Mrs. Campbell was, in fact, the boy’s mother.

  “He told me that he just assumed that she was. So I said well, okay, go ahead. So he opened him up and checked the organs, to see if they had all been returned after the first autopsy.”

  It was during this session, Mr. Ganley recalled, that Mrs. Campbell did some checking of her own. She examined the star-shaped wound on the back of the head and found it sewn up. She complained to Mr. Ganley about that.

  “She asked me why we did that, and I said, well, to keep it from leaking all over the table. And she said, ‘Don’t do anything else to it.’ And then she’d probe up in there with her finger.”

  “She actually put her finger in it?”

  “Oh yeah…She never expressed one bit of grief except when I first saw her and she sobbed…well, one night she kissed him and said poor David or something.”

  HOW BADLY HAD David Whiting beaten Sarah Miles? You will recall that Sergeant Hinderliter remembers Sarah telling him on the afternoon of the death that David Whiting had “slapped” her. It was the sergeant’s impression that Sarah meant she had been slapped just once. He had asked her where Whiting had slapped her.
She had pointed to the left side of her head. The sergeant does not recall seeing any marks, or any bruises, or any blood. Eleven days later Sarah told the police and the press that David Whiting had given her “the nastiest beating of my life.”

  This is how she described it:

  “He started to throw me around the room like they do in B movies…. This was the most violent ever in my life. I was very frightened because all the time I was saying, ‘Hold your face, Sarah, because you won’t be able to shoot next day’…he was beating me on the back of my head…there were sharp corners in the room and he kept throwing me against them…I was just being bashed about…he was pounding my head against everything he could…it was the nastiest beating I’ve ever had in my life. It was even nastier because it was my friend you see.”

  A lot had happened between the Sunday afternoon of February 11 when Sarah told Sergeant Hinderliter about being slapped and the evening of February 22 when she told the Arizona State Police about the “nastiest beating.”

  On Monday morning, February 12, an MGM lawyer named Alvin Cassidy took an early plane from L.A. to Phoenix, drove out to Gila Bend, and advised members of the cast and crew of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing that it would not be wise to talk to detectives from the State Police without the advice of counsel. MGM people stopped talking.

  On Monday afternoon the cast and crew of Cat Dancing began checking out of the Travelodge and heading for a new location two hundred miles southeast in the town of Nogales on the Mexican border.

  On Monday evening Rona Barrett broke the story on her nationally syndicated Hollywood gossip show.

  Rona had sensed something funny going on the night before when she attended the Directors’ Guild premier of Lady Caroline Lamb. Someone had given Rona a tip that Robert Bolt, who was attending the premier of his film, had received a “very upsetting phone call.”

  Monday morning Rona began talking to her sources in Gila Bend. By Monday evening she was able to tell her national audience of a report that Sarah Miles had been beaten up in her motel room by her business manager, a former Time correspondent. Rona called it “the alleged beating”—alleged because, according to Rona’s sources on location, Sarah Miles was “on the set the next day showing no signs of having been attacked.”

  On Wednesday of that first week, MGM hired two of the best criminal lawyers in Arizona—John Flynn of Phoenix and Benjamin Lazarow of Tucson—to represent Sarah, Burt, and the nanny.

  The MGM legal armada at first succeeded in working out a deal with the detectives. Sarah, Burt, and a few others would tape-record informal, unsworn statements about the night of the death, and answer, with the help of their attorneys, questions put to them by detectives. The detectives and the County Prosecutor made no pledge, but MGM hoped, through this taping device, to avoid having Sarah and Burt and the rest of the cast subpoenaed to testify publicly at the forthcoming coroner’s inquest.

  These recorded interviews with the detectives, which have come to be known as the “Rio Rico tapes,” took place on Thursday, February 22, at the Rio Rico Inn of Nogales, Arizona, where the MGM people were quartered. Sarah’s description of the violent, nasty beating, quoted above, comes from one of these tapes.

  The deal fell through. Gila Bend Justice of the Peace Mulford Winsor, who was to preside at the inquest, was not satisfied with this absentee-testimony arrangement. He issued subpoenas for Sarah, Burt, Lee J. Cobb, the nanny, and the two other MGM people, commanding them to appear in person in Gila Bend on February 27 to take the stand and testify.

  MGM’s legal forces promptly went to court. They asked that the subpoenas be quashed on the ground that appearances at the inquest would subject the six people to “adverse publicity and public display.”

  On February 27, just a few minutes before the inquest was about to open in Gila Bend, Justice of the Peace Winsor was served with a temporary restraining order barring him from calling Sarah or Burt to testify. Justice Winsor decided to proceed with the inquest without them, and called Sergeant Hinderliter to stand as the first witness.

  But the movie company had not counted on the determination of tiny, gray-haired Mrs. Campbell, who turned out to be a shrewd operator despite her fragile, grief-stricken appearance.

  Early that morning in Phoenix Mrs. Campbell had hired her own lawyer, presented him with a thousand-dollar retainer, and told him to contest the MGM injunction. Then she caught the first bus out to Gila Bend. On the bus she sat next to a reporter for the London Sun who was on his way out to cover the inquest. She introduced herself to the English reporter as a correspondent for a Washington, D.C., magazine and asked him for the details of the case. She wanted to know whether it were possible to libel a dead man.

  When she arrived at the courthouse, a one-story concrete all-purpose administrative building, Mrs. Campbell began passing out to the press Xeroxed copies of a document which she said was David Whiting’s last letter to her, a document which proved, she said, that David Whiting was neither unhappy nor suicidal. (While this “last letter” certainly did not give any hint of suicidal feelings, neither did it give a sense of much intimacy between mother and son. David Whiting began the letter by announcing that he was sending back his mother’s Christmas present to him, and went on to request that she send instead six pairs of boxer shorts. “I find the English variety abominably badly cut,” he wrote. “Plaids, stripes, and other bright colors would be appreciated, and I suggest you unwrap them, launder them once, and airmail them to me in a package marked ‘personal belongings.’”

  Next Mrs. Campbell approached Justice Winsor and asked him to delay the start of the inquest until her lawyer, who she said was on his way, could be present to represent her. She didn’t give up when he refused and opened the inquest. She continued to interrupt the proceedings in her quavering voice with pleas for a recess to await the appearance of her lawyer. At one point Justice Winsor threatened to have her removed.

  It came down to a matter of minutes. By midafternoon the two men from the County Attorney’s office conducting the inquest had called their last witness, and the Justice of the Peace was about to gavel the inquest to a close and send the coroner’s jury out to decide the cause of David Whiting’s death. At the last minute, however, the judge received a phone call from the presiding Justice of the Superior Court in Phoenix. Mrs. Campbell had secured an order preventing the coroner’s jury from beginning its deliberations until a full hearing could be held on the question of whether Sarah, Burt, and the nanny should be forced to appear in person to testify. Justice Winsor recessed the inquest, and Mrs. Campbell walked out with her first victory. She’d only just begun. On March 7, after a full hearing, the court ruled in her favor and ordered Sarah, Burt, and the nanny to appear at the inquest. Finally, on March 14, the three of them returned to Gila Bend and took the stand, with Mrs. Campbell seated in the front row of the courtroom taking notes.

  There were strange stories circulating about Mrs. Campbell. There was a rumor that she might not be the boy’s mother at all. Other than the “last letter,” she hadn’t shown any identification to Mr. Ganley. The copy of the last letter she was handing around showed no signature. Mrs. Campbell said she herself had written the word “David” at the bottom of the copy. She had left the original with the signature at home, she said. “Naturally I treasure it…that’s why I didn’t bring it.”

  Mrs. Campbell refused to give me her home address or phone number. She insisted on keeping secret the whereabouts of both David Whiting’s real father and his stepfather, her present husband. She implied that anyone attempting to contact the real father, who was recovering from a recent heart attack, might cause his death: she was protecting him from the news, she said.

  She described herself as a free-lance science writer, as a former writer for Architectural Forum, as a member of the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, and as retired. She insisted at first that her married name was spelled without a “p” in the middle. Then suddenly she began insis
ting that it was spelled with a “p.”

  She described herself frequently as “a woman without means,” and a “woman living on a fixed income,” but she hired four of the top lawyers in the State of Arizona to work on the case. She claimed to have flown to England with her aging mother to visit David a few months before he died.

  “My only interest in this whole affair is to protect the name of my son,” she maintained. “He was not a suicidal type, he was not the type to beat up women.”

  She was curiously silent about certain areas and curiously ill-informed about others. There was his marriage, for instance. Mrs. Campbell led me to believe that I was the first person to tell her that her son had been married. This revelation took place in the Space Age Lodge, a motel next to the Gila Bend Courthouse building, a motel distinguished by the great number of “life-sized” Alien Beings crawling over its roofs and walls. The second session of the inquest—the one at which Sarah and Burt had finally testified—had just come to an end and Mrs. Campbell was seated at a table in the Space Age Restaurant handing out copies of various affidavits to reporters and occasionally responding to questions.

  “Mrs. Campbell, has David’s ex-wife been in touch with you?” I asked.

  “His what?” she demanded sharply.

  “His ex-wife, the one who—”

  “David was never married,” she said firmly.

  “What about the London Express story which said he was married to a Pan Am stewardess, and that he used her Pan Am discount card to fly back and forth to England?”

  “What wife? What are you talking about? Where did you read that? I never heard of any marriage.”

  (It is possible that she may have been feigning surprise here, although to what purpose is not clear. The mother of the girl he married told me she herself was certain her daughter never married David Whiting. Nevertheless there is a marriage certificate on file with the Registrar of Vital Statistics, Cook County, Illinois, which records the marriage of David Andrew Whiting to Miss Nancy Cockerill on January 29, 1970. Apparently there was a divorce also, because the wife is now remarried and living in Germany.)