"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.