“The truth is not there, but here,” said British actress Sarah Miles in a One-Woman show in the King's Head Theater in London in 1999, gestures to her heart.
A quarter of a century later, the jury stays on that claim.
Miles, 83, who had a 20-year-old affair with Laurence Olivier on either side of two marriages with the deceased playwright Robert Bolt, recently said that she knows the truth about the infamous death of former magazine journalist David Whiting during the filming of Cat Dancing in Arizona in 1973.
Given that the death of Whiting, her personal manager, remains one of the most permanent unsolved mysteries of Hollywood, it was a decent statement – especially in view of the fact that she called Tinseltown -legend Burt Reynolds as the murderer.
How did she know? Because, said Miles, her son Tom Bolt – who was four years old and stayed in an adjacent room when his mother discovered the body of Whiting in her bathroom in a Travelodge in Gila Bend, Arizona, on 11 February 1973 – told her that.
“He said Burt did, the next day,” Miles told Robert Emery's backstage podcast.
However, Bolt, who is now 55, has disputed that claim – although he admits that the episode has chased him all his life.
“Mama, who is now 83 and is retired, suggested that the reason she knows that Burt has killed David – is a conviction that she is holding – is because I told her, which should mean that I witnessed it,” he wrote In the Daily Telegraph.
Burt Reynolds and Sarah Miles in 1973 Western the man who loved Cat Dancing. The death of former journalist David Whiting during filming remains one of Hollywood's Great Mysteries
According to Miles, Tom Bolt, who was present at that time and present during filming in Arizona, told her the day after Whiting's death that Reynolds was responsible
Miles cries while talking to reporters after witnessing an investigation into the death of Whiting, her business manager, shortly after his death in 1973
“I don't think this is true; I think it is exactly what Mama wanted to say at the time of the moment in the interview. But it is interesting that I have had a recurring nightmare all my life that I killed someone. '
Forced to deepen deeper, Bolt boarded an airplane last year to Arizona and stayed in the same hotel – and the same room – where Miles found the body of Whiting more than half a century ago.
Although he did not accuse the possibility that the journey could accommodate a long suppressed memory and ask him to report to the nearest police station, he was mainly motivated by a search for closure, he said.
In the case, Bolt felt 'remarkably small' and simply offered a prayer for Whiting, who says Miles that she found dead on his back and covered with pills.
Was it an overdose, as that scene would suggest, or a little more sinister?
Perhaps few would be better placed to answer that question than Reynolds, demonstrable the Leading man of the 70s and the star of hits such as liberation, Smokey and the Bandit and Boogie Nights.
But Reynolds died in 2018 and the truth behind a tragedy that 'left many unanswered questions', in the words of Mulford Winsor IV, a justice of the peace who provided an investigation into the death of Whiting in March 1973, is perhaps never known.
As Miles tells the story, she was confronted with Whiting, who, according to her, had an unhealthy obsession with her, after returning to her room in the early hours after a birthday party thrown by Reynolds.
Miles and Reynolds are seen smiling in a scene of the man who loved Cat Dancing, who was adapted from a novel by Marilyn Durham and directed by Richard C Sarafian
The British actress Miles says she was attacked in her hotel room shortly before his death, where Reynolds subsequently came to her help
“He said:” It's late, look at the time – where have you been? “Miles told Emery, adding that Whiting looked” more nutritious than I have ever seen before. ”
“Do you know damn well where I have been,” Miles reportedly replied.
At that moment, Miles said, Whiting started beating her. She called to Bolt's Nanny for help and then told her to get Reynolds – at which point Whiting fled the night. He was soon followed by Reynolds, who said he was unable to find Whiting, and invited kilometers to stay in his room for safety. Whiting was never seen alive again.
“It's like one of those things you read about in mysterious stories,” Winsor would say later.
And so it was.
As Winsor noted, Whiting's blood was found in three different rooms in the hotel. How did it get there?
He had a 'star -shaped' wound in mind and scratches and bruises on his body. Were the injuries consistent with someone involved in a scuffle or fight? Yes, an autopsie docker said.
A pilfleshing would reportedly mean that the link was missing; Reynolds, who said he removed it from the body and brought it to miles to ask her what Whiting had taken, claimed that he could not remember where he left it. How did it just disappear?
One autopsy doubted suggestions that the medicines in his system – especially Methaqualone, a sedative hypnotic medicine – were sufficient to kill him. Did he use the drugs in an attempt to calm himself, or did he try suicide?
The uncertainty was exacerbated by a trio of research judgment – suicide, murder, then again suicide – that for many only the impression of powerful forces at work behind the scenes worsened. Has the Hollywood studio system brought its weight behind the scenes?
These are questions that seem to be answered unlikely.
