My film star mum claims I witnessed Burt Reynolds murder her lover

Telegraph

21-02-2025

When we think of the great on-set tales from Hollywood history, many of us hold them at a distance, treating them like myths and legends populated by stars who feel so removed from our own lives that they might as well be fictional.
That, of course, isn't the case. For every story there's a kernel of truth; for every star there's a real person and a family behind them; for every event there's a witness. I should know, having grown up surrounded by legends.
My mother is the actress Sarah Miles, who starred in The Servant and Blow-Up and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for David Lean-directed Ryan's Daughter. My father was Robert Bolt, who wrote the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Man for All Seasons, receiving two Oscars and three Golden Globes in the process.
This made for an unusual childhood, to put it mildly. As well as in London, I grew up on film sets all over the world, from the Pacific island of Bora Bora, where Dad made The Bounty with David Lean, to Gila Bend, Arizona, where my mother made the Western The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.
The latter took place in 1973, and became the setting for not just that film, but one of Hollywood's greatest unsolved mysteries: when my mother's manager, David Whiting, died on set under circumstances that were, to say the least, suspicious. And 51 years on, I'd be dragged back into it.
At that time, I was four years old and fascinated by all things Wild West – an obsession no doubt fermented by my father's enthusiasm for them, as well as our occasional communal viewings of The Magnificent Seven. Given that, you can imagine my reaction when I arrived on set in Arizona and met Burt Reynolds, who was starring with Mum.
Reynolds was cool, really cool. When I first met him he was dozing: boots up, hat over face. Once awakened from his slumber, he could tell I wanted to draw – as they say in the Westerns – since I'd been loaned a gun belt and holster from the props department, and my fingers were twitching.
As he got up to about-face for the customary 10 paces (and full of fear, I could tell…), he spat out some goop from the corner of his mouth. It was so cool that I stopped the role play to enquire as to what it was and if I could have some.
'It's chewing tobacco,' he said, offering me a bit from a pouch he had tucked into his cowboy boot. Though that's Mum's account – it could have been snuff or even strong gum. Naturally I partook, though of course within 10 seconds I wish I hadn't, such was the fireball that started to rip its way through my face. To this day I still don't remember if we ever got to the draw. Though, yes, perhaps a little irresponsible of him if viewed through today's lens, that was then. Besides, I'd be smoking weed with Mum in only six years' time anyway.
I was comfortable on sets at that age, and confident enough around adults to have no reservations about speaking up. During one scene in the film, Burt and Jack Warden were to have a brawl, wrestling over a gun, then punching one another through a sugar-glass window. Given the hours it took to install, you can appreciate that the director was already very grumpy about having messed up the previous take, hence needing this reshoot.
'Action!' The clapperboard snapped down again. As they went bouncing off the walls, smashing props in the process, I suddenly noticed the barrel of the rubber gun they were wrestling over was bent.
'Cut!' I shouted, impulsively, from where I was standing, way behind and to the side of the camera. The sudden silence was deafening. All 30 or so members of the crew looked at me in total disbelief, including my hugely embarrassed mother. 'The rubber gun, it… it's bent in half!' I said, in a trembling voice.
Burt glanced at his hand. 'Yup, that's a banana,' he said, holding it aloft to everyone's relieved laughter. He then patted me on the back for having saved yet another false window being smashed or, worse still, another day of costly repetitive filming. The attention felt good.
That was the last of the 'good vibes' I remember from that production, as shortly afterwards, David Whiting died. David had been a fairly regular presence in my life over those few years. He'd previously had an affair with my mother, and was the final catalyst of my parents' divorce. A year earlier he was even sent to watch over me while hospitalised in an oxygen tent as Mum and Dad were filming Lady Caroline Lamb with Richard Chamberlain and Sir Laurence Olivier.
In the Arizona desert, I was staying in the Travelodge Motel with my nanny in an adjacent, connecting motel room to Mum. It was in Mum's bathroom, on February 11 1973, that David's body was found. How he got there, how he died, and a dozen other questions relating to the evening, have been debated and disputed ever since.
Though Mum's version of events has changed over the years, usually meaning they're inconsistent with the many other investigations, both official and journalistic, it is understandable that time might distort the truth. An allegation I might well suffer with the release of my forthcoming book, which is predominantly about recovering from drug addiction. Still, it wouldn't be possible for me to have been clean and sober for 38 years now, having given up drugs and alcohol at 18, should I not practice at least a modicum of self-honesty in my life.
I distinctly remember some four years after the event, while living back with Mum again in Beverly Hills, that she suddenly became extremely stressed because there had been some regurgitative press about the incident on American TV. It sent her into a panic – though the strongest finger of suspicion had been pointed at Burt at the time of David's demise, it also wagged at her.
The night he died, she had been in Burt's room, after an argument with David. Mum had been at Burt's birthday party, to which a select few were invited, but not David.
When she returned, having briefly partied with some wranglers at the hotel afterwards, David, full of rage and jealousy, physically attacked her. Mum screamed for my nanny to fetch Burt, who eventually came to her rescue as David scarpered into the desert night. Burt gave chase, telling Mum to take refuge in his room, but he returned saying he couldn't find David, so they thought it safer if she remained with him.
The dark Hollywood legend has it that Burt murdered David Whiting, but given he was fast becoming the hottest property in Hollywood, having just finished Deliverance, he was protected – by MGM, by the studio system and by Hollywood. The movie world was powerful at that time; the local cops of this Hicksville town were no match, it seemed.
In the morning after David died, I was playing in Mum's bedroom, having come to look for her. David's body lay in the en suite bathroom. When she discovered the corpse, the scene looked like a perfectly staged overdose: pills scattered around the body, all in keeping with David being manic depressive.
The slight problem was that not only was David apparently sporting a new, unstressed shirt, but he had several injuries, along with a gash on the back of his head that seemed consistent with a spur kick. There were also allegedly not enough pills in his system to have caused his death, according to one autopsy. Plus, the pill bottle mysteriously went missing.
In the maelstrom and panic after David's body was found, movie moguls, plus the relevant heavy-hitting lawyers who told everyone to say and do nothing with the police until forced, flew in from LA. This being Mum's first Hollywood movie, she was happy to listen to their 'advice'.
The death was initially recorded as suicide, but it soon changed to a murder investigation, before reverting again to suicide. Because Mum was also under suspicion, she needed as many character references as she could muster, and so asked Dad to be one. He obliged on the condition that he was given custody over me, as he felt Hollywood was no place for a child (he was proved right in the ensuing years), and even less so with a mother embroiled in a potential murder investigation.
Eventually both Mum and Burt had their day in court, but with the support of the studio lawyers, were more than a fair match for the local judge, a part-time plumber who, by most accounts, seemed pretty infatuated with Mum. He didn't stand a chance – though Burt did have to return to Gila Bend to give further evidence three months later. He always denied any involvement.
All of this seemed removed from me, despite some strong memories of that time in Arizona. Or it did, at least, until a recent podcast interview in which Mum, who is now 83 and retired, suggested the reason she knows Burt killed David – a belief she firmly holds – is because I told her, which must mean I witnessed it.
I don't think for a minute this is true; I think it's just what Mum felt like saying on the spur of the moment in the interview. But it's interesting that I've had a recurring nightmare throughout my life that I've murdered someone. That, and the blanks I feel I needed to fill in about that time in Arizona, is why I found myself on a plane last year to visit the very same motel 51 years later. Who knows, I thought, perhaps it'll all come flooding back and I'll end up handing myself in…
In the end, I stayed the night in the very same room where David died. I went in search of closure, more than answers, and in the end, far from handing myself in, I felt remarkably little. Perhaps I was simply too young for any appropriate recall, or maybe there is just too deep-rooted a memory blockage.
I am not religious, but in that fateful room in Gila Bend, having spent the night experiencing no ghostly encounters, I said a little prayer where David's body was found. Burt Reynolds died in 2018, and with him, the best shot at the truth about all this. But there are surely people still alive who know what really happened all those years ago. Like so many Hollywood tales, this is a complex, disputed and altogether tragic story. And at its heart is a real person with a family behind them. David Whiting's family lost him that night. He deserves to be remembered.