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- David Andrew Whiting (August 1946 – February 11, 1973) was an American writer and personal manager. After becoming the youngest correspondent hired by Time, he turned to working in the film industry, where he enjoyed close friendships with actresses Candice Bergen and particularly Sarah Miles. After a brief affair with the latter, he became her personal manager. A child of a broken marriage, he was educated at the exclusive St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., where his mother lived. He made an impression on fellow students there, and some faculty, with his intelligence and persona. Due to academic difficulties, he left the school after his junior year for Georgetown, where he also fell short academically. After a year working on a documentary film shoot in Libya, which cemented his interest in that field, he returned to the U.S. to finish his undergraduate studies at Haverford College. Following his 1968 graduation, he began his journalistic career, notably managing to sneak into a White House ball he was covering for Time and briefly dance with Patricia Nixon before the Secret Service caught him. He began gravitating toward film at the expense of his journalistic career, and was able to help Miles and her husband, playwright and screenwriter Robert Bolt, get Lady Caroline Lamb, Bolt's only directorial effort, produced in 1971. Whiting was unsuccessful in getting his own screenplays produced. Miles recalls Whiting as psychologically unstable, overly protective of her, sometimes to the point of abuse, and threatening suicide on several occasions. Following an incident during production of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing in 1973, Whiting was found dead, with a significant head injury and high concentrations of two tranquilizers in his bloodstream, in Miles's hotel room after fighting with her and co-star Burt Reynolds in the early morning. Extensive media coverage speculated that Reynolds had played some role in Whiting's death; MGM's lawyers allowed local authorities only limited access to Reynolds, Miles and her nanny, who had slept the night in the room adjoining Miles's. Almost two months later a coroner's jury found Whiting's death to be the result of an accidental overdose, but qualified that conclusion as based on limited evidence and demanding of further investigation. Private investigators and experts hired by Whiting's mother came to different conclusions. (en)
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