Piss Drinkers and Hell Raisers

Born on 31 December 1941, Sarah Miles is a British actress, best known for films including The Servant (1963), Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Blowup (1966), Ryan's Daughter (1970, for which she received an OSCAR nomination for Best Actress), White Mischief and Hope and Glory (both 1987).

She has also worked extensively in the theatre, and was nominated for a BAFTA for best newcomer in her debut, Term of Trail (1962) opposite Sir Laurence Olivier. She was just 19 at the time, Larry was 55, but the pair briefly became lovers.

So began a pattern that would dog her life. Over the years she has been the swain of several well-known men, including Robert Mitchum, Steven Spielberg and Burt Reynolds, and was twice married to playwright Robert Bolt, nursing him through years of ill-health.

In 1973 Miles was questioned over the death of her ‘business manager’ and one-time lover David Whiting, whose body was discovered in her Arizona motel room, on the morning of 11 February, while she was in America filming The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing with Burt Reynolds. Early reports suggested that Whiting had taken his own life, but as the story unfolded so did a tale of violence, with Miles admitting to having taken ‘a considerable beating’ from the aspiring scriptwriter. Miles had been spending time with Reynolds: when she returned, a jealous Whiting had ‘knocked her around the bedroom’, according to the statement she gave to police. Miles, who was married to playwright Robert Bolt at the time, left once again, staying with Reynolds. When she finally returned to her own room, at midday, she found Whiting dead.

The first police to arrive on the scene found a seemingly-bruise free Miles weeping on the bed. She would later claim that Whiting was the third man to die for love for her. The inquest into Whiting’s death questioned how the dead man had suffered head injuries and how his blood had been found in three separate rooms within the motel complex, however, a post mortem confirmed that he had died of a drugs overdose. 

Outside of her skills as an actress and deadly vamp, Miles is best known for swearing like a trooper and having once admitted to drinking her own urine daily since the mid-1970s. I think I’d like her. But it’s not the sex, drugs or piss-taking we’re interested in here, it’s her decidedly un-rock ‘n’ roll attempt at pop immortality, the Fontana release Where Am I?

In 1965, Sarah Miles recorded what I believe to have been her only stab at a pop single, a Burt Bacharach-style bossa nova written by Doctor Sam Hutt, aka Hank Wangford. It was a surprising move for a woman who, when promoting the disc, admitted to the Daily Mirror columnist Patrick Doncaster that ‘I haven’t got any records. Not even a gramophone.’ She went on to say that the reason she made the record was that ‘one must have a try at almost everything,’ but she was none too pleased with the results: ‘I’ve never heard a noise like it before’. And, until I discovered this little beauty, neither had I!

Unsurprisingly the 45 was not a success.  ‘The words were atrocious,’ Wangford himself would later recall, ‘And she couldn’t sing for toffee.  She made Ernest Tubb sound as if he hit every note on the button.’ The flipside, the whimsical Here Of All Places, was composed by David Mallet, who would go on to find fame as a much-sought-after pop promo director, working with Queen, Blondie, David Bowie (including the iconic Ashes to Ashes video), the Rolling Stones, Culture Club, AC/DC, Erasure and countless other acts. Dr. Hutt would later pen the highly collectable psychedelic 45 Jabberwock/Which Dreamed It, released under the name Boeing Duveen and The Beautiful Soup, before becoming better known via his country persona.

Miles would appear on The Anti-Heroin Project double album It’s A Live-In World in 1986, but she is not the same Sarah Miles that appears on the US cast version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. That particular Miss Miles is principally known as a choreographer, not a seductress or singer.

Here are both sides of this wonderfully woeful 45. Enjoy!

Download Where HERE

Download Here HERE