(Really, Really) Dirty Blonde

Actress-turned hooker Barbara Payton puts other "confessional" writers to shame

by John Epperson

December 19, 2006

From the vantage point of today's celebrity culture, 1950s Hollywood may seem as sparkling as white-picket-fence suburbia. In fact, it was completely depraved. Personalities were protected by their employers and managers; a powerful studio such as MGM could squelch a story about Lana Turner's abortion or Rock Hudson's pool parties. But as the studio system began to crumble in the late 1940s, Hollywood found itself awash with blacklists: not just the Communist witch hunt, but sexual stigmas created by tabloids such as Confidential magazine, which, for example, suggested Doris Duke had an affair with a "Negro handyman and chauffeur." Even Turner couldn't hide from Confidential, which reported on her numerous lovers (she was married eight times). Nevertheless, Turner's clever agent guided her into films that capitalized on her scandalous personal life, bringing her one Oscar nomination (for Peyton Place, based on the shocking Eisenhower-era bestseller) and an annuity (the enormously successful Imitation of Life, of which she had a percentage of the take).
   Less lucky in her attempt to turn personal notoriety into commercial success was another Hollywood bottle blonde, the most notorious Lana-wannabe of all: Barbara Payton, née Barbara Lee Redfield of Cloquet, Minnesota. Unlike the starlets who have produced tepid ghostwritten autobiographies, Payton wrote a wild book about her life, the lurid memoir I Am Not Ashamed, originally published in 1963. It was a pioneering celebrity confessional. Lillian Roth had discussed her alcoholism in I'll Cry Tomorrow and Diana Barrymore confessed her drug addiction in Too Much, Too Soon, but Payton described a life of boozing, pills, sex — and sex for pay.
   Payton was born on November 26, 1927. She wrote, "I loved the . . . cold, crisp Minnesota winters, with a blue-black sky at night and a billion stars you could reach up and grab by the handful. I think I made a wish on every one of those stars." She was an early bloomer: "Once when I was thirteen or so, my father came upon me necking, and I mean really necking, in a boy's car parked temporarily in our driveway. He apologized and walked away. My father didn't want to believe that his daughter could or would have anything to do with that mysterious something called sex."
   Payton lost her virginity at age fifteen to a friend's forty-five-year-old father, while a birthday party continued downstairs. "He just grabbed my arm and pulled me inside, locked the door again and kissed me. I was scared stiff someone would see us come out of the john together. I'm not going to tell you what happened, but what did happen was in a dry bathtub." At age sixteen, she married a young man about the same age, but her parents had the marriage annulled. The next year she married John Payton, a twenty-two-year-old Air Force Captain. This new marriage took, and the couple honeymooned in Hollywood.
   In 1948, just as the studio system was beginning to fade, Payton landed what may have been a casting-couch contract at Universal Studios (in the autobiography, Payton wrote, "Show me a producer or a casting agent — male — who won't succumb in some way to overtures like flirting or flattery and I'll show you a fag.") The movies she wound up in may not have been much, but Barbara became the new party girl in town, flaunting her bawdy wit. She drank her way up and down Sunset Strip and was dubbed "Queen of the Nightclubs" by the press. "I went out with every big male star in town. They wanted my body and I need their name for success."
   After a torrid affair with Bob Hope (she was reportedly his kept woman and followed him on his travels), she was dropped by Universal. But Warner Brothers picked up her contract and cast her as a gun moll in the violent crime drama Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, opposite A-lister James Cagney. There were rumors she got the gig by obliging Cagney's brother, the producer of the film, with what she called her "specialty" — oral sex. But Payton insisted she got the part by shocking the casting director with the welcoming greeting: "Shit! It's a hot fucking day!" She boasted of the exchange: "I told him if I hadn't done something spectacular, I would have been brushed off. Anyway, my entrance became a conversation piece around the studio. Eventually I got a test and was signed."
   In the film, Payton is somewhat stiff as the jilted girlfriend who shoots her philandering lover. Her voice is not particularly distinguished. She was photogenic and more than pretty. But she wasn't a unique beauty like Garbo, Ava Gardner or Elizabeth Taylor, and as film historian Howard Mandelbaum pointed out, her face was somewhat immobile. Nevertheless, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was Payton's finest moment. She had a few more big-budget chances in films with Gregory Peck and Gary Cooper, but none of them were hits. According to Mandelbaum, "There was nowhere for her to go but down. She was beautiful, but it was a hard beauty. She seemed to have a hard core."
   Payton wrote, "When I was rich and could afford it. I went to a psychiatrist . . . He gave me the obvious explanation — I was inwardly afraid of men and their power over me. I didn't argue. It could be. Men have dragged me through all the emotions, top to bottom, and in between . . . I had a lot of electricity in me and men just didn't hit and run with me. They usually came back for seconds and with their tongues wagging."    Plenty of gossip tongues were wagging when older distinguished actor and Group Theatre groupie Franchot Tone spotted Payton at Ciro's on The Strip and became her new boyfriend. High-profile Hollywood romance didn't stop Payton from fooling around with former footballer Woody Strode and dreamy young Guy Madison, however; when Tone found his girlfriend and Madison in bed, Confidential had its first big Barbara Payton headline. Mogul Jack Warner punished Payton by loaning her out to cheapie producer Herman Cohen to star in The Bride of the Gorilla. It was the beginning of the professional end for Barbara, of whom Cohen later said, "She was a whore who got lucky." Barbara Payton and Tony Wright in Bad Blonde.    In 1963, Payton freely admitted she was a whore (" . . . this kid of twenty-one, he was so awed by me I went to bed with him and then wouldn't take his money. That's how lousy a hooker I was"). But she considered herself a sexual iconoclast ("I was unconventional and a maverick — but people seemed to like it"). One man who clearly appreciated it was strapping B-movie star Tom Neal, whose most famous role is in the bleak, low-budget film noir Detour. Neal and Tone literally, publicly battled it out for Barbara on the cover of Confidential. Tone (one of Joan Crawford's matrimonial cast-offs) was hospitalized with a concussion after the fisticuffs, and Barbara married him. The marriage only lasted seven weeks, and she returned to her fiery relationship with Tom Neal ("Honey, I just took one look at him and I absolutely flipped! He looked so wonderful in his trunks"). He liked to lift weights in his skivvies on their patio while his girlfriend sunbathed nude nearby, in full view of nearby residents.    The two exhibitionists, now Hollywood jokes, ventured to England where Payton appeared in two films, one of them appropriately called Bad Blonde and inspired by The Postman Always Rings Twice, and the boxing movie Body and Soul. Back in the United States, the intense, dysfunctional couple toured in a theatrical production of Postman, and on at least one occasion Barbara appeared onstage drunk and passed out.    She and Neal finally called it quits — it was whispered Payton was his punching bag; in the 1960s Neal was convicted of killing his third wife — and Barbara tried to get her Hollywood career back on track. "Today, I live in a rat-and-roach-infested apartment," wrote Payton. "And I drink too much rosé wine." But the town had turned its back. Bloated and boozy, she lost the Beverly Hills estate that had been given to her by Tone when he dumped her, and pleaded poverty in court. Payton spent her last few years trying to survive as a five-dollar hooker in sleazy Los Angeles neighborhoods. "Today, right now, I live in a rat-and-roach infested apartment with not a bean to my name and I drink too much rosé wine," Payton wrote. "I don't like what my scale tells me. The little money I do accumulate to pay the rent comes from old residuals, poetry and favors to men . . . Does it all sound depressing to you? Queasy? Well, I'm not ashamed . . . " Desperate, she returned to her parents, by then living in San Diego, but they were also alcoholics. The trio stayed drunk, and Payton died in 1967 at age thirty-nine, of heart and liver failure, hunched over a toilet.    At one time Payton would have been called a nymphomaniac. Today we might call her sexually compulsive. Around the time her life story was published, she was hanging out in dark bars, her once-va-va-voom physique absurdly swollen by booze and teeth missing from heroin use, plotting her return to the top of the cinema game. I Am Not Ashamed was itself part of that pathetic attempt, but she also needed the money. For pouring her heart out, she received $1,000.

©2006 John Epperson and hooksexup.com