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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.”
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| Payton in her big break, Kiss Me Goodbye; later, in Bride of the Gorilla. |
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."
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photo: Austin Young