Bad Blonde

BARBARA PAYTON
November 16, 1927 - May 8, 1967

In 1949, Barbara Payton was starring opposite the likes of James Cagney and Gregory Peck at Warner Brothers, and well on her way towards earning a $10,000 per week salary. Within a few short years, it was all gone; her wild excesses (even by today's standards) rendered her persona non grata in Hollywood. In the most infamous instance, she pitted her two lovers, debonair Franchot Tone and pugnacious Tom Neal, against each other; the ensuing brawl resulted in Tone being left in a coma and requiring plastic surgery.

Payton's drug, sex, and booze bacchanals became legendary around town, and she seemed too busy having fun to notice, or care, that her stock was quickly plummeting. As rapidly as her star had risen, the offers dried up, and by the time Payton realized what was happening to her, it was too late. Her grand Hollywood mansion was foreclosed upon; blackballed from films, Payton drifted from job to job, at one point working as a shampoo girl in a salon just blocks away from the Warner Brothers studio where she had been, briefly, a star.

Payton's own brand of self-loathing often manifested itself in degrading sexual acts; it seemed a disturbingly natural progression in her downward spiral for her to turn to prostitution. At first, she worked out of expensive hotel bars; but as her life became more and more unmanageable, she soon was turning tricks for $5 in the back of running cars. By the early 1960's, she was being arrested constantly for vagrancy and prostitution. As her biographer John O'Down put it, Payton's life became an almost unreal Greek tragedy or Grand Guignol: a one-time A-list movie star whose complete and total self-destruction led to her becoming an alcoholic, heroin-addicted Skid Row prostitute, living variously in complete squalor or on the streets.

When Barbara Payton died in 1967, it was seemingly the end of a torturously slow, protracted suicide: the once dazzling blonde bombshell, at the hideously young age of 39, looked 20 years older; had lost her teeth to her heroin addiction; was grotesquely bloated from liver disease; and was covered in scars from the knife attacks she had suffered from the $5 johns and assorted hoods she had encountered in the seediest back alleys of Skid Row.

The title of her infamous 1963 "memoirs," for which she was paid $500? I Am Not Ashamed.