Barbara Payton – what a waste.

 

One of Hollywood’s truly tragic stories was that of Barbara Payton, a pretty and talented actress who experienced both the highs and lows of life in Tinsel Town. Just sixteen years after starring alongside Gregory Peck in the western feature Only the Valiant (1951) she was dead. Her body was so ravaged by hard living and liver failure by then it was all but unrecognisable, yet she was only 39 years old.

A run-down of Barbara’s private life reads like the script of a ‘B’ movie. She was born in 1927 in Cloquet, Minnesota (Jessica Lange’s home town) and moved with her folks to Texas when she was eleven. Four years later the father of a school friend raped her in a dry bathtub while the man’s family celebrated his surprise birthday party downstairs. That same year she eloped with her high school boyfriend, but her parents quickly had the marriage annulled. At seventeen she married an Air Force captain and moved to California where she took up modelling. The couple separated two years later, but not before Barbara gave birth to a son in 1947.

Gregory Peck and Barbara in Only the Valiant

Universal-International put her under contract in 1948, but dropped her in 1949 after learning of her six-month illicit affair with the very married Bob Hope. Hope had put her up in a luxurious apartment, but the relationship disintegrated when she began demanding money from him as well. Over the following 12 months she embarked upon affairs with attorney Greg Bautzer, gangster Mickey Cohen, actors John Ireland, Gregory Peck, George Raft, a couple of Sunset Strip playboys, and many, many others.

In 1950, Warner Brothers and Cagney Productions suddenly contracted her at $5,000 a week. Barbara had met Jimmy Cagney a couple of years earlier, but the rumour mill contended she slept with his brother William to get the contract, and not with Jimmy. Around this time her divorce came through from her Air Force captain. She celebrated her freedom by becoming engaged to actor Franchot Tone. Then she nailed both her co-stars when she made Dallas opposite Gary Cooper and Steve Cochran. Barbara liked men and she liked sex. She made Trapped with Lloyd Bridges in 1949, a pretty solid film noir, and had a brief fling with him, referring to the father of Jeff and Beau as ‘a champion ruiner of girls in Hollywood’. Lloyd had a heavy rep.

with Lloyd Bridges in Trapped

In October 1950 her ‘friend’ Stanley Adams, a suspected murderer and dope addict, was charged with perjury. Barbara bravely, but ill-advisedly, went to bat for him and Warners placed her on temporary suspension after she testified for the defence and earned herself and the studio a lot of adverse publicity. One year later Tone allegedly caught her en flagrante with the married Guy Madison at her apartment. Before the feathers had stopped flying she told reporters she was ditching Tone for her newest lover – not Madison, but B-movie tough guy Tom Neal!

Franchot Tone and Barbara

In September 1951, Neal attacked Tone outside Barbara’s apartment and beat him so viciously that the matinee idol required extensive plastic surgery to his damaged face. On September 28, much to the tabloids’ delight, Tone and Payton were wed anyway. Just seven weeks later the marriage was in tatters as scatter-brained Barbara went back to Neal, although not directly. Along the way she paused to dally with George Sanders’ alcoholic brother Tom Conway. She and Conway were shooting the woeful Bride of the Gorilla together.

with Tom Neal

In December that same year she and Neal headed off to New York City to promote a film, but Barbara quickly gave him the slip and spent the evening in a hotel suite with six drunken cowboys, goading each of them into fist-fighting one another for her favours. Before the month was out she astounded almost everybody by leaving Neal and returning to Tone again! March 1952 found her back in New York City, this time with her husband instead of Neal. The whole roller-coaster ride must have been beginning to affect her, for she accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills and almost died. Following her recovery two months later she suddenly divorced Tone. She informed the newspapers that he had threatened to kill both her and her on-again, off-again lover Neal. No wonder. Incredibly, eight years later, Tone would again ask her to marry him. This time she turned him down. And he was far from happy about it.

Steve Cochran and Barbara

In a fit of pique he hired private detectives to photograph her having sex with several men, and then mailed copies of those pictures to all the Hollywood studios in an attempt to ruin her career. He need not have bothered. Barbara had already done that herself. When she publicly flaunted her inter-racial affair with Woody Strode it finished her anyway. For those readers unfamiliar with Strode’s name, he is probably best-remembered today for playing the Nubian slave who spares the life of Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) in the arena at the expense of his own in Kubrick’s 1960 epic of the same name.

Woody Strode in Spartacus

July 1952 found Barbara still impersonating a human ping pong ball as she bounced back  – you guessed it – to the ever unreliable Mr Neal. However, while on a trip to London, he caught her in bed with a wealthy night club owner named Siegi Sessler and again the relationship almost foundered. Not quite. Not yet. The not so happy couple found time to feature together in a ‘B’ grade movie, The Great Jesse James Raid, before finally going their separate ways in 1953. This was the only time they appeared on the screen together.

Throughout 1954 Barbara surrendered to her sexually compulsive nature and gained a reputation for trawling Hollywood cocktail lounges in search of men. The striking blonde had little trouble finding them. One of her conquests was notorious playboy Serge Rubinstein. His luck ran out soon afterwards when he was strangled to death in his New York Apartment by an unknown assailant. By 1955, her acting career all but over, Payton narrowly avoided going to jail for writing bad cheques (just to buy her groceries).

She took off for Mexico where she married again, this particular union lasting three years. Between 1959 and 1962 she descended into alcoholism and prostitution in a big way. During this period, in February 1962, she propositioned an undercover cop in a bar on Sunset Boulevard and was arrested. Five months later she reported to police that a teenaged gang had tried to pack rape her in a motel. The next morning, battered and bruised, she was discovered on a bus stop bench, clad only in a swimsuit and overcoat and quite drunk. She was arrested for public drunkenness. Just one week after the public drunkenness incident she was again arrested, this time for being drunk and disorderly while noisily entertaining two men in a friend’s apartment. By then she was turning tricks regularly and, allegedly, starring in a pornographic movie simply to make ends meet. Her nights were still being spent in bars where she solicited openly. Actor Dennis Hopper unashamedly claimed he was one of her customers in the back booth of a bar around this time.

Barbara making headlines

By the spring of 1963 the once beautiful, popular blonde star was in an utterly hopeless state. Suffering from depression, mental illness, liver problems, alcoholism and drug addiction, the former screen beauty was selling her ravaged body most nights. One such encounter saw her knifed by a client. The wound required 38 stitches and she almost died. In October she was found guilty of prostitution and fined $150. It was also around this time that she contacted writer John Gilmore who was working on a film script about the ‘Black Dahlia’ murder. She told him of an alleged ‘kinky’ meeting between her ex-husband Tone and Elizabeth Short, the doomed ‘Black Dahlia’ herself. The meeting, Payton claimed, took place in January 1947, shortly before the lady’s body was found in two pieces on South Norton Avenue, Los Angeles. If she was implying that Tone had something to do with Hollywood’s most famous unsolved murder, she provided no other evidence to support such a monstrous claim. Since then, incidentally, there have been a half dozen people accused by various authors of killing the hapless Miss Short, among them none other than actor Orson Welles! Even his most ardent enemies would find that one difficult to swallow. It now appears that a police officer may have been the culprit all along. But that’s another story.

Tone and Barbara – the years are taking their toll

Police mugshot of Barbara 1964

Things continued to go from bad to worse for Barbara. In 1964, the girl who once wore $10,000 mink coats and gave away $1,000 garments to her friends and family was charged with shoplifting some clothing! Less than twelve months later she was arrested for possession of heroin and syringes. The charges were dropped but few doubted she was mainlining. A year later her ex-lover Neal was convicted of killing his third wife and was sentenced to six years behind bars. Barbara, apparently, attended the proceedings as an interested spectator. Two years later she was dead at 39 from heart and liver failure. Tone died from lung cancer less than eighteen months after her. Neal collapsed and died shortly after his release from prison in 1972. I doubt if many movie fans today have even heard of Barbara Payton, yet I feel her story is one of the most poignant in Hollywood’s long history of ruined lives. She appears to have brought much of her woes on herself, but maybe she was not very bright, even grossly naive? Surely, a reasonably intelligent person would not make the mistakes she made. Not so many anyway, yet underneath she was kind and generous. Most people who knew her liked her. Perhaps, her journal explained a lot about her approach to life. Her best friend found it and discovered a plaintive cry to her cold, uncaring father, repeated over and over within it. ‘Daddy, please love me!’ How sad.

 

37 Comments

  1. Hi Alan, my question would be, is Barbara an MK Ultra victim bc she has ALL the symptoms? There is nothing more INSANE than that. They are MPD. I lived with a female victim as a room mate, and it was the LONGEST 3 weeks of my life! MK is RAMPANT in Hollywood.

  2. “She was born in 1927 in Cloquet, Minnesota (Jessica Lange’s home town) and moved with her folks to Texas when she was eleven. Four years later the father of a school friend seduced her in a dry bathtub while the man’s family celebrated his surprise birthday party downstairs.”

    By my count, that makes her 15, and the sentence should read “Four years later, the father of a school friend raped her in a dry bathtub…” She wasn’t “seduced.” She was under-age and she was raped.

  3. Fame can easily destroy anyone. There is no manual or training that can prepare you for the pressures and temptations of being a celebrity in acting, music, or athletics. A fine TX musician once told me “you don’t want it to happen too fast”. Look at Elvis, despite all his success, drugs finally took over and he died at 42. Jim Morrison once said ” I hate being a rock star.” Janis Joplin said “I make love to 20,000 people on stage and I go home alone.” I tried acting long ago, after doing auditions, being rejected and put down, I left. I was too old and lacked star quality. I am glad now it didn’t happen–I am not sure I could handle the frustration and disappointment of that career. I was a librarian in Houston, did that for 25 years, and cancer forced me to retire at 56. Sometimes we’re lucky not to get what we think we want.

    • Thankyou for your most interesting note, Michael. Like many young people I dreamt of fame and fortune, either as a singer or a movie star, but I doubt if my nature would have handled the rejection and constant pressure that accompanies fame. Now I am approaching 74 and I am content to be a little fish in a big pond.

    • YES Michael, U R fortunate to have gotten as far AWAY from Hollywood as possible. What I KNOW about it most sheeple will NOT believe! “Those who SEE it will be thought of as INSANE.” THE BRUTAL TRUTH is ‘unsettling’ to say the least.

  4. Recently I found another woman, Stephanie Niznik, from the show Everwood died at her home in 2019. She was only 52. After an autopsy cause of death was ruled liver disease brought on by alcohol. This lady went to Duke Univ. got a double major in theater and Russian. She was a National Merit scholar, got accepted to Harvard, Duke gave her a full scholarship, and she later earned a Master’s in Drama in California. My point–even very bright people can fall victim to alcohol abuse. She was never married and had no children. Everything I find in print says she was a lovely and kind person. She did all kinds of volunteer work. I’ve lost two friends to alcoholism–a great guitar player and an MBA friend I knew for 30 yrs. It’s a real nightmare to watch good people be destroyed by this drug. What hurts most is watching them decline help or refusing to get help.

    • We hear a lot about the evils of drug abuse and rightly so, Michael, but alcoholism is just as destructive and equally sad. It also has an insidious nature that often goes undetected by loved ones until it is too late. I can’t help but wonder how much of this terrible disease could be treated effectively if governments only made a genuine attempt to do so. Thanks again for your comments.

      • @Alan Royle, my JUNKIE brother was kept alive long enough by 12 Step programs to STEAL my , and my 2 other brother’s inheritance which totalled almost a million dollars. I’m a drinker but sober 7 years this stint. Hard drugs are MUCH worse than alcohol!!! NO COMPARISON!

  5. I saw her in a Jimmy Cagney flick and wondered about her because she was really that good. After finding more of her movies I then learned of her crazy past. You went into more depth about her but I felt so bad that she felt the need to abase herself.

    • People are quick to judge others, Ginger. Barbara was just as much a victim of the Hollywood system as was Marilyn Monroe and countless others, yet she receives none of the sympathy and compassion that MM has always received. Carole Landis is another lovely woman treated very shabbily by history.

      • YES Alan! You seriously have NO IDEA what really goes on with these ‘stars’! Google MK Ultra, and/or go on FB, MK Groups. I’ve researched it about 26 years. I lived with a victim, so I have FIRST hand experience. IT IS REAL!

      • Very true Alan. Barbara’s story is tragic. Yes she behaved stupidly but she didn’t understand Hollywood and it’s rules and she was dumped by the Studios. Raymond Burr tried to help her later in his career by getting her a part in his series as she had been so kind to him when he was starting out yet he got nowhere. Very sad story and sinis Carole Landis and Gail Russell.

  6. I have visited and paid my respects to Barbara at her resting place in San Diego. Do you have any idea who attended her funeral service, any of her star laced lovers take the time. Great story, very sad.
    Thanks John Flage

    • I am sorry, John. I don’t know who attended, but I know a lovely guy who would. His name is John O’Dowd and he has a facebook page. He is an authority on Barbara and a terrific bloke as well. Drop him a line on facebook. I am sure he would answer.

  7. Regarding your response to me Dec.7, I’ve learned that addictions;
    substances often run in families, immediate, or further back. Those
    whom I knew well all came from alcoholic families; one or both parents, and they had problems. Having lived w/ alcoholic man, and getting involved w/ Alanon, I learned a lot about the disease. I don’t know the latest thinking on subject; the genetics could be there, plus family chaos along w/ Hollywood type environment, and
    BINGO! Bogart, whom I’m reading about, is an example of such.
    Parents, Morphine and booze addicts, who rarely offered any affection, mother in particular. His sisters suffered from addiction,
    one died. AA was around at that time; if memory serves me, Mary Astor
    got sober. [It amazes me that Bacall, well into middle age, said
    that Bogie wasn’t an alcoholic; he was a man who liked to drink!]
    Well, she’s not the point here.
    Sheila, from Minnesota “Land of ten-thousand treatment centers” [take off on “Land of ten-thousand lakes.”]

    • Very informative, Sheila. Thank you. I suppose it makes sense that offspring continually forced to live in an environment in which both parents have substance issues will more than likely tend to have similar issues themselves. A great many children tend to emulate their parents’ lifestyle, politics, religious convictions, work ethic etc. I do not know statistics, but I have read, however, that a lot of offspring swear off booze and/or drugs simply because they could not abide their parents’ addiction to both. I suppose it all gets down to the individual’s make-up in the end. Strength of character.

    • @Sheila, You are using terms like genetics, disease, etc., which are DISEMPOWERING terms! I CHOSE to drink, NOBODY put a gun to my head ever! Now I CHOOSE not to drink for 7 years! I use my WILL POWER not to drink, with my Creator’s help of course! ADDICTION is one word which is accurate though. do you know ANYBODY who is NOT addicted to something? If you don’t believe me, try going just ONE day without sugar, and let’s see what happens. (;

  8. Hi Alan,
    This is John O’Dowd, Barbara Payton’s biographer. You have written an excellent article here on Barbara’s sad and deeply troubled life. I spent nearly ten years researching Barbara’s life for my book, “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story”, and there were many times I wished I could take a time machine back to Hollywood in the 1950s and 60s, to save her from herself (as well as from all the bad people she seemed determined to surround herself with). Barbara’s continual defiance and complete lack of prudence were beyond shocking to me, as were all her many concerted efforts to derail her life. The people who knew her well insist that Barbara was inherently a good person, and I believe that, as well. Yet, she seemed on a kind of unconscious mission to totally destroy every decent and happy aspect of her life. On the surface, it is almost unfathomable, isn’t it, because she had so much going for her, and so many wonderful opportunities had been given to her. Barbara remains a sympathetic character to me because I realize now that she was
    emotionally ill, and probably felt confused and lost throughout much of her life. I have always had a great deal of empathy for people like her, who seem so hopelessly adrift.

    You wrote about Barbara with honesty and compassion, and I applaud you for that. I know her family will appreciate that, as well. Thank you.

    Best wishes,
    John O’Dowd

    • Thank you for your very kind words, John. It is a pleasure to meet you. I shall purchase your book on Barbara at once. I have intended to do so for some time but kept getting sidetracked. Once again, I appreciate your comments and look forward to reading more about this remarkable yet tragic lady. I have always had a soft spot for Barbara and Carole Landis. There were many victims of the studio system, but those two ladies seem to epitomize the pitfalls that existed back then. My article will almost certainly find its way into one of my future books. May I have your permission to include your comments if it does?

      • Hi Alan,
        Thank you very much for your interest in my book…I appreciate it. If you have a chance to read it, I hope you will share any new thoughts you may have about Barbara, with me, as I would be very interested to hear them. And please feel free to use any of my comments here, any way you wish. Thanks again.
        Best wishes,
        John O’Dowd
        jod6cindy@aol.com

    • Hi JD! Barbara was most likely an MK Ultra, Monarch slave. She has ALL the symptoms. Did you ask any of her friends, or family if she was MPD? (multiple personalties) Most, if not ALL ‘celebs’, leaders, etc are victims of this atrocity! I have life experience with them, as well as meeting some online.

    • The more I research these people the more of them I find who appear to be addicted to sex and sleeping around – men and women alike. I wonder, do they arrive in Hollywood that way already, or does the lifestyle there change them into promiscuous men and women?

        • It just seems to me that Hollywood was like a great big Venus fly-trap that swallowed unsuspecting young people, first by luring them with other young and beautiful people to work with, then by making them rich and famous more or less overnight, and lastly by not bothering to teach them how to handle it all. Barbara Payton was a basically decent and kind person until she fell under the Tinsel Town spell.

      • @Alan, they ‘arrive’ that way! PROGRAMMED to BE that way. Then the rest of us watch and DO the same. THAT is the agenda. Destabilize society 101.

    • Too true. I doubt if many movie fans have even heard of Barbara Payton, yet I feel her story is one of the most poignant in Hollywood’s long history of ruined lives. She appears to have brought much of her woes on herself, but maybe she was not very bright, even grossly naive? Surely, a reasonably intelligent person would not make the mistakes she made. Not so many anyway. Pretty sad really.

      • @Alan, Barbara was most likely very intelligent. Those are the types CHOSEN for trauma-based mind control. Many have photographic memories. Her self-destructive behaviour was PROGRAMMED into her. That is NOT NATURAL for anybody. It is LEARNED behaviour. The same as SLAUGHTERING trillions of innocent animals every year for ‘food’. Have you ever seen a baby hunt a rabbit and eat it? Neither have I.

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