In the annals of Hollywood degradation, no tale is more sordid than that of Barbara Payton. In her earliest days in the film business she starred in pictures opposite James Cagney and Gregory Peck -- then hit the skids and ended up in her 30s hooking on the Sunset Strip, addled by drugs and alcohol, bloated and with a few of her front teeth missing. She was dead at 39.
Her spiral to the bottom seems to have started with her disastrous alliance with B-movie star Tom Neal (above), who achieved immortality as the lead in the classic film noir Detour but whose arrogance and violent temper kept him perpetually on the fringes of the movie business. Payton tried to leave him and became engaged to classy but alcoholic star Franchot Tone (below). Neal confronted Tone one night at Payton's home and beat him within an inch of his life, creating one of the biggest tabloid scandals of the 50s. Tone recovered, barely, married Payton and divorced her a few months later -- apparently because she was cheating on him with Neal.
Payton's career never quite recovered, mainly because she couldn't slow down. A sex addict and an increasingly dysfunctional alcoholic, she went from one bad relationship to another, and by the time she realized that her reputation had ruined her career it was too late to rescue it. She proceeded down her road to oblivion with almost manic determination, eventually selling blow-jobs on the Strip for $5 a pop, with several arrests for prostitution and theft along the way.
John O'Dowd has written a detailed and sympathetic biography of the doomed starlet, plausibly suggesting that some sort of childhood sexual abuse resulted in an overwhelming self-loathing in Payton -- that on some level she willed her own destruction. Her story can take its place with the one Robert Guralnick tells in his magnificent two-volume biography of Elvis Presley as an object lesson in the way American celebrity can destroy the fragile psyches of damaged innocents.
It's all totally heartbreaking. You might pick up this book looking to relish the sheer sordidness of Payton's story -- and there's never been a more grueling (or more responsibly researched) examination of Hollywood sordidness -- but you'll end up touched by its portrait of an oddly appealing lost soul.
O'Dowd has a web site devoted to Payton here.