In yesterday’s post, mention was made of the disastrous life and death of starlet Barbara Payton, a blonde bombshell who drank herself to death after plowing her way through a pile of men–some husbands, some producers, some tricks–consuming drugs and making a public nuisance of herself and in general alienating most of the Hollywood people who had briefly embraced her before finally becoming a call girl. It’s a lurid tale, one that I didn’t know much about–save for the story of her sleeping with both Franchot Tone and Tom Neal at the same time and neither man knowing about it, resulting in a fist fight in which Neal–a former boxer–beat Tone into a coma. The Payton-Neal relationship essentially ended their Hollywood film careers. They capitalized on the notorious press coverage by touring in a play version of The Postman Always Rings Twice,  which is an interesting case of pioneering reality-show casting.  Above is a summary of her life by a fan who probably didn’t do quite as much research as  he should have. Some of the wrong facts include: she never married Tom Neal; she didn’t die next to a dumpster but at home with her parents who took her in when she was dying (she was stabbed by a trick and found by a dumpster in 1962, but did not die from this attack) and she was not an only child (she had a brother). Still, it’s a decent enough summary of her life and I offer it up as an antidote to the current news of the world, which is equally lurid but much less sexy. Below I’ve posted a very nice tribute reel that someone put together featuring long-ish excerpts from some of Payton’s movies. She started off with a bang, making her first movie appearances in a few B movies in 1949 and only a year later scoried her best known role in ‘Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye’ starring A-Lister James Cagney in 1950. (She apparently tested for the role that Marilyn Monroe eventually played in ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ that same year). By the middle of the decade she’d blown up most of her Hollywood relationships and wound up in England making programmers with titles like “Bad Blonde” (this movie actually looks pretty good). I can’t say that watching her in the tribute reel gives me the sensation of having discovered a great forgotten, unjustly overlooked star; she’s pretty good for the most part and does hysterical well, but I have a feeling that if her private life had been that of a Nancy Olsen (retiring from the screen , opening up a bookshop and living into her 90s) we probably wouldn’t be discussing her. There are two essential books about Barbara if you’re interested. One is an autobiography called ‘I Am Not Ashamed’. The other is a biography called ‘Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye’ which gets very positive write-ups online. Original hardcover editions of ‘I Am Not Ashamed’ are selling on E-Bay for close to two-hundred dollars which suggests to me that either A) Not many copies were printed to begin with and thus the book is something of a rarity or B) there’s more interest in Barbara than one might think. Or perhaps a mix of the two. And on that note, I’m off to my friendly local Amazon store to buy the bio. If it arrives by tomorrow then I can kiss this weekend goodbye….