Barbara Payton’s 1963 autobiography I Am Not Ashamed is a Hollywood tell-all detailing her meteoric plummet from stardom to the gutter. We touched on it a while back when we posted a 1963 issue of Confidential. Such falls from grace are nothing new in Hollywood—in fact they’re almost banal. Only a rare few stars stay on the heights for a very long time, and those that fall often do so turbulently. So in that respect Payton didn’t go through anything new. That’s why when you read these types of books there’s always a little voice in your head that says: “Countless other people saw fame trickle through their fingers without slipping their moorings over it.”
Even so, I Am Not Ashamed is an amazing book. Allegedly ghost-written by Leo Guild, which brings into question much of what’s on its pages, it describes Payton’s youth in Texas, how she became aware of the transactionality of feminine power by age twelve or so, how she married at sixteen after an unexpected pregnancy, and how she rolled into Hollywood at eighteen. From the beginning she was different. She had her first interracial relationship when she was twenty, and her first lesbian affairs shortly thereafter.
What definitely isn’t Guild-generated hyperbole is that Payton’s lifestyle always presented danger to her career, but it wasn’t until she met problematic actor Tom Neal that things took a hard right turn for the worse. Neal was an ex-boxer who had acting success with 1945’s Detour, but by the time Payton met him was a bit player barely hanging on in Tinseltown. Payton got into a love triangle with Neal and debonair actor Franchot Tone that led to a fistfight and irreparable damage to Payton’s public persona. We talked about it in that Confidential post.
Payton’s roles dried up, her friends dwindled, and she ran through all her money. At some point she began accepting cash from dates. At first these were gifts—or she thought of them that way—starting at hundreds of dollars, but they slowly diminished as her profile faded and her weight increased. Eventually she was accepting five dollars to have sex. Reading all this, her rise and fall feels as if it took many years, but it was incredibly rapid: she debuted in 1949, reached her zenith in the film noir Trapped the same year, and began to decline in 1951 with Bride of the Gorilla. In the end she made only fifteen films.
I Am Not Ashamed scandalized people back then, and some episodes raise eyebrows even today. An incident where she submits to rape but claims she enjoyed it stands out, as does another where she admits to deliberately provoking a jealous Neal into beating her up. Also noteworthy was her attraction to black men. One of her famed affairs was with
black actor Woody Strode. Obviously, back then her career minders didn’t like it, and had no compunctions about threatening her. We should note, though, that Guild was somewhat obsessed with interracial matters, as we discussed previously. Some liberties may have been taken, not with facts, probably, but possibly with some of the sensational related sentiments expressed.
There are some amusing moments. Payton revealing that she and Tom Neal were both cat lovers and would dress up as cats for sex comes to mind. We were surprised by her descriptions of the lengths she—and other actresses—went to when chasing screen roles. She says she secured a couple through blackmail, leveraging embarrassing dirt that her studio didn’t want known, and she once donated a thousand dollars to a producer’s church to score a part. She also claims Fay Spain once sent a producer nude photos to land a role. All of this brings the same caveat—Guild or Payton? Since Spain gets name dropped we’ll assume that episode is true. Sex dressed as cats? Hmm… maybe not.
One aspect of the book that surprises is that, except for Spain, Neal, Tone, and a select few others, Payton doesn’t drop many names, which in turn means many of the famous stories about her aren’t fully acknowledged by the party in question. We’re thinking, for example, of the rumor that Tone hired a detective who caught her in bed with Strode on the set of Bride of the Gorilla. Tinseltown lore says it was a final straw leading to her divorce from Tone; Payton doesn’t mention it. Nor does she mention alleged affairs with George Raft, Bob Hope, or Steve Cochran.
Despite these omissions, as Hollywood tell-alls go I Am Not Ashamed is worth a read, as it runs the gamut from pathetic to shocking to uproarious to bizarre. Payton reportedly received a thousand dollars from publishers Holloway House for the manuscript. Some sources say two thousand, but that she asked for it in booze so it wouldn’t be garnished due to her debts. We’re dubious of that claim. She was paid, we’re sure, but whatever the amount, it was undoubtedly lowball. But even if she’d been paid the ten or fifteen grand she deserved no amount of money would have helped her reverse course, and sure enough she was dead four years later, done in by liver and heart failure.
It’s a sad way to go, but I Am Not Ashamed has its joys. When Payton talks about how it felt to be a bright light in the Tinseltown firmament the book is a pleasure to read. Only a select few people ever get to see their names on Hollywood’s glittering marquees, and Payton achieved it. Even if she was a spark rather than a sustained flame, there’s no doubt at all that she enjoyed the ride, that she reveled in setting Hollywood on its ear. The title, if taken at face value, is uplifting, in our view. It’s defiant: “I am not ashamed.” Ghostwriter or not, it feels as if that phrase had to come from Payton herself.
