If I could take 25% of each ex-husband and combine them into one man I think I'd really have something.
Above: Three shots of actress Barbara Payton in Los Angeles County divorce court today in 1958 as she bade farewell to husband number four, furniture executive George Provas. In some accounts he’s described as twenty-three, but those accounts are wrong. The photos we found of him show a middle-aged man. The two had married only a year earlier. Payton’s name gets dropped often when the subject of fallen Hollywood stars comes up, but because the stories differ we finally tracked down and read her autobiography. It’s supposed to be the source of a lot of disinformation, but we figured we couldn’t get a complete picture without it. It was ghostwritten by schlockmeister supreme Leo Guild—or rather than ghostwritten, he allegedly plied Payton with booze while recording her on tape. The rambling final product ended up published by cheapie imprint Holloway House as a seventy-five cent paperback. These shots show Payton during what is considered to be her decline, but she doesn’t look it. We’ll get back to her soon.
So explain to me again exactly what my duties are as dolly grip.
Above: a photo cover for Leo Guild’s 1969 sleaze novel The Studio. The rear tells you most of what you need to know, except that the book is written from the first person viewpoint of none other than—Leo Guild. Ego much, Leo? He takes on the guise of a journalist who becomes the publicity agent for Toni Tremont, described as a Hollywood bitch. He’s the latest in a long line of agents to represent her. The fiction is really just a guise for Guild to promote his personal brand while claiming to tear back the curtain from the “real” Hollywood, something at least a hundred authors did before him.
Guild has a reputation for being one of the worst authors ever—he once wrote a novel in which a werewolf and a vampire become television stars, and he churned out such books as Black Bait, Black Champion, The Black Shrink, The Girl Who Loved Black, Black Streets of Oakland, and Street of Ho’s [sic]. In other words, he was a consummate opportunist and trendjumper. He found his most lucrative subject matter in lurid biographies, but also wrote a joke book, a book about gambling systems, and a tie-in to the television show What Are the Odds? The man was one of a kind. Thankfully.
No matter how far she ran dissatisfaction followed close behind.
This gold colored June 1963 cover for Confidential magazine is entirely given over to actress Barbara Payton, whose self-penned hard-luck story appears inside and details her life troubles. The tale is well known and is one we’ve touched uponbefore—early marriage and early motherhood, followed by stardom, romances, and riches, followed by booze, drugs, divorces and crime. Confidential being Confidential, the editors neglect to mention that the story here is not an exclusive, but rather is excerpted from I Am Not Ashamed, Payton’s painfully revealing autobiography.
I Am Not Ashamed did not sell especially well, and was pretty much forgotten a few years after its release. But it reappeared by chance two decades later when Jack Nicholson famously lent a rare copy to Jessica Lange to help her prepare for her femme fatale role in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Today the book is widely available. Just a few seconds reading Payton’s words conjures the suspicion she had a ghostwriter, and indeed, it was the king of lowbrow literature Leo Guild who gave shape to the prose, which reads like gutter level sleaze fiction.
For example: “He hated what I had been [but] loved me for what I was. He tortured himself. Every part of my body reminded him of another man.” And this bit: “I had a body when I was a young kid that raisedtemperatures wherever I went. Today I have three long knife wounds on my solid frame. One extends from my buttocks down my thigh and needed I don’t remember how many stitches.” Payton’s anecdotes are cringe worthy, but they read like she’d gotten a grip on her life. No such luck. After four more long years of drugs, drink, and disaster she was found dead on her bathroom floor in 1967.
Payton post-mortems usually describe her problems as self-induced, but that’s simplistic. In the 1950s famous men did anything they wished, but women had to be careful not to be seen doing the same. Still do today. That’s the part Payton had problems with. Even so, she had several happy periods during her life. One of those was the stretch she spent in Mexico married to a young fisherman. About this time she says, “We fished and I caught big ones, and we loved and for a couple of years it was beautiful. My big problems were what to cook for dinner. But it was inevitable the ants in my pants would start crawling again.”
We like that passage, because nearly all the stories about Payton declare, or at least suggest, that everything that happened after Hollywood stardom was part of a terminal plummet. That’s pretty much the default setting in American journalism—anything other than wealth and fame is by definition failure. It’s an idiotic conceit, even a harmful one, and Payton reveals that in Mexico she landed someplace solid and safe, and got along fine without money or recognition. Two years of happiness is nothing to take lightly. But she just couldn’t sit still—not because of where she was, but because of who she was.
And the spiral continued—cheaper and cheaper forms of prostitution, physical confrontations that resulted in her getting some of her teeth knocked out, and more. In all of these tales there’s a recurrent theme of lowly types taking advantage of her, but we can’t help noting that she was paid a mere $1,000 for her autobiography, an absurdly deficient amount for a former top star with a crazy story to tell, which suggests to us that guys in office suites take as much advantage—or more—of a person’s hard luck as guys in alleys. We have some scans below, and Payton will undoubtedly appear here again.
Even if it was only half true, it was still 100% shocking.
This National Enquirer published today in 1967 features cover star Hedy Lemarr promoting her 1967 autobiography Ecstasy and Me: My Life As a Woman. The title is taken from the 1933 Czech film Ekstase, in which sheappearednude, shocking audiences of the time. Enquirer describes her book as shocking, as well, and indeed there are some surprising revelations. An example: while still living in her native Austria, she ran away from her husband and hid in an empty room in a brothel. A man came into the room and she had sex with him rather than let her husband find her. Lamarr claims to have had hundreds of lovers, male and female, and depicts herself variously as both a nymphomaniac and a kleptomaniac. But all of this comes with a caveat—her ghostwriter, the notoriousLeo Guild, wrote various celeb biographies that played fast and loose with the truth. That said, even Guild was not imaginative enough to have fabricated everything in Ecstasy and Me.
As a side note, we should mention that Lamarr, along with George Anthiel, invented and patented an advanced frequency switching system that they envisioned for usage guiding torpedoes (the constant switching of frequencies would make them difficult to jam, thus more likely to reach their targets). Now, if you read other websites, most of them praise Lamarr as a military genius, and it’s true she had a highly developed technical mind, but the system she helped pioneer actually grew out of an idea to remotely control player pianos. In fact, the guidance system used eighty-eight frequencies, which is of course the number of keys on a standard piano. We think knowing that she applied a musical idea to military usage gives a somewhat fuller appreciation of how ingenious she actually was, rather than just picturing her as some kind of Oppenheimer type.
Ingenious or not, the U.S. Navy declined to purchase Lamarr and Anthiel’s system, but the moment the patent expired two decades later the military was all over it. We can’t discern with our limited resources whether this sudden decision to use the technology was coincidental or not, but certainly the result was that Lamarr got screwed out of probably millions of dollars. Or perhaps even more, when you consider that her and Anthiel’s frequency switching is closely related to that used today for global positioning systems and Bluetooth. Since Lamarr claimed in her book to have blown through more than thirty million dollars in her life, the fun and creative ways she might have spent a massive military windfall makes the mind boggle. We’ll get back to Hedy Lamarr a bit later, because she certainly deserves a more detailed treatment.
Leo Guild is considered—in some circles—the worst writer of pulp style fiction ever. Even if we wanted to we couldn’t dispute that claim, although we really don’t believe he took the writing very seriously. We’ll talk more about the maligned Mr. Guild at a later date. Meanwhile we wanted to show you this sweet cover for his novel Street of Ho’s. The art is by B. Smith—and that’s all we’ve been able to find out, possibly because Mr. Smith also thinks Leo is a hack and was ashamed of being associated with the novel.
On a punctuative note, the spelling of “ho’s” sparked a small controversy here at the palatial Pulp Intl. offices. After intense debate, we decided to consult the AP, which tells us the correct spelling of “ho’s” in the plural is “hos”, without the apostrophe. Only in the possessive or contractive forms should you spell it “ho’s”, as in the sentence: “That ho’s not likely to take it well if I call her a ho.” Now that we have that settled, please remember it’s impossible to spell hospital without hos, and that’s exactly where you’re likely to wind up if you make a habit of using such a naughty word.
The Soviet space probe Luna 3 transmits the first photographs of the far side of the moon. The photos generate great interest, and scientists are surprised to see mountainous terrain, very different from the near side, and only two seas, which the Soviets name Mare Moscovrae (Sea of Moscow) and Mare Desiderii (Sea of Desire).
1966—LSD Declared Illegal in U.S.
LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.
1945—Hollywood Black Friday
A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators becomes a riot at the gates of Warner Brothers Studios when strikers and replacement workers clash. The event helps bring about the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, prohibits unions from contributing to political campaigns and requires union leaders to affirm they are not supporters of the Communist Party.
1957—Sputnik Circles Earth
The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing.
1970—Janis Joplin Overdoses
American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.
