Barbara Payton

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Barbara Payton

Barbara Payton (born Barbara Lee Redfield, November 16, 1927-May 8, 1967) was an American movie actress.

Born in Cloquet, Minnesota, the daughter of restaurateurs, and raised in Odessa, Texas, she headed for Hollywood in search of a career in movies at the age of nineteen in 1948, and was eventually placed under contract by Universal Studios where she began appearing in movie bit parts.

After being discovered by James Cagney and his producer brother William, Payton starred in Cagney’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye in 1950. She signed a contract with Cagney’s production company. In 1951, while engaged to movie actor Franchot Tone, Payton proposed marriage to b-movie actor Tom Neal. She went back and forth publicly from being engaged to Neal to being engaged to Tone. Eventually, Neal, a former college boxer, fought with Tone, giving him a smashed cheekbone, a broken nose and a concussion, and leaving him in a coma in hospital for 18 hours. After being married to Tone for 53 days, she walked out on him and returned to Neal. Their relationship lasted for four years.

From 1955 to 1963, there were several skirmishes with the law - passing bad checks, public drunkenness, mental illness, drug abuse, and, ultimately, prostitution.[1] She was paid $1,000 for the ghost-written autobiography I Am Not Ashamed in 1963. Payton admitted to being forced to sleep on bus benches and was often beaten as a prostitute. In 1967, after failed efforts to curb her drinking, she moved in with her parents in San Diego in an attempt to dry out. On May 8, 1967, the 39-year-old was found dead in San Diego; the cause of death was heart and liver failure. Barbara Payton was cremated and is interred in a niche at Cypress View Mausoleum and Crematory in San Diego, California.

In addition to numerous love affairs (including ones with Texas oilman Bob Neal and actor Guy Madison, and, reportedly, James Cagney and Bob Hope),^[1] she was married four times:

William Hodge (m. 1943, annulled)
John Lee Payton, an Air Force pilot (m. 10-Feb-1945, div. 1950, one child, John Lee Payton Jr., born 1947)
Franchot Tone, actor (m. 1951, div. 1952)
George A. Provas (a.k.a. Tony Provas, m. 1957, div. Aug. 1958)