Preview from L. A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times
© John Gilmore 2005 All rights reserved

She got off the Greyhound at the Hollywood stop south of the boulevard, hair fluffy and yellow with the sun hitting her like a spotlight. To the first man she recognized, she gave a smile that electrified him where he stood. She beamed, blue eyes shining. "Hi! You're Dave?" He nodded and shook her hand. "Long time no see," she said. She was all in white, skirt and top, the pumps white though scuffed from the long ride. She had on a cute white hat and cotton gloves, some ketchup or a coffee stain on the back of the right glove. She said, "I'm never going to ride another damn bus! You get the hotel room like we talked about?"

"Next block over," Dave said. "Not the best in town, but what the hell, am I right? We got to start somewhere. Are you hungry?"

"I'm starving! I had a crumb-assed pancake that you could've rolled down the street like a dinner plate. I must look a mess." 

"You look gorgeous," he said. "Like right off of a magazine cover." 

That was the truth, Dave says. "I told her I'd take her to the hotel, grab a sandwich, and get over to the studio. I said they were waiting for her. We had to work out a few details, like the agreement I had folded in my jacket pocket. I'd told her she had a smile like Hedy Lamarr and she said, 'You know her?' I said yeah-I knew half the town. She said, 'If you know half the town, what're you trying to get a few bucks out of me for?' And she said it with a smile. She wasn't so dumb and she'd pegged me square. I shot her the pitch anyway. I said, 'I can get you into the studio, only I gotta bribe your way in. You understand what I'm saying? It isn't all roses and talent and I know you've got both, but it's a lot of what crosses the palm.' "

"And who sleeps with who," she said.

"Don't worry about that angle," he said. "Let's get you to the hotel, get something to eat, and I'll give you the plan. I've already got it figured. Those pictures you sent are terrific. A couple guys've taken a look and they want to meet you. Natch, the one where you're wearing nothing on top I haven't shown around, you understand." 

"That got in there by accident," she said. "I'm sorry-"

"Don't be sorry," he said. "I don't show it 'cause I haven't figured the right person to get a gander yet. It's dynamite. In fact, you're dynamite. You've got it. Dynamite's written all over you." 

For the expense fee that Barbara Payton had gladly paid (she'd had the money in a special envelope), Dave was going to get her on the studio lot and into a couple of casting directors' offices. "At the hotel," he says, "we dropped off her luggage and she got a grilled cheese. I brought out the paper for her to sign but she shook her head like a kid you ask if they want to go to the dentist. Still smiling, those eyes with a touch of hard glass like she was taking measurements, she said she wasn't signing any finder's fee without a lawyer reading it."

She said, "I'm no good with legal matters and it gets me confused."

Dave didn't push it. "Any shyster would've told her to forget it," he says. Instead of signing, she promised, and even crossed her heart like a girl scout, that she'd pay him the small percentage without the agreement. "'You trust me and I'll trust you,' she said. I could've pulled out then, nixed the whole shot, but she'd handed me the up-front envelope she'd clutched all the way from Texas like a kid with a ticket to the circus-a wad of sawbucks and some twenties still wet with the sweat of her hand." 

By mid-afternoon Barbara was on the studio lot meeting a couple of bottom-rung casting directors. One was delighted to meet her and took her name and her photograph. He made a quick note of her measurements on the back of the photo. The other man, Maury, was eating pastrami, the meat falling from his mouth. He said, "Pastrami irritates my nerves  -- it gives me indigestion and a rash on my neck."

Barbara said, "So what're you eating it for?"

He set the sandwich on the desk and stared at her chest as though with x-ray eyes. She sat there staring back at him. "You know what?" he said. "You're a bombshell blonde but there's five others knocking on the door and the problem's the front office has got to see them first. I'm giving you a little inside information," he said to Dave. "Before we talk about anything going on here, take this young lady over to Paramount and show her to Ed Sherman. I guarantee Ed'll put her in a picture and if he doesn't, you bring her back and I'll put her in a picture!"

Hopping to Paramount, Dave stopped for a gallon of gas and told Barbara, "If Sherman wants to get cute with you, I'd let him if I were you-I mean, just getting cute, 'cause he likes to flirt. Makes him think the women go for him. He's going to ask you to pull the skirt up so he can get a gander at the gams, and if he likes what he sees, he'll want to nuzzle-a little. You get what I'm saying?" 

"Yeah, yeah," she said in a dull voice. "I get what you're saying but if anyone does any nuzzling it's going to be me doing the nuzzling, and any other kind of nuzzling's going to be done when I get what I'm after."

"I didn't believe a word of it," he says. "'You can't go around telling these characters what's up,' I said.

"But 'Fair enough,' I said. I didn't want to scare her but I knew what she was in for. Made me feel like I was throwing someone to a wolf but she'd paid me for the ride. I wouldn't have minded a little nuzzling myself with her and wondered if I'd ever get it or the rest of what she'd promised in her so-sincere speech about me trusting her and her trusting me. Fast enough, though, I learned this gal's in one league of her own making. Like she wasn't really in touch with the rest of us or how she'd played her cards when we'd met before. Her sights were set on a narrow, straight target and that sure as hell wasn't me. I never knew just what it was, and the awful way it worked out, I never knew if she knew just what the hell it was that was driving her and everyone else up a tree . . ." 

She had the scent and went after it. Her first trip to Hollywood had been an underhanded endeavor to break into movies, and she'd say, "One thing above all else calls the shots, and that's what you've got between your legs that makes the difference." She told party-girl and bit-player Lila Leeds, "and how you get to workin' it . . ." She said, "I'll say something else, and that's when you get a guy like Bob Hope sniffing around, you know you're hitting the top of the ladder."

Barbara Payton had been on a honeymoon-a newlywed, she later told columnist Florbel Muir. "She laughed," Muir says, "and said she was still on a honeymoon though she'd long since given the army husband his discharge."

Her virginity had gone up in smoke at age fifteen. A girlfriend's forty-five-year-old father coaxed her into the bathroom while Barbara was attending her friend's birthday party. "The rest of the kids were eating cake and bursting balloons," Barbara said, "when the man busted my cherry in a dry bathtub and he was old enough to be my grandfather."

Born in blue-collar Coquet, Minnesota, she was eleven when the family-owned timber business hit the skids. Her father, boomer and hard-drinker Lee Redfield, joined a construction company down in the oil town of Odessa, Texas. "Times were bad," Barbara said, "and we didn't have much money. What money I'd manage to get together was a bunch of nickels and dimes I'd use at the Chief Theater," the local picture show. "I spent half my life watching movies and eating popcorn," she said, "and when I was sixteen-this is 1943, the war was going on and James Cagney came to Odessa on a Bond drive. He was at the picture show and I snuck back and asked him for his autograph. I never could've dreamed I'd someday be standing next to him in front of a camera, starring in the same movie with James Cagney."

The movies she'd sit through again and again soaked into Barbara, crowding the world she lived in with life reflecting from the "silver screen." She'd say, "I know I can do it-get into movies, because I got the looks and I've got the tits." But it seemed so far away from where she was, "scrunched in this dink-water town in the middle of nowhere." She wanted to get away. She wanted to go to Hollywood.

During her second year at Odessa Junior High School, Barbara ran off with a boy named William Hodge. "We eloped," she says, "and we were going to Hollywood." Her parents put an end to the marriage by having it annulled. They never even made the train depot. Later she wore low-cut blouses so her breasts would be half showing. "I wanted to meet a guy who'd take me out of Texas," she said. "I was at a dance on a military base and this young air force captain comes up to me and says, 'You want to dance?' I said okay, and the next thing he says is, 'I gotta tell you I'm in love with you.' I laughed. He said he was serious. I said, 'I don't even know you!' He said, 'So what?' and he's looking at my tits and he says, 'I'm in love with your eyes,' and I said, 'These aren't my eyes. . .' "

John Payton was twenty-two and on leave from Monroe, Louisiana, when he fell for the blue-eyed Barbara with the "tits that stood at attention," he'd say. Within weeks, they got married and Barbara convinced Payton to spend their honeymoon in Hollywood. 

"We'll go to the radio shows and nightclubs," she said, "and we'll rub elbows with the movie stars!"

Hollywood's Roosevelt Hotel quickly disenchanted Payton. In civic shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, he lounged poolside while Barbara bounced on the diving board in a bathing bikini little more than a red hankie. 

Dave Keenan was working as an associate theatrical agent on Outpost Drive when he spotted Barbara climbing out of the Roosevelt pool. Soaking wet, she shook herself like a blonde dog, splashing water on Dave, who laughed and said, "You know who you remind me of?" She said no, who? He said, "You look like Lana Turner." She laughed. "I'm not kidding," he said, "but you've got her beat in the body. Can you act?"

Sure she could act, she said. She could do anything from a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo to standing on her head. "I'll recite the Gettysburg Address upside-down," she said, and then asked, "What can you do?" Dave smiled and said he could get her into pictures. 

That turned the trick, Dave says. "But she didn't tell me she'd just gotten married. She was nuts to get into movies and I figured she'd do anything to make that happen. My motives weren't all aboveboard because she was like a ripe peach falling out of a tree. . . I wanted her to meet the guy who ran the agency, but he was in Palm Springs for the week. I suggested driving there and told her they had an Olympic-size pool at the hotel. She said she couldn't go-'I'm detained here,' she said.

"We met for a sandwich in a little joint and she said she'd had to ditch the guy she was with. He was an Air Force guy and she'd told him she had an important appointment that could change her life. She said, 'He doesn't understand or appreciate my position.' I told her it was possible she could get a screen test at RKO because the agent I worked with had strong connections there. She said she'd call me later-she had to talk it over with the Air Force guy." 

John Payton had to leave California for the base, but Barbara didn't want to go. She said she'd join him later. She wanted to stay longer. "I have things to do, you know." He said he couldn't let her do that-it was their honeymoon, after all.

"That's when she told me she'd married this guy in Texas," Dave says. "She said it was a mistake. He had to report for duty and she was burned up. I told her as soon as she got to Texas to get some professional photos taken, mail them to me special delivery, and I'd see what I could do . . ."

A year would pass before Barbara got around to having pictures taken. "She wrote and said she was pregnant," Dave says. "I got a letter saying she couldn't come back as soon as she wanted, and I answered and said, 'We're all in a pinch.' I told her I wasn't working for the agency anymore, was freelancing, which meant operating out of a post office and a shoebox. Whenever she got herself squared around in the family way, I said let me know and send the photos anyway. I told her I still had some good connections."

One of her cousins in Odessa claimed that Barbara didn't only have the one child, the boy, because her first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. The relative says, "She brought it on herself so she wouldn't have a baby 'to drag her down.' She was angry at John for getting her pregnant the second time, fouling up her plans for getting out of Texas. Talking to Barbara was always like talking to a stranger in a train depot . . ."

Months later, like throwing switches, Barbara ditched Payton, left the baby in her mother's care, and climbed aboard a Greyhound heading for Hollywood.

"By the time Barbara got to me," says agent Philip Feldman, "she'd bounced off a few others who'd run her through Paramount and MGM. I was partly responsible for getting her a contract at Universal. She was a hard and nervy girl underneath her special prettiness, and could speak soft, like they say, but carry a big stick. When she came to me she was wearing the hottest pair of skintight red pedal-pushers she said she'd been able to find and believed she'd knock them dead. In case one didn't keel over at the first shot, they'd get it fast with the hidden bullet-no underpants and holding her breasts upward from underneath, like saying, 'Try these on for size!'"

A million-dollar glamour puss with a sharp edge to a complex personality. She'd been a good girl, she'd say. She'd gone to church every Sunday. So they asked where she'd grabbed the aggressive attitude that gave you the idea she didn't give a hoot what you thought, she was going for your balls anyway.

"I've always been told I'm pretty and ought to be in movies," she'd say. "But I don't want to be just another pretty face walking around the boulevard showing my ass in a bathing suit. I want to be an actress. I want to be a star."

Feldman says, "She had the blonde goddess shine that can't be described as anything but a radiance that makes a movie star. Spotting it and nailing it down can set you and the talent on a winning streak. I wanted to see how she'd beam so we went for a musical but Barbara couldn't sing. She couldn't dance. She could hardly act, but they can always make you appear like you're doing okay. What she had was an immediate sense about her you couldn't overlook. She was Grade A goods."

Stupidly, according to Feldman, he had a brief fling with Barbara but confesses he has few good memories of it. "I got myself drawn in to her and I shouldn't have. It shows the chink in your ability to control things, and you get yourself cornered. I still feel a pity for her but she left scars. She scared the crap out of me and I don't mind saying it. I was married at the time and Barbara kept needling me ---giving digs I felt were unnecessary but in some way she had to do it, like giving you a wakeup call, and at the same time running all over Sunset with a bunch of self-appointed hotshots-low-rollers and nobodies.

 "Was she blackmailing me? The thought really came to me, 'Is this broad blackmailing me?' I told myself get your ass out but I didn't have to work hard at that because soon as she landed a player's contract she tossed me over. I said, 'Wish you luck, baby-be sure and shut the door on your way out.'"

Barbara said she was supposed to be in a movie with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne DeCarlo. According to Barbara, Director Robert Siodmak had pointed his finger at her and said, "Yes! You're the one!" "That was supposed to have been it," Barbara said. "All signed and set to roll. Tony Curtis was in the movie, a guy dancing with Yvonne DeCarlo in a scene which I was supposed to be in, dancing with someone else and then Tony's supposed to be dancing with me when DeCarlo stops dancing and the music changes. 

"So somehow Tony did the part. He didn't have any lines and I didn't even get into the movie. I was very pissed and I told them if I wasn't under contract they wouldn't be able to shove me around like a puppet or something!"

Piper Laurie was in the same boat. "Barbara was under contract," says Piper. "That's the point. It was part of the whole process, the training program for stock players. She wasn't any better than we were, but she thought she was and wouldn't even show up for the work we were supposed to be doing, like classes and the acting. Like, Oh, Miss Payton's in Las Vegas or Miss Payton's in Palm Springs until Thursday or Monday or whenever-"

Cast as a nightclub photographer in Once More, My Darling, a comedy with Robert Montgomery and Ann Blythe, the studio understood the "uniqueness" Barbara projected. The question was what to do with her. She was immediately featured in a few short films like Pecos Pistol and Silver Butte, being made as quick-run fillers. 

L.A. DESPAIR: A Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times 
is available NOW on AMAZON

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