I got a call about Barbara Payton from the editor at a North Hollywood paperback publisher I’d written potboilers for. At first I thought he was suggesting Barbara for a movie.  I’d never met Barbara nor talked to her, but she’d written an autobiography, which they were publishing. She’d been trying to contact me—something personal, she’d told the editor, that had to do with Tom Neal, then in prison.

The editor gave my number to Barbara, and in a matter of minutes she was on the phone. She’d been in touch with Tom, she said, and he’d mentioned the Black Dahlia project. If anything should come of it, he’d like to try to get some money for further appeals. I said not much was happening with the project, and Barbara said she believed she knew about "an involvement" between the Black Dahlia—Elizabeth Short—and the actor Barbara had married, Franchot Tone, shortly after "Tom’s fistfight with Franchot."

She said, "This information will give you some insight into the way we’re all living." She wanted some money for the interview because she was broke, and asked that I not use her name, "unless I suddenly die or something, which isn’t so unthinkable the way things’re going."

When I mentioned her to Dennis Hopper, he said, "Barbara Payton! She was getting to be a big star, man. I don’t think anybody knows she’s still alive. I wouldn’t mind getting a piece of that ass, man."

She’d hit the skids. "I’m a drunk," she said, "drinking wine all day and writing poetry." She was turning cheap tricks to stay afloat—boulevard creeps and jokers on Main Street. She was shooting smack but denied she was a junkie, though she’d been busted twice on Sunset by a Sheriff’s detective I knew from when we were acolytes. He’d been working narco when he busted Barbara, "with the smack and a load already under her skin," he said. "We weren’t interested in the two-bit tricks she was turning in that motel room—that was Vice. We were on her for junk, trying to nail her connection. It was kept out of the papers because a guy at the Hollywood Citizen-News felt sorry for her—with a lot of damn good reason . . . She was a sad, sad case. A talented beauty who turned into a fat, pathetic slob..."

Discovered by James Cagney, who made her his protégé, Barbara starred in movies opposite Cagney and Gregory Peck, but her personal life was a mess—a disaster running neck-and-neck with her success.

"She thought her shit didn’t stink," said one producer who’d known Barbara. "She was a pig’s ear Cagney had the hots for, and everyone tried to turn her into silk. She was a pig with a pig’s attitude about life and herself."

Drunkenness, brawls, and then out of work—theft, prostitution, soliciting an undercover cop—drugs, blackouts, spiraling downward... 

"I thought she’d be dead in a real short time," the detective said, "like Lenny Bruce, who I’d also busted for dope. I figured Barbara’d be dead a lot sooner than it actually took."

The producer said she was sex crazy. "A whore that’d fuck your dog if it humped her leg," he said. "But she didn’t like it—she didn’t enjoy it, there was never any love. Yet she couldn’t say no. She even tried it with other girls. She was an easy score—she went out of her way for it. Some jerk comes along and says ‘Hey baby, I’m going to lay you,’ and pulls her into a car and drives off. Screws her in the car and dumps her off when he’s done. She just goes along. That was more important to her than being an actress, than being a professional. She had the kiss of death stamped on her head like you get a rubber stamp on your hand at the fair. No good fairy’s kiss on that kid, and getting involved with Tom Neal was another sign of her need to wreck her life . . ."

Barbara looked fat and bleached-out, a walking mess with sores on her face and the backs of her hands, which she’d tried to hide with pancake makeup that didn’t match the color of her skin. We met in the little lunch counter of the drugstore at Santa Monica and Western. As bad as she looked, there was something about her eyes—the girl James Cagney had been so taken with, shining out of her face, the bright blonde starlet trapped somewhere inside the dilapidated slob that was only thirty-seven years old.

I looked at the small scabs on her arms as she spread a sheath of poems she’d written. "I’d appreciate your reading these," she said, "and letting me know what you think. I’d like to sell them. Some are about Hollywood." She said she was "living just around the corner" and needed money, "now that I’m getting evicted—again."

With me was an old Hollywood High friend, Jim Davidson, who told Barbara he’d been raised by his father two doors down on Santa Monica. His dad had been a studio strike-breaker. He said it had always been an unfriendly neighborhood, good for winos and tin-horns and guys that fix shoes. Barbara said, "And queers and cheap whores and poets . . ."

Barbara had written Tom again, but hadn’t heard back. "I’m afraid to see him," she said. "And if he gets out, I’d be afraid of him coming after me. That’s how it always was. I’d try to get myself straightened up a little, and he could sweet-talk better than he could breathe, and he’d go all night at having sex. He was like a sex maniac—there was something wrong with him. I’m sure he’s corn-holing half the guys in prison, knowing Tom. Some people can get their kicks by themselves, but he can’t do that. He always had to get his kicks at someone else’s expense, no matter what the hell it was . . . Like shooting his wife—she was a cute kid, a good-looking girl. Shooting her in the fucking head! You see why I say I’m scared of him. I shouldn’t have written him at all . . ."

What she had to tell me was confidential. She didn’t mind my taping our conversation and said she wasn’t pulling any punches. "I’ll talk straight out, and if it helps with my book, then that’s so much the better. But what I’m telling you isn’t pretty, and I wouldn’t be sitting here blabbing it out if I didn’t need money."

After the brawl over Barbara between Tom and Franchot that sent Franchot to the hospital with a concussion and "never talking the same way again," Barbara said, she married Franchot just to spite Tom. But it was a very short marriage," she told me. "Franchot was a sweet man but had a bad masochistic streak in his personality. He wanted something beautiful for its own sake, not for what it did for him." Barbara was gorgeous and young and fit the bill. "He wanted me to be what I was—so he said at the start." But with Tom, there had been chemistry. They couldn’t stay out of bed. It was simmering and "cooking," all the time. She was quick to see in Franchot’s nature "that purist’s obsession for a thing of beauty, and sometimes just parts of a woman could satisfy him—legs, breasts, your hind end," she said. "It didn’t matter, and it could change depending on his state of mind."

At times Franchot seemed to need only a "kind of humbling of himself before these things," Barbara said, "like my asshole in cut-up black silk underwear . . ."

After she married Tone, she said, they’d visited Miami for the opening of a movie she was starring in. "The mayor of Miami gave me the key to the city." She said, "This event was in the newspapers, and we were having a ball. Franchot was drinking heavily, and there were stories in the papers about the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles . . . about the victim having tried to get in movies, and how she’d lived in Miami sometimes. The reporter writing about me and Franchot talked about the murder and asked us if we’d like to see where she’d lived. Franchot was keen to do this, though I didn’t think much about it. What was the difference whether she lived in Miami or Siam?  She was dead. But Franchot had this natural curiosity.

"The reporter drove us a ways to this little court, a small bunch of bungalows in a horseshoe, with a sidewalk going around the front. There was grass in the middle that was long or had weeds—and nobody was taking care of anything. Maybe no one was living there. The whole place was run down.

"Where the murder victim had lived was a little room with a small bedroom. A kind of wooden sideboard or serving board in the wall with a mirror in it, a small place, with a fancy overhead light in the living room—it had a lot of points sticking out of it, like stars laid over one another. Plaster walls, sort of chipping or wrinkling, chipped stuff on them. I said to Franchot, ‘So what’s the deal?’ He was just staring around at the place.

"Then the guy took us to a hamburger place just down the street and said she’d worked there during the war, slinging hash on and off, and hung around with a lot of service guys. The jerk that ran the place was a German, and the reporter asked us if we wanted to meet him. Franchot said he did, but I didn’t see the point. The reporter said the guy’d had a lot of trouble because of being German during the war, though he was an American and going blind—something to do with a chemical explosion . . ."

It wasn’t until Barbara and Tone returned to L.A. that Franchot told her he’d met the Black Dahlia before, in Hollywood. "It was when he was thinking about making The Lady From Shanghai, before he lost the option to Orson Welles. Franchot said he’d been in a bad state over that deal when he ran into the Dahlia girl in the Formosa Cafe across from the Goldwyn Studios. He’d been drinking, and said he’d embarrassed her and hurt her feelings because of his callous attitude. He said he told her he felt like he was a real shit. He kept telling her he wasn’t worth a shit, and the girl kept insisting that he was a valuable person . . .

"As he was telling me this incident," Barbara said, "he started sobbing and was on the floor clawing at my knees, saying how he deserved everything rotten and wanted to be defecated on. He had told her he would be fitting for him to be shit on. Just like that. He promised to put the girl in a movie if she’d accommodate him and put an end to his foolishness, truly put him in his place...

"If she’d been any sort of stand-up gal, I’m sure she’d have put him in his place by walking out of it, though Franchot had a way of pleading and working on a person—like talking a turkey out of Thanksgiving. Only once, when he was out of his head like I’ve just described, did he ask me to do that to him—to shit on him. I refused. It made me sick—not the idea of what he wanted, but Franchot’s idea of allowing himself to be in situations like a living toilet. I know being busted up by Tom in that fight was something Franchot really wanted—actually wanted..."

When we’d finished talking about Franchot and the dead girl, Barbara said she believed with the publication of her book (which had nothing to do with the Black Dahlia in it) there might be the possibility of a comeback. She said, "This town takes your body away from you, but they also want the soul. Until they get the soul with the body, you’re skating on thin ice. When you give up the soul, you give life. What happens then is, you’re the walking dead. They just haven’t put you in the ground yet."

Excerpts from   LAID BARE: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives  and the Hollywood Death Trip.