Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story Paperback – March 26, 2007

I found out about this book on a FB Hollywood Babylon group. I had only heard of Barbara Payton in passing before. It sounded like an intriguing read. Well, I want to say, whether you are interested in old Hollywood or not, this book is a must read if you have any interest in addiction, mental illness, stigma, etc. The details that this writer lays down not only tell a story, but paint a picture--and take you into the seedy hotels and streets of Skid Row, where this fallen beauty spiraled. The writer tells the story with the utmost compassion for his subject, and you experience many emotions while reading it. You know that the story is not going to end well, but you want to stick with it until the end--because you also develop a great compassion and interest in her--because so few others seemed to truly care about her in life. RIP Barbara Payton--you are free of your terrible demons and chronic illness of addiction and poor self worth. Kudos John for a story very well told !

If Barbara Payton is remembered today, it is usually as a beautiful leading lady that tragically became a street walker in order to survive. This does not do justice to the lady or her contributions to Hollywood history.Most of Barbara’s pain and suffering in life came from her arguing with reality instead of owning it.People who usually suffer from mental illness have had horrific childhoods and Barbara Payton is no exception.At an early age, Barbara Payton was raped, and sexually abused. Because of this, Barbara discovered her sexuality way too young and set her on a path of out-of-control, life-shattering promiscuity.Barbara admitted she knew the time she was a teenager that she was never the girl that men would respect, so she had just decided that she would do whatever she wanted to do.Although Barbara’s father worked full-time when he came home from work, he drank and so did her mother. They both were alcoholics.Barbara’s brother and she would also inherit this insidious disease.Barbara’s father was also very cold man, ignoring her for much of her childhood. This would leave a void in her life that she would never fill. If men liked Barbara she did not believe them and if they did not like her, she did not understand why.Barbara would spend most of her adult life in co-dependant relationships that did little or nothing for her self-esteem or worth.The devastating effects of Barbara growing up in an alcoholic household went far beyond her eventual addiction to alcohol.Due to Barbara’s parent’s alcoholism, she learned at home to survive by living in denial as a coping mechanism. Unfortunately, this would play a major part in her downfall as an adult.In 1948, Barbara came to Hollywood to find herself.Upon arrival in Hollywood, she reputedly was a sex addict, who slept with so many men that the tabloids gave her the nickname “Queen of the Nightclubs.”The legendary Bob Hope spotted Barbara and she became his mistress. Hope paid for her apartment and bills. This started an unfortunate prescient in her life.Hollywood’s power players could not resist Barbara’s beauty, charm, and innate raw talent. She quickly found acting jobs that made many of her contemporaries envious.It was around this time; Barbara was given pills to keep her weight under control so that she could stay fit.Barbara had an addictive personality that now included her excessive use of alcohol, pills, and way too many sexually relationships.By 1949, Barbara achieved success with the film noir “Trapped.”It is incredible to watch Barbara in her fifth film “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” hold her own with the legendary James Cagney. This is a man who had been a movie icon and star for almost 20 years. Yet, Barbara dominates the screen as though she had been acting for years. Acting was easy for Barbara, life was her problem.After the success of the 1950 film, Barbara signed an acting contract which paid her $10,000 a week. At the time, she was the highest paid female in Hollywood.Instead of Barbara taking her career to the next level, she got involved in numerous affairs and scandals that made headlines and damaged her reputation as a serious actress.In 1951, Barbara soon-to-be husband, popular and respected actor Franchot Tone got in a fight over her with the much younger actor Tom Neal.Franchot was hospitalized and spent 18 hours in a coma. His cheekbone smashed, he had a broken nose, a concussion and needed plastic surgery.The incident made headlines throughout the world, portraying Barbara as a femme fatal. It caused all three parties great embarrassment with reporters following Barbara everywhere to question her.Although Barbara married Franchot, soon she would resume her relationship with Tom Neal.In 1952, Barbara divorced Franchot and began living with Tom.Barbara then toured the country with Tom in the play “The Postman Always Rings Twice” playing the deadly Cora, who conspires with her lover to plot the murder of her husband. This was not a wise career move especially after being publicly labeled a harlot.By 1955, Barbara made her last film. Hollywood power players realized Barbara was a deeply disturbed woman unable to handle success and blacklisted her.Barbara’s once promising career ended. She even went so far as to sell stories of her love life to tabloid papers that only made her seem more desperate and unstable.In 1958, Barbara’s loyal agent and friends advised her to leave Hollywood and start over. Yet, she was not finished with Hollywood.Barbara decided everyone else was wrong. She did not care that no agents, directors, or producers had any interest in revitalizing her career because she knew better.When Barbara could no longer get a job as an actress in Hollywood, she tried working a couple of regular full-time jobs. Yet, her alcoholism was affecting her ability to hold a full-time job. In order to make ends meet, she choose an even more stressful profession that of being a prostitute.Regardless of how many times Barbara was arrested for streetwalking and the toll it took on her mentally, physically, and spiritually, she did not give up hope that it was still possible for her to be an actress again. If only someone in Hollywood would give her a break.Instead, Barbara would find even more degradation; humiliation, poverty, and suffering.Barbara’s biographer John O’Dowd for the first time interviews her best friend, and son among many others close to her. The book is compassion and well-rounded portrait of a woman that was doing the best she could who clearly needed professional help.This long overdue and through book brings compassion, depth and understanding to one of the most misunderstood figures in Hollywood history.Let’s hope biographer John O’ Dowd starts a new trend in star biographies in which the writer shows empathy and respect to their subject.Believe me when I say this, you will not be able to put this book down once you start reading it. It is that good!!!

Mental illness was not usually recognized or treated back in the 1950s and 1960s and a life of a beautiful and talented woman was in total free fall towards a tragic end. I believe, she was a good person at heart which is evidenced by the way her son felt about her despite the fact that he never saw her again after the age of 9. Being separated from her son must have played a major role in her decline. I have lost a lot of respect for Franchot Tone.....despite the turmoil his life suffered due to their relationship; he obviously cared deeply about her at one time....and he had ample resources that he should have done something to help her when she was so desperately in need of help. She was addicted to Tom Neal....but in reality, Tom Neal was an animal who virtually destroyed her.

This is an enthralling biography that you will read again and again. Right off the bat, this is NOT your usual cut-and-paste biography. The author, John O'Dowd, has spent years researching and interviewing everyone he could find who knew Barbara Payton. The book is filled with rare photographs of the doomed star with even one snapshot taken just days before her tragic death. The result is a nearly 400 page study of a vastly complicated woman who was years ahead of her time. If she were alive today, she would be celebrated by the media as just another Anna Nicole Smith but with much more talent. I had always thought Frances Farmer probably had the most grim and tragic life since she was committed to the horrors of a state mental hospital by her mother during Farmer's peak years. Yet, you follow Payton from her childhood to her phenomenal luck in Hollywood, at the beginning, and you're amazed at how she early on began showing signs of self-destructive behavior. Even when she was signed by James Cagney to co-star with him in "Kiss Tomorrow, Goodbye," Payton was already getting a notorious reputation for wild promiscuity on the set. She loved sex and saw nothing wrong in having it from crew members to cast members. Her nymphomania grew to nightmarish proportions as her success brought her a $10,000 a week contract. On screen, she had all the makings of a true star. Her blonde, Nordic beauty, the crystal blue hue of her eyes and knock-out figure brought her comparisons with Marilyn Monroe. But as several people told the author, Payton was already showing alarming signs of recklessness. She hung out with drug and criminal figures and the most shady personalities on the fringe of Hollywood. After her affair with Bob Hope ended, she blackmailed him for tens of thousands of dollars and to turn the knife, she gave an interview with a scandal magazine detailing her sexual affair with Hope and laughed at his sexual prowess. When Universal wanted to sign her for a major contract, she showed up for their luncheon meeting with several of the studios major executives and then ended the meeting by walking out--leaving the executives enraged. She laughed about it later to her friends, even when it was pointed out to her that she had burned her bridges forever with Universal and word got around to the other major studios. The author goes into the scandalous affair between her and bad boy, Tom Neal, and writes how Neal nearly murdered Hollywood icon, Franchot Tone, who wanted to marry Payton. She played the two men against each other and was reportedly thrilled to have them fighting over her. But even after she married the much battered Tone, she kept seeing O'neal and laughed about it to the media. You keep watching Payton making one major mistake after another--burning all of her bridges, refusing to control her notorious promiscuity and refusing to stop being seen with filmdom's most shady characters. Her descent into prostitution is painful to read and you keep thinking: she went from $10,000 a week movie starlet to a $5 a trick prostitute, living on Los Angele's most notorious skid row. She was being kept by a black pimp who beat her relentlessly, knocking out many of her front teeth and leaving her with hideous black and blue bruises. This is a fascinating study of failed stardom and a beautifully blonde woman who made it a habit of making the wrong choices. At the end, you wonder why she insisted on staying in Hollywood--when she was offered many chances by her few friends to begin a new life. This would make a dynamite movie but I can't think of any recognizable female actress today who could really do Payton justice. In her own way, she was bigger than life. She was definitely someone who could have benefitted from psychiatric therapy or institutional care. Payton remains an enigma--someone who seemed hell bent on ending her last days in a living hell.

Hollywood has produced more than its fair share of real-life tragic endings, but few are quite so shocking and depressing as that of Barbara Payton. Barbara was a contemporary of other tragic divas like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, and yet somehow her story seems even more shocking than theirs. She was a promising young starlet in the late 1940s/early 50s, who began her career appearing alongside the legendary James Cagney. She was beautiful, glamorous, sexy, and had oodles of charisma. She was even thought at one stage to be the next Marilyn. Her career though degenerated into a series of cheap low-budget flicks, until finally it ground to a complete end in 1955, when Barbara was only 28. Three years later she tried to make a comeback, only to find that no one in Hollywood was interested, and she couldn't even get a job as an extra or a stand-in. How on earth did it all go so drastically wrong? Even at the end of this book we are still scratching our heads over this one. I suppose for a start, Barbara had a serious drink problem for most of her adult life. Both her parents were alcoholics, and it seemed to be in her blood. She also seemed addicted to sex, and was known for being attracted to rackety men. I think another problem was that, although she had talent, she never seemed much interested in honing it. She preferred partying, and i suspect one of the reasons the studios got fed up with her is that she never gave the impression she took her career very seriously. Although many people clearly liked Barbara, and thought of her as a good soul under the hard-bitten exterior, a few others also described her as "a borderline sociopath" and a "monster". So which was she? Towards the end of her life Barbara was described as being a good person, but unfortunately one who was (by her own admission) "attracted to evil". It's all these lingering question-marks about her which is one of the reasons why her life-story is so compelling. It's also an extreme example of someone who had it all, and lost it again. At the height of her fame Barbara was the quintessential movie-star, wearing floor-length mink coats, hosting celebrity parties at her luxury home, and earning a staggering $10,000 a WEEK (not exactly small beer in the 1950s). She went from all that to working as a prostitute on Skid Row, earning $5 a trick. By the age of only 39 she was killing herself with booze and drug addiction, and looked 20 years older than she really was. It is hard to think of anyone else who suffered quite such an appalling reversal of fortune. The author writes her story with great compassion and insight, but at the same time he doesn't try to exonerate Barbara from her own faults. This is heartbreaking stuff, Hollywood Gothic at its most extreme. It's also a fascinating insight into the dark side of the 1950s celebrity culture.

I had never heard of Barbara Payton and bought this book on the strength of the reviews as I really enjoy biographies. I also lliked the cover and title which of course is not really the best reason to buy a book but this one really lived up to both the wording and the image. In my opinion, I would say that this poor woman was, in her prime even lovelier than Marilyn Monroe and by all accounts had acting talent too. Whatever drove to destroy herself is an enigma, was it due to abuse in her childhood that led to a fragile sense of self and a feeling that she did not deserve her success? Was it the callous machine of Hollywood or undiagnosed bipolar illness which can be a manifestation of unresolved trauma? I would guess it was a fatal combination of all these factors. The horror and degradation of her final years are haunting and harrowing. The book is very well written too, deeply empathetic to Barbara but clear-sighted too. I finished it a few days ago and it is lingering in my thoughts

It's difficult to know who the real Barbara is, she was so multi faceted and complex. The people closest to her speak highly of her, whereas those in show business speak the worst of her. It's well known that most of those fifties stars were living exactly the same way as Barbara but they had money and the studios to cover up for their lifestyles. Marilyn might have ended up the same way had she not died young.

A really well researched and written book.Barbara was such a complex soul and this book tells her story without only focusing on the lurid details, it also describes Barbara’s kindness, talent and great intelligence.Barbara may have self destructed and that story is told here but she is also remembered for more than that in this book.

I loved this book - one of the best books l've ever read. Honest but sympathetic and beautifully written - l totally recommend this book.