I Am Not Ashamed
You Must Remember This' Karina Longworth Talks Boozy Starlets and Sex Work in Old Hollywood
Actress Barbara Payton claimed, as in her ghostwritten memoir’s title, that she was not ashamed. She wasn’t ashamed of sexing up the crime movies she’d graced with her presence in the early fifties, or of her love of booze and drugs; of her open affairs with multiple lovers, or her turn to street prostitution, or her ties to crime syndicates that, at one memorable point, landed her in the witness chair in a murder trial. The sensationalised, ballsy book about her life, ‘I Am Not Ashamed’, was published in 1963, and it pulled zero punches. Much of it is hard to verify, but it was published eight years after Payton’s last major screen credit (Murder is My Beat, a B-movie from 1955 directed by Edgar G. Ulmer). An actress who had starred opposite James Cagney and Gary Cooper in the early fifties was, by 1961, homeless, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and turning tricks on the streets of Los Angeles. It was a long way to fall. But the doors of opportunity could slam shut quickly for female stars of Barbara’s era, most especially if they crossed moral lines that Eisenhower’s America disapproved of. Payton’s story is also the story of so many others: of how the tangle of sex, sexual favours, and out-and-out sex work that she became caught up in would tarnish her name forever, while the men involved would remain unscathed.
Karina Longworth, film historian and creator/host of You Must Remember This, a podcast dedicated to telling secret/forgotten stories from Hollywood’s first century, knows a thing or two about Barbara Payton and her world. In her series from 2017, ‘Dead Blondes’, she dedicated an entire episode to Payton’s precipitous rise and fall. In point of fact, Payton almost proves a cipher for countless other beautiful women who never quite made a long-lived mark in show-biz, and ultimately met tragic fates. Payton just registers as a seedier, more extreme example of a spectrum of starlets considered interchangeable by the Hollywood studio establishment. And so-called misdeeds - criminal or sexual or both, in the case of Payton - were catalogued fastidiously by gossip columnists and moral arbiters for the world to see, and to judge. Those judgements - about her love affairs, her behaviour, and her ragged, sybaritic appearance - would eventually lead Payton to move back into her parents’ home, to die of kidney and heart failure at only 39 years old.
The new season of You Must Remember This, ‘Gossip Girls’, touches on the ways in which the media has long been able to imply criminality or moral failure beyond its remit to do so, often on little evidence or for petty reasons. Focused on the stories of rival columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, ‘Gossip Girls’ also points to another interminable fact: often it was women banging the gavel down in judgement of other women, to curry favour and consolidate power in all the ways that Parsons and Hopper used to do.
For this month’s Sisters Under the Mink, I spoke to Karina Longworth about her podcast, the seething underworld of vice and crime in 20th century Hollywood, and how the system was forever rigged to hypocritically punish ‘bad girls’.
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CN: For me, throughout various seasons of You Must Remember This, there are these elements of true crime and vice. Of course you have that with your Charles Manson series, but also in your examination of Confidential Magazine, and in Dead Blondes, too. Is it a running theme out of a specific interest on your part?
KL: When I first started the podcast, I thought I was going to tell more stories like that. And then the whole podcast world kind of became obsessed with true crime, so I wanted to go in a different direction. But certainly, if you're talking about the fullness of the Hollywood story over the course of the 20th century, it's something that it's difficult to get away from. There’s corruption, but then actual criminal behaviour, also.
CN: And the thing for me that’s striking about Barbara Payton’s story is that her promiscuity, boozing, eventual sex work, is that most of it isn’t really that aberrant in the grand scheme of things. Plenty of other people were doing the same sort of stuff. Yet at a certain point no one in Hollywood would touch her with a bargepole. For men who were similar - stars who ran with criminals, like George Raft, say, who was in a gang and had been a gigolo, their reputations remained unhurt.
KL: Even when Payton wasn’t formally doing sex work, she had a quite transactional attitude toward sex, and the thing was she didn’t try to hide this. But there’s a story coming in one episode of the Gossip Girls series which will come out in a few weeks. It’s about how Confidential Magazine came in and helped to sort of screw up this racket that the legacy gossip columnists had going. There was this one story that Confidential ran on its cover about an actor named Rory Calhoun, where they revealed that he had been in prison. What nobody knew was that this was actually a planted story by Rory Calhoun's manager. But his manager was also Rock Hudson's manager. So he made a deal with Confidential Magazine to not reveal that Rock Hudson was gay and instead reveal that Calhoun had gone to prison, because the manager knew that this would actually help Rory Calhoun's career. It would help his credibility sort of playing thugs and bad guys. But, you know, with somebody like Barbara Payton, there's never any conversation about helping the credibility of femme fatale. It’s only acceptable for somebody to play that girl on screen, if there can be sort of parallel stories about them being good girls in real life.
CN: It’s so hypocritical.
KL: Well, I’m working on something to do with Joan Bennett right now. And she was one of the first women to kind of enshrine this archetype of the femme fatale in film noir, because she was in some of the earliest film noirs directed by Fritz Lang. And then then she became the sort of sultry femme fatale at like age 35, in movies like Scarlet Street. About five years later, her husband who was a powerful producer named Walter Wanger actually shot her lover, an agent named Jennings Lang. So Walter Wanger did go to prison for a few months, but Joan Bennett's career was over. She just couldn't work anymore. And I think a lot of that has to do with this fact that even though she had been playing these sort of sex bad girls for a long time, the press about her offscreen life was about how she wasn't really like that. It was about how she was a mother of four and the perfect homemaker and the perfect hostess and, you know, insisted that her kids go to bed at 6pm and. The culture and particularly the Production Code required in the 40s and 50s. If somebody was going to portray, like, a sexual appetite, hanging out with crooks, you know, sadistic behavior, or sort of S&M sexual dynamics, there had to be something where the industry could also say, ‘but she's not really like that!’
CN: And I guess there was a similar situation with Barbara Payton, where her career became untenable because she was stuck in a very public love triangle between the very respectable star Franchot Tone and this B-movie actor called Tom Neal.
KL: Yes - Barbara was married to Franchot Tone, who had been a very respected kind of clean-cut star. And then she just also started having this relationship with this seedier guy, Tom Neal. And then Tom Neal really beat the shit out of Franchot Tone, who went to the hospital wrapped up like a mummy. Basically, Barbara continued to see the guy who beat him up. And it turned into this huge scandal. And, you know, she divorced Franchot NTone, and, and I think it was just like her. I don't know if it was naivete or if it was willful defiance, but she just really wouldn't play any version of the Hollywood publicity game, you know? She wasn't trying to hide that she was married to one guy and sleeping with another guy. And it turned out that the guy she was sleeping with almost killed her husband, by beating him so badly.
You know, Hollywood was really struggling financially to deal with a bunch of challenges. There’s the rise of television, the fact that they have been forced to sell their movie theaters, so they can't do vertical integration anymore, which changes the whole business model. And then there’s also the [HUAC] blacklist, so everybody's supposed to be on their best behavior. Because there is a national conversation about Hollywood being a cesspool, and full of traitors. And so everybody's supposed to be, you know, toeing a certain line.
CN: Yet around the same time, Payton was actually subpoenaed to appear as an alibi for someone who was on trial for murder. She said this guy was at her house at the time, when he was accused of having murdered a drug syndicate snitch. Turns out the syndicate was run by two mafioso brothers, and her alibi was probably phony. So she was tied into a lot of questionable stuff, and yet the main reason for her losing her career were... her sexual relationships?
KL: Certainly, at that time, yes.
CN: I wanted to ask you a bit about what I think is probably Payton’s most famous and maybe best film, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, opposite James Cagney. In your episode about her you call her character a feminist hero. There’s this great shot at the end, where it’s almost from the floor, looking up at her, after she’s just shot him down. And then two cops bust in and realise the job is already done.
KL: Something that's interesting, in terms of her career, is where it's like: you can't wait for the police to come in and fix the problem for you. You’re kind of on your own, and you just have to take care of business yourself.
CN: Thinking about your current Gossip Girls season, I wondered - did gossip columnists like Hedda and Louella ever write about or hint at sex work in Hollywood, and how common it was? When you look at Barbara Payton, for example, there was a grey area for her where she first began being paid for sex by executives and other Hollywood people.
KL: I would say they were involved because they would never write about that kind of thing. A de facto cover-up. Certainly with Louella, she was always a cheerleader for the studios. [...] She very quickly fell into the niche of being a defender of Hollywood.
CN: So they were protecting these men, too. And at the same time, there are these rumours about all of the brothels that were visited by these powerful moguls and stars. I’m thinking of the one that inspired the brothel in L.A. Confidential, which was rumoured to have really existed, where the girls were made up to look like popular actresses.
KL: I actually tried to do research about that place when I was reading my Howard Hughes book, because in one biography of him, it said he used to go there. All the sex workers were all styled to look like stars, like a fake Katharine Hepburn and a fake Carole Lombard. And so you know, in one biography about Hughes, there was a story of him going there and trying to have sex with the sex workers that were styled to look like the actresses who wouldn't have sex with him. But I just couldn't find anything trustworthy about it.
CN: That’s the thing. It’s hard to verify - it just sounds like Hollywood lore.
KL: The one thing you can say is that there wasn’t a lot of documentation of these places - they were underground. If it were today, there’d be a market for a woman who worked there to write some pseudonymous memoir about the place. But back then, there wasn’t much incentive. There was such a huge social stigma about that kind of thing.
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You Must Remember This is available on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you listen to your podcasts. New episodes of current series ‘Gossip Girls’ are released every week.
Later this month, Sisters Under the Mink will be back with a video edition, featuring some closer discussion of Barbara Payton’s film roles and screen acting. As ever, if you like what you see and wish to subscribe to the video posts also, you can upgrade or join up below.