WEIRDLAND: Private Hell: Barbara Payton & Franchot Tone

Saturday, June 07, 2014

Private Hell: Barbara Payton & Franchot Tone

Even her detractors acknowledged her potential, but in the early Fifties, with Hollywood striving for a wholesome family image, the odds of professional survival for "Glitterville's top tramp" were nil. Barbara, at the height of her allure, had captivated Franchot Tone, who found unstable women irresistible. Barbara Stanwyck declared after reading Payton's memories "I'm Not Ashamed" (1962): "She jolly well should be!" Source: www.issuu.com

Dave Keenan was working as an associate theatrical agent on Outpost Drive when he spotted Barbara Payton 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?”

“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. 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. Feldman says, “She had the blonde goddess shine that can't be described as anything but a radiance that makes a movie star. 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. 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.’”

Later in Hollywood, Barbara told bitplayer and call girl Lila Leeds, “Bob Hope's sure as shit no great lover like he wants everyone to believe.” She said he had her prancing around in a half-assed strip show while he lay, “guzzling and laughing his ass off at nothing that was funny. He said, ‘Oh, look what you're doing to this poor guy,’ meaning his prick he was showing. He's saying, ‘This poor guy needs company!’ Well,” Barbara told Lila, “about five minutes later while I'm just getting the heater going, Hope's already turning cold as a dead duck.” She'd been hoping he was going to give her “like a red Cadillac convertible,” she said. But instead, Hope gave Barbara three jars of jam, she told Lila Leeds. “Some jam made in Arizona from a cactus. Supposed to be a gourmet jam. I said, ‘What am I supposed to do with three jars of jam?’ and he said, ‘Well, honey, you eat jam. You put it on your toast…’”

Jean Wallace with Franchot Tone, 1941. After a whirlwind romance and seven years of rocky marriage -and, ultimately, divorce- she attempted suicide in 1946 with sleeping pills, and in 1949 with a self inflicted knife wound. During the acrimonious divorce proceedings that followed, Jean alleged extreme jealousy and an affair with peroxide blond siren Barbara Payton, while Tone claimed that his wife had been involved with gangster Johnny Stompanato, bodyguard of infamous L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen.

Beneath his smooth veneer of poise and refinement, his nightclub savvy, Franchot Tone was a troubled man in search of disaster. As he plunged himself into Barbara's effervescent, ricocheting chaos, he would say, “I have discovered my nemesis.” In Tone's purple velvet view of the world, Barbara would be the one to make him pay for every “dark and dirty deed and thought” the actor had carried in his soul like a dose of nerve gas.

Barbara Payton and Franchot Tone depart LaGuardia Airport (New York) after Payton's arrival (January 15, 1952)

Though he'd received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in 'Mutiny on the Bounty', Tone would say, “None of that really matters. Fame always failed to reach beneath my skin.” Franchot told Barbara's agent, “This girl has struck a deep chord in me. I identify with her and I've never fallen for someone so hard or so fast in all of my life. My prayers have been answered.” The agent said, “Just don't lose your head.”

What Tone didn't know but suspected, enough to thrust himself through episodes of anguish, was the extent of Barbara's ‘playing the field,’ as he put it. Tone tortured over her past, dwelling on whatever vague episodes she could dredge up, digging and coaxing her to divulge details that he'd use to fuel his obsession and pain. Tone told seasoned actress Connie Gilchrist while filming 'Here Comes the Groom,' “Barbara has aroused in me the idea of gathering her into my life completely. She is unpredictable and radiates the idea that she cannot be tamed anymore than one could break a tigress.”

I asked him why he was going to marry her and with that incredulous look he can give, he said, ‘Of course, I am in love with her and want her to be my wife.’ But he confessed he wasn't sure she felt the same. He said that it hardly mattered. I asked why he said it didn't matter. ‘She needs me,’ he said. She was incapable of seeing the situation she was in, from without, he said. She needed his guidance, his tutorship. He said she needed him to manage her way through ‘this jungle of illusion each and every one of us are living in.’

Barbara and Franchot emerged from the Beverly Hills hotel room, shining and smiling after two hours, Barbara would say, “of sex that'd raise the dead Lazarus with a hard-on.” They showed up at Ciro's, “cozy and affectionate,” as one columnist observed. Barbara was asked, “I understood you were marrying Tom Neal today? Or is it tomorrow? Or is it off?” It was past one o'clock in the morning when Tone and Barbara returned to her apartment. Tom, half-plastered, watched as Barbara deliberately gave Franchot a long kiss, lips smearing, her tongue going into Tone's mouth. Tom's red eyes, bleary from booze, grew hot as a bull's fixed on a cape. “Walking right in together like they'd just climbed out of the sack,” Tom would say. “Both loaded and her with that foggy look she'd get when she'd been pumped for an hour. Standing there frenching the bastard right in front of me.” Tom claims, I said, ‘Barbara and I are supposed to get married,’ and he says, ‘Nobody's marrying you, Neal, at least no one that's present company.’

Columnist Florbel Muir wrote, “What always puzzled me about this romantic trio is how Tone, who has a very trained mind, could play around in a league of daffy dillies and muscle developers.” A producer at Warners said, “Payton has made herself world famous as a ‘daffy dilly,’ and she's a jinx to anyone giving her a second glance.” Barbara called agent Feldman. He says, “She begged me to see her, and I met her in a bar on Sunset. We talked and she wanted help and was saying, ‘What can you do to help me?’ I said I couldn't do anything. ‘I take you on,’ I said, ‘and link my name with yours and I get a strike against me.’I said she needed to talk to someone, she needed some personal counseling. I told her she needed some mental help, and she gave me a dirty look. ‘You've got problems that're going to cause you grief and nobody in Hollywood's got any interest in somebody's problems unless they show a profit. With all the bad publicity you've gone out of your way to drum up, they think they're going to lose money on you.’

Barbara said, “Franchot never talked the same again, after the fight. He was a sweet man, had a sweet side to him, but he had a bad masochistic streak in his personality. He wanted something beautiful for its own sake, not for what it did for him… I was gorgeous and young and fit the bill in his private hell. He wanted me to be what I was, so he said at the start.

With Tom, there was basic chemistry. We couldn't stay out of bed. It was simmering and cooking all the time. I could see in Franchot this purist's obsession for a thing of beauty, and sometimes just parts of a body could satisfy him —legs, breasts, your hind end.…” Barbara's marriage to Franchot lasted for fifty-three days. A defeated, deflated Tone said, “She can't get Neal out of her hair. I am disillusioned and heartsick and there's nothing before us but divorce and hardship.”

Bill Watson of the Hollywood Citizen-News: "The town had washed its hands of Barbara Payton, though the public still showed a kind of morbid interest. Half the movie business had laid out a red carpet for her, and she threw it all back in their faces. She wasn't a star—not a star that the great mass wants to see and love or identify with. Payton was a tramp, yet she hadn't done it alone. She'd had a lot of help." Bill Watson says, “The Hollywood Citizen wanted a piece chalking off the deep water marks to which Payton was sinking and I covered it. I might add reluctantly. She broke down in the corridor like it suddenly hit her she'd lost her kid. “Another press conference,” says Watson. “Only a few showed up —including me. It had been about two years since I'd seen her at the child custody slaughter and I heard she looked awful and was falling apart. But she actually looked pretty good. She appeared trim and tanned and was dressed in a tailored suit.

She sat on the edge of a table with her legs crossed, giving us a treat, or so she thought, but we were more there out of curiosity —bizarre curiosity— watching her play the sex doll to the hilt as she told us she was divorcing the joker she was married to and was resuming her movie career. We all laughed when she said, ‘The ants in my pants are crawlin' again!’ Big joke! I can still see her sitting there and laughing like she's Betty Grable, thinking she's still a hot star. But from that moment on it was all downhill to a hard, merciless bottom.” -"L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times" (2011) by John Gilmore

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

It's funny I just saw "Dangerous" starring Franchot Tone and Bette Davis, very similar to what would happen to him in real life with Barb ... Patton !! ...