Barbara Payton's Scandals: The Fight, the Blacklisting and the Scotty Bowers Rumours
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Barbara Payton was pulling in $10,000 a week, dating Gary Cooper and Howard Hughes, and being talked about as the next big blonde star to come out of Warner Bros. Ten years later she was turning $5 tricks in parked cars on Sunset Boulevard. Nobody in Hollywood fell faster or harder, and almost none of it happened quietly. There was a fistfight that put a movie star in a coma, a romance that got her frozen out of the industry entirely, and years later, a gas station attendant turned Hollywood "fixer" named Scotty Bowers who claimed he knew exactly what she'd become.
Quick Answers
Who was Barbara Payton? She was a Hollywood actress who starred opposite James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950) and Gary Cooper in Dallas (1950) before a string of scandals ended her career by the mid-1950s.
What did Scotty Bowers say about Barbara Payton? In his memoir Full Service, Bowers claimed Bob Hope used to visit Payton for 20 to 30 minute stretches, and other accounts drawn from his book describe her as a high-class sex worker in demand among Hollywood men. None of it has ever been independently confirmed.
The Queen Bee of Hollywood
Payton was born Barbara Lee Redfield in Cloquet, Minnesota, in 1927 and grew up in Odessa, Texas. She eloped at sixteen, married an Air Force pilot at seventeen, and by 1945 was in Los Angeles chasing a modelling career while her husband finished college on the G.I. Bill. It worked fast. A screen test for James Cagney's brother William landed her the female lead opposite Cagney himself in the 1950 noir Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and Warner Bros signed her to a contract reportedly worth $5,000 a week. She followed it with Dallas alongside Gary Cooper and Only the Valiant alongside Gregory Peck, and for a couple of years she really was, in her own words, the queen bee of Hollywood.
She was also sleeping her way through the leading man directory, by her own admission and everyone else's gossip. Howard Hughes, Bob Hope, George Raft, Guy Madison and John Ireland all turn up in the rumour mill from this period. None of it dented her career much. What came next did.
A Weak Alibi for a Mob Killing
Before any of the headline scandals hit, Payton was already running with a rough crowd. In 1949 she was dating a movie extra and small-time drug dealer named Don Cougar, who at one point beat up her landlady in a dispute over rent. Through Cougar she got tangled up with members of the Sica crime family, and in early 1950 she and Cougar were called before a federal grand jury in the perjury trial of a friend named Stanley Adams, a heroin dealer already serving time for killing a police informant. Payton and Cougar backed up Adams's claim that he'd been having dinner with them in her apartment at the time of the killing. Nobody believed it. Adams was convicted of perjury on top of the murder charge, and Payton walked away without charges of her own, but the episode was already circulating in gossip columns by the time Warner Bros signed her a few months later.
The Fight That Put a Movie Star in a Coma
In 1951 Payton got engaged to Franchot Tone, an A-list actor twenty years her senior and Joan Crawford's ex-husband. It was a rocky engagement from the start. While the two of them were filming Drums in the Deep South together with co-star Guy Madison, Tone came home one evening to find Payton and Madison in bed. He didn't yell at Payton. He turned to Madison and asked him flatly, are you going to marry her? Madison, already married himself, could only stammer that he couldn't. Payton reportedly burst out laughing at the whole exchange. Confidential magazine ran the story soon after, and somehow the engagement survived it anyway.
It came to a head just after 1am on September 14, 1951, outside Payton's apartment. Tone showed up drunk after an evening with Payton and found an equally drunk Neal already there. According to Payton's own account, she'd kissed Tone that night and told him to get rid of Tom. What actually got rid of anyone was Neal's fists. He beat Tone so badly that Tone was hospitalised with a fractured cheekbone, a broken nose and a concussion that left him unconscious for eighteen hours. The story ran in newspapers across the country. Public sympathy landed hard on Tone's side, partly because Neal had a boxer's reputation and partly because Payton reportedly just watched the fight happen.
Then came the twist nobody expected. Tone married Payton anyway, two weeks after getting out of the hospital. It lasted about seven months. When he filed for divorce he named Neal as the correspondent, and reportedly mailed dozens of compromising photos of Payton and Neal to gossip columnists out of spite. Neal's career never recovered either, and years later, in a strange echo of the whole episode, he was convicted of manslaughter after shooting his third wife dead during a domestic argument.
The Relationship That Got Her Blacklisted
The Tone-Neal fight damaged Payton's reputation but didn't end her career outright. What did was a relationship with Black actor Woody Strode a few years later. Interracial relationships were treated as career poison in 1950s Hollywood, and when Payton refused to hide hers, the industry made its feelings known fast. She's widely quoted as responding to the gossip by saying something to the effect of not caring who knew she loved Black people, and meaning it as a challenge rather than a denial.
It cost her. Work dried up almost immediately, and by October 1955 she was arrested for passing bad cheques at a Hollywood liquor store, pleading indigence to avoid jail. Her last real film role came that same year. She'd go on to have relationships and rumoured relationships with other Black entertainers too, but by then the damage to her standing in the industry was already done.
The Scotty Bowers Rumours
Decades later, Payton's name resurfaced in an unexpected place: the memoir of Scotty Bowers, the Hollywood gas station attendant turned procurer who spent the 1940s through the 1980s arranging sex for the industry's biggest names. Bowers published Full Service in 2012, when he was around ninety, and in it he claimed Bob Hope had a particular fondness for Payton and would visit her for brisk twenty to thirty minute stretches before heading home to his wife. Other accounts drawn from the book describe Payton, by this later stage of her career, as a high-class sex worker who was very much in demand.
Bowers wrote that Bob Hope's wife Dolores likely never found out, since the visits happened at Payton's place rather than the Hope family home. Whether any of it is true is genuinely unclear. Bowers named plenty of living and dead stars in his book, and while some details have been corroborated by outside sources over the years, huge parts of Full Service rest entirely on his own word, decades later, with most of the people involved already dead and unable to confirm or deny anything. Payton herself never mentioned a relationship with Bowers or Hope in her own memoir. What's true either way is that by the time these alleged visits were supposedly happening, Payton really had slid into sex work to survive, which is presumably exactly why the claim stuck.
The Fall
From the mid-1950s on, Payton's decline was public and relentless. She lost custody of her young son in 1956 after her ex-husband accused her of exposing him to unfit conditions. She married and divorced two more times. In 1957 she went into business in Chicago with an old friend from the Hollywood party circuit, actress Lila Leeds, best known for having been busted alongside Robert Mitchum in his famous 1948 marijuana arrest. The business was a call girl operation. Leeds was arrested and jailed for it. Payton narrowly avoided the same fate.
By the early 1960s she was working as a street prostitute around Sunset Strip, doing most of it in parked cars with the engine running so she could watch for police. Accounts of exactly how low her price dropped vary and mostly trace back to a single retelling, but her own memoir describes being reduced to five dollar bills, which gives a fair sense of how far she'd fallen. She was arrested repeatedly for prostitution, drunkenness and shoplifting, stabbed by a client in 1962 and left needing 38 stitches, and once found asleep on a bus bench in a bathing suit and coat.
Barbara Payton at Hollywood Police Station, bruised and scarred, refuses to file complaint, 1962
In 1963 a paperback publisher paid her a small advance, reportedly around $1,000 to $2,000, for a ghostwritten tell-all called I Am Not Ashamed. Payton is said to have asked to be paid partly in red wine so her creditors couldn't seize the cash. The book is a chaotic, often incoherent read, but it's also brutally honest about what her life had become, describing the bus benches, the beatings and the rat-infested motel rooms in her own words. Barbara Stanwyck reportedly read it and said Payton damn well should have been ashamed.
By 1967 Payton was homeless and moved back in with her parents in San Diego to try to dry out. It didn't work. On May 8, 1967, she collapsed on their bathroom floor and died of heart and liver failure. She was 39.
Her story didn't stay buried with her. Biographer John O'Dowd spent years tracking down her son and the people who actually knew her to write Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the family-authorised biography that finally treated her as more than a punchline, and he's since worked on turning it into a screenplay. It's a reminder that underneath the scandals and the rumours, there was a real, complicated woman who friends and family remembered fondly, even if Hollywood never let her forget the version of her it preferred to tell.
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Barbara Payton wasn't the only Hollywood-era beauty whose life spiraled after a violent scandal made her the story instead of her work. Read about Evelyn Nesbit, whose love triangle ended with a real murder decades before Payton's ended with a beating, or Claudine Longet, another star whose career never survived the scandal that came to define her.
