Customer Reviews

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story

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Right off, let me note that this book is about my mother, Barbara Payton, so of course I have a strong reason to care about it. My initial reluctance to be interviewed by Mr. O'Dowd, and my deep doubt about the use for another person out to make money off my mother made it a hard sell. But, I came to know John and trust him to tell the whole story, to tell it from all sides, to research it to an extent that would be laudable for any biography, and to include the good and the bad, leaving it for the reader to reach his or her own conclusion. I love my mother and have always been proud of her, but I'm realistic that her life was mostly great success and great failure. The author has done a good job. I found the book a pleasure and an agony to read, but I'm grateful for it and hope you will give it a read. It is a fine piece of work. - John Lee Payton

"Unputdownable" is a clunky word that turns up far too often in book reviews, but it's applicable to this meticulously researched bio of Payton, who for a short time was one of Hollywood's golden blondes--and was for a painfully long time among the most miserable and dissolute of Hollywood's forgotten lost souls. O'Dowd has contacted relatives, former spouses, and many other primary sources to relate what will be the definitive account of the life of this clever, beautiful, and ambitious woman who was done in by her own demons, genetic predispositions, and impulsive, incautious behavior. To O'Dowd's credit, he makes Payton's sudden rise to fame as compelling as her crash-landing; seldom has an actress catapulted so rapidly from near-obscurity to starring roles in A-pictures opposite the likes of James Cagney and Gregory Peck. The book isn't just the final word on Payton, but the last word on her handsome but wretched consort, actor Tom "Detour" Neal, and the vicious love triangle whose third party was film star Franchot Tone. In the end, the intertwined relationships annihilated Payton and Neal's careers, and almost literally killed Tone (in one of the most infamous and brutal fistfights in Hollywood history). Payton's subsequent decline is awful, and Neal's dissipation and early death are nearly as hideous. O'Dowd writes with a relentless vigor that often shades to purple, and can't quite make up his mind whether Payton & Neal's downfalls were the results of our stars' flaws, a rapacious and uncaring Hollywood system, or that old standby, fate. O'Dowd's uncertainty, though, emerges as a positive element that allows the reader to decide the truth--if any meaningful truth at all exists in this tangled, obsessive story. The comments of Barbara Payton's son, elsewhere on this page, are touching because they reflect his mother's ability to love, and her inability to provide responsible care. In all, a remarkably affecting biography, handsomely produced by Bear Manor.

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.

It's rare that a person who is not a political figure or cultural icon receives the level of detailed attention and analysis that actress Barbara Payton has earned from her biographer, John O' Dowd, in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story. Even the word "story" here is an understatement, for Mr. O'Dowd has written a riveting, page-turning epic.

His subject is a stunningly beautiful actress of largely unfulfilled potential, a "starlet," in Hollywood's dismissive nomenclature. Barbara Payton died in 1967 at age 39, after a self-destructive plunge that remains unrivaled for its momentum and intensity. Her misfortune places her in that pantheon of haunting tinseltown tragedies that includes the Black Dahlia, and that Hollywood continues to pick at, like a sore that will not heal.

Payton's career began in a characteristic way: A high-spirited beauty from Cloquet, Minnesota, she set her sights early on stardom. Already a rebel in her teens, she had one, perhaps two runaway nuptials, quickly annulled, before marrying Air Force veteran, John Payton. The couple relocated to California, where John attended college, and where the proximity of Hollywood soon began to singe the marriage. Barbara's beauty and natural modeling talent quickly brought her studio notice. Despite her joy at the arrival of her son--a deep love that never wavered throughout her life--the modest rewards of domesticity could not compete with the siren song of Sunset Boulevard.

From the start, Barbara Payton's acting career conflated the professional and the sexual with puzzling recklessness, given Hollywood's determination to paste a conventionally wholesome facade onto its actors and actresses. That effort naturally spawned hypocrisy, rebellion, and wreckage. The cheery morality on display in Father Knows Best could turn with toxic fury on those who flouted it, as Ingrid Bergman and countless others discovered.

For whatever reasons, Barbara chose the path of least caution. Affairs with co-stars were frequent and blatant; liaisons with the likes of Bob Hope, Gregory Peck, George Raft, Guy Madison, Marlon Brando and others stoked the tabloids. Like Lana Turner, Barbara's poor judgment in boyfriends entangled her in the sleazy machinations of petty gangsters and dope dealers. A defiant streak and possible bipolar personality kept well-intentioned good samaritans at bay.

We see a timeline with an almost vertical rising trajectory, as Barbara is groomed to be a major star. Her salary shoots up to $10,000 a week. She enjoys a heady honeymoon of parties and associations with A-list stars. She is flattered, lauded and lionized as only Hollywood can. Then, almost as quickly as it began, her career is over. Her life becomes a long, agonizing skid downwards, through unspeakable degradation to early death. After reading this book you will never again look at a bag lady without wondering if she might have once been a beauty that men could fight over.

And fight they did. Her probably unintentional heedlessness one night provoked near-lethal drunken combat between her incendiary lovers, the suave, popular Franchot Tone and noir bully Tom Neal, an icon of hyper-sexualized brutality. In the aftermath, Barbara was branded and banished to the hinterlands of her profession. Her career never recovered, nor did that of Neal, who subsequently spent years in prison for murdering his next wife. Tone fared better professionally than he did physically, but his obsession with, and misbegotten marriage to Barbara continued to gorge the gossip columnists--on one of whom Tone famously, and deservedly, spat in a nightclub.

By the mid 1950s, Barbara's career was in freefall. Pictures that came her way were of the ilk of Bride of the Gorilla, thanks to the manipulations of Jack Warner, the vindictive, foul-mouthed head of Warner Brothers, who set out to ruin his own star. But by this time, Barbara's personal life was in freefall as well.

As her looks coarsened from relentless self-abuse, so did her language and behavior. She lost custody of her beloved son, a blow that hastened and exacerbated her decline. The partying became frenzied. She treated her luscious body, formerly a source of pride and pleasure--as something of no value, marinating herself in alcohol, letting herself go shapeless and unwashed. She had sex with a succession of men, seeming almost to celebrate her nihilism--flaunting her poverty; turning passers-by into voyeurs as if to accuse the world. Friends tried in vain to interrupt the momentum. Her long-suffering lawyer, Milton Golden, not only represented her pro bono on prostitution and bad check charges, but threw her a lavish, hopeful party to kick off a comeback effort in 1958, which failed miserably, sealing her doom.

Barbara Payton's decline vividly exposed the deficits of her parents--hopeless alcoholics themselves, complicit in her drinking. The inexplicable impotence of a social system that turned its back on a woman plainly a threat to herself and in desperate need of hospitalization continues to appall. Of course the tabloids, flies on a wound, never deserted her in her torment.

The book is liberally seasoned with pictures, which harmonize poignantly with O'Dowd's evocative writing. We visit Barbara's world in a wealth of scenes; we are riveted by the flawless young beauty wooing the camera, playfully confident of no bad angles. And yet, in retrospect, the eyes seem haunted; the joy manic. Sadness lingers at the corners of the famously lush mouth. The last snapshots are simply agonizing to look at--and yet we cannot look away.

John O'Dowd, who dedicated ten years to this labor, has both shed light on and deepened the mystery of Barbara Payton--which is, after all, a mystery of the human condition. Often, a book or a film is not immediately recognized as the masterpiece it is. Tom Neal's performance in Detour; Barbara Payton's in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye; and O'Dowd's in this book all bear witness to the demons that can infest the human spirit, lurking just outside our dreams, testing the boundaries, awaiting their day.

Prior to reading John O'Dowd's brilliant biography of Barbara Payton, my knowledge of Barbara was peripheral at best. I knew she was once a famous actress who descended into alcoholism and died tragically. On the surface the story seems simple, but the complete story of Barbara Payton's life is much more complex and much more compelling. With the aid of Barbara's family (including her son who had never spoken publicly about his mother before), friends, and co workers, O'Dowd gives a clear, fair view of Barbara and manages to create a tone that is neither overly sympathetic nor overly judgmental. All in all this is a fine, fascinating biography of a subject whose story I now realize has been overly simplified previously. There is no doubt that Barbara Payton led a lifestyle that would be considered salacious to most, but, John O'Dowd's biography dims the lights on some of the sensationalism and restored the some respect to the name Barbara Payton. This book is HIGHLY recommended!!!!!

Mr. John O'Dowd is a man of great talent and writing skills. And what a pulse pounding read this was! I can see why Miss Payton's son agreed to do the Foreword. I bought this book because of the cover! Then I started reading it and it is an easy read, but very emotional. Today's Stars have no clue who Miss Payton was. But many of them should find out. Barbara Payton was a very glamorous and talented star on the big screen. She lived life to the fullest, sometimes to extremes.

Today's badly behaved stars don't have her talent, beauty or presence. But Mr. O'Dowd captured her story, tragically her life ended the way she lived. But what a good lesson that is for today's scream queens. The Author will become one of the best known celebrity biographers in the future. He's amazing in his storytelling skills. But who doesn't buy a book hoping to have incredible photographs that you have never seen? You will not be sorry. The photographs are incredible and the ones of her at the end of her life where very moving, sad and tragic. The photos start out in her youth, childhood and later on in her early modeling and acting careers.

By the time you get to the end, you feel (thanks to tihs great author's skills) that you have lived the life of Miss Payton along with her. This is a great read if you know anything about the classic stars or not. Mr. O'Dowd has an ability to capture your interests and attention early on in his book and you feel like you know him and trust him. He's very fair and honest in his writing. Here! Here! Mr. O'Dowd, you are the best. Miss Payton, we miss you!

What an incredible book! You can tell that talented writer John O'Dowd has poured his "heart and soul" into this book! What a amazing story...... a very beautiful and talented actress who is starring in films with such superstars as James Cagney, "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye" Gary Cooper, "Dallas" Gregory Peck, "Only The Valiant"! And earning 10.000 a week to five dollars a day! This is the incredible story about this beautiful women's meteoric rise to fame..... then suddenly just as quick, a swift tragic descent! This book covers every aspect of Barbara's incisive "descend" into Hell! Her many amorous scandalous affairs with Bob Hope, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Steve Cochran, Tom Neal, Franchot Tone, and the famous headline fight between Neal and Tone its all here. But O'Dowd is not here to denigrate Payton, he wants to get at all the facts and the (real) story. You can tell that he wants to bring some humanity and respect for this actress! I firmly believe he succeeds in that! It had to take MANY painstaking years of flawless thorough research and devotion to write this prolific biography! O'Dowd doesn't seem to miss anything! This is hands down one of the BEST biographies I ever read! Also in this very thick(479 page)book are many rare photos through-out. I did not know that much about Barbara Payton but after reading this well-written book I certainly do now! I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Barbara Payton! Could it had been certain "influences" that led her down the path of this nightmare world of alcohol,drugs,and prostitution..... you be the judge. But I know that O'Dowd's book in reading it brought to me compassion for this actress and why not! Yes we get to see the "dark side"........ the seedy apartments,the prostitution! But when I read that she was a loving mother, loving and protective of her son! And when I read where she had hit rock bottom living on "skid row"! And yet she had enough compassion in her disillusioned heart to bring in a homeless straving dog into the run-down hotel that she was living in, that pulls at my heart! This is definitely a "heart-breaking" tragic story,that pulls no punches! The insurmontable suffering this dear woman went through is horrible! This is an amazing insight into her life! I believe John O'Dowd proves that with this book that he is one of the BEST biographers out there in the literary field! This is the type of imformative riveting book that once you pick it up and start reading the book it is hard to put it down until you are finished! Thank you John O'Dowd for writing this book! There is no doubt that this fantastic "compelling" book should be turned into a screen-play and made into a movie! What a movie this would make! This book and story of anguish and torment definitely "cries out" to be made into a movie! This book is worth every penny it cost and much more! Again highly recommended!

Lawrence Fultz Jr.

John O'Dowd has given us a nearly 500 page biography of fallen 1950s Hollywood starlet Barbara Payton. The breadth and depth of his research is extremely impressive. The major primary sources are interviews with Payton's brother and former sister-in-law, a long-time friend, her son John Lee Payton (who has provided his own book review here on Amazon), and her fourth husband, Tony Provas. But this is just the start, as O'Dowd displays an uncanny ability to track down figures even remotely connected with Payton those many years ago. As an example, in 1957 Payton spent time with Provas at the then remote village of Kino Bay in Mexico, and O'Dowd presents the first-hand account of one Randal Barrack, who at 14 got to know Payton well while spending the summer there with a boyhood friend. O'Dowd weaves together lengthy interview excerpts and documentary research to describe Barbara's family origins, her childhood in Minnesota and Texas, her nearly instant rise to the cusp of Hollywood stardom while barely into her 20s, and her equally sudden implosion and long descent to her depraved final years and premature death. A vast collection of photos interspersed throughout the text enhances the reading experience.

Despite the narrative detail, the book amounts to far less than one would hope. I completed my reading baffled by Payton's life. As a budding star she earned $10,000 a week (nearly $5 million annually in 2011 dollars) under a joint contract with Bill Cagney and Warner Brothers, but immediately began to undermine her career with her outlandish behavior, culminating in her ill-fated simultaneous relationships with Franchot Tone and Tom Neal and the near-fatal beating of Tone by Neal in 1951. Hanging over the narrative like a gray storm cloud is the question of the fundamental cause of Payton's undoing. She clearly had a drinking problem, evidently due in some measure to a genetic predisposition. As the 1950s progressed and her acting career vaporized, her alcohol abuse escalated from very serious to completely uncontrolled, but we don't learn to what extent this caused her personal problems or merely exacerbated them. O'Dowd's laundry list of her possible demons includes alcohol and drug abuse, incest or sex abuse as a child (though he presents no evidence of the former and a single, extremely fishy anecdote of the latter), self-hatred derived from her father's emotional detachment, a rapacious and sexually hypocritical Hollywood, the influence of bad boy Neal or assorted other shady lovers, serious mental illness such as manic depression (no evidence of this is provided), the loss of parental rights, hypersexuality, a rebellious nature fatally at odds with 50s conformity, or some combination of the above.

In the absence of more insight into what drove Payton's epic rise and fall, O'Dowd's insistence, in the book's final sentences, that Payton MATTERED (his emphasis), rings hollow. Her acting career, which amounted to less than a handful of meaningful roles, certainly doesn't justify this assertion. Her profound irresponsibility in her personal relationships, career, and parenting duties incongruously juxtaposed with what some saw as a warm and generous nature make for entertaining reading but hardly mark her as a figure of any real consequence.

Payton's final years were spent in a nightmare of drunkenness, violence, destitution, arrests, homelessness, and prostitution leading to her death at 39. True to form, O'Dowd impressively documents this underground phase of her life. It is painful to read of the horror of her increasingly sordid existence as it unfolds over the final third of the book. Other reviewers here are perplexed that Payton wasn't rescued by the many family members and friends who still cared about her and maintained intermittent contact through these years. They miss an obvious point. Payton was simply unwilling or unequipped to accept readily available help to establish herself in a "normal" life away from the fantasy of Hollywood stardom that had long since eluded her grasp. She was gifted and energetic in pursuing her love of cooking and interior design, and with help from her network of contacts and some personal initiative, could likely have parlayed either skill into a satisfying and successful career. She never came close, at one point quickly fleeing a partnership in a restaurant venture to return to her life on the dark side. Such was her unfathomable persona as captured by a book that is consistently entertaining in its true-life pulp noir sensibility but lacking the depth of insight that marks a fine biography.

The story of the quick rise and equally quick fall of actress Barbara Payton is a fascinating story, and writer John O'Dowd has done some excellent research into the actress' tragic life.

This book does have some careless errors of fact. Errol Flynn, for example, was not a Brit. He was born in Tasmania, Australia. Also, Franchot Tone was Oscar-nominated in the Best Actor category for MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935), not Best Supporting Actor.

Those kinds of errors are annoying, but don't necessarily detract from the drama of Payton's story. What DOES detract is the fact that O'Dowd (apparently) did not have an editor for his book, which is so often repetitive that I found myself skimming many pages, rather than reading them. Indeed, it appears that he used every word of every interview he conducted...even though people were saying the same thing over and over again.

Cut 50 pages out of this book, and it would be a first-rate, albeit depressing, page-turner. As it is, it is a good story that could have been told better.

Incidentally, during the Spring of 1964, I lived briefly in an apartment building on Los Angeles' Normandie Avenue, and one of the other tenants was Barbara Payton. I never actually met her, but I often saw her when I was down by the swimming pool

There will never be another Barbara Payton.

There have been tragic Hollywwood actresses in the past. But none, save perhaps for the ill-fated Frances Farmer, were subject to the Hellish fall from grace that Barbara Payton suffered so publicly. One can see from her photographs that she was one of the screen's most stunning beauties. Anyone who has viewed her performance in the prophetically titled movie "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye" can also see that she possessed real acting ability as well. Unfortunately, Ms. Payton's beauty and talent were discarded after a blazing start in a town that can be very unforgiving. She was stripped of a very promising career and any bit of dignity almost as quickly as she had been announced as the next big thing in films. Her story is horrifying, moving, and tragic on an epic scale.

Writer John O'Dowd has written an unwaveringly honest and detailed account of Ms. Payton's life and all-too-brief Hollywood career in films. Few stories can make the reader openly weep, cringe with horror, and gasp in disbelief. But this fine book, as written by Mr. O'Dowd, will move you that profoundly. Make no mistake. Mr. O'Dowd is never timid about revealing details that get to the core of the truth. Ms. Payton undeniably had her own personal demons. She abused drugs and alcohol. She had an oppositonal and defiant streak with people who liked to push others around. She balked at the conventions and norms of sexual morality that women, especially female stars, were supposed to adhere to in the 1950s. These were Eisenhower years. Women who had as much sex appeal as Ms. Payton might be forgiven for flaunting it if they were submissive about it. Barbara Payton was never submissive, and she never appologized for it. She was also warm-hearted, talented, original, and insecure. Whatever she did or did not do in her lifetime could never justify the merciless public lynching that she was subject to by the Hollywoood studio system and the press that worked with them. They completely massacred her on both a professional and personal level. The vindictive witch-hunt tactics that were aimed at Ms. Payton would almost put the McCarthy hearings of that decade to shame. WARNING: Do not open the cover of this book unless you have several hours to spare. Once you begin reading it, you will not be able to put it down!

What is most moving, dare I say even inspirational, is the spirit and resilience of Ms. Payton that Mr. O'Dowd clearly recognizes and which shines through all the pain and disappointment of her tragic, short life. She died at age 39 almost unrecognizable after years of living on the streets as a prostitute abusing drugs and alcohol. Nobody ever stepped forward to effectively help the beautiful and talented actress who had once co-starred with the likes of James Cagney and Gregory Peck. But, through it all, Barbara had never given up her dream of an acting career perhaps until the very last moments of her life. This is the spirit that earned her those initial breaks, and her legacy lives on everytime a new fan discovers her films.

As Mr. O'Dowd states, "She mattered. And she will never be forgotten."