Barbara Payton - Later Years and Death

Later Years and Death

Payton's hard drinking and hard living ultimately had a devastating effect on her once enviable beauty, destroying her both physically and emotionally. From 1955 to 1963, her growing alcoholism and drug abuse led to multiple skirmishes with the law including the passing of bad checks and eventually an arrest on Sunset Boulevard for prostitution.

Writer Robert Polito recalls a thirty-four year old Payton in 1962, when she was a habitué of a Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard establishment, “Coach and Horses,” where the young Polito’s father tended bar: “Barbara Payton oozed alcohol even before she ordered a drink … her brassy hair; her face displayed a perpetual sunburn, a map of veins by her nose … she carried an old man’s potbelly … her gowns and dresses … creased and spotted … She must have weighed two hundred pounds … She does not so much inhabit a character as impersonate a starlet.”

In 1963, she was paid $1,000 for her ghost-written autobiography, I Am Not Ashamed, which included unflattering photographs taken of her at the time. In the book, Payton admitted to being forced to sleep on bus benches and suffering regular beatings as a prostitute.

In 1967, ill and seeking refuge from her turbulent circumstances, she moved back to San Diego, California, to live with her parents. On May 8, 1967, Payton died at her parents' home of heart and liver failure. Jan Redfield, Payton's sister-in-law, related that Barbara expired cradled in her mother's arms.

Payton was cremated and is interred at Cypress View Mausoleum and Crematory in San Diego, California.