“Does it all sound depressing to you? Queasy? Well, I’m not ashamed.” – Barbara Payton

No secret that I love Kim Morgan’s writing. No secret either that we are friends. But this piece, on the re-issue of the autobiography of poor messed-up Barbara Payton – actress, drunk/heroin-addict, prostitute, bar-fly, dead at the age of 39 – an autobiography with the ferocious ahead-of-its-time title I Am Not Ashamed is one of the best things she’s ever written.

There’s an account in O’Dowd’s book of a Payton friend observing Barbara on the street from his car during her downbeat days, running through the rain in the night. She’s wearing short shorts and sopping wet. What a sight. That blonde, wet and rushing through the darkness, her hair glowing. He was horrified by what he saw, but, he could still see that movie star there; the confidence of her gait. She walked like a goddess. Looking at Payton through various police snaps and older sexy shots, the reader can see it too, even in the supposedly ghastly photos taken of Payton for “I Am Not Ashamed.” Yes, she looks bloated and busted with her chintzy little fur and shoved down top, but there’s a beautiful woman in there (even Guild, as mean as he was, could see it). She really was a stunning creature – good bones, luscious lips, a defined jaw –it’s still there – just puffed up and drunk and, for lack of a better word, trashy. So what? How dare she age? How dare she suffer and not stay pretty?

Thinking of her battered body, jumping into all of those stranger’s cars, how is she supposed to look? That image of her running down the street in wet shorts, it’s so sad and sick and insolently sexual. One can see how men would gravitate to her, even in that debased state and exactly for that debased state. She’s not just a diamond in the rough but a diamond you’d find lying in a gutter, covered by a wet mink – you’d have to look closely to see it glistening. And she must have.

Read the whole thing, for God’s sake.