A fall from grace: Franchot Tone & Barbara Payton (She wasn't Ashamed)

Franchot Video ("My love for you") video.

Barbara Stanwyck saw what was happening with Joan Crawford’s marriage to Franchot Tone, and though Joan had been changed by Franchot (Joan had hoped their marriage would be like that of the Lunts, joined onstage and off—longtime, loving friends and actors), she was already wearying of him and their endless arguments, in which Tone occasionally, in a drunken rage, beat her, and she would go to work wearing dark glasses to hide the bruises on her face.

Joan and Franchot had finished making The Bride Wore Red, and Joan was working on a picture with Spencer Tracy. Barbara [Stanwyck] knew that Joan was mixed up with Tracy. What Joan was doing with her marriage infuriated Barbara. It was only a flurry with Tracy, but Joan would come home after being with him and call people at two or three in the morning asking if Franchot was there. “Well, I don’t know where he is. He’s out... and I can’t find him. And I’m desperate.” Franchot was out drinking and, said Barbara [Stanwyck], “wearing his heart on his sleeve and staying in some lousy bar” because he’d found out “about Joan and Tracy.”

In addition to Robert Montgomery, the negotiating committee for the Screen Actors Guild consisted of Kenneth Thomson, the guild’s executive secretary and veteran actor from the mid-1920s who appeared in more than sixty pictures; and Franchot Tone, scion of an industrialist fortune, who’d fled his privileged upbringing for the stage to become the handsome, genteel leading man of the Group Theatre. Tone decided to leave the stage for a year when an offer came from Hollywood; the other Group Theatre founders were heartbroken to see him go; they believed Tone had the makings of a great stage actor. Twenty pictures later and with a long-term contract with Metro, Tone was married to one of the studio’s most glamorous stars and had himself become the ultimate of urbane movie idols. Tone, ever ambivalent in his choices, saw his defection from the stage as a fall from grace.

Barbara Payton: "I was engaged to the actor with the most class in Hollywood-Franchot Tone. In other words I was the queen bee, the nuts and boiling hot. The odds were a million to one I'd grow old with twenty servants, three swimming pools and a personal masseuse plus an adoring husband. I try to think of what was my biggest moment-my biggest thrill. I think it was 1950 on St. Valentine's Day. I was going to start a big movie with Jimmy Cagney the next day and I went with Franchot Tone to the opera. I wore a mink stole he had given me and I was dripping ice (diamonds). We marched into the Opera House and it was like everyone had suddenly been struck silent. People stopped whatever they were doing and just stared at us. We were the most glamorous thing since Lily St. Cyr's pasties. Franchot and me, we just stood there and let them gape for a moment. It was heaven."

"Franchot Tone, suave, likeable, quiet, unexciting Franchot asked me to do a play with him in New York. He was hooked on me. He spelled it out for me and I read him... 'Kiss me and your troubles are over.' I may not look like I used to but, not very long ago Franchot Tone asked me again if I'd marry him. You know what he said? 'If you'll marry me, I'll become young for you again. I'll become a boy again.' After living a full life he wanted me back again."

"I was good to Franchot. He was good to me, too. You'd think that combo would strike oil-but it was a dry well." Tom kept zinging Franchot with, 'What the hell, you're twenty years older than Barbara. She's a passionate broad. What happens ten years from now? Are you going to be able to satisfy her?' Franchot kept debating the subject politely but I know he was getting madder and madder and madder. ------A next-door neighbor of Barbara’s named Judson O’Donnell claimed to have witnessed the fight, he said that Tom Neal pummeled Franchot over thirty times, adding, “It was like watching a butcher slaughtering a steer. At first, I thought my refrigerator was on the fritz. It sounded like a prizefighter in a gym beating the bag. It was one of the bloodiest fights I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty — on that very lawn!” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner staff writer James Bacon reported that he visited Franchot the morning after his plastic surgery. “He was wrapped in enough bandages to fill a Johnson and Johnson warehouse,” said Bacon. “I was told that his face underneath looked like a piece of beefsteak that had been run over by a truck.”------

Barbara Payton: "I loved Tom. I liked and respected Franchot. In May of 1951, I married Franchot Tone, a millionaire success who loved me more than any girl in the world. Sounds like a happy ending to a fairy tale, doesn't it? Sorry - it was just the beginning. Franchot is a lovable, honest, irascible, masochistic man who loves beauty for beauty's sake. Some core of insecurity makes him insanely jealous. He tortured himself. I was only somebody for his doubts, fears, recriminations to bounce off. I resolved to let him spend himself of the torture. It was endless. It built and there was no end in sight. After days of wrangling and reconciliations our attorneys agreed on a settlement."

One of Tom’s more understated (and ludicrous) quotes to the press during this time alluded to his and Barbara’s wedding plans, now canceled. “I’m not paying for her Wassermann if she’s going to continue to see Tone,” he declared with an almost laughable sincerity. With very little effort, Tom’s artless offerings became fodder for a ravenous press intent on crucifying him. Barbara’s friend Tina Ballard offers, “I think Barbara wished she could combine Franchot’s qualities of wealth, intelligence and class with Tom’s down-and-dirty, raw sexuality, and make a whole other person out of them!"

In an example of Hollywood’s growing vendetta against Barbara for the humiliation she had brought to the well-liked Franchot Tone, as well as to the film community in general, Dore Schary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Chief of Production, and Darryl F. Zanuck, Vice President of 20th Century-Fox, both of whom had once publicly expressed an interest in buying Barbara’s contract from WB, quickly changed their minds.

Sources: "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - The Barbara Payton Story" (2013) by John O'Dowd, "I Am Not Ashamed" (1962) by Barbara Payton, and "A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940" by Victoria Wilson

Barbara Payton, nominated 'the girl most of men would like to be trapped with in an ice-manufacturing plant' about to star in her first major production "Trapped" (1949)

"The Song is You" (2007) by Megan Abbott (Excerpts):

Hop felt funny. She was lonely and he was willing to spare a
minute. “Barbara?”
“Yeah?”
“Let me ask you: you’ve been around this dirty town a few years. You’ve never been afraid to dig your heels in.”
“Hell no.”
“You ever run into Marv Sutton and Gene Merrel out on the town?”
“Yeah.” She paused, which she’d never done once since Hop met her.
“What’s their story?”
“Fuck if I know, Hop.”
“C’mon, Barbara. Between you and me. You don’t need to pussyfoot with me.”
There was another pause. Then, “Look, I don’t like repeating what I ain’t seen firsthand.”
“I’m a clam, Barbara. It’s my one and only virtue.”
“Well, that Marv’s cuddled up to me a few times, but there was something about both of them that rubbed me the wrong way. A girl gets a kind of radar.”

Barbara Payton, circa 1950

So he said now, pointedly, to Barbara Payton, bleached-brittle hair and toreador pants, smell of bar vibrating off her, “You’re the last person, Barbara, that I’d expect to take stock in rumors.” “Hey, I got nothing to hide,” she said, crossing her legs, lipstick-red mule hanging from her twitching foot. “They’re probably all true, every last one. Did you see the photos Mr. Franchot Tone spread all over town a few years back? Those private dick shots of me on my knees, all black garters and beads, before my beloved boxing partner, Tom Neal? How many girls get out of that?”

Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton outside the Mocambo nightclub on July 8, 1951 in Los Angeles, California

Hop nodded his signature knowing, understanding nod. She sighed, rubbing her arm wistfully. “What was I supposed to do? Play the blessed virgin or Betty Crocker? I was having a ball. And I wasn’t about to pull the brakes for Louella Parsons or Daryl Zanuck. I know it’s hurt me. I’ve paid. You don’t see me on-screen with Gregory Peck or Jimmy Cagney these days. The money ran out. There were some bad men. I hit the sauce. A bottle of Seconal a hotel doctor had to suck back out of me with a tube. Then I took the route, as the junkies say. It started sticking to me. You know the song. You could sing it to me.” -"The Song is You" (2008) by Megan Abbott