Julie recommends I Am Not Ashamed by Barbara Payton:
This month I found myself in a real reading funk. I’d been bashing my head with books I should have read in college but didn’t and trying to play catch-up with all of the “notables” of 2016. Nothing was provoking much delight. I needed a delicious cheeseburger of a book and found satiation in Barbara Payton’s memoir I Am Not Ashamed.
Payton’s voice rose off the page like a gale, blowing my hair straight back. The book begins with a casual forthrightness that makes it impossible to stop reading:
Today, right now I live in a rat-roach (they’re friends) infested apartment with not a bean to my name and I drink too much Rosé wine. I don’t like what the scale tells me. The little money I do accumulate to pay the rent comes from old residuals, poetry and favors to men.
A famous 1950’s Hollywood actress, Payton’s name was once mentioned in the same breath as Debbie Reynolds, Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. “I know it sounds unbelievable,” she writes, “but it’s true that Gregory Peck, Guy Madison, Howard Hughes and other big names were dating me.” She went from making ten grand a week, wearing furs and “dripping ice (diamonds)” to selling her body for just enough money to buy booze.
Payton calls her life story a rollercoaster ride—this is true, perhaps even an understatement; she also deems the book “a kind of detective story,” one that attempts to piece together the reason(s) for her fall from marquee glory. How could a woman with beauty, power, money, and talent end up disgraced at thirty-five, and dead at thirty-eight? The answer’s heartbreaking to peer into. Payton knows this; she writes:
I had a body when I was a young kid that raised temperatures wherever I went. Today I have three long knife wounds on my solid frame.
Memoir today is often telescoped on one experience, divorce, addiction, grief. Payton stirs the pot, bringing in all the ingredients of her remarkable life as an actress, poet, mother, and an expat in Mexico, where she spent two years. There’s no overthinking things, the scenes arise naturally as if she were talking to you at a bar, a dressing room, or her squalid apartment. Her story is so urgent and her voice is so strong that it just pours out with ease and originality, creating a natural balance between vignettes and introspection. Before the term “radical self-acceptance” existed, Payton was living by its premier code.
I just want to be myself. If I’m a disreputable harridan, then tough, that’s what I am. I don’t want to be characters on film. I just want to be me. I think I found out who I am and that’s the way it’s going to be.
After finishing the book, I hungrily googled images of Payton, both when she was in her prime, on the top of the world, and after her life hit the skids and she’d had four failed marriages under her belt and had been busted for writing a bad check to buy wine. Something she wrote about how women are known and understood by men seemed to sting with truth:
A woman is like an iceberg. Only a facade shows. The rest is hidden and it takes months, even years, to find out the mysteries of what’s underneath.
Payton does not emerge on the other side cleansed or purified or transformed. Nor does she ascend the ladder of success again. That’s how this book makes its mark, it foregrounds the uncrushable human spirit. At its heart, I Am Not Ashamed is a good story—told by a woman who led a full life, multiple lives, really, in one, and despite ending up destitute, Payton’s message is still a hopeful one—live, and do so without regret, without shame.
