I Am Not Ashamed

One of the great "lost" autobiographies of Hollywood Babylon history, I Am Not Ashamed is the memoir of Barbara Payton, the 1950s film noir star who acted alongside greats like Jimmy Cagney and Gregory Peck – only to be fired by the studios for her wild (and very public) love-life... and ultimately walk the streets of Hollywood as an alcoholic prostitute. But, as she says throughout, she is not ashamed of her life. She achieved rare success in the Hollywood system and went down in an archconservative era, when McCarthy threatened the country’s free speech and Hollywood producers ran terrified of even a whiff of scandal. When Payton's boyfriend, actor Tom Neal, pounded a concussion into his effete romantic rival Franchot Tone, the whole incident went public and made Payton the Hollywood bad girl - too bad, as it turned out, for Warner Brothers to handle. Describing her downfall, Payton also talks about her relationships with Cagney, Sinatra, Peck and other big names. 
Lost for decades after its original 1963 release, I Am Not Ashamed leapt back into the limelight when Jack Nicholson lent it to Jessica Lange to help her prepare for her part in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Now Holloway House Publications has finally released this classic Hollywood tell-all.

Payton, Barbara

Biographies & Memoirs

Holloway House Pub Co

Arts & Literature

Hassell Street Press

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Film. Women's Studies. I AM NOT ASHAMED, first published in 1963, is the absurdist tale of a forgotten movie star's unnerving decline. When sleazy journalist Leo Guild arrived at Barbara Payton's flophouse Hollywood apartment, he was surprised to find that the thirty-five-year-old former actress was working as a prostitute to support her alcohol addiction. He brought her cases of cheap wine, turned on the tape recorder, and she began to speak . . . Surreal and often depressing, I AM NOT ASHAMED is an anti-memoir: as Payton reveals intimate moments of her life, she slides down and down the wormhole of her memories and watches her life in numb horror. Unable to recover or make any changes, Payton remains locked in admiration of her brief Hollywood fame. A self-proclaimed "con girl in specialized areas of living," Payton is pathologically self-destructive. Her favorite topic is men―how she used men to get ahead, and how they used her. In its bizarre frankness, I AM NOT ASHAMED follows in the autobiographical tradition of Jack Black's You Can't Win and Liz Renay's My Face for the World to See, and the literary tradition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and William S. Burroughs' Junkie.

Humor & Entertainment

Spurl Editions

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