broke up the following year. In November 1955, Payton married George A. "Tony" Provas, a 23-year-old furniture-store executive in Nogales, Arizona. They divorced in August 1958. Later years and death Payton's hard drinking and hard living ultimately destroyed her physically and emotionally. Celebrity bartender and self-proclaimed hustler Scotty Bowers has alleged that for a time, she was regarded as a high-class sex worker, much in demand. From 1955 to 1963, her alcoholism and drug addiction led to multiple skirmishes with the law, which included arrests for passing bad checks and eventually an arrest on Sunset Boulevard for prostitution. Payton was offered the option of being admitted to a detoxification unit, and said, "I'd rather drink and die." Following her brief hospitalization, Payton was driven by a county social worker to her parents' home in San Diego. She told her family's neighbor, "I never wanted to be with them, I never wanted to see them again. But here I am, and I got all the booze I want." Her parents were both heavy drinkers and engaged with Payton in unabated drinking binges. Writer Robert Polito recalled 34-year-old Payton in 1962, when she was a frequent visitor to Coach and Horses, a Hollywood establishment on Sunset Boulevard, where Polito's father tended bar. "Barbara Payton oozed alcohol even before she ordered a drink," Polito said. "Her eyebrows didn't match her brassy hair; her face displayed a perpetual sunburn, a map of veins by her nose... [S]he carried an old man's potbelly... [H]er gowns and dresses... [were] creased and spotted. She must have weighed 200 pounds... She does not so much inhabit a character as impersonate a starlet...." In 1963, Payton was paid $1,000 for her autobiography, I Am Not Ashamed, which was ghostwritten by Leo Guild; the memoir was reissued in 2016 by Spurl Editions. The book originally included unflattering photographs of Payton and admissions that she had been forced to sleep on bus benches and suffered regular beatings as a prostitute. That year, she won a bit part in the Western comedy film 4 for Texas, which was her last acting role. In 1967, Payton was ill and seeking refuge from her turbulent circumstances when she moved to San Diego to live with her parents. On May 8, she died at her parents' home of heart and liver failure at the age of 39. Payton was cremated and her ashes interred at