Strutting Tom and his conspicuous bulges

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In 1951, a scandalous love triangle hit the Hollywood headlines. Barbara Payton had a reputation for sleeping with almost every man she met before she became engaged to the suave and debonair Franchot Tone….

Franchot Tone had gone to New York on business when Barbara attended a Hollywood pool party, where she met B-Movie actor Tom Neal. According to an Exposed Magazine article, she had spotted the muscular and handsome Neal in the pool, “displaying his masculinity via a brief pair of bathing panties. Babs took one look,” and uttered the legendary statement: “It was love at first sight. He looked so wonderful in his trunks that I knew he was the only man in my life.” Exposed went on to say: “The memory of whatever Tone resembled in his undies was blurred by strutting Tom’s conspicuous bulges.” The passionate duo quickly started an affair.

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Barbara proposed marriage to Tom Neal, broke her engagement with Franchot, then went back and forth between the two actors several times, pitting one against the other.

The triangle exploded one night in front of Barbara’s home when Tom Neal assaulted Franchot Tone and beat the living daylights out of him. Franchot was hospitalized and remained comatose for 18 hours. Public sympathy went against Tom Neal because he had been a boxer in his younger days. There was little sympathy for Hollywood’s ‘bad blonde” either. Their careers were as good as finished as lurid stories of the incident splashed across the country’s newspapers.

Much to everyone’s shock, Franchot Tone married Miss Payton although the marriage lasted only two months. Tom Neal was named co-respondent in their divorce. Franchot used explicit photographs to prove his course of action and then spitefully mailed dozens of pictures of Barbara in compromising positions with Tom Neal to heads of major studios to destroy her chances of ever working in Hollywood again.

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The Tom and Barbara affair continued for another four years. When they finally split, Tom married for a second and then a third time, ultimately shooting his last wife in the head and serving six years in prison for manslaughter.

Meanwhile, Barbara forged on…..

“In 1962 she was arrested several times for prostitution, disorderly conduct, and public drunkenness. In ’63 she published an infamous memoir and was attacked by a trick, receiving 38 stitches in a knife wound. Barbara died in 1967, of heart and liver failure, aged just 39