Payne worked as a model for artists before making her first film, Hollywood Hobbies (1935), where she appeared in the bit part of a tourist.
She also played in comedy shorts for RKO Radio Pictures (playing the on-screen wives of Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol on several occasions) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (in a number of Pete Smith subjects).She is most remembered for her performance as Calamity Jane in the Roy Rogers western Young Bill Hickok (1940), as well as acting the role of Belle Starr in Robin Hood of the Pecos (1941), where her performing style echoed that of a contemporary, Una Merkel.
She frequently wore men's clothing, carried a weapon, drove stagecoaches and rode horses.
[2] Rarely did Payne's characters become physically intimate with her masculine counterparts; thus if she were called on to display affection of any sort, the relationships never went beyond the strictly platonic.
[5] Payne retired from films in 1942 after her marriage to Arthur F. Kelly, an executive for Western Airlines.