Debra Paget was extremely beautiful in her prime and charmed millions of Americans when she starred in Elvis Presley’s film debut, Love Me Tender.
The talented actress was ”touched by the hand of God,” according to legendary director Cecil B DeMille.
Apparently, even the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ became obsessed with her…
Debra Page was born on August 19, 1933, in Denver, Colorado. Her real was Dabralee Griffin – but the actress changed her name as she moved towards movie stardom.
Raised in a showbiz family, Debra’s parents moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s so that they all could be closer to developing the film industry in Hollywood. (Debra’s two sisters, Tala Loring and Lisa Gaye, also had substantial film & TV careers).
Debra, who always wanted to be a dancer, has described herself as a ”post-depression” baby. She came into the world during a devastating and prolonged economic recession. Her family didn’t have much, but Debra held her parents in high regard.
“When I looked back, we had so much love in our home,” Debra said when being interviewed by Dale Evans Rogers.
‘Most beautiful legs in the world’
Pushed by her mother, Debra enrolled in the Hollywood Professional School when she was 11.
The talented young girl landed never doubted herself, landing her first professional job aged eight. Soon after that, she starred in a production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Her motion picture career began at the age of 14, and her big break came in 1950 when she was cast in Broken Arrow. Co-starring alongside James Stewart, Debra Paget portrayed a Native American maiden called Sonseeahray (“Morningstar”).
Debra’s “exotic” looks won her several roles in adventure dramas, and she soon earned the reputation as the only starlet who had never been kissed.
In the 1950s, she earned the title “The most beautiful legs in the world” when the National Association of Hosiery Manufactures polled 15,000 people in the industry. The deeply religious Debra won by a wide margin, according to The Baltimore Sun.
As a 14-year-old, Debra had signed an exclusive contract with 20th Century Fox. But it was when Paramount Pictures borrowed Debra for The Ten Commandments that she made her most successful movie.
Debra played the part of Lilia, the water girl, in Cecil B. DeMille’s giant biblical, spectacular movie. The blue-eyed Debra had to wear brown contact lenses – something that caused quite some trouble for her.
“If it hadn’t been for the lenses, I wouldn’t have gotten the part. They were awful to work in because the klieg lights heated them up,” she said.
The movie, which won seven Academy Awards, changed her life forever.
”It was probably the highlight of my career, ” Debra said.
Meeting Elvis
Debra Paget was a 22-year-old established Hollywood star when she stepped onto the set of Love Me Tender. Back then, she was probably the most beautiful actress of the Hollywood Golden age. And that is saying something.
She and Elvis Presley first met months earlier when both appeared on the Milton Berle Show on June 5, 1956. It was the moment when Elvis shocked conservative America by gyrating his famous, or infamous, pelvis during his now-iconic rendition of Hound Dog.
“Although I usually don’t form an opinion of a person until I have met him,” she explained. “Frankly I looked forward to my first meeting with Elvis Presley with mixed emotions. I’d heard and read a lot about this new young singing sensation from Tennessee—and most of it was not complimentary.”
The young singer surprised Debra in many ways during their first, memorable meeting. As a born-again Christian, you might think that Debra disliked The King, but it was quite the opposite.
When Mr. Berle introduced the 21-year-old rising star to Debra, he firmly grabbed her hand and said: “I’m glad to meet you, Miss Paget.”
Elvis then shook her mother’s hand with ”equal vigor,” excused himself, and a couple of minutes later came back with a chair for her.
“We were together for only a couple of hours but sometimes you can learn more about a person in a short span of time than in weeks of seeing one another constantly. I felt I did. From the very beginning, Elvis impressed me as a pleasant, sincere, obliging young man,” Debra recalled.
The proposal
A few months later, Debra starred opposite Elvis in Love Me Tender – his first movie. According to Daily Express, the singer became obsessed with his co-star. He believed that Debra was ”the most beautiful girl he had ever seen” and even visited her parent’s house.
“From the time he first came to the house, my folks have considered Elvis a member of the Paget clan—a feeling which, I believe, he reciprocated,” Debra explained.
But Debra and Elvis’s relationship was more family-oriented than a whirlwind romance – at least in the eyes of the young actress.
“I was very shy, very quiet and very immature for my age. I was in my very early 20’s but I was emotionally more like a 16-year-old. Elvis and I just sort of came together like a couple of children really.”
Elvis, however, seems to have thought otherwise.
“Following the film, he did ask me to marry him but my parents objected to my getting married. I cared about Elvis, but being one not to disobey my parents, that did not take place,” Debra shared.
In the end, Debra turned Elvis down – she had already fallen in love with Howard Hughes, a famous film producer and billionaire.
Debra would later marry actor and singer David Street, but she always spoke fondly of Elvis. And Elvis didn’t forget Debra either – many think she did set the template for Elvis’ fixation with the ‘Debra Paget look.’ For example, it was reported that young Priscilla Beaulieu changed her hair and make-up when she learned about Debra.
Debra left the entertainment industry in 1964 and is now 89 years old. Sadly, there is not much information about her life today; Debra seems to live a quiet and private life out of the limelight.
Elvis and Joan Blackman
Interestingly, Elvis’s proposal to Debra in the late 1950s wasn’t the only time he wanted to marry a co-star. After shooting Blue Hawaii with Joan Blackman in 1961, he wanted to tie the knot with her as well – while he was dating Priscilla.
Joan Blackman, who looked very much like Priscilla, has shared what really happened during the making of Blue Hawaii.
“When we first set eyes on each other (in 1957), there was a spark, a magic in the air… There was just that special something between us, sometimes so warm and wonderful you could almost reach out and touch it,” she told the Midnight Globe newspaper in 1977.
In the sensational interview, Joan Blackman said that Elvis ”really wanted” her as his wife and that he repeatedly begged her to appear in his movies, but she turned him down each time.
“I wanted parts because of my ability, not because I was dating Elvis,” she stated.
Matt Heath: My parting message: Enjoy things while they are around
A lot of big, tragic and important things have happened to this wonderful country of ours since April 2014. None of which I have covered. I was too busy writing about hungover parenting, ancient philosophy and my dog Colin.
Out of the 536 columns I have written, 27 were about that guy. Far too few. He is such a good boy, he deserves an article a week.
Today is the end of an era for me, and whenever these final events pop up in our lives, we can’t help but think about the ultimate end.
Everything we do, we will one day do for the last time. That’s why you have to enjoy things while they are around. It’s not just big events like leaving a job, house or loved one either. Whatever moment you happen to be in now, you will never get it back, and you don’t know how many more you have.
Everything we do in life, from eating pizza to spending time with the people we love, to driving, writing, drinking or breathing, we will one day experience for the final time. It might happen tomorrow. This can be either a depressing or an inspiring thought, depending on how you look at it.
A few years back in this column, I interviewed professor of philosophy William B Irvine, of Wright State University, Ohio, on this very topic. He put it this way on a Zoom call: “Recognition of the impermanence of everything in life can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. The only way we can be truly alive is if we make it our business periodically to entertain thoughts of the end.”
Today’s column is very meaningful to me because it is my last. Like the last night with a lover before she goes overseas. And just like a lover, there have been some half-arsed efforts put in from me over the years. Last week, for example, I spent 750 words moaning about how bad my cricket team is. But the truth is that any of my columns could have been the final. If I had reminded myself every week for the past 10 years that the end is inevitable, I may have been more grateful for having a column and appreciated writing them all as much as I am this one.
While everything we do could have more meaning with a focus on finitude, some things are inherently more worthwhile than others. There is no doubt my column “The pros and cons of wearing Speedos” from November 2022 was less meaningful than most things in this world. That was a waste of everyone’s time. So, if we only have so much time, how do we pick the best things to do?
Well, Oliver Burkeman, the author of Four Thousand Weeks – Time Management For Mortals, suggested this to me in a 2022 column: “Ask yourself, does this choice enlarge me? You usually know on some unspoken level if it does. That’s a good way to distinguish between options.”
With that in mind, I don’t feel great about my 2018 article on “New Zealand’s best hole”. That didn’t enlarge anyone.
There will be people reading this column right now who have loved my writing in the Herald and are sad to see it end. Others will have hated it and are glad to see me go. Many won’t have any opinion at all. But for those in the first camp, I have good news. I have a book coming out on May 28 called A Life Less Punishing – 13 Ways To Love The Life You Got (Allen and Unwin Book Publishers). It’s a deep dive into the history, philosophy and science of not wasting our time lost in anger, loneliness, humiliation, stress, fear, boredom and all the other ways we find to not enjoy perfectly good lives. It’s available for pre-order right now (google it if you’re interested).
A Life Less Punishing took me two years to write and is equivalent in words to 100 of these columns. Which would be a complete nightmare for those in the hate camp, but as I say, great news for those who want more.
Anyway, thanks to the Herald for having me, thanks to the lovely people who make an effort to say nice things to me about my column nearly every day and thanks to the universe for every single second we get.
Bless!
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