Debra Paget

When I heard in the early 60s that this beautiful, talented and versatile actress was going to quit acting, I was disappointed.  Of course, I hoped she didn't mean it but history proves that she did.  I liked quite a few of her films which were largely B efforts.  I never understood why, with only a couple of exceptions, she didn't appear in big films.  Other less talented actresses worked far longer than she did and in better films.

To make Debra Paget's story even odder is the fact that she was raised in a show business family (two of her sisters and a brother also acted) and I would have expected that would have been the glue that might have held it all together longer.  But apparently not.

Her mother ranks right up there with the mothers of Shirley Temple and Natalie Wood in the stage mother department.  She herself had been a vaudeville performer but like the mother Rose in Gypsy, it just didn't work out for Marguerite Griffin and she got married and had babies.  Perhaps having had such attractive children helped Mama to become stage mother extraordinaire.  

The family moved from Denver to Los Angeles, a must for anyone so serious.  In short order, no less, daughter Marcia became actress Teala Loring, Leslie became Lisa Gaye and brother Frank became Ruell Shayne... none exactly big names.  But Mama was right in there coaching and taking them all over the town for auditions.  Hearing no just made Mama more determined.

Paget had her first professional assignment when she was eight.  Three years later she was enrolled in the Hollywood Professional School.  At 13 she was on the stage in The Merry Wives of Windsor and a year after that 20th Century Fox signed her to a contract.  Mama was not only behind it all, she became Paget's agent and most of the actress's career was in the hands of her mother.  Paget never seemed to mind. 

Her first film, a noir, was Cry of the City (1948) where she had a small role as thug Richard Conte's Italian girlfriend.  So different does she look from the Debra Paget of the 1950s.   The following year she was in an even better noir, House of Strangers (1949) with criminal Edward G. Robinson heading a criminal family.  Conte is back with Susan Hayward as his leading lady.  Again, Paget is an Italian girlfriend/wife of one of the brothers.

Her big break came in a film for which she is well-remembered by western fans particularly, Broken Arrow (1950).  It was her first venture into westerns and playing a comely Indian maiden but it would not be her last.  What is touching about this colorful film is that it is sympathetic to Indians.  The drama concerns an ex-Army officer (James Stewart) who makes peace with Cochise (Jeff Chandler).  Stewart's character marries Paget, who plays Cochise's sister who gives up her life to save her husband's.  During the filming when the 41-year old Stewart discovered Paget was only 15, he briefly freaked out.

Belles on Their Toes (1952) is a sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen (1950).  Both are stories of the large Gilbreth family.  The family head, Clifton Webb, dies in the original and Paget's character was played by another actress in it.  Myrna Loy is now the head of a family that includes Paget, Jeanne Crain and Barbara Bates and Jeffrey Hunter (in his second of five films with Paget) is around as a love interest.

As Lily in Stars and Stripes Forever

Paget did finally appear with Webb in one of the latter's best films, Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), a biography of the famed march king, John Philip Sousa.  While it's reported that the film closely follows Sousa's life, the characters played by Paget and Robert Wagner are fictional.  Fox felt Sousa's story needed a love interest.  Paget is exhilarating as a song-and-dance performer.  Too bad she didn't stick with musicals.  In this same year she played Cosette in Les Misérables.

Paget's exotic good looks appealed to Fox's decorative instincts.  They needed an exotic, good-looking young woman and rather than just give her a couple of such films, they gave her far more.  The studio's decision may have stunted her career.   She was too young to argue and it wouldn't have occurred to her to cross her mother/agent. 

She did love playing dress-up and the costumes, jewelry and headpieces she was given to wear excited her.  She started in a sarong in Bird of Paradise and then was in Anne of the Indies, both in 1951 and both costarring Louis Jourdan, and then began her baubles, bangles and beads period with Princess of the Nile, Demetrius and the Gladiators and Prince Valiant, all 1954, and Omar Khayyam (1957).

The only one that could even remotely be called a good movie was Demetrius.  A sequel to The Robe (1953), Paget is gorgeous as the girlfriend of the title character, played by Victor Mature.  Hayward was again the female star and others in the cast are Michael Rennie (his third of four films with Paget), Anne Bancroft, Richard Egan and Jay Robinson.

With pals Hunter & Wagner in White Feather

After star turns in the Sousa film and Demetrius, the studio still didn't capitalize on her talents.  They lined her up for a series of westerns.  White Feather (1955) is one of my favorite B westerns and she is incandescent as another Indian maiden, Appearing Day, in still another film sympathetic to Indians.  Wagner and Hunter were her costars.

Seven Men from Now (1955), a fictional take on the rise and fall of fanatical abolitionist John Brown, was popular in its B sort of way and another pairing with the handsome Hunter brought in the customers.  Both of them and their pal Wagner were incredibly popular at the time.

The Last Hunt (1956) is a decent western supposedly about the last big buffalo hunt.  The drama comes from the rivalry of partners Robert Taylor and Stewart Granger over, among several things, a beautiful Indian girl played by... oh you know.  Most of the excitement comes from the scenes with the buffalo and watching one of Taylor's best performances.

Elvis was besotted

Along with Broken Arrow, her next two films, both in 1956, are  certainly Paget's most famous films.  She was Elvis Presley's first leading lady in Love Me Tender.  A Civil War story of the Reno family with Paget as Richard Egan's girlfriend who marries his brother, Presley, when Egan goes off to war.  It's a trifle of a film that likely would barely be remembered had The King not been in it.

Paget looked terrific and there was no problem understanding that two brothers could be in love with her.  Apparently, Presley really was and even proposed to her but her parents would not permit a marriage.

By far the best film she was ever in and her favorite is the all-star production of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments.  She plays Lilia, the water girl, and was the last of the main cast to be hired.  Oddly, DeMille, hired her without a screen test because he said that he could see she had the hand of God upon her.  

Paget had begged Fox's head Darryl Zanuck to give her better roles.  Some reports say she asked for sexier roles.  Perhaps a problem she had was Marilyn Monroe, who from 1952 until her death in early 1961, was about the only one Fox paid much attention to.  As it turned out, Paget's favorite film was the last decent film she ever made.  After a 1957 movie, The River's Edge, she and Fox parted company.

Because she was a good singer and dancer, she arranged to have a Vegas act that was well-received but didn't result in anything else that moved her career upward.

She was often a fixture in gossip columns and movie magazines because of her busy dating life.  There was occasional speculation that she was going to marry someone.  One of those whose name swirled with hers for a few years was Howard Hughes.

In 1958 she became the fifth wife of singer David Street.  She'd known him for 13 years but their relationship was renewed during the time she appeared in Vegas.  The marriage, however, lasted a mere four months and then was annulled.  Despite his multiple marriages, I'd always heard he was gay.  In 1960 she married director Budd Boetticher.  The press picked up stories of how terribly in love she was but they separated after 22 days and the marriage was legal for 17 months.

She loved big earrings 

She went to India to play the same dancer, Seetha, in three odd films by Fritz Lang, at the end of his colorful career.  I believe Lang actually made one film at one time and it was edited into three, Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb, both 1959 and Journey to the Lost City (1960).  While they were lush and Paget was covered in jewels, they gained little play in the U.S. and did almost nothing to enhance her career... with one exception.  In the middle one she does a snake dance that caused quite a stir.  You can see it at the end of the posting if you're so inclined.

Another Fox actress, Terry Moore, and Paget were buddy-buddy for years when they apparently had a falling out of sorts.  In 1960 Moore wanted to produce and star in a film called Why Must I Die? about one prisoner who is scheduled to die for a murder committed by another.  Oddly, Moore hired Paget.  It was surely well-intentioned but came out as trashy and exploitive and was Paget's most hard-bitten role.

The Indian films did nothing for her career and neither did a couple from Italy.  She was trying everything.  I suppose it was inevitable that she would wind up doing a couple of American-International horror pics, Tales of Terror (1962) and The Haunted Palace (1963), both with Vincent Price.  

In 1962 while preparing another Vegas act, a friend set her up with  wealthy Texas oilman and U.S.-Chinese oil industrialist, Ling-chieh (Louis) K'ung, and two months later they were married.  He was the son of China's minister of finance and nephew of Chiang-Kai Shek.  The couple would settle in Houston.

She gave birth to her beloved son, Gregory, in 1964.  Two months after his birth, he got very sick while she was appearing as a guest on a TV show and she couldn't be reached.  It freaked her out and she decided she would henceforth stay home and take care of her son.

Around 1965 Paget embraced religion as never before.  Apparently she had always had religion as part of her life but now it took on greater meaning, attention and dedication.  This would never change.

The marriage would last 18 years, by far her longest.  Apparently the friendship that came afterward was satisfying to both. I never heard anything about her all that time (and more) and every now and then checked sources to see if she had died.  

In the early 1990s she came out as a bit of a public personality again when she hosted a show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, An Interlude with Debra Paget.  I've watched a couple of faith-based interviews with her on YouTube and I could see she was very happy and still had a great capacity for laughter.

Let's face it, the movies hadn't really worked out as she expected they would.  I've always regarded her as a talented but undervalued actress.  I would love to hear why it didn't evolve beyond a series of, well, ok, decorative roles.  Lovely to look at as she was (I thought she was stunning as a redhead), she was more than that.

She strongly protects her privacy and seems to have little or no interest in discussing her Hollywood years of so long ago.  Luckily when I need a Paget fix and want to see a beautiful woman cavorting about in a sarong or a lovely, long-haired girl atop an Indian pony or a high-stepping song and dance lass, I know just what to do.   

Today at 87, Debra Paget still lives a quiet life in Houston.

Here's a look at the famous snake dance:

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A film from the 60s