When Debra Paget starred in Elvis Presley’s first motion picture, Love Me Tender, she enchanted millions of Americans with her extraordinary beauty.
The renowned filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille claimed that the gifted actress was “touched by the hand of God.”
Even the “King of Rock and Roll” apparently developed an obsession with her.
August 19, 1933, saw the birth of Debra Page in Denver, Colorado. The actress changed her identity as she progressed toward movie prominence, although her real name was Dabralee Griffin.
Growing up in a family with a history in show business, Debra’s parents relocated to Los Angeles in the 1930s so that they could all be near the growth of the Hollywood film industry. Tala Loring and Lisa Gaye, Debra’s two sisters, both had successful careers in cinema and television.
Debra has referred to herself as a “post-depression” baby and has always aspired to be a dancer. She was born into a terrible and protracted economic downturn. Although her family didn’t have much, Debra thought highly of her parents.
“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’
At the age of eleven, Debra, encouraged by her mother, enrolled in the Hollywood Professional School.
The gifted young woman never questioned her abilities and, at the age of eight, earned her first professional job. She starred in a play of The Merry Wives of Windsor by Shakespeare shortly after that.
Her big break came in 1950 when she was cast in Broken Arrow, marking the beginning of her motion film career at the age of 14. Debra Paget costarred with James Stewart in the film Morningstar as Sonseeahray, a Native American maiden.
Due to her “exotic” appearance, Debra was cast in a number of adventure dramas and quickly gained notoriety as the only actress who had never been kissed.
When 15,000 members of the industry were surveyed by the National Association of Hosiery Manufactures in the 1950s, she was dubbed “The most beautiful legs in the world.” The Baltimore Sun said that Debra, who is quite devout, won by a significant margin.
Debra had committed to an exclusive deal with 20th Century Fox when she was just 14 years old. However, Debra’s most successful film was The Ten Commandments, which she rented from Paramount Pictures.
In Cecil B. DeMille’s enormous, beautiful, biblical film, Debra portrayed Lilia, the water girl. Debra’s blue eyes caused her a lot of difficulties because she had to wear brown contact lenses.
“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.
Her life was drastically altered by the seven Academy Award-winning film.
”It was probably the highlight of my career,” Debra said.
Meeting Elvis
When Debra Paget arrived on the set of Love Me Tender, she was a well-known Hollywood celebrity at the age of 22. She was arguably the most attractive actress of the Golden Age of Hollywood at the time. And that’s a statement.
Months prior, on June 5, 1956, she and Elvis Presley made their first appearances together on the Milton Berle Show. During his now-iconic performance of Hound Dog, Elvis stunned conservative America by gyrating his infamous or renowned pelvis.
“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.”
During their first unforgettable encounter, the young vocalist caught Debra off guard in a number of ways. You would think that Debra didn’t like The King because she was a born-again Christian, but she didn’t.
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 excused himself, shook her mother’s hand with “equal vigor,” and returned a few minutes later 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
Debra featured beside Elvis in his first film, Love Me Tender, a few months later. The musician developed an obsession with his co-star, according to Daily Express. He even went to her parent’s house because he thought Debra was “the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.”
“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.
However, the young actress believed that Debra and Elvis’s relationship was more focused on family than a fast-paced romance.
“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.”
But Elvis seems to have had a different idea.
“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.
Debra ultimately declined Elvis since she was already in love with Howard Hughes, a well-known movie mogul and multibillionaire.
Despite her eventual marriage to singer and actor David Street, Debra never stopped praising Elvis. Debra was also not forgotten by Elvis; in fact, many believe that she served as the model for his obsession with the “Debra Paget look.” When teenage Priscilla Beaulieu found out about Debra, for instance, she reportedly changed her hair and makeup.
Debra, who is currently 89 years old, left the entertainment business in 1964. Unfortunately, not much is known about Debra’s life these days; she appears to lead a quiet, private existence away from the spotlight.
Elvis and Joan Blackman
It’s interesting to note that Elvis had other desires to wed a co-star before proposing to Debra in the late 1950s. When he was dating Priscilla, he intended to marry Joan Blackman, with whom he had shot Blue Hawaii in 1961.
Joan Blackman, who bore a striking resemblance to Priscilla, has revealed the true events that transpired during the production 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.
Joan Blackman claimed in the dramatic interview that Elvis “really wanted” her as his wife and that he urged her to be in his films on several occasions, but she consistently refused.
“I wanted parts because of my ability, not because I was dating Elvis,” she stated.
