Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

Half Saint — Half Siren (Continued from page 50) Consoling her was her mother Maggie, a brisk and loving buffer in the two different worlds of Debra, when the pieces of those worlds need picking up and putting back together again. . . . The role she had lost was replaced by another one, an even better one, not long afterwards, and Debra Paget was happy again. Yet tears are no stranger to this shy and beautiful young star. Nor is innocence. On the other hand, neither is sex appeal. Debra has a figure that is breathtaking. In a way, that whistle-bait figure perjures the pure, undisturbed beauty of her face — undisturbed, that is, until the music starts or the cameras turn. Then the veils drop and Debra Paget comes ahve with every instinct as ancient as Eve’s, in a transformation which is as puzzling to the observer as it is complete. At twenty-three Debra is the most intriguing paradox in motion pictures today. She lives in amazing splendor in the magic world of her own creation, a world she has dreamed about since she was five. Whether because of disillusionment with the Hollywood she grew up in or for some other, secret reason of her own, Debra long ago decided to restore in all its oldtime glamour and glitter a movie era of yesteryear. Singlehandedly, if need be, she has undertaken to bring back the excitement of the “movie queen” — the fabulous female who walked the streets of Movietown with a tiger 'on a leash, or took a bath in bubbling champagne. Debra lives with her family in an old, twenty-seven-room Mediterranean style mansion which she has leased, located back of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Constance Bennett once lived there. But if the walls could speak, even of the glamorous Constance and the rest of the unforgettable Bennetts, they could tell nothing that would top Debra Paget’s jeweled Cadillac, the mirrored, African-motifed “Mogambo Room” on the third floor, where Debra rehearses her dance routines, her jeweled mermaid murals in the hall or the living-room fireplace which she has converted into a fabulous planting area, including coral flamingos, a silver fountain and a statue of Kuan Yin, the Chinese goddess of fertility. Debra dresses elegantly, possessing the most glamorous wardrobe of any of Hollywood’s young stars. She wears mink and white fox and blue fox and pink fox. And she has over a hundred custom-made cocktail dresses and evening gowns, all designed to hug her thirty-five-inch bosom and nineteen-inch waist. She rides in a Cadillac painted strawberry color, to go with her velvet bed, and encrusted with fifteen-hundred dollars’ worth of multi-colored, glittering crystals. Debra and her mother and brother-in-law worked all one night, until five in the morning, jeweling the car. Why, you ask yourself, would any young and beautiful girl, who could be out on the town enjoying herself, stay up all night pasting gay pink crystals on the top of a car? What can she be like, this young star who lives so lavishly in a romantic world of strawberry velvet and white satin and jeweled mermaids — but without romance? Debra Paget is the girl who never dates. Why? What was the story, where did all the pieces fit in the life of a young actress Hollywood producers have so enthusiastically acclaimed? To find the answers, Photoplay’s reporter climbed aboard an Aeronaves Airlines plane bound for Mexico City. There Debra is co-starring with Ray Milland and Anthony Quinn in Benedict Bogeau’s production of “The River’s Edge.” It is a role that could make her a top dramatic star. But Debra’s own story is as exciting as any movie script. It has all the drama and pathos and conflict that can happen in the life of a girl who is half siren and half saint. In her Mexico hotel room, wearing a short pink terrycloth robe and gold slippers, brushing her flame-red hair and looking all-siren, Debra tells you quietly why she is here. Why she has been working long hours in the rain day after day, bruising herself crawling over rocks and through underbrush, giving her every emotion to the camera. Why acting is her whole life today. Leveling amazingly blue eyes on you, the girl directors call “one of the sexiest in Hollywood” says, “I believe there’s a job that each of us is meant to do. And I believe we have a duty to ourselves to do it to the best of our ability. As far as I’m concerned, I think I was put on this earth to act. That’s what I love and it’s my life. Acting, singing, dancing — this is what I can do. How good it is, I don’t know. I try to do my best. But through work I find my happiness. . . In the spacious hotel room in Mexico City the girl who is so dedicated to acting went on, “I played my first movie role when I was only fourteen. That’s pretty young to be suddenly thrust into the motion picture business. There’s something about a big studio that’s so overpowering, and I’m naturally a shy person anyway. Those first years, if somebody asked me a question I would just say 'Yes’ or ‘No.’ Mother would break the ice for me. She’d get people laughing and make the atmosphere friendlier and I would relax a little. “Shyness is something I’ve had to grow out of, and I’ve really had to work to change it.” Debra however, is still slow to trust people. “I have to know somebody a long while. In this business you learn never to trust too much. I’ve been very lucky and I haven’t been hurt badly. “But perhaps, it’s because my mother’s such a great judge of people.” The rumor that her mother dominates her life really draws Debra’s fire. “This simply is not true. I get so angry when people say those things. The truth is there’s only one person who runs my life. And that’s me! “But I hate to fight with people,” Debra says frankly, a fact which might help spread this misconception. By mutual consent her mother, serving officially as her business manager, does much of the fighting for her. Maggie’s always reminding her daughter, “This is a business, Debra. You've got to fight for your rights.” Theirs is a very close relationship. Debra does the acting, and Maggie spares her those things which by temperament or desire Debra feels she isn’t qualified to do. But once her mother said: “Some day she’s going to have to learn to fight for herself, and the day she feels she no longer needs me, I’ll go. I’m sure it will be painful? but that’s the way it will happen. But as long as Debra wants me here with her, that’s right where I’ll be.” “You need somebody you can believe — somebody you know will tell you the truth,” says Debra, who always wants her mother close at hand wherever she works. Debra’s beauty and her unquestioned sexiness has caused professional and personal conflicts in the girl who is so devoutly sure this is the job she was intended to do, didn’t bargain for and sometimes can’t understand. Like the jeweled mermaid mural on the wall of the hall in her fabulous house, Debra has beauty that invites without asking. For instance, the crew on a television rehearsal stage just look idly at a pretty and passive girl until Debra goes into her dance. Then the TV censors start looking around wildly for somebody from wardrobe, hollering, “Put a skirt on her!” Debra’s first experience with this, however flattering, was heartbreaking. It was her first big TV show “and they had to go and put a ballet skirt on me.” The big number was called “The Jaguar,” and, says Debra, “We had a terrific routine where I jumped over this fancy IT hen Maxine Arnold flew back from Mexico City via Aeronaves de Mexico after interviewing Debra Paget for Photoplay, Debra look her to the airport limousine