Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1957)

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UCrUscaeJlA CLrCfctv ©1957 G W. 102 The guy went on at length in a patronizing tone, as though he were doing her a favor, and finally Debra had enough. “Look,” she said, “if I won’t go with those who call me direct, I sure won’t go out with a blind date!” And she hung up on him. “I’ve gone to a few premieres, but I always go with Mother,” Debra says. “I get such a kick out of it when somebody calls and says, ‘You’re invited to such-and-such party afterward. Please tell your escort to wear a bow tie.’ I have to laugh, thinking how Mother would look in a bow tie.” Debra’s story begins in a house on High Street in Denver, Colorado, right across the street from where Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., was born. Little Debralee Griffin was fascinated by the house and never tired hearing about the great Doug. She haunted Elitch’s and other theatres where her mother, Margaret Gibson, a legitimate actress, performed in those early years. Debralee loved the “play-acting,” the glamorous costumes and the wigs and makeup. This was a magic, happy land and she wanted to be part of it. “She begged for this business before she could even talk,” her mother says. “Debra is a real ham. She cannot live without acting, and that’s the full definition of the word!” To the cute, tow-haired little girl with the serious, wide blue eyes her mother would say, “When you’re old enough to know whether you have the guts and the backbone it takes, then we’ll see.” When her mother and her older sister, Teala Loring, went out on the road with various shows, Debralee lived for the moment when they would come home, bringing some of the magic back with them. “My sister, Lisa, and I would get into their wardrobe trunks and dress ourselves up in the oddest get-ups.” Whenever he could, Debra’s father would bundle up the younger Griffins in the family car and they’d trek across the country to Cheyenne or to Chicago or New York, wherever Debralee’s mother and sister were booked. Backstage — any backstage — whether Elitch’s, or the Gayety in New York, or an old burlesque theatre, was an enchanted world to Debralee Griffin. She would watch, wide-eyed, saying nothing — and missing nothing. When Teala Loring was signed to a Paramount contract, Hollywood was the Griffins’ home base. And little Debralee was tired of just watching the show. She wanted to be part of it. “Sit down, Debra, I want to talk to you,” her mother said. Maggie Griffin had been in show business since she was five, and she told Debra what success would demand. The sacrifice it would involve. “If I work with you and help train you to be an actress, and the first time your little friends come over and you say, ‘I’d rather go out and play,’ you’re finished.” And she added, “Learning to act is not like taking a piano lesson. It is work, work, work.” Yes, Debra said, she knew. And she would work. For a solemn-eyed little girl this was like taking a vow. And Debra did work. She took tap and ballet lessons. She studied with her mother and with actress Queenie Smith. She played “Joan of Arc” in a children’s theatre group. “She was merely a child — but she brought tears to everybody’s eyes,” her mother says. And one day, a day and a gamble that was to decide the future of her life, Debra walked with her mother and her brother, Frank, through the magic gate of a motion picture studio. Margaret Gibson knew Ivan Kahn, then talent head at 20th Century-Fox, and he had once told her: “When your children are ready, bring them out to me.” Debra and her brother tested together in a scene from “Ah, Wilderness,” and Kahn agreed they were both very good. They had talent, no doubt about that. But the studio was cutting down on its stock players and could only hire one of the children. Their mother was to decide which one. “That was the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make in my life,” Maggie says slowly now. “I didn’t tell the kids. My son didn’t know until two years ago. I thought they were both good — but I felt the dramatic depth Debra had would carry her a long way.” With a mother’s love she prayed she’d done the right thing. Two weeks later the combination of innocence and sex appeal got Debra the part of Richard Conte’s sweetheart in “Cry of the City.” Three name players were up for the role, but the studio was looking for the unusual combination of youthful innocence and dramatic ability. Debra was chosen. “I cried all over Richard Conte,” she recalls now. At fourteen Debra Paget, who’d never had a date in her life, was playing love scenes with Richard Conte and going to school in between. She was a child in a confusing world of adults. Before the camera she was at home. Acting was her real world — the one she knew and could trust. Here she could talk and laugh and cry. But in the other — Debra Paget was quiet and withdrawn. From the beginning, Debra defied the customary build-up for a Hollywood starlet. “I will not date for publicity,” she You can get a FREE Membership Card and a wallet-size picture by joining the Elvis Presley Fan Club Just send your name and address (and those of your friends, too) to: Elvis Presley Fan Club, Box 94, Hollywood, California. says. “I never have and I never will. There’s no mystery about this, no gimmick. I won’t fake romance, and I don’t see going out unless it’s with somebody you’re sure you’ll enjoy being with. When I am ready to fall in love I will. “I don’t feel it’s necessary to ‘go out’ with a man to know him, or to find out whether you’re in love with him. “I think you can fall in love just as easily at first sight as you can seeing a different man every night. I think a girl will know when she’s in love. I have seen so many girls going out with first one and then another man. They don’t know what they want. These poor girls get so confused dating so many fellows that when the right man comes along they don’t even recognize him,” Debra says seriously. “When people say to me, ‘Where will you meet the man you will marry?’ I tell them that I see people every day of my life, that there’s no place where you meet more people than in the motion picture business. And with personal appearances and foreign locations I go all over the world these days. I’m gone so much — that’s why I love to be home. When I get home I just want to stay there. “And we entertain people at home all the time. We have big parties and we have small groups of friends in too.” When asked whether she shies away from a serious romance as a result of be