SNAPSHOT
This page: Debra Paget, circa 1955, sitting in her Los Angeles driveway (left); Debra showing off her strawberry-pink Cadillac, covered in rhinestones (inset); Paget’s love affair with jewels was not limited to cars.
ROADS PAVED WITH RHINESTONES BEST REMEMBERED AS Lilia the water girl in Cecil B. DeMille’s epic, The Ten Commandments, Debra Paget knew how to draw the public’s eye. A stunning natural beauty, she began her acting career at the age of eight, and signed a contract with with 20th Century-Fox before her sixteenth birthday. She received almost as much fan mail at the height of her stardom as fellow actresses Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable. Elvis Presley enthusiasts know her as the King’s first leading lady in 144 QUEST
his 1956 debut film, Love Me Tender. She was a woman who was accustomed to attention, and who reveled in it. A brilliant example of her love affair with the limelight comes from May, 1956. For the previous two years, she had been driving around the studio lot in a pale orchid Cadillac (which, one morning, attracted the attention of actor Dan Dailey, who responded with a wolf-whistle for both the car and the girl). That May, Debra repainted her beloved car a bright strawberry-pink and covered it
with rhinestones, thus ensuring that nobody would ever be able miss her as she drove by. She would spend entire days washing and polishing the stones to make sure they sparkled in the sun. Reportedly, she carried around a bucketful of rhinestone jewels in the back of the Cadillac to replace the ones fans would pick off as souvenirs. Yet she was far from annoyed at needing to continuously refurbish the car with new gems. After all, according to Debra, “a jewel lost off the Cadillac is a fan gained.” —Lily Hoagland