 Born near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the only child of two schoolteachers, Clayton started singing by age four.Clayton was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer starlet in the early 1940s, appearing in several films, none of them particularly notable, except for an unbilled role in 1948 as a singing inmate in "The Snake Pit".She appeared in the role of Julie Jordan in the original 1945 Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic "Carousel".