Sally Rand

Sally Rand was born Helen Gould Beck on April 3, 1904, in Elkton, Missouri, and died August 31, 1979. She worked as a burlesque dancer, stripper, vedette, and actress, and was best known for her ostrich-feather fan dance and her balloon bubble dance. She also went by the stage name Billie Beck.

Her career lasted more than four decades, during which she performed on stage, in movies, and on television. She worked with Humphrey Bogart, Karl Malden, and Cecil B. DeMille. Rand was a licensed pilot and had a brief romantic relationship with Charles Lindbergh.

Early life

Her father, William Beck, was a West Point graduate and retired U.S. Army colonel; her mother, Nettie Grove Beck, was a schoolteacher and part-time newspaper correspondent. The family moved to Jackson County, Missouri while Rand was still in grade school.

Career

Rand began performing early, working as a chorus girl at Kansas City’s Empress Theater at age 13. Drama critic Goodman Ace of the Kansas City Journal saw her in a Kansas City nightclub and wrote favorable reviews. After studying ballet and drama in Kansas City, she set her sights on Hollywood. On her way west, she worked as an acrobat for Ringling Brothers Circus and performed in summer stock and traveling theater, including with a then-unknown Humphrey Bogart.

In the 1920s, she acted on stage and in silent films. Cecil B. DeMille gave her the name Sally Rand, taking it from a Rand McNally atlas. She was named a WAMPAS Baby Star in 1927. When sound films arrived, she turned to dancing, popularizing the fan dance at Chicago’s Paramount Club.

Her most famous performance came at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the Century of Progress, with an orchestra led by Art Frasik. She used her fans to create a peek-a-boo effect, swooping and twirling to “Clair de Lune.” During the fair, she was arrested four times in one day for perceived indecent exposure—after a fan dance, while riding a white horse through Chicago streets (where nudity was only an illusion), and after being body-painted by Max Factor Sr. with his new Hollywood makeup. On September 23, 1933, she was convicted of willfully performing an obscene and indecent dance in public, but she was allowed to keep performing at the fair, and the conviction was overturned in November 1934.

She invented the bubble dance partly to deal with wind during outdoor shows. She performed the fan dance on film in Bolero (1934) and the bubble dance in Sunset Murder Case (1938).

In 1936, she bought The Music Box burlesque hall in San Francisco, later renamed the Great American Music Hall. She starred in “Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch” at the 1939–1940 Golden Gate International Exposition. To promote it, she staged a stunt on February 17, 1939, in which women in lingerie rode horses down San Francisco’s Market Street.

Rand’s interest in flying was partly sparked by her brief relationship with Charles Lindbergh. She learned to fly by 1923 and later earned her pilot’s license, often flying herself to gigs. On August 1, 1939, she reportedly set a light-plane speed record flying from San Francisco to Reno in 1 hour and 54 minutes.

In the early 1940s, she did summer stock in Woodstock, New York, starring in Rain and Little Foxes with Karl Malden. Malden later recalled being stressed by her lack of preparation and her greater interest in costumes than lines—though he admitted her costumes were dazzling enough to make him forget his own lines. He also wrote in his memoirs that her burlesque habits showed, noting she rarely bathed and instead relied on heavy perfume and layers of makeup that caked and revealed dirt in the creases of her neck.

In 1946, Rand was arrested twice in San Francisco. While performing at Club Savoy, six police officers in the audience arrested her as she danced, seemingly nude, behind a large white fan. Judge Daniel R. Shoemaker granted her immunity from arrest for the same offense during her trial, but she was arrested again during the trial while performing—despite the immunity and the fact that she was wearing long underwear and a sign reading “CENSORED. S.F.P.D.” The judge then viewed her act at the Savoy and cleared her, ruling that anyone finding it lewd must have “a perverted idea of morals.”

In the early 1950s, she toured the Midwest with a 17-member troupe, appearing at state fairs and small theaters. Edith Dahl accompanied Rand’s fan dance finale on violin and told jokes. Local newspapers noted that Rand’s large white feathered fans “acted as a guard to keep too much of mother nature from showing” and that “smutty jokes” were kept to a minimum at afternoon shows. The tour moved through Oklahoma and Texas, then west toward Washington before heading back east.