Faith Bacon

Faith Bacon, born Frances Yvonne Bacon on July 19, 1910, in Los Angeles, California, was an American burlesque dancer and actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1928 to 1931. Her parents, Francis Page Bacon and Charmion, married on July 10, 1909, and divorced several years after her birth. At the height of her career, Bacon was billed as "America's Most Beautiful Dancer."

Bacon's performing career began in Paris in the 1920s, where she stated in a 1930 interview that she had decided to become a dancer despite having no formal training. While in Paris, she met Maurice Chevalier and made her performance debut in his revue. Her work incorporated bubbles, flowers, and fans into nude dance routines.

Upon returning to the United States, Bacon made her Broadway debut in Earl Carroll's Vanities, performing from August 1928 to February 1929. The program credited her with a number titled "Fan Dance - Heart of the Daisies." She subsequently appeared in the musical Fioretta in 1929 and Earl Carroll's Sketch Book in 1930. In July 1930, she returned to an Earl Carroll's Vanities production as a principal nude performer. Her initial routine involved standing nude and motionless onstage while lights played over her body, a workaround for indecent exposure laws that prohibited movement while nude onstage. After experimenting with various approaches to circumvent those laws, Bacon and Carroll developed the fan dance, which became an immediate success.

On July 9, 1930, police raided the New Amsterdam Theatre and arrested Bacon, Carroll, and other cast members for giving an indecent performance during a scene titled "A Window at Merls." Carroll maintained that Bacon had worn a chiffon arrangement during the performance and was not fully nude. In August 1930, a grand jury declined to indict Bacon, Carroll, or their fellow cast members, and Bacon continued performing the fan dance throughout the run. Her final Broadway credit was the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931, in which she appeared from July to November of that year.

In 1933, Bacon traveled to Chicago to perform at the World's Fair after learning that dancer Sally Rand was performing a fan dance there. Maintaining that she had originated the dance for Earl Carroll in 1930, Bacon billed herself as "The Original Fan Dancer." In October 1938, she filed a lawsuit against Rand seeking $375,000 in damages and an injunction barring Rand from performing the fan dance. Rand denied Bacon's claims, stating that the fan concept predated both of them. The case did not result in an injunction. At the 1939 World's Fair in New York, Bacon held an official position as fan dancer. On April 23, 1939, she was arrested for disorderly conduct after staging a publicity stunt on Park Avenue in New York City, walking a fawn on a leash while dressed in chiffon and maple leaves ahead of her scheduled appearance at the fair. She was released on a $500 bond.

In 1938, Bacon made her only theatrical film appearance, playing the role of Maxine in Prison Train, directed by Gordon Wiles. She also appeared in two short film recordings in 1942, titled "Lady with the Fans" and "Dance of Shame."

Bacon's career declined steadily after her 1933 World's Fair appearance. During the winter of 1936, while performing in Temptations at the Lake Theater in Chicago, she fell through a glass drum on which she had been posing nude, cutting her thighs and leaving permanent scars. She sued the Lake Theater Corporation for $100,000 in damages and ultimately settled for $5,000. The scarring and resulting leg pain reduced her dancing abilities. Throughout the 1940s, she continued performing at clubs and venues across the United States. In 1948, she claimed a carnival promoter owed her $5,044 in back salary and sued him for $55,444, alleging he had placed tacks on the stage where she danced barefoot. She lost the case. By the mid-1950s, an attempt to establish a dance school in Indiana failed, and she was found unconscious after reportedly overdosing on sleeping pills.

In 1945, Bacon and Sanford Hunt Dickinson, a Buffalo businessman and songwriter, applied for a marriage license. It was never established whether they formally married; they never lived together and never divorced. By 1956, Bacon was living in Erie, Pennsylvania, and traveled to Chicago in search of work, checking into the Alan Hotel at 2004 Lincoln Park West. After three weeks of unsuccessful job searching, on September 26, 1956, Bacon climbed out of her hotel window. Her roommate, grocery store clerk Ruth Bishop, attempted to stop her by grabbing her skirt, but Bacon pulled free and fell two stories onto the roof of an adjacent building. She sustained a fractured skull, a perforated lung, and internal injuries, and died that night at Grant Hospital. At the time of her death, she had no money, and her possessions included clothing, one white metal ring, a train ticket to Erie, Pennsylvania, and 85 cents. The American Guild of Variety Artists claimed her body and arranged for her burial at Wunder's Cemetery in Chicago.