Sally Rand

Sally Rand, born Helen Gould Beck on April 3, 1904, in Elkton, Hickory County, Missouri, was an American actress, burlesque dancer, and vedette who performed under both the name Sally Rand and the name Billie Beck. Her father, William Beck, was a West Point graduate and retired U.S. Army colonel, and her mother, Nettie (Grove) Beck, worked as a schoolteacher and part-time newspaper correspondent. The family relocated to Jackson County, Missouri while Rand was still in grade school.

Rand began performing at the age of thirteen as a chorus girl at the Empress Theater in Kansas City. Drama critic Goodman Ace, writing for the Kansas City Journal, attended one of her early nightclub performances and published favorable reviews of her work. She pursued training in ballet and drama in Kansas City before making her way toward Hollywood, spending a period working as an acrobat with the Ringling Brothers Circus and gaining additional experience in summer stock and traveling theater, where she performed alongside a then-unknown Humphrey Bogart. During the 1920s she appeared in silent films, and Cecil B. DeMille, drawing on a Rand McNally atlas for inspiration, gave her the stage name Sally Rand. In 1927 she was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars.

Following the transition to sound films, Rand shifted her focus to dance. She became widely known for her ostrich-feather fan dance, which she first popularized at the Paramount Club at 15 E. Huron in Chicago. Her most celebrated appearance came at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the Century of Progress, where she performed the fan dance to "Clair de Lune" accompanied by a backing orchestra directed by Art Frasik. During the fair she was arrested four times in a single day on charges of indecent exposure — following a fan dance performance, while riding a white horse through the streets of Chicago, and after being bodypainted by Max Factor Sr. On September 23, 1933, she was convicted of willfully performing an obscene and indecent dance in a public place, though she was permitted to continue performing at the fair, and the conviction was overturned in November 1934.

Rand also developed the bubble dance, conceived in part as a practical response to outdoor wind conditions. She performed the fan dance on film in Bolero, released in 1934, and the bubble dance appeared in the 1938 film Sunset Murder Case. In 1936 she purchased the Music Box burlesque hall in San Francisco, a venue that later became the Great American Music Hall. She starred in Sally Rand's Nude Ranch at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in both 1939 and 1940, and on February 17, 1939, she organized a publicity stunt in which lingerie-clad women on horseback rode down Market Street in downtown San Francisco to advertise the upcoming Treasure Island Nude Ranch.

Rand's interest in aviation developed in part through a brief relationship with Charles Lindbergh. She had learned to fly by 1923 and subsequently obtained her pilot's license, frequently flying herself to engagements. On August 1, 1939, she reportedly set a speed record for a light plane on a flight from San Francisco to Reno, completing the journey in one hour and fifty-four minutes.

Her Broadway career included an appearance in 1930 in the musical Luana. In the early 1940s she performed summer stock in Woodstock, New York, appearing in Rain and Little Foxes alongside Karl Malden, who later wrote about the experience in his memoirs. In 1946 she was arrested twice in San Francisco while performing at Club Savoy. During the second arrest she was wearing long underwear and a note reading "CENSORED. S.F.P.D." despite having been granted immunity by the presiding judge, Daniel R. Shoemaker, for the same offense during the trial. After viewing her performance at the Savoy himself, the judge cleared her of all charges.

In the early 1950s Rand toured Oklahoma, Texas, and states further west with a seventeen-member troupe, performing at state fairs and small theaters. Edith Dahl accompanied the fan dance finale on violin. Rand appeared as the mystery guest on the December 28, 1952, episode of What's My Line, where panelist Robert Q. Lewis correctly identified her. On March 12, 1957, she appeared in episode thirteen of the first season of To Tell the Truth, hosted by Bud Collyer, with panelists Polly Bergen, Ralph Bellamy, Kitty Carlisle, and Carl Reiner; introduced under her birth name Helen Beck, she was correctly identified by all four panelists.

Rand continued performing the fan dance into the 1970s. While appearing at Mangam's Chateau in suburban Chicago in 1966, she donated two of her feather fans to the Chicago History Museum. She replaced Ann Corio in the stage show This Was Burlesque, performed at the Mitchell Brothers club in San Francisco in the early 1970s, and toured as one of the featured performers in the 1972 nostalgia revue Big Show of 1928, which played major concert venues including Madison Square Garden in New York. Her career spanned more than forty years across stage, screen, and television, and included work with Humphrey Bogart, Karl Malden, and Cecil B. DeMille.

Sally Rand died on August 31, 1979, from congestive heart failure at Foothill Presbyterian Hospital in Glendora, California, at the age of seventy-five. At the time of her death she was deeply in debt; according to her adopted son, Sammy Davis Jr. wrote a check for ten thousand dollars to cover her expenses.