Faith Bacon: The Nude Dancer Who Invented the Fan Dance, Then Watched Sally Rand Take the Credit
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In July 1930, a Broadway dancer named Faith Bacon was arrested for performing nude on a New York stage, fans in hand, nothing else. Three years later, another dancer doing essentially the same act with the same fans was the single biggest attraction at the Chicago World's Fair, pulling crowds that reportedly saved the whole event from a financial flop. That second dancer was Sally Rand. The first was Faith Bacon, and she's the one who actually invented the fan dance. History remembers Rand. Bacon spent the next two decades trying to correct the record in court and losing every time, before jumping out of a Chicago hotel window in 1956, broke and unable to find work in the business she'd helped create.
From Paris Streets to Broadway Nudity
Faith Bacon was born Frances Yvonne Bacon on July 19, 1910, in Los Angeles. She had no dance training at all, but as a teenager traveling through Paris in the late 1920s, she talked her way into a chance meeting with Maurice Chevalier and ended up in his revue, performing nude with bubbles, flowers, and fans as her only props. It was enough of a calling card that when she came back to the United States, Broadway showman Earl Carroll put her in four productions between 1928 and 1931: two editions of Earl Carroll's Vanities, a book musical called Fioretta, and Earl Carroll's Sketch Book. Carroll's shows were built around nudity as the main event, dressed up as artistic spectacle, and Bacon quickly became his most reliable headline generator, on stage and in the papers.
The Law That Basically Invented the Fan Dance
That reliability came from working around a genuinely strange legal loophole. New York law at the time drew a very specific line: a performer could be nude on stage as long as she didn't move. Motion plus nudity equaled indecency. So Bacon's earliest nude routines were performed as tableaux, frozen poses under shifting stage lights, technically legal because nothing on her body was in motion. She and Carroll eventually found a way around that too. If she held large fans and kept them in constant motion, covering and uncovering her body as she went, she could dance while arguing, at least in court, that the fans themselves counted as clothing. That argument got tested for real on July 9, 1930, when police raided a performance and arrested Bacon, Carroll, and several others on charges of staging an indecent show. Carroll's courtroom defense was almost comic in its precision: he insisted Bacon wore a thin layer of chiffon and only gave the illusion of nudity, and that the fans should legally count as a costume in their own right. A grand jury declined to indict, and Bacon kept dancing, now with a fresh layer of publicity stacked on top of the old one, the woman the law had tried and failed to stop.
Sally Rand Learns the Act
It was around this same moment, 1930, that the rivalry began that would define, and arguably erase, Bacon's place in the story. Sally Rand had been working as Bacon's fan holder during a Nils Granlund revue, close enough to the routine to learn every beat of it firsthand. Within a couple of years Rand had her own version of the act polished and ready, and unlike Bacon, she had the instincts and the timing to take it somewhere huge.
Ziegfeld Called Her the Most Beautiful Girl in the World
Bacon, for her part, was still climbing. By 1931 she'd moved up to the Ziegfeld Follies, the most prestigious revue on Broadway, where Florenz Ziegfeld himself reportedly billed her as the most beautiful girl in the world. She was marketed nationally as "America's Most Beautiful Dancer," performing nude and seminude with fans, bubbles, and flowers in an era when photographers like Alfred Cheney Johnston were turning Ziegfeld's showgirls into a kind of American pin-up mythology. It was, in hindsight, the peak of Bacon's career. She just didn't know it yet, and neither did she know that the woman who'd once held her fans was about to eclipse her completely.
Sally Rand over the years
The 1933 World's Fair Showdown
That eclipse happened at the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago in 1933, where both women performed and both billed themselves as the fan dance's true originator. Rand had the better stage: a pair of seven foot pink ostrich feather fans, timed to Debussy and Chopin, that turned her into a national sensation almost overnight and reportedly helped keep the entire fair solvent during the Depression. Bacon, dancing at the same fair under the same claim, simply didn't have the same spectacle or the same self-promotional instincts, and got quietly outshone at the exact event that should have settled the argument in her favor. When reporters eventually pressed Rand on who deserved credit, she brushed it off by pointing out that women had been dancing behind fans since Cleopatra. Legally and rhetorically, it was a hard point to argue with, and it's more or less the line history settled on too.
The Glass Box Accident
Bacon's career took its next hit in 1936, during a performance at Chicago's State-Lake Theatre, when the glass platform she was dancing on top of cracked and gave way beneath her. She fell through it, badly cutting her legs on the broken glass and spending weeks recovering. The wounds healed into permanent, visible scars, a serious liability for a career built entirely on being looked at. She sued the theater and settled for a few thousand dollars, reportedly around five thousand, which she then spent on a ten carat diamond rather than, say, rent. It's the kind of detail that says a lot about how she understood her own value: as long as she looked the part, she assumed the work would keep coming.
The Lawsuit That Went Nowhere
By 1938, with her body scarred and Rand's career still climbing, Bacon finally took the fan dance dispute to court directly, suing Rand for damages and seeking an injunction to stop her from performing the act at all. She lost. It wasn't her only unsuccessful legal fight either: a decade later she sued a carnival promoter for allegedly scattering tacks across the stage where she performed barefoot, and that case was thrown out too. Bacon kept billing herself as "The Original Fan Dancer" for the rest of her career regardless of what any court said, which was, by that point, close to the only leverage she had left.
The Slow Fade
The rest of the 1930s and 1940s were a steady decline dressed up as a career. In 1938, the same year as the failed lawsuit, Bacon landed her only film role, a bit part in the low-budget crime picture Prison Train. The following year she held an official fan-dancer engagement at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and also got arrested on Park Avenue for a publicity stunt in which she walked a pet fawn on a leash while wearing little more than maple leaves and chiffon, which is either the most or least on-brand arrest of her career depending on how you look at it. By 1942 she was appearing in low-budget short films called Soundies, including one literally titled Lady with the Fans. Through the rest of the decade she worked burlesque houses and eventually carnival circuits, a steep drop from Ziegfeld's stage, and lost the tack-covered-stage lawsuit against a carnival promoter along the way.
According to Rachel Shteir's book Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show, Bacon developed an addiction to heroin during this stretch that accelerated the decline further. In 1945 she applied for a marriage license with a songwriter named Sanford Hunt Dickinson, whose main later claim to fame was a music credit on Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda, though by most accounts the two never actually lived together and the arrangement had faded by the early 1950s. In 1954 she tried to open a dance school in Indiana. It failed, and she was found unconscious there after an overdose of sleeping pills.
A Final Job Hunt in Chicago
By 1956, Bacon was living in Erie, Pennsylvania, essentially broke, and traveled to Chicago hoping to find any kind of work in the business that had once billed her as the most beautiful woman in the world. She checked into the Alan Hotel at 2004 Lincoln Park West and spent three weeks searching without success. On September 26, 1956, she climbed out of her hotel room window. Her roommate, a grocery store clerk named Ruth Bishop, grabbed for her skirt and tried to pull her back inside, but Bacon tore free and fell two stories onto the roof of an adjacent building. She died of her injuries, which included a fractured skull and a perforated lung, at Grant Hospital later that night. She was 46. The American Guild of Variety Artists claimed her body and arranged for her burial at Wunder's Cemetery in Chicago.
Rand, meanwhile, kept performing her version of the fan dance for roughly six decades, right up until close to her own death in 1979, and became the version of the story most people know, if they know it at all. Bacon invented the act, got arrested for it in 1930, got overshadowed by it in 1933, sued over it in 1938, and got quietly erased from it by the time she died in 1956. "Original Fan Dancer" was printed on her billing for the rest of her life. It's just that fewer and fewer people, as the years went on, were reading the fine print.
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