(A small-time showgirl, loved by two decent men, poses as ...)
A small-time showgirl, loved by two decent men, poses as a stripper to infiltrate a nightclub whose owner is believed responsible for her father's murder.
https://www.amazon.com/Sunset-Murder-Case-Sally-Rand/dp/B00170ID4M?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00170ID4M
https://www.amazon.com/Burlesque-DVD-Documentary-Betty-Page/dp/B004S93BKU?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B004S93BKU
Sally Rand was born on April 3, 1904 Hattie Helen Gould Beck in Elkton, Missouri, the daughter of Mary Annette Kisling and William Beck. Her mother was a schoolteacher and correspondent for several Kansas and Missouri newspapers; her father was a career military man who separated from his wife before World War I and remarried in France.
Rand, raised in the Quaker faith, stated that her desire to be an actress was stimulated in high school and college (both apparently in Columbia, Missouri, though there is no evidence that she completed either level of education).
In the 1950's and 1960's she took college classes in the sciences in California. In 1976, on the occasion of her fiftieth reunion at Christian College in Columbia, Missouri, she said that to get rid of her Missouri accent cost her $10, 000 and took twice as many hours as it did to earn a college degree. She also claimed to have put six younger brothers through college.
Rand left home at age thirteen to help support her mother. She spent her teenage years in Chicago and Kansas City, studying ballet in Chicago and working as a model in life classes at the Chicago Art Institute and as a cigarette girl in Chicago speak-easies.
Her first showbusiness exposure, as a chorus girl in Kansas City, led Kansas City Journal critic Goodman Ace to recommend Rand for Gus Edwards's juvenile vaudeville company, School Days. In 1920 she appeared in a Ziegfeld Follies - type revue at the Marigold Gardens in Chicago. Later in the 1920's she worked as an acrobatic dancer, including one season with Ringling Bros. Circus, substituting as a flyer for a brief time. In 1924, stranded in California with the Billy Seabury Troupe, Rand appeared in the first of twenty-five silent films, playing bit parts. Her first film was The Dressmaker from Paris (1924) and the last, after a six-year absence from Hollywood, Bolero with George Raft (1934). In 1927, as Billy Beck, she was under contract to Cecil B. DeMille and appeared as Mary Magdalene's slave girl in his The King of Kings.
DeMille is credited with selecting the name Rand, from a Rand-McNally atlas on his desk; Rand chose Sally as a good name for theater marquees. Although she returned to dancing and touring with the introduction of talkies, in 1929 she settled in Glendora, California. In 1930, while appearing in New York with a brother as The Rands, her name first appeared in the newspapers following her brother's altercation with a director. Subsequently, she was constantly covered by the press, often as a result of arrests for indecent behavior in her invention, the fan dance. Rand's fame began in 1932 when, following a tour in The World Between that closed in Chicago, she obtained a $75-per-week job as a dancer in a speak-easy.
Broke, she decided to adapt her classical ballet training to the taste of the club's patrons. A pile of moth-eaten ostrich plumes at a costume maker's reminded her of Pavlova's Dying Swan and of "the white herons that used to float through the moonlight on nights of the harvest moon. "
Fans were cheaper than an expensive wardrobe, and a pair of white, twenty-one-inch-stem, double-willowed ostrich fans, ordered from Henry Sittenberg in New York at $125 each, arrived the day her job was to begin. A late rehearsal prevented her from obtaining a chiffon nightgown she intended to wear, however, and so that night her famous fan costume debuted through chance. In the spring of 1933, Rand's application for a dancing job at Chicago's Century of Progress World's Fair was rejected.
At a benefit the night before the fair's opening, she appeared as Lady Godiva, "wearing only my long blonde hair. " The next day, she was hired for $125 per week; by the end of the second year, she was making $3, 000 per week. It was claimed that she "practically single-fanned" saved the fair from slow death. In August 1933, Rand was arrested four times in one day on a charge that her fans failed to constitute a decent costume.
Rand's legitimate acting career never progressed beyond infrequent appearances in summer stock, first in 1935 in Skowhegan, Maine, as Sadie Thompson in Rain (with a young Humphrey Bogart in a small role). Other appearances included They Knew What They Wanted and Susan and God (both in 1938), and Mary of Scotland and The Little Foxes in the 1960's. More successful was a stint in 1963 as Ann Corio's replacement in This Was Burlesque in New York City.
In April 1964 she narrated an NBC television special on carnivals. Rand continued her fan-dance appearances at fairs, nightclubs, carnivals, and theaters, touring up to forty weeks of the year, until May 1979, when she gave her final performances in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N. Mex. By 1950 she reportedly had worn out five hundred sets of fans. Initially, her performances were considered outrageously immoral, but by the end of her career her act was considered camp nostalgia, devoid of prurience.
Rand's act was consistently six minutes long, performed under blue light to the music of Chopin's Waltz in C-Sharp Minor and Debussy's "Clair de Lune. "
Its success was not so much in what she revealed as in what she projected onto the fantasies of onlookers. In 1934 she added a bubble dance to her act.
To Rand, the fan dance, which she compared to a frieze of nymphs, was less abstract and more successful, while the bubble dance was more like the classic acanthus-leaf pattern. A master of publicity, Rand called herself a ballet dancer or a "terpsichorean artiste, " claimed never to have appeared in a burlesque show, and rejected the names stripper, exotic dancer, and even fan dancer.
She was variously billed the Babson of the Bubble-Dance, the Fan-Waving Financier, the Nabob of Nudity, the Tycoon of Terpsichore, the Queen of the Bubble-Bounders, and her own favorite, Her Sexellency. She always insisted on the "pristine purity of her dance and the classicalness of its line. " Wanting to be considered an intellectual, she spoke often to civic clubs, dressed in a tailored suit, cocky little hat, and an "air of genuine gentility. " She often took time from her professional performances to dance for free at local benefit shows for schools, charities, and churches (with her clothes on).
Rand died in Glendora, Calif. , her home of fifty years.
(A small-time showgirl, loved by two decent men, poses as ...)
She believed in mystery and illusion, often stating, "The Rand is quicker than the eye" when asked about her adroit fan manipulation.
Physically, Rand and her act changed little over forty years. At five feet tall and 113 pounds, she claimed in her sixties that her figure still measured the same (36-24-37) as it had at her peak.
Rand was wed three times. Her marriage in 1942 to Thurkel ("Turk") Greenough, a rodeo cowboy, ended three years later in divorce. Her second marriage, to Harry Finklestine, failed because, she said, he was "a young girl casualty"; they adopted a son in 1948. Her final marriage in 1954, to Fred Lalla, a Los Angeles plaster contractor, ended in divorce in the 1960's.
