Sally Rand, originally Harriet Helen Gould Beck was born in Elkton, Missouri in 1904. At fourteen she ran away to the carnival, but she really started her career in silent film. An accent, something she called her lisp stopped her from having complete success in the genre of film. The one field where she did succeed was in burlesque, introducing it to the San Francisco World's Fair in 1933 after its rejection from the one in New York. The fan dance was comprised of Rand twirling across the stage with two huge fans, basically naked underneath never revealing a thing, but burlesque dancer Faith Bacon accused Sally of stealing her idea and a trial ensued. The fans would provide Rand with another legal issue when there was objection to her seeming nude, at least to their eyes. There were further claims on the bubble dance Rand performed when Rosita Royce said she invented it first. The bubble dance was once again a barely clothed Rand twirling around with a massive rubber bubble. She said during her career in the 30s that her performance was an art form. Sally Rand's nude ranch was started out west in 1936, featuring nude women on horseback in only a cowboy hat, bandana and belt. As a result of Sally Rand in burlesque there were two ideas brought into society concerning burlesque and its dancers. The first was that every fair producer couldn't have a successful operation without a dancer. The second was that the modern definition of burlesque was the fastest way for a woman to make money. She also managed nightclubs geared towards burlesque in 1938 with The Music Box and in 1939 with Sally Rand's Hollywood Club. Sally Rand died in 1979.
(Striptease the Untold History of the Girlie Show, 146-155, 255)