Born in Elkton, Missouri, on January 2, 1904, Helen Gould Beck entered show business at an early age. Eventually adopting the name Sally Rand (suggested to her, she said, by Cecil B. DeMille), she played in vaudeville and performed as an acrobatic dancer at carnivals and for a while in the Ringling brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus while still in her teens. By the time she was twenty she was in Hollywood, where she appeared in a number of films, among them The Dressmaker from Paris, 1924, Manbait, 1926, Getting Gertie╒s Garter, 1927, and King of Kings, 1927, but never became a star.
With the onset of the Depression of the 1930s she found herself stranded in Chicago. She improvised a dance routine employing ostrich-feather fans that she performed in a speakeasy for $75 a week. Her great opportunity came with the opening in Chicago of the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933╨1934. After riding a white horse to the fair, attired more or less as Lady Godiva, she received star billing at the ╥Streets of Paris╙ concession on the Midway and was credited with having made the whole fair a financial success. Her act consisted of a slow dance, with ostrich plumes as her only costume, to the music of Debussy╒s Clair de Lune. Nudity, she conceded, was not new, but she insisted that she had made it both artistic and financially successful with a new sales method. The difference between a mere performer and a star, she maintained, was merchandising. She continued to merchandise her act for more than 30 years, starring at the California Pacific International Exposition at San Diego in 1935╨1936, San Francisco╒s Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939╨1940, and on many other occasions. In 1965 she was mistress of ceremonies of the hit Broadway revue This Was Burlesque, and she was still occasionally presenting her dance in the 1970s. She died in Glendora, California, on August 31, 1979.
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