The Girl Behind the Fans: Faith Bacon’s Glittering Rise—and Chicago’s Last, Dark Window
They sold Faith Bacon the way show business sells every beautiful miracle it can’t quite explain—like a new light bulb for the national imagination. “America’s Most Beautiful Dancer,” the billboards promised, and for a while the country believed it, because it wanted to. She was born Frances Yvonne Bacon in Los Angeles on July 19, 1910, a city that specialized in making legends out of runaways, ingenues, and nervous hope. But Faith didn’t rise through the tidy Hollywood ladder of bit parts and studio grooming; she rose through the hotter, rougher air of burlesque, where applause could turn to police whistles in the same breath and “art” was whatever survived the next raid.