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.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Faith Bacon - "America's Most Beautiful Dancer"
Her origin story came dressed in perfume and foreign streetlight—Paris in the late 1920s, where she later said she decided to become a dancer despite having no formal training, and where she crossed paths with Maurice Chevalier and stepped into his revue as if she’d been born under footlights. Back in America, she hit Broadway in Earl Carroll’s Vanities—the kind of glittering, half-naughty, half-classy spectacle that kept Prohibition-era audiences dreaming with their eyes wide open. There, Faith became synonymous with an act that would define her and haunt her: the fan dance. It began as a workaround—an elegant con game against indecency laws that frowned on movement and nudity sharing the same stage. Faith and Carroll, so the story goes, kept testing the limits until they found the sweet spot: feathers, choreography, illusion, and just enough daring to make the audience feel like accomplices.
In July 1930, the illusion drew blood from the system. Police raided the New Amsterdam Theatre and arrested Faith, Carroll, and others for an “indecent performance.” It was the kind of scandal that should have ended a career—except scandal was the fuel of that era, and Faith’s notoriety only sharpened her shine. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict, and Faith kept dancing, now with an added aura: the woman the law tried to stop and couldn’t. Not long after, she turned up in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931, drifting through the most famous glitter factory on Broadway, a living ornament in a pageant of American appetite.
But the business of “originality” in burlesque is as slippery as a stage slick with talcum. By the mid-1930s, the fan dance had another queen in the public mind—Sally Rand—whose World’s Fair fame threatened to write Faith out of her own legend. Faith fought back the only way showgirls could: through billing, publicity, and the courts. She billed herself as “The Original Fan Dancer,” performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933, and later held an official fan-dancer position at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The rivalry with Rand turned bitter enough to reach a lawsuit, with Faith seeking damages and attempting to stop Rand from performing the act. Rand shrugged it off with the kind of line that belongs in a hardboiled script: the idea was older than Cleopatra—how could anyone own it? Faith lost what mattered most in that fight: control of the narrative.
Faith’s problems, however, did not end with competition. In 1936, Faith was badly injured in a Chicago performance when she fell through a glass drum used in one of her acts. She was badly scarred and experienced pain for the rest of her life, which contributed to a decline in her performance ability, which the business had always expected of her. And she gained a reputation—fair or not—for being difficult. That dogged many women in entertainment like an alcoholic private eye with nothing better to do. In 1939, Faith was arrested yet again, this time in New York City, for walking a fawn on Park Avenue on a leash, dressed in wisps and baubles that were more news headline than clothes. In 1938, she made one, lone, appearance in a feature film, the crime drama Prison Train. A brief, unspectacular, Hollywood brush with glory that never became the escape hatch it had the potential to be. Onscreen she was just a character, and offscreen, well, Faith was still the headline act, and the act was aging in a business that worships youth like it’s the most hallowed religion.
As with so many lives lived in her world, the powder on her skin could not quite hide the ache in her personal life. In 1945 she applied for a marriage license with Sanford Hunt Dickinson, a Buffalo businessman and songwriter; accounts are that the relationship was complex, likely more arrangement than romance, and the two did not cohabitate. There were whispers about her sexuality, as there were about so many women of her time who did not (or could not) have the story of which her mother would approve. She was, by the 1950s, an echo. The spotlight had passed, and Faith was left in the silence, chasing the memory of her own name. Accounts from later decades relate financial instability, and issues with alcohol and drugs, as work became scarce. A dance school in Indiana, started by Evelyn in her last years, failed. She was reportedly a ghost of her former self, recognizable only in the shadows, living on the kindness of the alley.
Then came the final curtain call, and it did not take place beneath a marquee. By 1956 she was living in Erie, Pennsylvania. She had traveled to Chicago hoping to find employment—any employment—back in show business. She checked into the Alan Hotel at 2004 Lincoln Park West and spent weeks searching, to no avail, a former sensation reduced to knocking on doors that no longer opened. On September 26, 1956, Faith Bacon died after jumping from a hotel window; contemporary accounts described her as depressed, desperate to return to the stage, and nearly broke. The inventory of what she had left was as bleak as a noir ending: a few personal items, a train ticket, and some coins. The American Guild of Variety Artists claimed her body and arranged for her burial at Wunder’s Cemetery in Chicago—an unglamorous coda for a woman once sold as America’s most beautiful dream.
If Hollywood is a city of bright lies, Faith Bacon’s story is what happens when the lights go out and the billboards keep glowing anyway. She was a Los Angeles girl who found her fame not on soundstages but on the razor edge between art and arrest, invention and imitation, adoration and abandonment. In the end, what killed her wasn’t merely the loss of youth or the cruelty of the business—though both were there, waiting in the wings—it was the slow, grinding disappearance that show business inflicts on women whose names once filled rooms. Faith Bacon didn’t just perform behind fans; she lived behind them, too—hiding what the world demanded she conceal, until even the applause couldn’t reach her anymore.
Wunder's Cemetery-Chicago. Photo Credit: Findagrave.com / Miss Susie
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