Miguel Covarrubias's December 1934 "Impossible Interview" in Vanity Fair contrasted the harsh red and sharp angles of modern choreographer Martha Graham with the smooth curves and candy-sweet pink of fan dancer Sally Rand. Corey Ford's accompanying dialogue, however, emphasizes their similarities:
SALLY: Hello, Martha. Still doing the same old intellectual strip-tease?
MARTHA: I beg your pardon, Miss Rand, I do not think we have anything in common
SALLY: Forget it, kid, we're in the same racket, ain't we? Just a couple of little girls trying to wriggle along.
MARTHA: But my dancing is modern-classical-imaginative. If you leave anything to a customer's imagination, it's because he's near-sighted.
SALLY: Sure, I come right out in the open. I put my best points forward.
MARTHA (haughtily): You should learn to bare your soul.
SALLY: Say, I got to keep something covered. . . .
MARTHA: I'm sure you'd be frowned on in the ladies' clubs.
SALLY: And you'd be a flop in a cooch concession, kid. From now on, we'd better split fifty-fifty. You take the ladies, and I'll take the men.
Ford's repartee gently mocks Graham's modernism for its seriousness while endowing Rand's playful allure with a certain legitimacy. Nothing about the fan dancer suggests immorality or even bad taste; she comes across as feisty, funny, and talented. In other words, high art and low, popular culture and the avant-garde merge together in an expression of the new preoccupation with the talented and famous.
Sally Rand 1904-1979 and Martha Graham 1894-1991
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Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957)
Gouache on paper for Vanity Fair, December 1934
Private collection
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