Evan-Burrows Fontaine

Evan-Burrows Fontaine (October 3, 1898 – December 27, 1984) was an American Denishawn-trained interpretive dancer and actress whose career suffered after she became entangled in a breach of promise lawsuit with a member of one of America's wealthiest families.

Early life

Evan-Burrows Fontaine was born on October 3, 1898, in Huron, Texas, a present-day ghost town with the Cedar Creek Baptist Church as its last surviving structure.Friedman, Evan Burrows Fontaine - Passenger Manifest SS Leviathan October 13, 1930 - Ancestry.com She was the daughter of William Winston Spotswood Fontaine, an accountant who would later become general manager of the Alamo Cottonseed CompanyWinston Fontaine Dies on East Coast-The San Antonio Light - August 21, 1939; pg; 15;Ancestry.com and Florence West Evans, the daughter of a Dallas life insurance agent. Her family later moved to Dallas, where by the turn of the twentieth century they were boarders at a rooming house owned by her maternal grandparents. Fontaine's paternal 3rd great-grandmother was Martha Henry, daughter of American founding father Patrick Henry.The Green Book Magazine, Volume 21, January, 1920, pg. 454-457
accessed June 11, 2012 Her grandfather, William Winston Fontaine, served in the American Civil War as a colonel under Confederate generals, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. After the war he taught at Baylor Female College in Independence, Texas and later held the chair of Latin for a decade at the University of Texas. Not much is known here about Fontaine’s early life except that by 1915 she was living with her mother in New York City and that at an early age she traveled to California where she became a protégée of dancer Ruth St. Denis. Later she would claim she was also trained by Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, but this has yet to be verified.Dancing the Subject of ‘Java’: International Modernism and Traditional Performance, 1899-1952
accessed June 11, 2012

Career

Fontaine was taught the ''Dance Egyptienne'' by St. Denis’ husband, choreographer Ted Shawn, one of several dances Shawn would teach her based on his interpretation of Javanese ceremonial dancing. Fontaine’s stage debut may have occurred on December 16, 1914, when she performed Shawn’s ''Syvillia'' in a production staged by St. Denis’ company at the Ye Liberty Playhouse in Oakland, California. The next year she was booked to perform the traditional ''Jockey Dance'' at an annual celebration that follows the running of the Saratoga Cup in upstate New York. Fontaine went on to tour nationally with dancer and future film actor Kenneth Harlan before joining the Ziegfeld Follies where she would later shine in Ziegfeld’s ''Midnight Follies'' (1919). Around this time she also appeared in The Ed Wynn Carnival as the Queen of the Nile at New York’s Amsterdam Theater. Fontaine was among a group of entertainers who in 1919 donated their talents to a benefit costume ball held on behalf of blind war veterans at Manhattan’s Ritz-Carlton. The next year at the Casino Theatre (Broadway):

Early target of paparazzi

Eyebrows were raised when in late 1919 the press published a photograph (right) of Fontaine jogging along the Hudson River in stockings, clad in a heavy hooded sweater and workout shorts; something that would have probably gone unnoticed a few years later.

Marriage

On April 18, 1918, Fontaine married Sterling Lawrence Adair, a young sailor from Houston, Texas, whom she had met on a train ride the year before. Their marriage was annulled in February 1920, around the time she became involved with millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. This relationship collapsed when Whitney became engaged to Marie Norton, sometime before Fontaine gave birth to a baby boy that December. On January 14 of the following year, Sterling Adair was found shot to death at his Oak Wood apartment in south Dallas. A police homicide investigation would prove inconclusive and a later coroner’s jury would rule Adair probably died by his own hand.

Legal battles

In the summer of 1922 Fontaine filed what would turn out to be the first of several lawsuits against Cornelius “Sonny” Vanderbilt Whitney, claiming he had broken his pledge to marry her and that he was the father of her son. Whitney’s attorneys countered that Fontaine was still married to Adair at the time of the proposal and that the date of her marriage annulment was contrived by Fontaine and her mother. Over the next several months the case would become headline fodder for the national press; in the end though, Whitney’s attorneys prevailed and the case was dismissed. After the trial’s end, Fontaine and her mother were arrested for perjury; charges that were in due course vacated by a judge. Fontaine continued the battle with subsequent lawsuits against Whitney that would fare no better than the first.

Parents' deaths

On January 21, 1928, Fontaine’s mother was killed near New Smyrna Beach, Florida, when her automobile collided with a Florida East Coast Railway passenger train. Florence Fontaine had been on her way to Miami to care of her daughter who had fallen ill. Fontaine's father died on August 19, 1939, while on a visit to her home in Margate, New Jersey

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases