Evan-Burrows Fontaine

Evan-Burrows Fontaine
Library of Congress
Born	(1898-10-03)October 3, 1898 Huron, Hill County, Texas, US
Died	December 27, 1984(1984-12-27) (aged 86) Winchester, Virginia, US
Other names	Evan Burrows Fontaine
Occupation	Dancer
Spouses	Sterling Lawrence Adair ​ ​ (m. 1918; ann. 1920)​ Harold “Stubby” Kruger ​ ​ (m. 1928; div. 1935)​ Jack Lynch
Children	2

Evan-Burrows Fontaine

Fontaine was taught the Dance Egyptienne by St. Denis’ husband, choreographer

A performance by Fontaine was incorporated in the 1921 novel Beauty, by Rupert Hughes:

Then a dancer came forth on the full stage in an American Orientalism. She was no less a personage than Evan Burrows Fontaine and she danced with grave passion. She wore trousers of cloth of gold. Her shoulders and her waist were bare, with jeweled disks and chains across the breast; and her bare feet were jeweled. She told a gloomy story in a rhapsody of posture and transition. Larrick was spellbound with the drama and with the flight of beautiful moments and colors, following pell-mell as in a kaleidoscope whirled at top speed.^[20]

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.^[7]

Marriage

On April 18, 1918, Fontaine married Sterling Lawrence Adair, a young sailor from Houston, Texas,^[21] whom she had met on a train ride the year before. Their marriage was annulled in February 1920,^[22] 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.^[23]

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,^[24] 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.^[25] After the trial’s end, Fontaine and her mother were arrested for perjury;^[26] charges that were in due course vacated by a judge.^[27] Fontaine continued the battle with subsequent lawsuits against Whitney that would fare no better than the first.^[28]

Parents' deaths

On January 21, 1928, Fontaine’s mother was killed near

Sometime in the late 1930s Fontaine became a co-owner of the Walton Roof, a Philadelphia night spot atop the Walton Hotel, along with her husband (or soon-to-be husband), restaurateur Jack Lynch.[35] Her first son, Neil “Sonny” Winston Fontaine, whose father was Cornelius "Sonny" Vanderbilt Whitney, debuted there as a bandleader in 1939,^[36] and later served at times as master of ceremonies before the club’s demise in 1946.^[37][38] Jack Lynch was a longtime owner of clubs and restaurants in the Philadelphia area before his death in 1957.^[39]

Fontaine spent her final years as a resident of Paris, a small rural town in northern Virginia.^[40][41] She died on December 27, 1984, aged 86, at the Winchester Medical Center in Winchester, Virginia.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• List of dancers

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Evan-Burrows Fontaine.

42: “Beat Maid with a Hanger,” NYAN, January 14, 1925, A1; “Says Dancer Threatened Her with a Gun,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 14, 1926,A1