Dancer, Entertainer, Actress. She was an American Vaudeville interpretive dancer and Vaudeville and Hollywood actress. Born in rural Texas in what is now a ghost town, she was descended from several heroes of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. 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. She studied and performed with the touring Denishawn Company of Vaudeville dancers. She then then embarked on her own solo Vaudeville tour in 1916, supported by Kenneth Harlan, later to be a film star. Vaudeville led quite naturally to Broadway revues, and she appeared in Ziegfeld’s Nine O’Clock Revue (1919-1920) and Ed Wynn’s Carnival (1920). She next appeared in three silent films, Women Men Love, Madonnas and Men, and A Romantic Adventuress, all released in 1920. Her time in the sun was to be short-lived however thanks to an affair she had with the millionaire Cornelius “Sonny” Vanderbilt Whitney, resulting in divorce from her husband Sterling Lawrence Adair (a young sailor from Houston, Texas whom she met on a train in 1917 and married in 1918; the marriage was annulled in 1920. He committed suicide soon thereafter). Fontaine bore a son in 1920 whom she claimed was Whitney’s, resulting in a breach of promise suit against Whitney which Fontaine lost at considerable cost to herself, financial and otherwise. After the brief bump of tabloid publicity, her entertainment career was essentially over. She later married a former Olympic swimmer, Harold "Stubby" Kruger in 1928 or 1929 (he toured fairs and carnivals with fellow Olympian Johnny Weismuller; he became a Hollywood bit actor and stuntman). Fontaine had a second son, Bobby, by Kruger. They divorced in 1935. Fontaine married a third time in the late 1930s to Jack Lynch, a restaurateur. They managed a Philadelphia night club she owned called the Walton Roof atop the Walton Hotel. Her first son, Neil "Sonny" Winston Fontaine debuted there as a band leader in 1939--he remained as the club's master of ceremonies until it closed in 1946. Jack Lynch managed retaurants and clubs in the Philadelphia area until his death in 1957. Fontane lived out the remainder of her life in the small rural town of Paris in northern Virginia. She died at age 86 in the Winchester Medical Center in Winchester, Virginia.