Evelyn Emily Fariss was born Oct. 19, 1896, on Signal Mountain to Seaton and Martha Fariss. She began with little schooling, money or social standing, but she had enough beauty and spunk to propel her out of her mountaineer beginnings and onto the New York stage. She found wealth and glamour and was married seven times, twice to the same man.
The maid of the mountains begin her trajectory when she wandered into a five and dime store in downtown Chattanooga and so dazzled its manager, Carl King Merritt, that he offered her anything in the store. She came back the next week, took Merritt to a minister and soon realized that being married and living in town was better than living on the mountain. Realizing her powers, however, she won an annulment of the marriage due to her “youth,” she being 18 and he 26, and left for New York, where her pretty face wrangled her a spot in the Ziegfeld Follies. From then on she was a “Follies Girl.” She also appeared in two silent movie productions, Paramount Pictures’ “The Masqueraders” (1915) and a weekly film serial, “Beatrice Fairfax” (1916).
While performing at the Follies, Fariss attracted the attention of and married wealthy newspaperman William Sherman Gill in 1915. During four years of marriage, she saw little of her husband and lived the “good life” as other men wined, dined, bestowed gifts and showed her the world. The divorce went uncontested “because of a secret pact that if either fell in love with someone else a divorce would not be contested.” Gill left Evelyn with a “fortune of several hundred thousand dollars.”
Evelyn returned to Chattanooga and married Raymond O. Bennett, son of wealthy meat market owner, R.O. Bennett. The couple sought to lead Chattanooga’s social circle but were snubbed. They left for Florida, where the “young Bennetts entered into the country-club-gin-drinking-jazzing side of Tampa’s social life.” The couple met trouble in May 1923, when Raymond went on trial for the murder of Herbert Caruthers, a young Tampa lumberman. Raymond claimed that he was defending his wife’s honor, and the jury acquitted him. The newspapers lauded Evelyn for supporting her husband. One account stated that “the former queen of the Broadway stage loved her ‘butcher boy’ so much and was so willing to forgive everything he did that she clung devotedly to him through a trial for murder and through all sorts of other trouble.”
The trial proved stressful. In 1925 Evelyn filed for divorce, but Bennett’s charm or wealth soon wooed her back. On Jan. 1, 1926, she remarried him in Hamilton County. The second marriage lasted only three months as he tired of her extravagance. Newspaper accounts credited Evelyn with being a supportive wife and seeking to reform Bennett from his drinking and gambling.