Aimée Crocker: The Tattooed Railroad Heiress Who Married Five Times and Kept a Boa Constrictor

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By the time Aimée Crocker died in 1941, she'd survived a train wreck on her honeymoon, lost her daughter in a custody fight that involved a drawn pistol, been given an island by the King of Hawaii (or so she said), got herself tattooed by a Japanese master, filled a Paris house with Buddhas and married five men, the last of them a 26-year-old Russian prince when she was 60. American newspapers called her the Queen of Bohemia. She called her memoir And I'd Do It Again, which tells you most of what you need to know about her.

The tricky bit is working out which parts of her story actually happened. Some of it is nailed down by court records and newspaper files. Some of it rests on Aimée's word alone, and Aimée was not a woman who let the facts spoil a good dinner party story.

Quick Answers

Who was Aimée Crocker? A Sacramento-born heiress, traveller and author, born Amy Isabella Crocker, whose father was the Central Pacific Railroad's lawyer.
How rich was she? She's reported to have inherited around $10 million when her father died in 1875, when she was about ten.
How many times did she marry? Five: Porter Ashe, Harry Gillig, Jackson Gouraud, Alexander Miskinoff and Prince Mstislav Galitzine.
Was she related to Charles Crocker? Yes. The railroad baron was her uncle, her father Edwin's younger brother.
Did she have children? One daughter, Alma, by her first husband, plus at least four adopted children.
Was she really tattooed? Yes. She was tattooed in spring 1899 by Hori Toyo, and the New York World revealed it in June 1901.
When did she die? On 7 February 1941 in New York. She's buried in Sacramento.
Is her memoir reliable? Only partly. The marriages, divorces and parties are documented. Many of the Asian adventures aren't.

A Sacramento Childhood With $10 Million Attached

Amy Isabella Crocker was born in Sacramento on 5 December, in either 1863 or 1864. The Crocker Art Museum gives 1863 and so does her grave record, while most biographies go with 1864. She didn't help matters, because she spent her adult life knocking years off her age on official paperwork.

Her father, Edwin B. Crocker, was an abolitionist lawyer who'd won a fugitive slave case at the US Supreme Court in 1851, sat on the California Supreme Court from 1863 and then became legal counsel to the Central Pacific Railroad. His younger brother Charles was one of the railroad's "Big Four", which made the man who built the Central Pacific Aimée's uncle. A stroke in 1869 ended Edwin's career, so the family spent 1869 to 1871 touring Europe and buying art at a rate of roughly a painting a day, much of it in Dresden.

Edwin died in 1875. Amy, the youngest, is reported to have inherited about $10 million, which puts her somewhere north of $200 million in today's money. In 1885 her mother Margaret gave the family gallery and its contents to the city of Sacramento, which is why the longest continuously running art museum in the American West still carries the family name.

Margaret had less luck with her youngest daughter. She sent Amy to a finishing school in Dresden at 15, hoping it would calm her down. Her biographer Kevin Taylor says she came back having had romances with a German prince and a Spanish matador instead.

The Honeymoon That Ended in a Train Wreck

At 18 she eloped with Richard Porter Ashe, a young San Francisco lawyer with a serious racetrack habit. Her mother announced the engagement two weeks after the couple were already married.

They headed south on the Southern Pacific's brand new Sunset Route, which had only opened on 12 January 1883. Eight days later, in the early hours of 20 January, the train stopped at the top of the Tehachapi grade, the brakes failed to hold and the carriages rolled backwards down the mountain, came off the rails and burned. Taylor's research puts the toll at 21 dead and 12 seriously injured, though other counts are lower. The dead included the wife of former California governor John Downey.

Aimée walked away unhurt. Porter got a bruised eye and lost $1,600 in cash, and her maid Minnie Patterson broke two ribs. As starts to married life go, it wasn't promising.

Her mother's wedding present was a mansion on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, complete with a third-floor Turkish bath measuring 30 feet by 10, with fountains and perfume sprays. The house outlasted the marriage by decades. It survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and was leased to the City of Paris department store before burning down in February 1913.

A Pistol, a Toddler and a Very Public Divorce

The Ashes had a daughter, Alma, in 1885. Two years later the marriage was finished and the fight over Alma turned ugly. On 29 April 1887, Porter and his brother Sydney turned up in Los Angeles and took the two-year-old from her nurse at a drug store. Porter drew a pistol in the process and was charged with carrying a concealed weapon, though the charge was later dropped.

A week of court hearings followed, with reporters taking down every word. On 6 May the judge gave custody to Porter. In the end neither parent raised her. Alma went to live with her grandmother Margaret, who adopted her and renamed her Gladys Crocker. Aimée got her divorce on 11 June 1887.

It was the first time the press feasted on her private life, a good twenty years before Evelyn Nesbit became the gold standard for Gilded Age scandal coverage. It wouldn't be the last.

Hawaii, a King and an Island

With her reputation in California shot, Aimée did what she'd do for the rest of her life when things got awkward. She left. She hired a schooner and sailed for Honolulu, arriving in the late 1880s and settling straight into the court of King Kalākaua, where she wore local dress, learned to dance hula and rode in horse races.

Her version is that the king gave her the title Princess Palaikalani, usually translated as "Bliss of Heaven", along with a small island and its 300 inhabitants. That story comes from Aimée and I haven't found a Hawaiian land record that backs up the island, so treat it with care.

What's better documented is her fling with Washington Irving Bishop, a famous American mind reader who performed for the king in Honolulu. He gave her private lessons in hypnotism for a few weeks. It ended, Taylor writes, when Bishop took her to a leper hospital as a joke. Also in the audience for Bishop's act was an amateur magician called Harry Gillig, who became husband number two in 1889.

The Asian Years, as Told by Aimée

From the late 1880s she spent the best part of a decade drifting around Asia, with and without Gillig. This is where the memoir gets wild. By her own account she lived in Tokyo with a Japanese baron, was held by a Chinese warlord near Shanghai who made her watch an execution, sailed with a Bornean prince and had to escape a jungle village by dugout canoe when the locals decided they'd rather kill her.

In India she claimed to have spent three weeks inside a harem near Bombay. The San Francisco Examiner ran that one in November 1909, calling her the first English-speaking woman to manage it. She later turned it into a short story about a woman dancing with a cobra.

None of these episodes has independent confirmation that I could find. That doesn't mean they're invented. It does mean that every retelling you'll read online, however confident it sounds, traces back to one source, and she was selling a book.

Something real did come home with her, though. She returned a committed Buddhist, practising yoga and meditation decades before either was fashionable in New York, and she started buying Buddha statues by the dozen.

The Tattooed Heiress

Tattoos are the one bit of her legend that's rock solid. In spring 1899 she was tattooed at home by Yoshisuke Hori Toyo, a Japanese master who'd trained under the celebrated Hori Chiyo, in an arrangement set up through Samuel O'Reilly's studio on the Bowery. O'Reilly is the man who patented the electric tattoo machine.

The Crocker Art Museum's own history of her tattoos lists a demon's head, a Japanese beetle and two snakes on her arms, one carrying the initials A.G. and the other J.G. The New York World got hold of it in June 1901 and ran a full-page colour feature with a notarised statement from O'Reilly confirming the work. By 1925 she'd added a snake on her leg and a butterfly on her back.

She wasn't quite as alone in this as it sounds. Tattooing was having a moment among the very rich, and London society had Sutherland Macdonald inking aristocrats in a Jermyn Street studio while George Burchett was building the clientele that would later include royalty. The difference is that most of those clients kept it under their sleeves. Aimée let the newspapers print diagrams.

Prize Bulldogs and a Poisoner

Before the snakes there were dogs. In 1896 she bought a brindle French bulldog called Pinko, at a time when hardly anyone in America had seen one, and within a couple of years she was the breed's loudest champion. Her star dog Dimboola took best in show at a Waldorf-Astoria dog show in 1898, and her bulldogs won their class at Westminster three years running.

Kevin Taylor, writing in the Sacramento News & Review, says her dogs were valued at $10,000 apiece and each had a wardrobe budget of at least $100 a year. He calls her perhaps the single most influential early promoter of the breed in the country, which is quite a legacy given that Frenchies are now among America's most popular dogs.

It ended horribly. In October 1900 somebody got into the kennels at her Larchmont estate and killed four of the dogs, including her prizewinner To To, with arsenic and powdered glass. Nobody was ever caught.

Queen of Bohemia: Snakes, Buddhas and the Dance of All Nations

She divorced Gillig in December 1900 and on 1 May 1901 married Jackson Gouraud, a songwriter and man about town. The speed of it caused a scandal of its own. By every account he was the one she actually loved, and together they turned their house at 46 West 56th Street into the loudest address in Manhattan.

Jackson Gouraud, third husband of Amy Crocker, was called, “The Best Dressed Man in New York.”

The parties are where the snakes come in. The most repeated story has her arriving at a society dinner wrapped in a sixty-pound boa constrictor while guests fainted around her. Time magazine, reviewing her memoir in 1936, noted that she'd once thrown a formal dinner in honour of a boa that had grown attached to her. The papers had other names for her too. The Crocker Art Museum records "Queen of the Pearls" and "the Tattooed Countess" alongside Queen of Bohemia, the first for the ropes of pearls she wore to pretty much everything.

The best documented bash is the Dance of All Nations, held one Sunday evening in December 1911 for about 150 guests. The entertainment included a python called Kaa, borrowed from a performer billed as Princess Sita Diva, and Aimée assured anyone nervous that it was "as gentle as a powder puff". The cast of the Broadway show Vera Violetta turned up, which means Al Jolson and an 18-year-old Mae West were probably in the room. Snake acts stayed a reliable way to shock American audiences for decades, as Zorita would prove on the burlesque circuit in the 1930s.

Jackson died on 21 February 1910, and she kept his surname for the rest of her life, whoever she happened to be married to.

Paris and the Fake Prince

Widowed, she moved to Paris and reinvented herself again. She published a book of short stories, Moon Madness and Other Fantasies, in November 1910. She staged a play at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in October 1911. For a while she lived at the Hôtel Biron, the crumbling mansion that Rodin, Matisse, Cocteau and Isadora Duncan all used as studios and which is now the Musée Rodin.

In June 1912 she bought a house in Passy for $150,000 and named it the House of Fantasy. Paris at that point was full of women doing exactly as they pleased, from balloonist and racing driver Camille du Gast downwards, and Aimée fitted right in.

Husband number four arrived on 11 June 1914, at a London registry office. Alexander Miskinoff called himself a Russian prince. The Russian embassy said he wasn't. The register gave his age as 26 and hers as 40. He'd just turned 30 and she was 49.

It lasted about sixteen months. Court papers alleged Miskinoff had been carrying on with her adopted daughter Yvonne, who'd been a witness at the wedding. He hit back by accusing his wife of "a desire to live a disorderly and tempestuous cabaret life", which she'd probably have put on a business card. The divorce became absolute on 25 October 1916.

Aimée Crocker and Aleister Crowley

While the Miskinoff farce was playing out, another man was circling. Aleister Crowley, the English occultist the press would later call the wickedest man in the world, was about eleven years younger than Aimée and every bit as fond of attention.

Taylor has pieced the affair together from Crowley's own magical diaries. In February 1914, during a series of rituals in Paris, Crowley recorded receiving a message that concerned her. That March he travelled to Tunis to meet her, at the very moment she was touring North Africa with her fiancé. By the start of 1915 the two were lovers in New York, and his diary logs her as a partner in the sex magic rituals he was obsessively recording at the time.

He raised her to the Ninth Degree of his order, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the highest rank open to a woman. He also, Taylor writes, proposed to her repeatedly over roughly ten years. She kept saying no. Crowley eventually soured on her and wrote her off as a selfish pleasure seeker, which from him was rich.

It's worth saying that almost all of this comes from Crowley's side of the story, and he wasn't a man known for underselling his conquests.

The Real Prince and Too Many Buddhas

In 1925, at a secret ceremony in Paris, she married Prince Mstislav Galitzine. This one was a real prince, born in Kyiv in 1899 and washed up in France after the revolution. He was 26. She was 60.

It went about as well as you'd expect. The divorce came through in May 1927, with Aimée citing infidelity and abandonment. Galitzine told the court it had been a business arrangement from the start, claiming she paid him $250 a month and threatened to halve it if he didn't perform to standard. He was Orthodox, she had more than 200 Buddhist figures around the house, and his most quoted complaint was that there were "too many Buddhas in the bedroom".

She won, he was ordered to pay the costs and she announced she was done with marriage for good. This time she meant it.

Aimée Crocker's Five Husbands at a Glance

Husband	Who he was	Married	How it ended
Richard Porter Ashe	San Francisco lawyer and racehorse man	December 1882	Divorced June 1887
Harry Gillig	Yachtsman and amateur magician	1889	Divorced December 1900
Jackson Gouraud	Songwriter and man about town	1 May 1901	He died 21 February 1910
Alexander Miskinoff	Self-styled Russian prince	11 June 1914	Divorced 25 October 1916
Prince Mstislav Galitzine	Exiled Russian prince, aged 26	1925	Divorced May 1927

What Happened to Aimée Crocker's Children?

For a woman who lived so publicly, her children are oddly hard to keep track of, partly because several of them changed names.

Alma, later Gladys. Her only biological child, raised and adopted by her grandmother Margaret after the 1887 custody fight. In a twist nobody could have scripted, Gladys grew up to marry Powers Gouraud, the brother of her mother's third husband, which made Aimée her own daughter's sister-in-law. Gladys died in 1947.
Yvonne and Reginald. Taylor dates their adoption to 1899 in Europe. Yvonne is the one caught up in the Miskinoff divorce. Family accounts have her later turning down a proposal from Rudolph Valentino, settling in Paris and raising three sons, though that rests on family lore more than paperwork.
Dolores and Yolanda. Adopted later. Yolanda Vera arrived in April 1915, in the middle of the Miskinoff marriage, and he tried to claim custody of her. Aimée testified that the child was adopted. She died in 1920, aged four or five.

The adventuring streak skipped a generation. Her grandson Gerald Russell became a zoologist and animal collector who, Taylor notes, was part of the 1936 expedition that brought Su-Lin, the first live giant panda, out of China, and later went looking for the Yeti.

And I'd Do It Again

Her memoir came out in 1936 from the New York publisher Coward-McCann, priced at $3. A lot of modern write-ups date it to 1934, but Time's review ran on 28 September 1936 and treats it as new. She set out her stall on the first page: "I have been accused of living adventurously. Let us admit the word."

The critics were not kind. Time called it "the silliest of the new crop" of women's autobiographies. The Los Angeles Times went further and labelled it "a deplorable record". A reviewer in Singapore, who presumably knew the region she was describing, thought it should have been sold as fiction. A few were charmed in spite of themselves, with a Birmingham paper admitting it was a string of rattling good stories.

She died of pneumonia at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York on 7 February 1941, in her late seventies. Her body went home to Sacramento, where she's buried in the Historic City Cemetery alongside the family whose expectations she'd spent a lifetime ignoring.

How Much of It Is True?

More than you'd think, and less than she claimed. Here's roughly where the line falls.

Documented: the Tehachapi wreck, the 1887 custody case, all five marriages and four divorces, the 1899 tattoos, the prize bulldogs, the 1911 Dance of All Nations, the Paris house and the 1936 memoir. These show up in court records and contemporary newspapers.
Probably true but dressed up: the Hawaiian title, the Bishop affair and the boa constrictor dinner. There's outside evidence for the outline, but the details are hers.
Unverified: the island with 300 inhabitants, the Shanghai warlord, the Borneo escape and the Bombay harem. All rest on her own telling.
Shaky: a popular claim that she once got into a drinking contest with Oscar Wilde. Wilde did visit San Francisco in 1882, when she was a teenager, but I couldn't find a contemporary source that puts the two of them at the same table.

What isn't in doubt is that a woman born into one of the stuffiest fortunes in California spent sixty years doing exactly what she wanted, in public, with the press watching, and never once said sorry for it. Plenty of Gilded Age heirs, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt among them, spent their money on horses and yachts. Aimée bought snakes.