Gouraud, Aimée Crocker, 1864-1941
Aimée Isabella Crocker (December 5, 1864 – February 7, 1941) was an American mystic, Bohemian, author, and member of the wealthy Crocker family. She was known for her cultural exploration of the Far East, for her extravagant parties in San Francisco, New York and Paris, and her collections of husbands and lovers, adopted children, Buddhas, pearls, tattoos, and snakes.
Early life and family
Crocker was born Amy Isabella Crocker on December 5, 1864, in Sacramento, California, to Judge Edwin B. Crocker and his second wife Margaret (née Rhodes). In 1875, the ten-year-old Crocker inherited $10 million (approximately $277,455,000 today) when her father "E.B" died.[1][2] In 1880, her mother Margaret decided to send the boy-crazy Amy to a finishing school in Dresden, Germany. There she was presented at court and had her first love affair and engagement with Prince Alexander of Saxe Weimar.[3] Crocker broke off the engagement and quickly had a brief entanglement with a Spanish bullfighter.
In 1883, Crocker made headlines when she was traveling to Los Angeles on her honeymoon with first husband, Porter Ashe. After the public humiliation of losing her child to her ex-husband, Crocker decided to accept an invitation that she had received years earlier by King Kalākaua to tour Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands. Kalākaua was so enamored with Crocker that he gave her one of his islands and an official title: Princess Palaikalani—Bliss of Heaven.[9]: 45 She found an occasional traveling companion in her second husband, Henry Mansfield Gillig, whom she married in 1889. Gillig was a Commodore, a prestidigitator, and a respected amateur opera singer who cultivated his voice under the Polish master Jean de Reszke.[10] Crocker met her third husband, songwriter Jackson Gouraud, at a Buddhist colony that she organized (said to be the first in Manhattan). Gouraud wrote the ragtime melodies “Keep Your Eye on Your Friend, Mr. Johnson,” “She's a 'Spectable Married Colored Lady,” “I'se Workin'—I'se Hustlin,” “He's My Soft Shell Crab on Toast,” and “My Jetney Queen.” He set the town singing with the broadly comic number-one hit of his song writing career, “Waldorf-Hyphen-Astoria.” Marrying a showman was controversial at the time to her family and peers as Jackson was considered an "upper servant" at best and beneath the dignity of New York high society. Jackson's father, George Edward Gouraud, was himself an internationally known figure who acted as an agent for Thomas Edison in Europe. He helped found the Edison Telephone Company of London, and a number of European companies using Edison's technology.[11]
Crocker and Gouraud adopted three children, Reginald, Yvonne and Dolores (she would later adopt another daughter Yolanda), and acquired numerous bulldogs. The couple lived in Oriental-themed homes in Manhattan and on Long Island. They also had tattoos of each other's initials inscribed inside coiling snakes. Crocker then reunited with her daughter, Gladys, who went on to marry Gouraud's brother, Powers, making her daughter (who was already legally her sister) a sister-in-law.[12]
Aimée with children Yvonne and Reginald (circa 1905) photo courtesy of Crocker Art Museum
The couple became well known Broadway “First Nighters” attending all of the opening nights of the biggest plays at the grandest theaters. Crocker befriended all of the popular performers of the era including Anna Held, David Belasco, John Drew, and the Barrymore family. Her good friend, Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, often visited and sometimes performed at her New York homes.[9]: 288 Crocker would eventually be invited to play herself on Broadway at the grand opening of the Folies Bergère Theater in Rennold Wolf's vaudeville “profane satire” piece Hell, with music by Irving Berlin.[13] Another Aimée Crocker inspired character would turn up in a modern society comedy "The Lassoo," by Victor Mapes, a few years later at the Lyceum. Broadway legend George M. Cohan wrote a comedy "Broadway Jones," and a musical "Billie," with an Aimée Crocker character.
The Gourauds made headlines in the early 1900s when their lavish mansion on the Long Island Sound burned to the ground, and when, on another occasion, several of Crocker's prize winning French bulldogs were poisoned. The power couple was known to go on "slumming" tours through the dregs of lower New York City with good friend and self-proclaimed mayor of Chinatown, Chuck Connors, who Crocker claimed silently ruled the Underworld.[9]: 269–270
Around this time, Crocker began hosting lavish parties that shocked and embarrassed New York's conservative upper crust. She threw a Robinson Crusoe-themed party in Parisian treetops in 1905. At a country circus party at the Hippodrome, then the largest theater in New York, she appeared as a dairy maid and arrived on the back of an elephant. Her co-host that evening was the legendary scallywag/carnival barker Wilson Mizner who would later become a co-owner of the Brown Derby. She knew the Mizner boys from her San Francisco days and was linked romantically in print to Wilson's brother Lans. Another memorable appearance was as Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, in a costume party in Paris, and yet another gala that she hosted had her pet boa constrictor, Kaa, as the guest of honor.[9]: 269–270
Her crowning achievement as “Entertainer of Entertainers” which received press all over the world would be “The Dance of all Nations.” The program that evening featured the very frank “Salome” dance, the curious Vienna Viggle, and the “cannibal” dancer Dogmeena, whose costume consisted of coconut oil and a red sash, and who enthusiastically danced in La Danse des Igorrotes. Crocker, appearing in pearls “that would clothe a baby and ransom a king,” delighted the company when she danced La Madrilena, an Argentine tango (then denounced and forbidden by the Catholic Church) with one of her most recent admirers.[14] A little later, with a twelve-foot snake twined round her neck, she appeared in La Danse de Cobra. When her guests backed away from the snake's emerald eyes and darting tongue, she exclaimed, “It's as gentle as a powder puff."
Because of her frenetic and lascivious lifestyle, Crocker was shunned by much of New York society including some members of her extended family. The public, however, was mesmerized by her. The Philadelphia Inquirer named her "The Most Fascinating Woman of Her Age" [15] and "The Queen of Bohemia."[16] The Bohemian set in New York worshiped her. They were spellbound by the adventurous stories of the well-traveled heiress. They were impressed by her bevy of young male admirers. They were inspired by the guest lists at her gatherings, which were brimming with both illustrious and infamous merrymakers. She sometimes cohosted events with Bohemian artist friend Edmund Russell, who was a well known "Delsartean" lifestyle coach, an actor, an apostle of Madame Helena Blavatsky, and Aimée Crocker's portrait painter.
Crocker and Alexander Miskinoff in 1914
Later years
In 1910, Gouraud died of an acute attack of tonsillitis. The devastated heiress was hospitalized in Paris. Later that year, a publicity tour for her first book catapulted her into the spotlight. For the next 20 years she was America's most eccentric personality whose every move made headlines. She changed the spelling of her name from “Amy” to “Aimée” for the book and moved her children to an estate in Paris dubbed “The House of Fantasy.” Crocker would live off and on for the next 27 years in the City of Lights, throwing sensational and neurotic parties and housing young artists and exiled Russian nobles. She briefly lived in an artist colony at Hôtel Biron whose other residents included Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Jean Cocteau and Isadora Duncan.[17]
After Gouraud's death, Crocker was romantically linked to many high-profile men including: Eduardo García-Mansilla, the great Argentinean musician, composer and diplomat, with whom she wrote a song Mon Amour; Genia D'Agarioff, opera baritone singer, who is credited with being the first person to sing in the Russian language in London and Paris; composer, performer, designer, director, and arranger Melville Ellis; Jacques Lebaudy, the self-proclaimed "Emperor of the Sahara"; and legendary French actor Édouard de Max, “The Most Beautiful Man in Paris.”[18] Another notable suitor during this period was famous ceremonial magician, occultist, Tantra master and hedonist Aleister Crowley. Crowley wrote about their memorable decade long affair in graphic detail in his journals. He proposed marriage to Crocker nearly every time he saw her or wrote to her.[19]
Though she kept the name Gouraud for the rest of her life, Crocker went on to marry and divorce two more times, both to Russian princes decades younger than her. Her fourth husband, Alexander Miskinoff, caused a stir on two continents when he was accused of having an extramarital affair with Crocker's then 15-year-old adopted daughter, Yvonne. Aimée would marry her fifth and final husband, Prince Mstislav Galitzine, when she was 61 and he was 26. When asked by a friend who lost count of her marriages whether Mstislav was her fifth or sixth husband, she said, “The prince is my twelfth husband if I include in my matrimonial list seven Oriental husbands, not registered under the laws of the Occident.”[20]
Death Crocker died on February 7, 1941.[21] She was interred in the Crocker family plot along with her third husband, Jackson, and two of her daughters in the Sacramento Historic City Cemetery.[22] The brass urns holding both her ashes and the ashes of her third husband, Jackson Gouraud, were stolen.
