14.12.08

F I R S TP R E V906NEXTLAST

Uninvited Guests, Grand Hyatt Union Square
This wedding scene from last Saturday evening provides a nice segue to discuss Aimee Crocker. She was her age's most notorious free spirit, a heiress who inherited millions, married five times, and, in her later years, often wore Kaa, twelve-foot pet boa constrictor around her neck.

In 1873, when she was just ten, Aimee Crocker demanded that her wealthy mother buy her an elaborate Chinese bed that she found in San Francisco's Chinatown. Years later, Aimee would credit that ornate bed with drawing her imagination across the Pacific to the exotic East. As a young girl she traveled to the East with an inattentive chaperone and engaged in love affairs with a Japanese lord, a Chinese merchant, and a Borneo chieftain.

Her displeased mother shipped her off to Europe to be educated. But once in there she fell in love with a German prince and later a bullfighter from Madrid. Aimee then returned to San Francisco, was married and divorced in short order. She next hired a 70-foot schooner and took off for a South Seas adventure where she horrified the missionaries in Hawaii with her sexual escapades. King Kalakaua however was charmed by the lively young heiress and gave her an entire island where she was named princess of its 300 inhabitants.

Another marriage came and went as did several more lovers. Aimee traveled the globe and amused herself in various ways such as hunting big game from a maharaja's Indian palace or, on a dare, spending three weeks in a Turkish Harem. On her 62nd birthday she married a Russian prince (her second) in Paris but later divorced him as well. She eventually returned to America, wrote her memoir And I'd Do It Again, and sometimes danced veiled in a supper club. She died at the Hotel Savoy in New York City, unmarried and happy at 78 years of age.
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