New Release: The Thirteenth Husband by Greer MacAllister

The Thirteenth Husband is a new novel by historical fiction writer Greer MacAllister about controversial Gilded Age heiress Aimée Crocker. Its recipes, its characters and stories, were taken directly from cookbooks compiled by historian and archivist Kevin Taylor who has been studying the protagonist of the novel and her orbit for many years.

“I found her back in 2008. I was then manager of an artist colony at the old twelve-story Crocker Bank building in downtown Los Angeles,” said Taylor. “It was a very lively Bohemian building. When we weren’t hosting huge crowds at art parties and major film shoots and when I wasn’t fielding complaints about ghost activity in the creepy old building, I was investigating the Crockers.”

“I first learned all about the now defunct bank, then the Crocker brothers and how they built the Transcontinental Railroad. And then I learned about the family black sheep and trouble maker Aimée. Looking back, I was hooked as soon as I heard the title of her 1936 travel memoirs And I’d Do It Again. Her personality absolutely leaps off the page. She cast a spell. Within months I was interviewing her offspring in Paris for my first book about the heiress Aimée Crocker’s Refined Vaudeville.”

And I’d Do It Again, published in London as Without Regrets, was at that time a cult classic named the number one out-of-print biography in the country, beating out Marilyn by Norman Mailer. It’s no surprise. Her potboiler memoirs has it all. An opium den in Hong Kong. A double murder in Bombay. An assassination attempt in Shanghai. Headhunters in Borneo.

Taylor started his saturnalian investigative journey at the Crocker Art Museum archives and the State Library in Sacramento. His research has taken him to several continents.

The historian discovered early on that many of the embellished and dramatized stories in Crocker’s memoirs, which focused on her round the world odyssey in 1894-95, were giving cover and distraction for other stories left out of her memoirs that were even more outrageous, most of which involved her spectacular love life.

Aimée Crocker was clearly an active social butterfly and a talented, flamboyant coquette. But when her first marriage fell apart the national press wrote salacious stories depicting Crocker as a promiscuous adulteress. The disparaging term “adventuress” was used to describe her, which at that time meant that she was something between a maneating hussy and an evil woman. It didn’t matter that it was her husband that was judged to be the adulterer by the courts. She was branded with the scarlet letter.

After that all bets were off.

She was linked romantically in the press to dancers, writers, musicians, princes, counts, a state senator, an ambassador, a commodore, a baron, a king and an emperor. The press didn’t catch wind of a possible fling with Rudolph Valentino when she was in her fifties and he was in his twenties, and a definite sexual entanglement with wicked magician Aleister Crowley. She married five times in five different decades of her life, each time to a man in his twenties.

Finding a reliable narrator in the story of the Bohemian heiress is a challenging thing for a historian. “A good portion of the thousands of articles that I have collected are peppered with gossip and reek of yellow journalism,” reports Taylor. “William Randolph Hearst issued a personal letter of apology and a retraction when a slanderous story appeared in his newspaper linking Crocker romantically to Sir Henry Norman, an English journalist and Liberal Member of Parliament. The apology was given to Norman, of course, not the ‘wanton trollop’ Aimée Crocker.”

The heiress lost control of her life story very early in life. She wrote And I’d Do It Again to have a kind of final say. And she did until Taylor started his investigation and found an avalanche of bodacious stories that, once compiled, gave a fuller, more interesting picture of a quintessential free-thinking, free-loving, free-spirited woman, who became the focal point of a Bohemian counter-culture movement.

In The Thirteenth Husband, Greer MacAllister tackles this broader life story of Crocker which is based on Taylor’s exhaustive, “invaluable” research that she found in his books and on his Crocker themed website. “There were many moments when MacAllister channels the great Bohemian’s spirit,” said Taylor. “I applaud her taking on the challenge.”

Crocker is a complex character subject to an array of interpretations. Some will say she was a feminist, others sexually liberated, still others a insipid and shallow hedonist, debauchee and libertine. The heiress in fact had a deep and yearning inquisitive side and was an earnest student of Eastern religions. She also studied esoteric philosophies under guru Aleister Crowley. She spanned the globe in ardent pursuit of both spiritual enlightenment and carnal adventures. While on the road, Aimée was often pilloried and ostracized by Westerners for fraternizing with foreigners and “cultural crossdressing.”

Crocker was an enigmatic figure before her book’s release. After its publication, she became a mythological creature. The New York World wrote that she was “a genius of individuality” and compared her to Hebe, the daughter of Zeus, a goddess who had the power to restore youth to mortals, and who was responsible for keeping all the gods at Mt. Olympus eternally young. She was named by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “The Most Fantastic Woman of Her Age.”

Aimée Crocker wrote her fantastic book forty years after her globe girdling tour. Was the heiress herself a historical fiction writer? Crocker tells her readers that her memoirs are absolutely honest recollections, and that she didn’t have the skills to write fiction. Taylor reflects:

None of her flabbergasting, jaw-dropping Asian adventures can be corroborated, though her Hawaiian tales ring true. Her interactions with Oscar Wilde are embellished but her friendships with Robert Louis Stevenson and his family are left out. She doesn’t mention the fake Russian prince that she married in her book or the real Russian count. There is a lot to sort out and reassemble. Whether the collection of stories in And I’d Do It Again were 100% historically accurate or not, they are lively tales well told. The protagonist in her memoirs was both an exceedingly engaging personality and a sexy story teller. If she was a historical fiction writer, she is the best in the business and the character that she created is pure gold.

Historical fiction is a literary category that enjoys unwavering popularity as it blends entertaining storytelling with the gravitas of history. The challenge to the writer is to breathe life and contemporary relevance into distant times without distorting their essence. “The author’s chief responsibility is historical fidelity,” says Taylor, “honoring the people and events they are writing about. When you write historical fiction, you’re not just telling a story, you’re bringing a forgotten time back to existence, you’re resurrecting events and figures that might otherwise fade from collective memory.”

Taylor’s own time traveling process involves tracing the footsteps of the characters, visiting their homes and haunts, interviewing their offspring, combing through photo morgues and immersing himself in period articles, diaries and letters. The real insights and revelations, according to Taylor, are found in attics and basements and faraway private libraries. “Historical accuracy is rarely found on YouTube or Netflix. I abhor period pieces and costume dramas that drastically rewrites history and historical characters, removes any whiff of political incorrectness, and then attaches a heavy metal soundtrack,” remarks Taylor.

His second book, Aimée Crocker: Queen of Bohemia, casts Crocker as a transcontinental, transcendental tour guide who takes readers on a steam powered journey throughout the Occident and the Orient and introduces them to some of the most dynamic and challenging people of the Gilded Age, the Belle Époque, and the Edwardian Era. In her orbit were legendary, world changing characters like Oscar Wilde, August Rodin, Thomas Edison, Aleister Crowley, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and, of course, Charles Crocker, as well as many other lesser known heroic exemplars such as Edgar Saltus, Henry George, Paul Poiret and Eugen Sandow. With his website, aimeecrocker.com, Taylor includes some stories where Aimée and the Crockers play more of a supporting role.

Taylor confides, “I am periodically approached by film producers interested in an Aimée Crocker vehicle. I have several now in development. But the joy in my Crocker obsession comes from going on these various deep dive research expeditions. There are a half-dozen holy grails that I’m on the hunt for in this endless creative journey. My research will take me to Northern Africa in the spring. I couldn’t possibly finish all of the essays that I plan to write. Meanwhile I have gotten to learn from archetypal sages and scientists, inventors, artists and self-made men. And the Queen of Bohemia herself,” says Taylor. “These characters are very alive to me at this point. I have gained access to a magic portal and I’ve invoked many a magnanimous character. I can’t wait to see who I meet next.”

Purchase The Thirteenth Husband