American world traveler, adventuress, heiress and mystic, Aimée Crocker was dubbed the “Queen of Bohemia” in the 1910s by the world press for living an uninhibited, sexually liberated and aggressively non-conformist life in San Francisco, New York and Paris. She spent the bulk of her fortune inherited from her father Edwin B. Crocker, a railroad tycoon and art collector, on traveling all over the world (lingering the longest in Hawaii, India, Japan and China) and partying with accomplished artists of her time. She was famous for her collections of tattoos, pet snakes, pearls, husbands and lovers. Aimée was by all accounts, an Olympic-caliber sexual athlete; she married five times in five different decades of her life, each man being in his twenties. Two claimed to be Russian royals.
Spiritually inquisitive, Crocker had a ten-year affair with occultist Aleister Crowley, was a devoted student of Hatha Yoga, and formed the first Buddhist colony in Manhattan.
In 1936, Crocker wrote a biography/travel book, And I’d Do It Again. Included in her life story: a harrowing honeymoon train crash in California; a blood curdling escape down a jungle river; an abduction by a Dyak prince; a lesbian double suicide; a poisoning in Hong Kong; a murder attempt by knife-throwing servants in Shanghai; a search for Kaivalya (Liberation) at the cave of the Great Yogin Bhojaveda in Poona, India; and two bizarre sensual/sexual experiences, one with an Indian boa constrictor, and another with a Chinese violin in the “House of the Ivory Panels.”
Aimée Crocker’s bucket list of Bohemian escapades would make the free thinking, free loving, free spirited poseurs of today green with envy:
- Crocker had romances with foreign powerful men on several continents, some decades younger than her.
- She was the first English speaking woman to spend time in a harem;
- lived in the “Chelsea Hotel of Paris” with a pantheon of genius artists such as Rodin, Matisse, Jean Cocteau and Isadora Duncan, (who entertained Picasso at their studios); and,
- went to the red-light district of Hong Kong by rickshaw, hung out at an opium den, and paid to free an addicted slave prostitute.
- Aimée purchased a home in Paris which is quickly dubbed the “House of Fantasy” by the press, which provided sumptuous accommodations for a few exiled Russian noblemen (who plotted a counter-revolution) and some artists (including a young painter that she nicknamed Bobo).
- She got matching tattoos with her new boyfriend before the divorce decree from her second husband was inked;
- engaged in mind blowing conversations with Aleister Crowley about Qabalah, the Gnostic Gospels, and Sex Magick, then tested out some of his theories; and,
- was accused of being an “immoral hussy” by missionaries and commanded to leave the island country of Hawaii. (The king luckily favored her company).
- The aeriodite heiress also hosted the great baritone Enrico Caruso at a Broadway after party in her Manhattan home where he sang to a delighted crowd that included the legendary Barrymores;
- accepted an offer to play herself on Broadway in a vaudeville show called “Hell” with music by Irving Berlin;
- went on a tour to promote her new book of short stories Moon Madness that her publisher referred to as “arabesques” and the press called “memoirs in fiction form”;
- spent steamy summer evenings showing a young protégé named Rudolph Valentino how to do the Argentine Tango, the forbidden dance, in a New York nightclub; and,
- invited all of blue blood New York to a birthday party for H. H. Kaa, Maharajah of Amber. She laughed as the faint of heart in the crowd collapsed and screamed for the exits as they learned that the Maharajah was her pet boa constrictor.
To name just a few highlights….
The Philadelphia Inquirer would name Aimée Crocker “The Most Fantastic Woman of Her Age.” The New York World said 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… who was responsible for keeping all the gods at Mt. Olympus eternally young. Aimée Crocker would spread the Gospel of Bohemia boldly to the far corners of the world, to the Occident and the Orient, and dig channels between high and low culture, outsiders and insiders. She laid tracks for Troubadour beatniks and flower-faced drug-laden hippies of future generations.
All of the forces of nature vied with one another in heaping on Aimée Crocker their choicest gifts. She had wealth and she was perfectly independent. Crocker and her posse are an emporium of human curiosities, a constellation of some of the most extravagant and extraordinary personalities from the Civil War to World War II. Crocker mixed easily with royalty and ruffian. Though she had connections to the highest levels of society, her true milieu was a network of similarly free agents from all walks of life. Her coterie included a pantheon of unique and fearless spirits. Rare blooms. Some are legends even today (Oscar Wilde, the Barrymores, Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan, Enrico Caruso, Aleister Crowley, Rudolph Valentino, Auguste Rodin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Isadora Duncan, Thomas Edison, and, of course, Charles Crocker) and others were like her destined to face an ill-deserved obscurity, but who emerge from the shadows of history as unsung influences on our lives.
Aimée Crocker was a champion of vivid individuality who lived for intrigue and outrage. Drawing on her irresistible charm, she carefully crafted an electric, eccentric persona, and with the assistance of the press, became the quintessential–the archetypal–Bohemian muse. She wrote:
I believe absolutely that living, in the completest sense of that word… discovering the full beauty of living and plunging oneself utterly into the human beings that swarm through this life… is a pure art. It is, I honestly think, the highest artistic accomplishment we can hope for. All the recognized arts…your paintings, your sculpture, your music, your books…all those things are only the symbols of that higher art: living.
It wasn’t an extraordinary body of work that she left behind, but how she lived that was her real masterpiece.
–Kevin Taylor
Authorized biographer
frugoliandtaylor@gmail.com