AND I’D DO IT AGAIN
Aimée Crocker
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About And I’d Do It Again
With the world at her feet and Californian railroad fortunes in her purse, Aimée Crocker had a tale or two to tell. Here, she boldly delivers her hilarious memoirs of escaping headhunters in Borneo, avoiding poisoning in Hong Kong and outwitting murder in Shanghai.
Not remotely cowered by her skirmishes with sin, shame or vice, Aimée celebrates her quintet of unfortunate husbands including a Russian prince almost forty years her junior and King Kalakaua of Hawaii, emboldened by her forcefulness to hold sway over the faint of heart.
Aimée was a woman of means, not always a lady and never what you might call ‘proper’. In this laugh-out-loud story of her life, she recounts her adventures with flair, invincibility and unapologetic gusto.
With a foreword by Helen Lederer.
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
About And I’d Do It Again
Foreword
Preface
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
About Aimée Crocker
Great Lives: Great Women’s Lives
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
FOREWORD
BY HELEN LEDERER
As a child, I had a best friend whose parents encouraged her to paint murals on their kitchen wall. Oddly, when I tried this at home, my Bohemian artwork (biro on wallpaper) was not met with the same enthusiasm. But I always wanted to be different; I was always attracted to the unconventional ways of having fun.
I mention this because Aimée Crocker’s memoirs will appeal to the lurking adventuress in us all. From an early age, Aimée knew she would reject her conventional upbringing to travel and discover other cultures. And while her ‘calling’ was possibly more noble than my yen to become a small, fat show-off (as one school report would have it), we both share a spirit of curiosity and a distinct unease with convention; Aimée’s abhorrence of the mundane oozes from almost every page of this beguiling book.
Born into affluence, Aimée was the daughter of a judge whose family was well-heeled and well-known. She was sent to a finishing school in Europe and then, presumably, was expected to find a suitable aristocrat to marry.
But Aimée had other ideas. Instead of returning home, she set sail for the Far East almost immediately. She canoed down crocodile infested rivers, was seduced by men of dubious pedigree, and on one occasion had a brush with a snake prompting a rather unusual erotic awakening. But thankfully, Aimée embraced these discoveries without apology or compromise. Her need for wit from her fellows, her cheerful enthusiasm for the male body and her deep fascination with other ways of life, made her a woman of hope and adventure. She was as honest as she was naïve and in my view, it’s better to be naïve and give yourself up to experience, than to stay home and miss the party.
Aimée was a trailblazer and her book is a characterful reminder of how far we have come, particularly if you incline towards authenticity and a freedom of spirit over the limitations of stereotypes. At a time when women were expected to take an interest in fabrics and wifely duties in the home, Aimée was gamely traversing continents, behaving as little like a tourist as possible.
She threw herself at new worlds with humility, openness and ‘pushiness’ and despite a near fatal train accident, a beheading from a Bornean head hunter, a narrow escape from a rampant warlord and losing to Oscar Wilde in a drinking game, Aimée triumphed.
A true original, her steely determination to bypass social strictures and have a ‘lark’, made for a colourful if eventful life. Such antics would not have been considered suitable behaviour at the time for her contemporaries, but Aimée broke rules. She followed her impulses and passions, flouting convention whenever she could.
Today we celebrate 21st century pioneers such as Cheryl Strayed who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail solo and Junko Tabei, the first woman to climb Mount Everest. We no longer dismiss such women as ‘eccentric’. We admire their strength and bravery. But let us also include Aimée Crocker in this canvas of women who followed their dreams. Admittedly her adventures are marginally less athletic, but her pleasure in the telling of them calls out to the Bohemian in all of us.
And if the abundance of death and drama makes some of you wonder if it could all be true, I would encourage the doubting Thomasinas among you to go with the spirit of adventure. It is always better to travel than to arrive. And have fun. Bon voyage.
PREFACE
This book is not to be mistaken for an apology. Not at all.
If I have lived fully and richly I thank God for it. My only regrets are for the things that I have not done and for the experiences I have not had. Also for the people I have not known.
I believe absolutely that living, in the completest sense of that word … discovering the full beauty of living and plunging one’s self 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.
I have been accused of living adventurously. Let us admit the word. But I have never been an “adventuress.” If I have never cared about your man-made conventions (and every modern schoolgirl would laugh at those of my day), I was not immoral, but un-moral. If I have often loved, I have at least loved well and fully. I have nothing to be ashamed of, in spite of the scandalous press reports that hopeful reporters managed to use to amuse a scandal-loving public. And if I have dared to stick my nose into trouble just because the game was fun, does it make me a brazen hussy?
No, this is not an apology.
It is the recollections of a woman who is no longer young and who has crowded a great deal of movement and fun and action and love and adventure into a lifetime now drawing towards its close.
And if I could live it again, this very long life of mine, I would love to do so. And the only difference would be that I would try to crowd in still more … more places, more things, more women, more men, more love, more excitement.
Let the Mrs. Grundys arch their eyebrows and reach for their smelling salts.
Charles Crocker, uncle of Aimée, was the founder of the Central Pacific Railroad. Portrait c. 1972 by Stephen W. Shaw.
✥
It does not matter in the least about my early childhood except for three things. I choose these because they had a bearing on the rest of my life.
I was born a Crocker of San Francisco, which is another way of saying that I had the “golden spoon” in my mouth. The Crocker family needs no introduction nor comment. For those who never read the papers I might say that we were exceedingly wealthy.
Infancy and childhood passed in the Californian metropolis. I was very much like any other child. I had the same fun,
same naughtinesses, same prodigiousnesses. Why bore you with all that? Those three things of my young girlhood that matter are a vision I had and two childish passions.
The vision came to me first before I had reached my teens. It was in Sacramento, in a huge, roomy, comfortable house. I can still remember the details and the arrangement and the atmosphere but it does not matter. One moonlight night I ran ahead of my nurse upstairs, when it was time to go to bed. I was not afraid of the dark, I remember, but rather enjoyed it. I cannot say now whether I felt an exhilaration or any sort of an “odd” feeling, although it is possible that I did. When I think of that experience now it is so entwined in later experiences, so almost frightful, that I am not sure.
Whether or not, I ran ahead of Nurse and got to my room before she reached my stairs. The moonlight was pouring in the large bay window and shone directly on my bed. I could see very plainly, stretched out on my white bedspread, a woman.
I knew she was very beautiful but I could not see her features because they were covered over with a veil of some gossamer material up to her eyes, and she was dressed in colored silk robes, a costume such as I had never seen, even in pictures. There she lay, radiant and shining, her arms stretched back on the bed, and looking straight at me. She smiled, I remember. She seemed to know me.
And it was somehow … I can hardly explain it … as though I knew her, too; as though she were there naturally, as if she belonged to me.
I was not frightened, but I was excited. I ran back to the stairs and called out to Nurse who was lumbering up, and I told her to hurry. I remember that I did not say why. Good old Nurse ran up as fast as her heavy legs could carry her, thinking something had happened to me. But when she came into my room, and there was nothing wrong at all, she was angry. Actually the woman on the bed had disappeared as soon as I moved to call Nurse. The whole incident had taken about ten seconds.
I tried to tell Nurse about it, but it was no use. I knew perfectly well that I had seen some one on the bed, but to her simple, honest and awfully practical mind it was all stuff and nonsense.
But twenty years later I was to see this same vision again, clearly and unforgettably, and a very wise man was to explain to me what it meant, or rather just enough of what it meant to open up, just a crack of the way, the doorway through which the age-old wisdom of the East is able to look back along the curious streets of Life and to see what all our science and our Western “knowledge” has never even suspected.
And, perhaps if that very wise man had been able to tell me about it in those days when I was a child, I would have been able to understand it more fully. At all events I felt more fully, and I have always believed that children in their simplicity are a little closer to that great understanding which is so remarkable a part of the Orient.
And I shall see this vision once more before I die. That same very wise man told me so, and I believe it utterly. It will be the end, then. It frightens me. Not that I am afraid to die, but rather afraid of the great mystery of death, afraid of what I do not understand, of things that I have seen strange vague glimpses of during this curious life of mine.
So much for the vision. The two childish passions are more difficult to explain because there is no real story in them. Perhaps the best way is to say plainly that everything that smelled or reminded me of or in any way suggested the Orient had a fascination for me from the day of my vision.
Pearls, for instance. I adored them. I used to save all my allowance money for them. I had a miniature collection when I was very young. The more sparkling stones … diamonds, emeralds, rubies … they were all pretty pieces of glass to me. But pearls said something to me. I could not have told you what they said, but they were alive to me. And later on in life, when I was able to have some of the loveliest pearls, I discovered that I made them glow, gave them luster, just by wearing them or touching them. Women have often asked me to wear their pearls just to restore their lost luster.
When I was still in pigtails I could sit for hours with a beautiful pearl pendant of Mother’s, watching the liquid color-changes, feeling them warm in my hand. I believe pearls hypnotized me in some strange way. Certainly they had some influence upon me, and to this day it has never ceased. It is all wrapped up in this power of the East over me, a power which has never dimmed, which has never left me, even though I am now too old to go there, to the world where my life blossomed. And if you could see the brown bodies of the pearl fishers going down, knife in teeth, to bring up the precious drops of iridescence for the trade, if you could see the clusters of them that stud the head-dress of some haughty, obese and sulky harem favorite, as I have seen them, you would understand how much of the soul of the Orient glows in the mysterious luster of pearls.
Very young indeed was I when the finger of the East reached out across the Pacific and touched me. For instance I had a Chinese bed which I picked out for myself when I was only ten years old. That was my other childish passion. It is not a very important incident, perhaps, nor a very entertaining story, but it is just one more key to my later life.
Ten years old, I was. Perhaps a trifle older. I was to be given a bed of my very own. My mother took me into the shopping district of San Francisco and we looked at a great many good old-fashioned, mid-Victorian beds. None of them interested me very much and I paid little attention to them. But while we were walking about we looked into some sort of an antique shop and there I saw a bed … a bed of exquisitely carved teakwood, canopied like a little house. I could feel that it was alive with something of me, I could feel that it was trying to speak to me. I had never seen nor heard of a Chinese bed, but I knew perfectly well that it was for me. It is the only way I can express what I felt. Children all will know what I mean.
So I set up a cry for the bed (I dare say it was ridiculously expensive) and nothing would quiet me until my mother had paid for it and ordered it sent home at once. I slept in my Chinese bed that very night and I have slept in one ever since, even to this day, whenever I have not been traveling. I have had others, but never one that was so close to something inexpressible in me as that first one.
As I say, this little incident does not seem very important and yet I know now that it showed something very definite about me, young as I was. My life was to prove it.
But let me go on with my story.
Up to the age of fourteen I was a little savage. My family moved about from San Francisco to Sacramento and back again. I was spoiled and indulged and let run wild and pampered. I played about the water fronts like a young beachcomber. I baby-flirted with the sailors and the sea-captains who all gave me little things from the other side of the world across the blue Pacific, and told me endless stories. Incidentally, I learned to swear then. I guess that was about all I learned, too, because my schooling was shamefully neglected until I was getting to be quite a big girl.
Then my parents decided that I should go to Europe and be educated. So off I was packed with a party of other California girls of wealthy parents under the chaperonage of Mrs. C. who turned out to be pretty much of a failure as the guardian of the young, prankish and romantic little imps that we were.
We went to Dresden. We went to one of those curious schools which Europe creates especially for American girls where you learn nothing at all of any practical value or educational merit, but where you learn to act like a duchess, to flirt outrageously, to wear the clothes of a society woman ten years older than your age, to smoke, to drink and to carry on with the handsome, heel-clicking young officers of the court in their musical comedy uniforms. And if the chaperon is the same sort as Mrs. C. you learn to do a number of things that would make dear old Victorian mothers reach for their prayer-books.
But all in all it was rather fun, and I seriously believe it gives poise, and that is what a woman needs more than anything else in life.
Mrs. C., as I have already suggested, was not a model duenna. Excellent woman, of good social standing in San Francisco, her fortune needed padding a little, and she
had consequently “consented” to escort this little party of girls abroad for finishing. She was well-meaning and sweet, but the fact that her young charges were daughters of some of the wealthiest citizens of California was too much for her. She attempted to do things in the grand manner, albeit with scarcely a thought to the budgets the families had placed at her disposal. I have always noticed that rich people are pretty practical about budgets, and I imagine that there is the true secret of most of the world’s fabulous fortunes.
The first thing she did was to rent one of the most imposing apartments in Dresden. If I remember rightly the building had been especially constructed for Augustus, elector of Saxony, about 1730, and it was as sumptuous as an apartment at Versailles.
When we were installed, groomed, trained to walk haughtily, coyly, or demurely (as the occasion might demand), and schooled in the art of pleasing the young German noblemen, we “received,” dressed like miniature queens.
We received practically the whole court of Saxony, and the apartment of the American mädchen grew to be a very lively place, as you may imagine.
Now all this cost a great deal of money, and while Mrs. C. had been given plenty, our fairly simple California parents had not bargained for anything so regal as our chaperon was attempting, and the debts, consequently, began to pile up to quite considerable sums.
Still it went on. I remember that in the daytime when lessons were to be done I dressed in simple middy blouses and wore pigtails, but when night came I became a very grown-up little lady with my long hair done up into a series of coils that ran three times round my head and let short little curls fall coquettishly at the back. You can see this monstrosity of a coiffure in the old German prints of the day, but you can imagine that I was very proud of it.
The climax of my Dresden schooling was being presented at court. Custom was that one had to be at least twenty-one years old, and I was in my fourteenth year. However this difficulty was easily overcome by the help of a Paris couturier (brought to Dresden at incredible cost, you may be sure) coiffeurs and specialists in “maquillage,” and I was made to look like something between a wax doll and Catherine of Russia in full array. The train of my court dress was wonderfully long and wonderfully hard to manage, but Mrs. C., for all her economic weaknesses, knew her business when it came to training us, and so the Great Day passed without mishap, and we all graduated from childhood into the estate of grandes dames in the royal presence of the King and Queen of Saxony.
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