Back Story - December 2007

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Even a casual look into the story of Amy Crocker's life can feel like watching one of those silent melodramas from the '20s -- the heroine! the dashing young suitors! the scandals! -- accompanied by the underlying sense that some of it is just too outrageous to be true.

Some facts: The youngest daughter of Judge E.B. Crocker and his wife, Margaret, Amy (later Aimée) Crocker-Ashe-Gillig-Gouraud-Miskinoff-Galitzine was arguably the most colorful of their offspring. Born in 1863, the indulged child of wealthy parents was sent to Europe in her early teens to be "finished." Amy fell in love with several men (including a German prince and a bullfighter) but returned to California without having acquired a husband, a situation she shortly set about remedying, not once, but five times over the course of her life.

In between (and sometimes during) her marriages she spent time in the Far East, India and Hawaii, returning several times to San Francisco and finally settling in New York City, where she lived until her death in 1941.

Details, however, are less clear-cut. Despite having no MySpace or YouTube, the scandal-sheet journalists of Amy's day had no trouble keeping tabs on a free spirited daughter of prominent citizens, embellishing, exaggerating and just making it up as they went along.

Consider the story of how she came to marry her first husband, Porter Ashe. Ashe and another man (maybe Harry Gillig, or maybe Billy Wallace), both in love with 19-year-old Amy, played a hand of stud poker (or poker dice) at the Bohemian Club (or at Amy's home in Sacramento; one story even has Amy dealing the cards), the winner to claim Amy's hand in marriage.

According to one version, Porter lost the game, but while accompanying the couple on the train to San Francisco, he took advantage of the winner's visit to the smoking car to persuade Amy to marry him, instead. When the groom-to-be returned, the conductor informed him Porter and Amy had left the train in Port Costa (or maybe Martinez) and were married straight away.

Perhaps to make it up to him, after divorcing Porter, Amy married Harry Gillig. She'd go on to have three more husbands after that.

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