At 10 years old, Amy Crocker inherited roughly $10 million in the same year her father died. Over the next five decades, she converted that fortune into a life of relentless spectacle—five documented marriages, a claimed dozen more, tattoos from a master Japanese artist, a pet boa constrictor worn as living jewelry, a Hawaiian princess title, and a Paris apartment filled with a hundred Buddhist statues. The source of the fortune was her father, Edwin Crocker, a judge who served as chief legal counsel for the Central Pacific Railroad. His brother, Charles Crocker, was one of the railroad’s principal owners.
When Edwin died of a stroke in 1875 in Sacramento, his share of the family wealth passed to his heirs, including Amy. The sum, estimated at approximately $10 million at the time, would equate to well over $200 million today. She grew up in an age when married women rarely controlled their own money, yet her inheritance was legally hers. Her mother, Margaret Crocker, used her own portion of the family wealth to endow charities and establish the Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento, which still bears the family name.
Amy’s life took its defining turn during her teenage years in Dresden, Germany, where her family sent her to finishing school. There, she became engaged to a prince from the House of Saxe-Meiningen. She broke off the engagement—a near-unheard-of rejection of the era’s most coveted social transaction. Rumors also surfaced of an involvement with a Spanish bullfighter, a detail historians have never been able to confirm but that foreshadowed her lifelong preference for danger over rank.
She married for the first time around age 18 to Richard Porter Ash, a well-connected Californian. Days into the honeymoon, their train broke loose near the summit at Tehachapi, California, rolling backward down a steep mountain grade in darkness before derailing. The wreck killed 21 people. Amy survived; her husband helped pull survivors from the wreckage.
The marriage deteriorated quickly. The couple divorced in 1887 amid a bitter custody fight over their daughter, Alma. At one point, Ash physically took the child from a relative’s care at a Los Angeles drugstore counter, prompting a search involving detectives and lawyers. The court ultimately placed Alma with Amy’s mother, Margaret, who renamed the girl Gladys.
Amy handed over her daughter and continued with her life. Her second marriage, around 1889, was to Henry Mansfield Gillig, a commodore and amateur opera singer. The couple sailed west to Hawaii, then a sovereign kingdom. King David Kalākaua took an immediate liking to Amy, gave her the Hawaiian name Palikalani, and made her a princess over a small island with roughly 300 inhabitants.
She cherished the title for the rest of her life. Following Hawaii, Amy spent about six years traveling through Japan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Borneo, and India during the 1890s. She later wrote of being poisoned in Hong Kong, attacked by knife-throwing servants in Shanghai, and carried off into the Borneo jungle by a prince whose people planned to kill her before she escaped by canoe. These accounts survive mainly through the memoir she published decades later—vivid, unverifiable, and widely believed to be heavily embellished.
What was verifiable: she returned to the United States with a boa constrictor and permanent tattoos from Horichiyo, a celebrated Japanese tattoo master in Tokyo. New York society, already wary of her divorces, largely shunned her. Some members of her own extended family joined in the exclusion. A tattooed woman in that era was associated with sailors, not railroad heiresses.
She continued to keep boa constrictors as pets, naming one favorite Carrie. At parties, she wound snakes around her bare neck and shoulders the way other women wore pearls. At one gathering, she appeared with a 12-foot serpent coiled about her and reportedly calmed alarmed guests by calling the animal “gentle as a powder puff. ”
Excluded from respectable circles, Amy built her own.
She opened a Fifth Avenue home to Buddhist monks and filled it with statues of the Buddha, founding what was described as a Buddhist colony in Manhattan. Her rooms attracted artists, poets, singers, actors, mystics, and exiled aristocrats. Newspapers dubbed her the “Queen of Bohemia. ”
It was in this orbit that she met Jackson Gouraud, a ragtime songwriter and son of an associate of Thomas Edison.
They married around 1901. Friends described the match as genuinely happy. The couple traveled and gathered adopted children around them. In a permanent gesture of commitment, both were tattooed with each other’s initials inside the coils of a serpent.
In 1910, Gouraud fell ill with a throat infection. He died within days. The exotic dangers Amy had survived for years did not touch her; an ordinary illness took the man she loved. She never gave up his name.
She married twice more—a man styling himself Prince Miskinoff in 1914, a union that ended in divorce within about two years, and a 26-year-old Russian prince named Galitzine in 1925, when Amy was roughly 61. That marriage also ended within about two years. She moved to Paris after Gouraud’s death and remained there for much of the following 27 years. An apartment near the Trocadéro housed her hundred Buddha statues and an entirely Japanese staff.
She hosted artists including Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Isadora Duncan, and Jean Cocteau. Her entertainments included a banquet staged in the treetops in the manner of Robinson Crusoe and a costume ball called the “Dance of All Nations,” at which she performed a serpent dance with a large snake around her body. The self-described ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley later claimed in his writings to have had a lengthy affair with Amy. His account is generally treated with caution, given his habit of self-mythologizing, though Amy did move in the occult circles of Paris.
By the 1930s, her fortune was nearly gone. She had spent it steadily across five decades on travel, parties, husbands, artists, and households. She wrote her memoir in 1936 under the title “And I’d Do It Again,” published in London as “Without Regrets. ” In it, she defended her life without apology.
She wrote that she felt no obligation to society and that living fully was the highest form of art. Amy Crocker died on February 7, 1941, at the Hotel Seaview Plaza in New York, of pneumonia. She was 76. Her remains were returned to Sacramento and buried in the Crocker family plot, beside Jackson Gouraud, still carrying his name on the stone above her grave.
She was not buried alone. Two of her daughters—biological and adopted—also lie in that plot. The circle that began with her father’s death in 1875 closed over her in the same city. Even the grave did not hold her in the end.
The brass urns holding her ashes and those of Gouraud were later stolen from the family plot, apparently for the scrap value of the metal. Only the urn of one of her daughters was recovered. Amy Crocker’s ashes remain missing. Her mother’s sober legacy—the Crocker Art Museum—still stands in Sacramento.
Amy’s legacy rests on a life that scandalized her family and fascinated the public for decades. She chose the fascination. She spent her fortune on it, and she kept that choice to the end.