The Thirteenth Husband: A Novel

“The Thirteenth Husband is an outstanding depiction of Aimee Crocker's complicated real life turned into fiction.”

The story in this book is set in the 1880s, but is it really historical fiction? Or did the author write a biography? Aimee Crocker is a real person (now deceased.) Her named husbands are real men. The startling and sometimes unbelievable adventures and events depicted are mostly real, though the private conversations and dialogue surrounding them are by necessity made up.  

Author Greer Macallister has done an incredibly superb job of spinning real life into a riveting novel about an impetuous, free-spirited, free thinking, courageous, often scandalous woman in an era when women had almost no rights, no independence, and little or no say in decisions about their own life.

Of course, Aimee's ten million dollars inherited from her father allowed her to make decisions (some of them foolhardy and disastrous) and experience things most people would consider ludicrous—even now. All of her movements and misadventures were widely chronicled in newspapers and magazines of the time. Wealthy socialites from California to New York gossiped about them.

Porter Ashe, Aimee's first husband, wins her in a poker game. Well, sort of. In a moment of jovial inebriation he really wins the right to ask her to marry him. Despite her youth, she was only 17, she has low expectations of marriage, but accepts his proposal.

"I already knew I would say yes. . . . I was desperate for change, and what better way to change than to throw caution to the wind? Girls I knew complained that marriage only meant trading one master for another. . . . In my opinion, people who were unhappy with marriage had expected too much from the institution. I knew how to lower my expectations."

However, Aimee is completely swept away by what turns out to be a daring and romantic courtship. Her mother disapproves of Porter from the start, so Aimee and Porter keep their very adult relationship clandestine. Later, they secretly elope.

On the first day of their honeymoon they board a train to Los Angeles. But perhaps as a dire warning of what is to come, their travel is interrupted by a deadly train wreck. While braked for a rest at the top of Tehachapi Pass after a laborious climb up steep tracks, the Southern Pacific locomotive begins rolling backward. Several cars crash to the valley below.

Aimee and Porter survive both the crash and the subsequent railway fire, but not so their marriage. Porter's enthusiasm for the marriage and his devotion and attentiveness to Aimee turns into disinterest and neglect while his private life and late-night escapades make headlines.

Aimee reads about it in the morning papers and desperately tries to save her marriage, but Porter's drinking, gambling, and philandering continue. Aimee considers it a cruel twist of fate that their marriage ended before their new house had even been built.

During their divorce proceedings Porter uses lies and exaggerations to build enough of a case against her that she is forced to give up custody of their only child, a three-year-old daughter.

Aimee laments: "Despite pursuing me as much as a person could, Porter had turned against me with remarkable speed."

After her divorce from Porter, Aimee goes on to live a lavish life of excess and notoriety filled with extravagant dinners and parties, travel to Hawaii, Singapore, Paris, Madrid, Yokohama, Borneo, and other exotic destinations where she meets interesting and important people.

And, yes, she marries again and again sometimes to younger men. Still, much of her life is tainted by death, tragedy, and sorrow:

"Time crept relentlessly forward, as time does. Before I knew it, I'd been married to Miskinoff two whole years. I still felt like a young woman if I avoided mirrors and didn't focus on my north-of-fifty-year-old face, but there was one piece of evidence I couldn't avoid: my children had reached their teenage years. . . .

". . . Yvonne remained with me in Paris, beginning her studies at the Sorbonne. She was seventeen and beautiful. She reminded me of myself at that age, which should have been all the warning I needed.

"Instead, I had no idea until I read it in the newspaper that my daughter Yvonne Gouraud and my husband Alexander Miskinoff had been seen leaving a hotel together, compromised.”

The author has thoughtfully added a detailed Author Note outlining the few instances she had to condense or modify the narrative in the interest of clarity for the reader. She adds that Aimee had packed far more exploits into her life than could fit in the book. The real Aimee Crocker, known as The Queen of Bohemia, died in 1941.

The Thirteenth Husband is an outstanding depiction of Aimee Crocker's complicated real life turned into fiction.

But readers be warned.

Don 't look ahead to see who the 13th husband is. You'll spoil the ending.