Her real name was Edith Hardisson, he said. She was forty-six years old. She was not the youngest child of an East Coast stage family but the oldest of six, daughter of a clerk and his wife from Independence, Missouri. Her parents were members in frightful good standing of a devout chapter of Reorganized Latter Day Saints, and they betrothed her at fifteen to a widower and pig farmer from their church, but Edith ran away before the wedding.
