Elsie Whitaker Martínez (1 March 1890 – 31 January 1984) was renowned for her beauty in youth and old age, a muse of many famed writers and artists and an associate of most people in Northern California's Bohemian community of 1906 into the 1920s.

[1][3] In 1902, she and her family moved to the hills of Piedmont, California, to the "Silk Culture House" at the end of Mountain Avenue.

"[3] At sixteen I was a blonde beauty, medium height, lithe and slim, with perfect features that our artist friends called classic Greek; and some, inclined to romanticism, declared I resembled the Blessed Damozel; of Rossetti.

But to our Piedmonters and our friends, used to seeing me flitting about the hills with my long golden braids, I was the little Valkyrie.Elsie met painter Xavier Martínez (1869–1943) at Coppa's Restaurant in San Francisco.

Months later, he proposed to an 18-year-old Whitaker, who had already promised to marry at least four other men, all friends of her father.

[1] In 1916, Harriet Dean, a friend of Emma Goldman's,[6], met Xavier and Elsie Martínez, while Dean was working at The Little Review, which was published, for a while,[7] in San Francisco (after Chicago, for a while, Margaret C. Anderson and Jane Heap published The Little Review out of a ranch in Muir Woods,[8] in southwestern Marin County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, before moving to New York's Greenwich Village in 1917, then Margaret C. Anderson took it to Paris).

[6] The interview was undertaken at the request of James D. Hart, Professor of English, who served as faculty advisor.