Millicent Rogers

Mary Millicent Abigail Rogers (February 1, 1902 - January 1, 1953), better known as Millicent Rogers, was a socialite, fashion icon, and art collector. She was the granddaughter of Standard Oil tycoon Henry Huttleston Rogers, and an heiress to his wealth. Rogers is notable for having been an early supporter and enthusiast of Southwestern-style art and jewelry, and is often credited for its reaching a national and international audience. Later in life, she became an activist, and was among the first celebrities to champion the cause of Native American civil rights. She is still credited today as an influence on major fashion designers. After contracting rheumatic fever as a small child, doctors gave her only a few years to live. She proved them wrong, but suffered from poor health for her entire life; enduring several heart attacks, pneumonia, and even a crippled left arm. In the 1920s, as a young woman Rogers became well-known on the socialite scene, and photographs of her were often featured in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Newspaper gossip columns, such as the one in the Hearst's New York Journal-American, regularly detailed her personal life. Rogers lived primarily as an expatriate for many years, and remained in Austria until World War II broke out. She spent time in Austria, wearing traditional dirndls with her Mainbocher and Schiaparelli couture; in Hollywood, where she was dressed by the costume designer Adrian, her good friend; and in Taos, N. M., where she retreated in 1947 after a messy breakup with Clark Gable, only to fall in love with the Southwest aesthetic. In 1947, Rogers retreated to a small adobe home in Taos, New Mexico, which she referred to as Turtle Walk. While living there, she purchased more than 2,000 Native American artifacts. In 1951, Rogers and several prominent friends (including authors Frank Waters, Oliver Lafarge and Lucius Beebe) hired lawyers and visited Washington, D.C. to promote the issue of Indian rights and citizenship. She successfully lobbied for Native American art to be classified as historic, and therefore protected. In Taos, she immersed herself in local culture, renovating an adobe home called Turtle Walk and collecting chunky silver and turquoise Native American jewelry, which she wore with broomstick skirts and peasant blouses she had made by Charles James in New York. Images of her Taos lifestyle that were featured in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar caused a sensation in the fashion world that has reverberated in the work of Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano and other current designers. In 1956, the Youngest son Paul Peralta - Ramos founded the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico. The museum houses a large collection of Native American, Hispanic, and Euro-American art, with a specific emphasis on northern New Mexico and Taos pieces. It first opened in a temporary location in the mid-1950s, later moving to its permanent location in the late 1960s, a home built by Claude J. K. and Elizabeth Anderson. It was later remodeled and expanded by architect Nathaniel A. Owings. The collection was acquired in record time. Not that long before installing herself in New Mexico, Rogers had been racing around New York in a chauffeured, custom Delage coupe that Billy Baldwin said was so stuffed with throws and other sable accessories he could barely squeeze in. Our heroine was nothing if not adaptable. Fashion designer John Galliano credited Rogers as an influence on his Spring 2010 Dior collection. A less-known fact is that Rogers also designed her own jewelry, sketching neoprimitive pieces on yellow legal pads. And now, seven decades later, her great-granddaughter Sascha Mary Millicent Peralta-Ramos, 20, is continuing the tradition, with a collection of fine jewelry called Mary Millicent, Rogers’s full name. Born in 1902, Rogers died just 51 years later, succumbing to what her doctor only half-jokingly suggested was a romantic heart. Three husbands (including a gold-digging Austrian count and a wealthy Argentine aristocrat), Clark Gable, Roald Dahl, Prince Serge Obolensky, Ian Fleming and a twirl around the dance floor with the Prince of Wales had taken their toll. Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress, gave high fashion a good name. She was an aesthete with a fine, searching mind, not a ditz or a brat (like some of her more tabloidy colleagues one could mention). Nor was she particularly troubled, psychologically or otherwise, about having a colossal fortune she did nothing to earn, as her friend Cecil Beaton observed in The Glass of Fashion. No one ever called Millicent Rogers a poor little rich girl. On the face of it, at least, she took a (relatively) healthy, straightforward pleasure in the sometimes obscene luxuries indulged by her inheritance. These numbered a 24-karat-gold toothpick she did not hesitate to use at table (the one habit no one has ever been able to square with her merciless chic); traveling with a pack of seven dachshunds; and a penchant for the same four-figure Charles James couture blouse, which she literally ordered by the dozens. (Not incidentally, Rogers wore those blouses; never for a second did the blouses wear her.) When gas rationing made it impossible for Rogers to keep her usual car and driver during World War II in New York, she found her elegant way around this inconvenience by hiring a yellow cab and cabby full time. When the cabby asked, “Where to, Lady?” She replied, “Just keep the meter running ’till the end of this damn war.”….and he did. She even had the cab painted black and the back seat upholstered in leopard print.