Millicent Rogers: Heiress For The Ages

In the recently published biography, “Searching for Beauty: The Life of Millicent Rogers,” author Cherie Burns paints a portrait of Ms. Rogers, a fashionista and a trendsetter, as a complicated woman, whose full and creative life was defined both by great wealth and ill health.

Ms. Burns, with no previous biography on which to build, spent close to five years working on this book, which is the first comprehensive study of the life of the former part-time Southamptoner known as the “Standard Oil Heiress.” Ms. Rogers was the granddaughter of Henry Huddleston Rogers, a partner of John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Corporation.

Dubbed the “Hell Hound of Wall Street,” the elder Rogers was known for his duality as a ruthless businessman and as a fine family man and generous friend. When he died in 1909, his estate, equivalent to several billion dollars by today’s standards, was divided among his children and second wife.

H.H. Rogers Jr., called “Harry” but also known as “the Colonel,” had a distinguished military career and sat on the board of directors of his father’s Virginia Railway Company after his death. He lived with his wife, the former Mary Benjamin, in New York, where they maintained a home.

With homes here on the East End, a vacation house in Tuxedo Park and summer visits to her grandfather’s grand estate in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, their daughter, the young Millicent, was exposed to aesthetic wonders that few children could ever hope to see. She was also exposed to a strep infection, resulting in the prognosis of rheumatic fever. The medical professionals of the day prescribed bed rest and informed her family that her chances of reaching the age of 10 were slim.

Born in 1902, Ms. Rogers grew up in the Gilded Age with all of the social and monetary advantages of great wealth. During her long periods of convalescence, she learned how to draw and was home tutored (common for young girls in her social strata) in French and German. She studied Latin and Greek and was influenced by her mother in her appreciation of art.

With time, however, she rebounded from her illness and began to enjoy life as an active teenager. The Rogerses began planning her coming-out party and potential marriage prospects before she was 18.

The jazz-age debutante was a real beauty. She danced with the Prince of Wales on his tour of America in the early 1920s and dated some of the country’s most eligible bachelors.

Summers were spent at the family’s Walker & Gillette designed Italian Renaissance palazzo, Black Point, also known as the “Beach House,” in Southampton, where the family entertained lavishly. Another Rogers family home, Port of Missing Men, designed by Henry Russell Pope, was known to the family as “The Port” and built as a Colonial Revival shooting box for Colonel Rogers. The home, set on 1,800 acres overlooking Scallop Pond in North Sea, was decorated with antiques by Eleanor Brown as an early commission for the interior design firm McMillen Inc.

To the surprise of everyone, the young heiress eloped at age 20 to Europe with a 40-year-old Austrian count, Ludwig Salm von Hoogstraten. The Rogers family did not approve of the marriage and cut off her funds.

After spending months as a vagabond, literally dancing across Europe with her husband to make money, the Colonel prevailed and brought his pregnant daughter back to the States. Ms. Burns said that in a photo of the father and daughter coming off the boat “the body language of the Colonel tells you everything.” He was an overbearing bully as well as a heavy drinker.

What followed was a scandalous divorce and a $300,000 payout to the impoverished count. Ms. Rogers’s attorney accused the count of neglect. The count countered by claiming that Ms. Rogers was despotic.

The pages of the New York Times, as well as those of this newspaper, were filled with accounts of the legal proceedings, including the custody battle for the couple’s son, Peter, which was won by his mother.

Not long after the divorce, Ms. Rogers remarried, with the approval of her parents this time, the Argentine aristocrat Arturo Peralta-Ramos. The couple had two sons, Arturo and Paul. The marriage, however, did not last.

Motherhood was not Ms. Rogers’s strong suit and all three sons were shipped off to European boarding schools at a young age. It should be noted that it was not uncommon for those in her circle to send their children away to school.

A third marriage in 1935, to Ronald Balcom, lasted just six years. The couple lived as expats just outside of St. Anton in Austria for most of those years.

By 1938, the handwriting was on the wall for the safety of Americans in Austria and Ms. Rogers realized that she should leave. However, she stayed longer, and bribed the Swiss border patrol in order to help Jewish friends escape the Nazis.

When she finally returned to the States, she looked for a new place to live and decided to buy the 300-acre Claremont Manor estate in Claremont Virginia, which was not far from Washington. The 200-year-old house had been previously renovated in 1928 by William Lawrence Bottomley (architect of Southampton’s Town Hall and the Canoe Place Inn in Hampton Bays).

It was in Virginia where Ms. Rogers began a series of affairs. Notable paramours were writers Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl, as well as Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal—all of whom were working in Washington during the war years.

Ms. Rogers later ventured to Hollywood briefly in the late 1940s where she pursued the actor, Clark Gable. But their affair did not end well and she left California with a broken heart.

From 1940 to 1948, Ms. Rogers was a five-time nominee to the best-dressed list. Today, she is still considered one of the best-dressed women of all time. She had a penchant for couturier clothes from Mainbocher, Schiaparelli and Charles James. In 1949, her gowns were presented to the Brooklyn Museum’s costume collection.

During all of her adult life, the style icon was regularly featured in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

Wherever she went, Ms. Rogers would assume the style of dress worn in the region and then make it her own with tailored embellishments to fit.

In Austria, there were the Tyrolean outfits. And later in Taos, New Mexico, where Ms. Rogers spent her final years, she dressed in broomstick skirts with Charles James blouses, often ordering 48 of them at a clip. She became intrigued with the jewelry of the Navajo Indians, which she wore regularly, and later started designing her own pieces in turquoise and silver based on the Navajo idiom.

Her friend Cecil Beaton noted, “She used up the energies that might otherwise have been channeled into serious artistic accomplishments.”

Elsa Schiaparelli observed, “Her jewels were of rare beauty and strange design ... If she had not been so terribly rich, she might, with her vast talent and unlimited generosity have become a great artist.”

Ms. Rogers’s last years in New Mexico came with a different perspective on life. In a letter to her son, Paul, in January 1951, she wrote, “Did I ever tell you about the feeling I had a little while ago? I felt I was part of the Earth, so I felt the sun on my surface and rain. I felt the stars and the growth of the moon, under me, rivers ran. Against me were the tides. The waters of rain sank into me. And I thought if I stretched out my hand they would be earth and green and would grow from me. And I knew that there was no reason to be lonely that one was everything, and Death was so easy as the rising sun and as calm and natural—that to be infolded in Earth was not the end but part of oneself, part of every day and night that we lived so that being part of the earth one was never alone. And all fear went out of me; with a great good stillness and strength.”

Ms. Rogers died just before her 51st birthday. A stroke, a heart attack and then, still weakened by the ravages of rheumatic fever, a final heart attack claimed her.

A true collector of paintings, sculpture, jewelry, houses, men and friends, at the end she was overtaken by the spiritual pull of the Native Americans she so admired and a landscape that far outstripped material possessions in its richness.

Asking the author about her feelings with respect to her subject, she replied, “I didn’t feel I knew her but I do feel like I understood her.”

In “Searching for Beauty,” Ms. Burns has written a must-read for those interested in the life and times of one of Southampton’s many storied rich and notable residents.