Maybe it's because I'm partial to both New Mexico and stylish, independent-minded people, but I've always rather admired Millicent Rogers, the Standard Oil heiress and (yes, somewhat dilettante) artisan, who ended up - after a glamorous and highly episodic life - settling in Taos. There she is memorialized in the eponymously named museum that houses the considerable collection of Native American and Spanish Colonial art, pottery, and jewelry amassed during her final years there. I think today she's best known to fashion designers and editors - as a posthumous muse of sorts - and really what we know of her is mostly just a name attached to her often pioneeringly stylish image. That's actually not necessarily such a bad place to be, since it leaves admirers either wanting more or free to fill in the blanks (or project) for themselves. Of course being of the former camp myself, when I saw that a new biography about Rogers had come out I immediately bought it, completely disregarding the size and intended sequence of my growing to-read stack and otherwise superseding a book on Thomas Jefferson and Natural History. I wanted to know more about the stark-looking lady behind the terrific clothes - and I'll also say that after a long literary romp with Lewis and Clark, I was ready to return to civilization...
The book is called Searching for Beauty: The Life of Millicent Rogers. It's written by Cherie Burns, who is a Taoseño (or Taoseña) herself. I don't know if there are other biographies on Rogers on the market - Burns never cites another - and anyway it seems she did an exhaustive job with the research and interviews. But biography is a tricky, elusive thing. Often what one is reading, I think, is a record not just of its subject but also its writer's engagement with that subject (or, more likely, about the writers engagement with primary and secondary source material on the subject), and really one is never getting the full, curiosity-quenching story - and definitely not one unadulterated with the subjectivity of the biographer, to whatever degree that may be. So perhaps this is a long way to go about saying that I had mixed reviews for the biography - or possibly my now expanded perspective on the subject - but either way, if you want to be really known after your death then please, please, please take the time to pen your own autobiography before you die. Admirers and detractors alike will certainly respect you all the more for it. And also, like Vreeland, at the end you can casually add that you just dropped a bunch of lies into your narrative and leave posterity guessing...
After reading Searching for Beauty, I can say that - like most people - Millicent Rogers didn't become truly interesting until her late thirties and beyond. Or maybe this hints to a more deft or reverential treatment of Rogers' New Mexico years at Burns' hand. In fact, in the first hundred pages, I found myself wondering if I'd made a mistake in giving my admiration to someone who was actually coming off somewhat inane. Reading that Millicent, when informed her account was running low, expressed disbelief on the basis of still having plenty of checks left in her checkbook - well, it didn't exactly do much for her image. But the girl was, for most of her life, unfathomably rich and I suppose cluelessness about money management often comes with the territory.
Much of Rogers' character - the interesting parts, anyway - was shaped by a childhood episode of rheumatic fever, her prolonged convalescence, and the consequent heart problems that would follow her for the rest of her life. She was originally not expected to live past ten. She was often bedridden and unable to fully join in the society (and physicality) of other children, and so she found her world in art and books - and in the process fostered a curiosity that would continue throughout her life. And because her health prevented her from pursuing the outdoorsy, horsy outlets typical to most society girls of her generation, Millicent also took early to dressing as a means of self-expression and visibility - again cultivating something that would stay with her throughout her life: an acute sense of style that (plus an awful lot of money) put her in magazines and on best-dressed lists.
Rogers was a collector: art, clothes, and also men. She married or took as lovers a series of generally tall, dark, and handsome men, most all of whom offered an intelligence that could engage and entertain her. The roster included the penniless but titled Austrian Count Ludwig Salm von Hoogstraten, the Argentine playboy Arturo Peralta-Ramos, the writers (before they wrote, actually) Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl, and the film star Clark Gable. She lived the expatriate life overseas until Hitler came to power, and then she set up house in a colonial estate in the Virginia Tidewater. Fleming introduced her to Jamaica, and Hollywood friends in Jamaica turned her on to Los Angeles. Finally it was after the break up with Gable that friends brought her on a getaway to New Mexico.
Either Rogers' life becomes the most interesting, or Burns' telling of it becomes the most compelling, once she gets to New Mexico. There she is introduced to the rugged, stunning landscapes of the state by the Hollywood couturier Gilbert Adrian and his wife, the actress Janet Gaynor. And if you've ever been to Taos you'll know it is not difficult to see how she became enchanted: the little adobe town sits in a gorgeous valley ringed by mountains and is really a bit like finding the Shangri-La of Lost Horizon. The sun somehow seems closer and it gently caresses your face; that and the thinned oxygen of the heightened altitude conspire to lull visitors into a sublime feeling of relaxed wellbeing. And the culture to be found is a tripartite cross of the indigenous Pueblo Indian, the Spanish colonial, and the later Anglo - a fascinating and highly picturesque mix that is the pretty much the norm throughout the northern part of the state.
Rogers very abruptly fell in love with the place and bought an old adobe there which she proceeded to expand and fill, over the years, with her growing collection of Indian and Spanish Colonial arts and crafts. She took to Indian style dressing but, in heiress fashion, would purchase items like squaw skirts and send them off for a deluxe remake by her main couturier Charles James. The velvet blouses traditionally favored by the Navajo women were recreated for her in fine French velvet. Rogers collected the bold silver and turquoise jewelry, and her own designs took on inspiration from the cross-cultural and bohemian milieu in which she'd enveloped herself. She is credited with introducing "Southwestern" dressing to the mainstream consciousness, and the mix of the couture with the indigenous that she forged was soon picked-up upon by Diana Vreeland and other midcentury tastemakers.
Rogers became enthralled with Indian culture, and her natural openness, curiosity and very gracious manners eventually gained her acceptance and entree onto the Taos Indian - or Tiwa - pueblo, where she regularly attended dances. Indians in her employ also secured her access to dances held in neighboring reservations, which she avidly attended. Millicent was hungry to experience it all; as Burns writes of the recollections of Millicent's son Arturo (one of two she had with Peralta-Ramos) on one expedition:
Arturo was along on some of his mother's camping trips into Indian country and he remembers one outing with her, Brett, Tony Reyna, Trinidad Archuleta, Tony Luhan, and Benny Sauzo into the Apache lands around the Jicarilla Apache lakes. On that trip, he recalls, Millicent wanted to try peyote, the Indian hallucinogen. She vomited it up on the first go and tried it again. She threw up again, but she was determined to experience its effect. The third time she managed to ingest it. In her Navajo costume she was invited to dance with the Apache Indian women and continued to dance until she sank to the ground with exhaustion and had to go to bed. The next morning her fellow travelers waited for her to revive, a bit later than usual, and get started on the day.Once I had the pleasure of driving through the Jicarilla Apache reservation en route to visit the Ansazi - or as is increasingly correct to say, Ancestral Puebloan - ruins around Farmington: it's gorgeous, exhilarating country, where nature is large. I loved it then and I think I would have loved it even more knowing that somewhere on my route I was passing the historic site of an internationally known heiress and style icon tripping on peyote and dancing herself into a spent heap of who-knows-what kind of feathered couture costume. Well, New Mexico is called The Land of Enchantment, and it really is one of the few states around that really lives up to its motto...
Millicent became increasingly involved with Indian dancing, and her engagement with Indian spirituality deepened during the course of her years in Taos. It is in these final years, and the final chapters of Burns' biography that Rogers really seems to come alive. In this paragraph - yes, inordinately long but so compelling - Burns quotes Dorothy Brett, the English painter, writer, and aristocrat who'd originally emigrated to Taos in the company of D.H. Lawrence and wife and later became Millicent's friend:
After the Horse Lake trip, winter began to close in on mountainous Taos with its quick storms, early snows, and sudden drops in temperature, yet Millicent continued to give open-air Indian dances on the mesa behind her house. They seemed to transport her, almost like a drug. She couldn't get enough. If a thunderstorm came up, the party would be transferred to Brett's studio on the north end of town. Millicent would bring the food in tubs, along with whiskey, and wine, beer, and colas and fruit juices for the Indians. Arranged around Brett's studio on cushions and chairs the guests watched the Indians dance, hypnotized by their own singing. Brett, eloquent in her own right, described the scene: "All the guests have arranged themselves around my messy gay studio. The brightly colored Indian paintings hand high up on the walls. Saws and hammers and all the paraphernalia of a work bench are pushed aside and people perch on the narrow table. In the bedroom the drum is beating softly. There is an occasional jingle of bells, as one of the Indians, ready dressed, begins to dance. We all sit and wait patiently. Millicent moves around, disappears into my box of a kitchen, and returns, with glasses of cocktails. The guests who have already eaten her picnic on the mesa before the rain nibble cookies and sip their drinks. At last, impatient, Millicent taps on the bedroom door. It opens a crack. 'We are ready now,' and in a few minutes the door opens and the blanketed singers come out and arrange themselves under the archway from the studio to the sun room and begin to beat the drums. The bedroom door re-opens. Out of it comes the line of feathered dancers. Slowly, gently, they dance into the room and become a circle of waving feathers, jangling bells. Some of the dancers have brought their little sons and the little boys dance earnestly. One of them, a very gay little four year old called Hermann, dances with such fervour and joy that his sunny gay character pervades everyone. As the evening goes on, the wine and beer provided for the Indians stimulates their dancing. They begin, as usual, to get caught up in the mesmerism of the drum and voices of the singers. Millicent sits on a low stool, quiet, absorbed as usual, her whole heart and soul hypnotized by the tremendous power of the song and the endless powerful beating of the drums. During the rests, she gets up to minister food and drink to all the guests, to the Indian guests, the singers, and to her own household, who have also come to the dance. She is untiring in her hospitality. Then at about midnight the dancers are tired. They bring the drum into the center of the room and the circle dance begins. This is a dance of friendship, and we can all take part in it. One of the dancers goes up to Millicent, takes her by the arm, and she dances slowly around with the rest of us. Between two feathered Indians she dances the curious half walk, half dance step round and round. Fatigue overtakes most of us. The circle dwindles and dwindles. The dancers return to the bedroom, take off their dancing clothes. To return to the circle, and round it goes. At last we all tire, the guests have been gradually slipping away, finally the Indians look at their tired sleepy children and decide to go, too. Everybody goes...I fall into bed with the drum still beating in my head.' When she wakes the next morning, the drum is still thudding in her head.
Millicent Rogers died early, at the age of fifty in 1953. The damage from the rheumatic fever she'd suffered in childhood finally caught up with her. She was buried in Taos, her funeral well attended by both international society and Indians from the local Pueblo.
Burns biography Searching for Beauty: The Life of Millicent Rogers is available from St. Martin's Press. As I have said - perhaps too much, and I suppose it indicates a not entirely ringing endorsement - the most captivating parts of the book are those centering around Rogers' life in Taos. Again, though, I am unsure if this lopsidedness is that of a life or its reportage or perhaps my own adoration of New Mexico. Plenty of bloggers seem to be all thumbs-up, so perhaps you should read it yourself and see. My final word on the book, though: a narrative about someone so legendarily stylish and, well, visual - someone with so many aesthetically distinctive episodes throughout life - I think both necessitates and deserves many, many more photographs than are published in the book.
- a.t.s.
