"Burns makes it abundantly clear . . . they just don't make heiresses like Millicent Rogers anymore." ―Hampton Sides Nobody knew how to live the high life like Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers. Born to luxury, she lived in a whirl of European vacations, exquisite clothing, and dashing men. In Searching for Beauty , Cherie Burns chronicles Rogers's rebellious life from her days as a young girl afflicted with rheumatic fever to her final days as one of the legendary chatelaines of New Mexico. She eloped with a penniless baron; danced tangos in European nightclubs; romanced Roald Dahl, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, and Hollywood icon Clark Gable; and triumphed in the world of fashion. She was muse to legendary American designer Charles James, appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and popularized Southwestern style by adopting turquoise jewelry, squaw skirts and short-waist jackets as her signature look. With Searching for Beauty , Millicent Rogers enters the pantheon of great American women who, like Diana Vreeland and Babe Paley, put their distinctive stamp on American style. “Millicent Rogers is truly an American Legend and Cherie Burns has finally given us a wonderful biography about her!” ―Diane Von Furstenberg “What a fabulous life! Rogers was an American original who charged through her wildly varied career with coruscating originality and maximum style. Hers was a high-wire act of glamour, art, philanthropy, and rapier smarts. With this fine biography, Cherie Burns makes it abundantly clear that, in our sorry age of Paris Hilton brats, they just don't make heiresses like Millicent Rogers anymore.” ―Hampton Sides, bestselling author of "Blood and Thunder" “Cheri Burns has given us a glittering tale of Millicent Rogers, one of the most glamorous women of the twentieth century. Anyone who is interested in the annals of high society will be fascinated with this book. Burns has reached far beyond the gossip of how the very rich live and produced an intimate and deeply personal view of Millicent Rogers, her family and her unending search for love and beauty.” ― Adam Lewis, author of The Great Lady Decorators, Billy Baldwin, Albert Hadley and Van Day Truex “Standard oil heiress and fashion icon Millicent Rogers, a beauty who traveled with thirty-five suitcases and seven dachshunds, made headlines throughout her life for her famous romances and influence as a style-setter. Cherie Burns has written a page-turning tale of a society rebel.” ―Meryl Gordon, author of Mrs. Astor Regrets CHERIE BURNS is the author of Searching for Beauty, The Great Hurricane: 1938, and Stepmotherhood . Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, People, and Glamour, among others. She lives in Taos, New Mexico. Searching for Beauty The Life of Millicent Rogers, The American Heiress Who Taught the World About Style By Cherie Burns St. Martin's Griffin Copyright © 2012 Cherie Burns All right reserved. ISBN: 9780312547257 CHAPTER ONE Farewell to an Heiress   JANUARY 1953 The procession of mourners wound along the rutted unpaved road toward a weedy little graveyard next to Indian land. Behind it tolled the bells of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in town; ahead of it rose Taos Mountain, the Sacred Mountain, all white with its peak hidden in the clouds. Brightly colored plastic flowers, indigenous to Spanish gravesites, bloomed from decorated crosses and gravestones in the high-desert resting place for local Spanish families and anglos. Millicent Rogers, in a manner as improbable yet fitting as so much of her unsettled life, was going home. Taos, New Mexico, had long captivated artists, bohemians, scamps, and freethinking souls from elsewhere, who settled into its hive of quirky adobe houses at the feet of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Millicent Rogers had finally been one of them. She had been one of the most beautiful and richest women in America, perhaps the world. The toast of barons, industrialists, and royalty for almost five decades, she was known and admired in the fashion ateliers of Paris, London, and New York. Her face and fashions had appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar all her life. She had loved a constellation of spectacular men. Now that the grand arc of her life had come to an end she was laid, as she requested, with her head facing Taos Mountain, next to the pueblo village and Indian people whom she had fallen nearly desperately in love with during the last six years of her life. One mourner, the critic and writer William Goyen, wrote of the day, The ceremony was a dreadful small-town ceremony in the graveyard produced by the local funeral home.… A sort of Muzak chimed a mawkish hymn. We all gathered round while the priest said his words, and a brilliant game rooster suddenly leapt to a fence just to one side of the grave and crowed. When the brief ceremony was over, Benito, the young Indian who had been in love with Millice