Millicent Rogers

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It seems like we’re always coming off, or having, a Millicent Rogers moment. Her grip on style is that strong. 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.

Rogers favored Mainbocher, Adrian (whose wife, Janet Gaynor, was a BFF), Schiaparelli and Valentina, but she is best remembered in fashion terms for her unique association with James. This association tended toward collaboration, which was all the more amazing considering how proprietary and unbending James was about his work. Both client and designer are on the brain again — as the inspiration for John Galliano’s spring-summer couture collection for Dior and as a focus of “American High Style,” an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum opening May 7 and running through Aug. 1.

Rogers in a Charles James blouse.

The new exhibit promises plenty to chew on, maybe even a glimpse of how the building of a James frock for the likes of Rogers was a ‘‘mathematical problem solved with calipers and equations,’’ as Elizabeth Ann Coleman noted in the catalog of a 1982 show about the designer, also at the Brooklyn Museum. In a remembrance of his patron published in The New York Journal-American after her death, James wrote that she “as no one else did” brought out the best of his talent, despite withering competition from Mrs. Randolph Hearst Jr., the Marchesa Luisa Casati, Babe Paley, Chanel on her way to becoming Coco … the list goes on.

Rogers lived as well as she dressed, in settings equal to her wardrobe. She grew up in Manhattan, in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., and in Southampton at Black Point, a 1914 Italianate villa on the ocean commissioned by her father, with gardens by Frederick Law Olmsted. In the 1920s, Col. Henry Huddleston Rogers II went on to consolidate a breathtaking 1,200 acres of meadows, ponds, woods and wetlands rich in wildlife on Southampton’s Cow Neck, a peninsula reaching into Peconic Bay. He christened the property Port of Missing Men (which takes the prize for the most flummoxing name ever harnessed to a piece of real estate.) It was the largest tract on Long Island until 1998, when the financier Louis Moore Bacon purchased nearly half of it for $25 million.

Port of Missing Men, designed by John Russell Pope in the style of a hunting lodge, was originally intended as a manly retreat from formal life in the big mansion on the beach, according to Ann Pyne of McMillen, the blue-chip firm that decorated it in an 18th-century country vernacular, with hooked rugs, Windsor chairs and the kind of collectibles that a ship captain might have brought back from his travels. Almost everything remains in the house, which is now owned by Countess Salm, Millicent Rogers’s daughter-in-law. Bacon donated his 540 acres as a conservation easement.

Preservation was an impulse Rogers understood. At the beginning of World War II, she exchanged the charm of her Hansel and Gretel period in an Austrian chalet (where her uniform was a dirndl, an apron, an embroidered vest and a peaked Tyrolean cap) for the colonial grandeur of Claremont, the 18th-century country estate in Tidewater, Va. ‘‘I consider it a desecration in Virginia to change even one single architectural detail,’’ Rogers announced. ‘‘Inside, you can do whatever you want.’’ The family friend Van Day Truex, later president of the Parsons School of Design and design director at Tiffany & Company, hung the rooms with Rogers’s ravishing collection of Watteaus, Fragonards and Bouchers and furnished them with ceramic stoves, a desk that once belonged to the poet Schiller and the museum-quality Biedermeier furniture that was a spoil from Rogers’s marriage to Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraten, the playboy count.

McMillen decorators re-entered the picture when Rogers acquired an apartment in one of the Phipps tenements on Sutton Place that Dorothy Draper famously painted glossy black with white trim, giving each door a different brilliant color. In her living room Rogers reached back for inspiration to the draped salons of the Empire period, cloaking the walls with miles of crimson satin swagged from rosettes at the cornice. It was not a tame look.

No professional decorator is linked to her last house, Turtle Walk, an ancient adobe fort in, of all places, the high desert of Taos, N.M. Surrounded by the Spanish Colonial furniture and native American textiles, pottery, jewelry, baskets, santos, tinwork and paintings that she lovingly amassed, Rogers secluded herself here in 1947 after concluding it was time to stop falling in love. (She divorced her last husband, Ronald Balcom, a stockbroker, in 1941.) In Taos, her uniform was an authentic Navajo blouse, a long and full skirt propped up with multiple petticoats, a shawl and bare feet.

Soon after her death in 1953, one of Rogers’s three sons created a local museum in her name to showcase his mother’s trove of regional artifacts, a collection 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.