Millicent Rogers
. . 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)...