In early 1946, Millicent Rogers sat in a parked car in the dark and watched Clark Gable walk another woman to her door. She had followed him, and she did not look away until she understood completely what she was seeing. Then she went home to Falcon’s Lair, the Beverly Hills estate she had rented from the estate of Rudolph Valentino, and wrote him a letter. It was not a private letter.
She sent it to the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who published it in full in the Los Angeles Times for the entire town to read. “I followed you last night as you took your young friend home,” she wrote. “I am glad you kissed and that I saw you do it because now I know that you have someone close to you. ”
The woman who wrote those words had spent her entire life being told she was supposed to die young.
Born in 1902 into one of the great industrial fortunes of the American Gilded Age, she was the granddaughter of a Standard Oil partner of John D. Rockefeller, a Wall Street figure known as the Hell Hound. At eight years old, she contracted a fever so severe that doctors told her parents she would not live to see her tenth birthday. She spent that year in a darkened room, too weak to stand for long, filling paper with a child’s handwriting.
It was the first time a sheet of paper mattered more to her than the room around it. She outlived that verdict by more than four decades. By 1919, she had come out into society, and by her early twenties she was one of the most photographed young women in America, documented in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town and Country. Her parents arranged a suitable engagement to a man named Jimmy Thompson, but in January 1924, at twenty years old, she eloped not with Thompson but with Ludovic von Salm Hoogstraeten, an Austrian count nearly twice her age, a professional tennis player and aspiring actor whom the press dismissed as a penniless gold digger.
Her father cut off her allowance. When he discovered she was pregnant, he lured her home with a $300,000 settlement paid directly to the count, ending the marriage before her son Peter was born. She remarried in November 1927, this time with her father’s approval, to Arturo Peralta Ramos, an Argentine aristocrat. The colonel settled a $500,000 trust on the couple with one condition written directly into the paperwork: Peralta Ramos would lay no future claim to the Rogers fortune.
The marriage lasted eight contentious years before Peralta Ramos filed for divorce in December 1935. Barely three months later, in February 1936, she married a third time, to an American stockbrocker named Ronald Balcom in Vienna. They built a chalet near St. Anton, but as the political climate in Austria darkened through the 1930s, she began paying attention to what was happening to her Jewish friends.
When German troops crossed into Austria in 1938, she stayed behind long enough, it is reported, to bribe Swiss border officials to help some of those friends cross to safety before she crossed the border herself. She divorced Balcom in 1941, worn down by a marriage that had run its course. By the time she reached her forties, her body had never once let her forget the verdict delivered in that New York sickroom. She had survived multiple heart attacks, repeated bouts of double pneumonia, and several reported strokes.
But she had also spent twenty years collecting admirers the way other women collected china: the novelist Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Prince Serge Obolensky, even the Prince of Wales so it was said, on a dance floor if nowhere else. What she had never collected, not through three husbands and not through any of her admirers, was a man who did not eventually disappoint her. Then she met Clark Gable. He was the biggest star in the world, a widower still grieving Carole Lombard, who had died in a plane crash in January 1942.
By most accounts, he drank more, said less, and rarely let anyone close afterward. They were seen together in the right restaurants and at the right parties, and Hedda Hopper began pairing their names in print. For a while, she believed she had finally found the one thing her name, her fortune, and her wit had never managed to buy. For a few months at least, it seemed true.
She was not the only woman he was seeing. She discovered that on a night in a parked car outside another woman’s door. The letter published in the Los Angeles Times described a woman in the dark watching a man she loved walk away from her. What it did not describe was how she had gotten to that particular street on that particular night.
Decades later, when a biographer named Sherry Burns went looking through what remained of that Hollywood romance, she found something the letter had never mentioned. “She chased him,” Burns said of Millicent and Clark Gable. “They were dating, but she stalked him in restaurants. ” She had pursued the king of Hollywood with an intensity that went well past mutual interest, turning up wherever he happened to be dining.
The story everyone thought they knew, the wounded socialite whose heart had been broken, was not the whole story. She had gone looking deliberately for a feeling strong enough to drown out everything a lifetime of doctors, husbands, and society columns had told her about how her story was supposed to end. In 1947, the actress Janet Gaynor and her husband, the designer Adrian, drove her out of California entirely, toward the high desert of New Mexico. At the Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial, she stopped at a trading table and picked up a piece of turquoise set in silver and turned it over in her hands as if she had never actually seen a stone before.
She bought a small adobe house in Taos and named it Turtle Walk. She began wearing broomstick skirts instead of couture, designing jewelry herself, working with the fashion designer Charles James to translate the silverwork and the turquoise into pieces that had never existed on Fifth Avenue. The painter Dorothy Brett, who had settled in Taos years earlier around D. H.
Lawrence, watched her arrive and described her simply: “She was like moonlight drifting into a room and spreading a glow of charm and beauty and sadness among us. ”
The sadness did not disappear. What changed was what she chose to do with it. By 1951, she traveled to Washington with a group that included the writers Frank Waters and Oliver La Farge, hired a lawyer out of her own pocket, and lobbied Congress directly to have Native American art formally recognized and protected as historic heritage.
She kept going anyway, in rooms full of men who had every reason to assume a woman known mainly for her marriages and her jewelry would tire of the effort within a week. She did not tire of it. It succeeded. By the winter of 1952, she worked from bed most days, her jewelry sketches propped against her knees, sketching a bracelet, addressing a letter, arguing a point about Pueblo land rights.
Not long before the end, she wrote to her youngest son Paul, a letter not written for any newspaper but for him. “Did I ever tell you about the feeling I had a little while ago? ” she asked. “Suddenly passing Taos Mountain, I felt that I was a part of the earth, so that I felt the sun on my surface and the rain.
I felt the stars and the growth of the moon. Under me, rivers ran. ”
She died on the first of January 1953, following surgery for an aneurysm. An autopsy is said to have found her heart nearly four times its normal size, worn down by a fever that had first come for it forty-three years earlier.
She was buried in Taos, in a small graveyard beside land belonging to the Pueblo she had spent her last years fighting for. She was not buried among the Vanderbilts or the Astors. Three years later, her son Paul opened a small museum in her name, not far from the same mountain. Its shelves hold the jewelry she designed and the turquoise she once could not stop touching, along with her sketches and carefully kept the letters.
All of them. From the earliest notebooks of a sick child who was not supposed to become anything at all, through the one that ended up in a Los Angeles newspaper, to the last one about a mountain addressed only to her son. She had spent a lifetime being introduced by other people’s names and never had a body that simply held or a love that simply stayed. In a small adobe house under a mountain that asked nothing of her, she had found something that simply did stay.
That mountain is still there.