I'm so excited that the "book of my heart" Secretary to the Socialite is finally out in the world!!! Here's a little peek behind the story...
I’ve had so many questions from early readers about “who is real” in my story, so I thought I’d make a quick post (and use some of my notebooks full of research!). This was such a fun story for me to write, because Taos has been a special place in my own life. When I was very young, about 4, my parents decided to spend part of the summers in Taos, and so that was my vacation spot every year. One year, we visited a beautiful museum in an old house just outside of town, the Millicent Rogers Museum, and on the gift shop wall was a Vogue photo of a gorgeous blonde woman in a Charles James blouse and piles of turquoise and silver bracelets. I had to know more about her!
The Museum was started by one of Millicent’s three sons, Paul Peralta Ramos, in 1956 to showcase his mother’s collection of nearly 2000 pieces of local art—jewelry, pottery, weavings, carvings, and her own work as well, as she was a jewelry designer. It’s now grown to over 7000 pieces, and moved to its current location in 1968, where it’s continued to grow and expand.
Violet Redfield is fictional, but Millicent Rogers was very real! In her short life (1902-1953) she was a socialite and heiress (her grandfather was a co-founder of Standard Oil), fashion icon, art collector, and later an activist for Native American rights. She contracted rheumatic fever at age 10, which shortened her life and plagued her will illness, but she managed to marry three times, fall in love with men like Clark Gable, Roald Dahl, and Ian Fleming, and live in New York, Virginia, Jamaica, and Austria before making her final home in Taos in 1948. She was buried in her new hometown at the Sierra Vista cemetery on January 1, 1953.
Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) was, like Millicent, a socialite, daughter of a wealthy Buffalo, New York family, who married several times (four!) and was a patron of the arts. She lived in Florence, at a famous Medici villa, and ran a counterculture salon in New York before landing in Taos in 1917 to establish her own arts colony, attracting people such as DH Lawrence, Georgia O’Keefe, and Ansel Adams. She married Tony Luhan from the Taos Pueblo in 1923, and is buried in the Kit Carson Cemetery in Taos. Her house is now a National Historic Landmark and run as a conference center.
One of the great Taos characters is Dorothy Brett (The Hononorable! 1883-1977). Daughter of a viscount, she was raised amid Queen Victoria’s court, but became an artistic bohemian who attended the Slade School and became friends with the Bloomsbury Circle before befriending DH Lawrence and moving with him to Taos in 1924. She stayed there for the rest of her long life, creating her own unique art (some of which can now be seen in the Smithsonian, as well as the Millicent Rogers Museum and Harwood Museum).
Martha Reed (1922-2010) actually opened her famous shop in 1953, so I fudged it a bit for my story! Daughter of artist Doel Reed, she got her own Arts degree in 1944 and worked at the Philbrook Museum and Dallas Museum of Art before moving to Taos. She first worked at the Pink Horse Shop on the Plaza, where she became well-known for designing her “broomstick” skirts and blouses in calico and velvet, before opening her own shop. She was a very sociable person, famous for her “soirees with hooch” all over town. I am lucky enough to own a painting by her, as well as Martha of Taos original bought by my aunt in the 1960s!
Lorenzo is fictional, but his cousin Benito was real, a man who (like so many others) was tormented by what he had seen in World War II and was helped by Millicent. The Karavas brothers first bought La Fonda in the 1920s, and it came to be run by one of their sons, Saki, until his death in 1996. He was an art collector and (as his tombstone says) “a great Taos character.” Tom McCarthy is also real, and if you visit Taos you can stay at his family’s beautiful B&B, Casa Benavides! They have the best breakfasts, and he is full of stories of his long life in Taos.
These are just a few of the sources I used! I have to thank the Historic Santa Fe Archives for all their help, too.
The Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers Collection at the Beinecke Library of Yale (much of which is online)
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter in Taos (1935) and Edge of Taos Desert (1937)
Lois Palken Rudnick, Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture (1996)
Cherie Burns, Searching for Beauty: The Life of Millicent Rogers, the American Heiress Who Taught the World About Style (2011) and Diving for Starfish: The Jeweler, the Actress, the Heiress, and One of the World’s Most Alluring Pieces of Jewelry (2018)
Judith Nasse, A Life in Full (2022)
Annette Tapert and Dana Edkins, The Power of Style (1994)
Sam Hignett, Brett: From Bloomsbury to New Mexico (1985)
Lois P. Rudnick, ed. Mabel Dodge Luhan and Company: American Moderns and the West (2016)
