Chapter III

Abbey Rockefeller: The Vanishing Granddaughter

The Rockefeller heirs grew up in the family enclave at Pocantico Hills. a private fiefdom of some 3500 acres on the Hudson River 50 miles north of New York City. There were employed as many as 1500 servants, guards. secretaries and other retainers to care for the eleven baronial mansions on the estate. The playhouse where the heirs spent much of their childhood had an indoor swimming pool, indoor tennis and courts. billiard tables, two bowling alleys and closets full of toys. There were also such recreational facilities on the estate as a private golf course, stables, miles of private riding trails and six swimming pools.

The eldest heir and only daughter, Abby, was born in 1903. "Babs," as she called herself, attended finishing school, and, as their was no place for a woman in the family power machine, married three times. Taking on the surnames of her husbands, she became Abbey Milton Pardee Mauze. Like other women in the Rockefeller family, she was carefully shielded from any public role the Rockefeller managers who invested her funds, and arranged her political contributions. She was rarely during her lifetime mentioned in the press by the Rockefeller public relations machine in Room 5600. Even the authorized biographies of the family, while focusing on her 5 brothers, minimize her existence. For example, the lengthily official biography of her father mentions her only once in passing in a footnote referring to her as "Mrs. Jean Mauze." In almost all other family biographies, she was simply subsumed under the collective title "the Rockefeller messieurs." After she dies in 1976, a number of professorship were created at Rockefeller University in her name, a memorial liaison with the Rockefeller dynasty.


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