Anne T. McBride

Heiress. Annabelle was born into a life of privilege. Her mother, born Rebekah West, came from a wealthy St. Louis banking family and her father, Dickson W. Pierce, was an advertising photographer who according to published reports was descended from President Franklin Pierce. In 1946, when Annabelle was 2, her mother divorced Dickson Pierce. A year later, she married William Hale Harkness, a wealthy investor and a co-founder of Time magazine. His grandfather was Daniel M. Harkness, a half-brother of Henry Flagler and an early investor in the Standard Oil Co., formed in 1870. “Uncle Bill,” the nickname Annabelle and her brother, Allen, used for their mother’s new husband, helped surround his stepchildren with lavish comfort — a chalet in Switzerland, a Manhattan apartment and Holiday House, the family’s oceanfront estate in Watch Hill, R.I., Annabelle attended private schools around the world before going to Rollins College, a small liberal arts school in Winter Park. She first came to Palm Beach on vacations with her mother. Before she got involved with Wolfie, she had been married twice. Her first marriage, from 1966 to 1970, was to Anthony McBride, an aspiring actor who hung out in the Malibu surfing crowd and whose stepfather was CBS newsman Mike Wallace. The other, to a man named Alin M. Gillieaux in November 1974, lasted less than a year, according to Clark County, Nevada, marriage records. On June 1, 2005, Annabelle died of breast cancer and renal failure. She was 61.