Finances Of Heiress, 104, At Center Of NY Probe

When her mother died in 1963, Huguette was transformed from a rather private socialite in her 50s to a social specter â€" an eccentric whom building staff members say they never saw; she had whatever she needed delivered.

Even distant relatives attempting to visit were discouraged from entering; she told several of them to stand on the sidewalk and she would wave to them, staffers remember.

"She never went out," said Laurance Kaiser IV, a Manhattan real estate agent who once met her in the Fifth Avenue building.

She apparently trusted almost no one, but was generous. Each doorman got a $500 check from her at Christmas. They'd seen her only a few times over the decades -- and only by accident, while slipping mail under her door when she happened to open it. She would scurry away.

Huguette Clark left for good one day in the 1980s, on the stretcher.

"She just got tired of living," Kaiser said.

Steven Shirley, an amateur historian in Helena, Mont., said Clark was "very much on top of things -- very lucid" when he last spoke to her a half dozen years ago, by phone.

Though hard of hearing and unable to understand all of his questions, "she reminisced about her days in France before World War I," Shirley told the AP. "She read The New York Times every day and she was very aware of world events," he added.

In the end, her vast fortune allowed the heiress to lead an ever more solitary life.

She's said to have once told friends that extreme wealth is a "menace to happiness."

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Associated Press Writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.

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