Saturday, July 31st 2010, 4:00 AM
She owns a 42-room apartment on Fifth Ave., a palatial California estate and a million Connecticut chateau.
But a 104-year-old heiress whose life is shrouded in mystery has forsaken the lap of luxury for a nondescript hospital room somewhere in the city.
Reclusive for decades, Huguette Clark has abandoned her wildly valuable properties, which remain empty but well-tended by staff.
A life of incredible privilege took a bizarre turn with the death of her mother – and Clark traded in aristocracy for eccentricity.
“Everything stopped for her when her mother died,” Andre Baeyens, Clark’s grand-halfnephew, told NBC’s “Today” show, which tracked down the centenarian.
“She didn’t want to go out. She didn’t want to have beautiful things, no, no. She just wanted to be home and play with her dolls.”
The show did not identify the medical facility where Clark spends her days, to protect her privacy. Her lawyer told them she’s lucid but not interested in the outside world.
She reportedly told friends that wealth was a “menace to happiness” – and few people were richer than Clark.
She inherited her fortune from her father, William Clark, a U.S. senator and Montana tycoon who made a killing from copper mines, railroads and Las Vegas property.
Her birth raised eyebrows in high society because her father – the second-richest man in the U.S. at one point – was 39 years older than her mother and no marriage license was recorded.
As a young woman, she embraced extravagance like the Paris Hilton of the Gilded Age.
She ran around with wealthy playboys and was linked in society pages to a British duke. To learn to play the harp, she hired a Juilliard maestro.
She was obsessed with dolls and would bestow them on friends’ children as gifts. Once she flew a doll first-class to Paris with her personal physician along to ensure its safety, the “Today” report said.
She amassed a real estate portfolio that would make Donald Trump blush.
There’s the 15,000-square-foot Fifth Ave. apartment overlooking Central Park where her lawyer sends a cleaning crew once a week, building staffers say.
In 1952, she bought a 52-acre New Canaan, Conn., estate, but never spent a night in the breath-taking French chateau.
“It’s a beautiful property,” real estate agent Barbara Cleary, who has been trying to sell the million home for two years, told the Daily News.
“It’s been very well-cared for over the years.”
Clark’s oceanfront spread in Santa Barbara, Calif., has also been unoccupied for more than 40 years.
In 2009, she was offered 0 million for the property known as Bellosguardo, but turned down the offer, the Santa Barbara Independent reported.
