This one’s a corker (via the New York Times):

Huguette Clark, Reclusive Heiress, Dies at 104

She was almost certainly the last link to New York’s Gilded Age, reared in Beaux-Arts splendor in a 121-room Fifth Avenue mansion awash in Rembrandt, Donatello, Rubens and Degas. Her father, a copper baron who once bought himself a United States Senate seat as casually as another man might buy a pair of shoes, had been born before the Mexican War. Her six siblings died long before her, one in the 19th century.

Though she herself lived into the 21st century, Huguette Clark managed through determination and great wealth to spin out her golden childhood to the end of her long, strange, solitary life. Mrs. Clark died on Tuesday, at 104, at Beth Israel Medical Center, the Manhattan hospital where she had chosen to live in recent years, said Michael McKeon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clark’s lawyer, Wallace Bock.

That would be Wallace Bock who’s currently under investigation for his handling of Mrs. Clark’s financial affairs.

Last August, the Manhattan district attorney’s office began an investigation into the handling of Mrs. Clark’s finances, which were managed by Mr. Bock and [her accountant Irving H.] Kamsler for more than a decade. The investigation is continuing; no charges have been filed.

Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the hardworking staff is looking forward to stopping by (as in, on the outside looking in) at “Clark’s Folly,” the mansion Mrs. Clark’s father built at Fifth Avenue and 77th Street around 1910.

Its 121 rooms included 31 bathrooms, 4 art galleries and a theater; there was also a swimming pool and a thundering pipe organ. It was there, interspersed with stays in California and France, that Huguette grew up.

Then there’s the 42-room apartment at Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street that was her longtime residence until she went hospital. We’re looking forward to standing outside that place too.

UPDATE: From MSNBC (via The Daily Beast):

Family excluded from Huguette Clark burial

No funeral Mass, no priest, no mourners at tomb of 104-year-old daughter of copper tycoon and senator

The attorney did it.