Alice Mason was throwing one of her black-tie dinner parties. For years, she’d been hosting events that New York City’s social pages fawned over, but she didn’t expect that this one would disrupt a secret she’d kept for much of her life.
A Manhattan real estate agent to the elite, Alice typically held six dinner parties a year, almost always with 56 attendees — half women, half men, not too many couples. Her guests, as one socialite put it, were “the A-list of A-lists”: Barbara Walters, Bill Clinton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Alan Greenspan, Norman Mailer, Estée Lauder, Mary Tyler Moore, Jimmy Carter.
“The key to my parties is the small tables,” Alice once told The New York Times. “That way people do not have to talk only to the people on their right or left. They can talk to the whole table.”
This party, circa 1990, was for her only child, Dominique Richard, who had just become engaged. More than 30 years later, Dominique doesn’t remember much about the party, just that it was “glamorous and fabulous,” as usual. What stands out now is what it meant for her relationship with her mother. One guest’s plus-one would cause a permanent rift between them.
In New York’s real estate scene, appearances matter. The deft placement of a rug or a lamp can create an impression that helps make the sale. Alice Mason built her storied career in part on beautiful illusions, and this guest would lay bare the way she had staged her own life.
F Stands for Fluffy
Alice grew up in Philadelphia and in the early 1940s attended Colby College in Maine, intending to follow in the footsteps of her father, a dentist. At Colby, she was in the modern dance club, and when she later moved to New York, she worked as a dance instructor, teaching Broadway and Hollywood actors how to salsa and mambo. Alice turned to real estate somewhat on a whim, after Gladys Mills, the founder of Gotham Realty, helped her find her first New York apartment in 1952, a studio on East 53rd Street. Gladys invited Alice to work with her.
“I was never interested in real estate; I was just interested in New York,” Alice told The Real Deal in 2007. “But when she offered me the job and she said that she mainly handled movie stars, I thought that would be interesting.” Alice’s clients included Marilyn Monroe and Rex Harrison, and soon she became close friends with the socialite Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt.
Jeanne and her husband, the railroad heir Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Jr., brought Alice to gatherings they hosted at their Broadhollow estate, a sprawling property on Long Island. Their parties were mostly for family members, until Alice suggested inviting the celebrities she was meeting through her budding real estate career. Alfred, impressed, became a client.
He came from one of the wealthiest families in the country, but as Alice soon discovered, the city’s most exclusive co-ops still didn’t want him as a tenant. “I called many buildings and they said, ‘We would never take a Vanderbilt or an Astor — they’re the 1880s, and we’re the 1620s,’” Alice said in a 2010 interview.
At the time, if someone wasn’t in the New York Social Register — essentially a Yellow Pages for high society members — getting past certain co-op boards was a very difficult, if not impossible, task. Family name, race, marital status and social status all played a role in whether someone could get into a certain building — even if, like Alfred, the person could afford to buy the entire building.
Eventually, Alice found Alfred an Upper East Side penthouse to call home. And she realized that she could build her business to address this problem. Around 1958, she founded her own firm, which she’d call Alice F. Mason Ltd. The F was fake; she told people it stood for Fluffy, a lovingly sarcastic nickname given to her by Alfred. But Alice was also a believer in numerology, and with the middle initial F, her name added up to 22, “the most powerful number,” she said.
In time, Alice became one of New York’s most powerful brokers — the person you called if you couldn’t get past the board.
She urged one client, an Iranian businessman, to bring two large tins of Iranian caviar to impress the board of a co-op. She advised another to donate $10 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, since the co-op president was on the museum’s board. And once, she told a Jewish furrier from the Bronx to open a bank account in Manhattan and find four people in the Social Register who could write him letters of recommendation; she told his wife to pretend she had a cough and not to talk during their interview with the board — to hide her accent.
In her unpublished memoir, parts of which were included in a 2023 Air Mail article, Alice wrote, “I became a success almost overnight because I really made a study of the establishment to figure out how to outwit them.”
Eventually, when Alice’s clients became board members of the co-ops she hustled to get them into, she held the keys to several of the city’s most desirable buildings. The nouveau riche were now simply the rich, and they owed her.
Though Alice helped dozens of clients buy their dream homes, she continued to rent. In 1962, she moved into a $400-a-month, 2,043-square-foot rent-stabilized apartment in a building on East 72nd Street. This would become the setting for her famous dinner parties, which were documented in New York magazine, The Daily News, The Times and more. “The hot meals, created especially for Alice by restaurateur Daniel Boulud, are always delicious,” wrote the society columnist Aileen Mehle for Women’s Wear Daily. At the table, the conversation “is always amusing — you can count on the wits and savants strutting their stuff — and just controversial enough.”
Thin and petite, Alice wore pearls and suits with set-in sleeves. At some point those suits became Chanel, Dior and Armani — “lots of Armani, because Armani is what I call ‘older lady classic,’” Dominique said. Alice sprayed herself with Diorissimo perfume and was often seen carrying her little white dog, a Maltese named Fluffy.
Alice would invite her dinner party guests weeks in advance, after perfecting the list on yellow legal pads. She wasn’t just drawn to flashy movie stars; she also hosted business executives, writers, artists and heirs and heiresses of all sorts. The architect Philip Johnson, the journalist Diane Sawyer, the Chanel executive Kitty D’Alessio, the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr. and the diplomat Richard Butler were all guests.
By the 1970s, Alice’s interests had expanded beyond hosting and real estate into the realm of politics. She became close with Jimmy Carter, who was a guest at her dinner parties, and she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his presidential campaign. Alice called donors asking for contributions of $225 — in numerology, that figure adds up to 9, as opposed to $250, which adds up to 7, an unlucky number, Dominique explained. “We couldn’t have won without you!” Carter wrote to her on Nov. 16, 1976, just two weeks after winning the election. Later, in 1992, she hosted a fund-raising dinner for Bill Clinton when he was running for president, and reportedly raised $1.5 million.
The agent George Vanderploeg, who worked for Alice in the 1990s, recalled that in her office, “she had black-and-white photographs of all the presidents and all the rich and famous people she knew.” He continued: “It was so inspiring. It was like an Alice Mason museum.”
A Relationship Strained
Sometime in the 1950s, Alice met Francis Richard, who had moved to New York from France to open a Berlitz language school. Alice took French lessons there, and “he charmed her to death,” Dominique said.
They married in 1957, and three years later, in May 1960, they had Dominique. “I only wanted a girl and I only wanted her born on Sunday and I wanted her to be a Taurus, not Gemini,” Alice later told The Real Deal. “I got everything I wanted.”
But the couple divorced before Dominique turned 1, and as a child she went back and forth between her parents. Her father, she said, “wanted to hear what I liked. He wanted to read me the stories I wanted. He made me little French foods and cookies and things and made my life important.”
Her mother gave her a different life. “We would go to big cocktail parties, Mom and I, all the time,” she said. “And I would always say, ‘Why are we going to these?’” Alice would always respond, “Well, we have a business.”
Alice was a star gin rummy player, and she frequently played with businessmen. At times she had to live commission to commission, and her card game winnings could go toward rent. “I’d say to my mom, ‘Will you play cards with me?’” Dominique said. “And she’d say: ‘You’ll ruin my game. I can’t play with you.’”
Dominique wanted to go to college in California or France, but Alice convinced her to stay in Manhattan. “What’s wrong with New York?” Dominique recalled her mother saying. “You can live at home.” Dominique graduated from Barnard College in 1982 and, inspired by the television drama “Perry Mason,” had hopes of becoming a lawyer. Alice urged her to join the family business instead. If she was terrible at it, Alice said, she could do something else. But Dominique eventually became the firm’s vice president, and even sold Joan Didion an apartment. “I was good at it, but I never liked it,” she said.
“I kind of always felt stifled under her,” Dominique said. “Everything was her way.”
While Dominique was in college, she met Luke Yang, a student at Columbia University. The two became close through a French class they took together — a parallel to her parents’ love story. They began dating after college, and eventually became engaged.
And that’s when Alice decided to do what she did best: plan a party. But this time, since it was an engagement party for the couple, the guest list included some of Luke’s friends, too. One was Pamela Thomas, whom Luke knew through his time at Harvard Business School, and she brought her future husband, the writer Lawrence Otis Graham.
The Busboy
Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to take place at the engagement party itself, which was just as glamorous as any other Alice Mason event. But Lawrence’s presence planted the seed for the rift to come.
Lawrence had grown up in Westchester County and graduated from Harvard Law School after attending Princeton University.
But in 1992, he scrubbed his Ivy League credentials from his résumé and got a job clearing dishes at the Greenwich Country Club in Connecticut.
On Aug. 17 of that year, his portrait appeared on the cover of New York magazine, with the headline “Invisible Man.” “I got into this country club the only way that a Black man like me could — as a $7-an-hour busboy,” Lawrence wrote in a first-person story detailing the racism and sexism he had observed.
His tale prompted a discussion on race, class and discrimination, and he included it in his 1995 book, “Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World.” Lawrence was a rising literary star.
In 1999, around a decade after attending Dominique’s engagement party, he published “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class.” The book explored the lives of the Black elite, the kind of people who summered in Martha’s Vineyard and were educated before many doors to wealth and success were open to them. “In fact, I knew some who not only had complexions 10 shades lighter than that brown paper bag, and hair as straight as any ruler, but also had multiple generations of ‘good looks,’ wealth and accomplishment,” Lawrence wrote in the book. “And, of course, I also knew some black kids who could claim nothing at all.”
It was a who’s who of Black high society, and on Page 268, there she was: Alice.
Lawrence said she was “born into the prominent Christmas family in Philadelphia.” He described her as “elegant,” and said he first met her at one of her “famous dinner parties.”
Light-skinned and tight-lipped, she had passed as white, deluding the city’s elite for decades. Alice was Black.
Alice Christmas
Dominique had known for years. She was 9 when she learned she was half Black. Alice’s parents, Dr. Lawrence Duke Christmas and Mrs. Alice Christmas, took her to the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel for ice cream. It was the first time she had met either of them, and Alice “prepared” her. Just a child, Dominique didn’t overthink it back then, she recalled. Her mother told her she’d be meeting her grandparents, and she “felt the need to tell me that they were Black, and I remember thinking, OK, like, whatever.” Today, she remembers little of their interaction. But, she said, “they were very kind.” She never saw them again.
In Philadelphia, Dr. Christmas was a successful dentist, a member of Delta Eta Sigma fraternity and a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of the prestigious Black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha. The family, part of the city’s Black bourgeoisie, was frequently mentioned in the Black society pages as guests at notable parties and events. Until she left for Colby College, “I never interacted socially with a white person,” Alice wrote in her memoir.
The family was called “the white Christmases,” because of their fair complexions. Alice, the third born of four children, was particularly light. Alice’s mother urged her to pass, leaving her family behind for a future in white society, Dominique said. It was the 1940s, and that meant a Black woman couldn’t shop in certain stores, attend certain schools, live in certain buildings or move through the world as freely as a white woman. The Christmases were a successful Black family, but passing was a passport to a whole different life.
In 1943, Alice married a distant cousin, Lt. Joseph Christmas, in a ceremony at her family’s home. A wedding announcement in the African American newspaper The Philadelphia Tribune referred to Alice as “one of the most popular members of the younger set.”
There was tension in the marriage almost immediately. Her mother, Alice wrote, “felt Joe and I should pass for white and not have to face the prejudices surrounding people of color. Joe didn’t seem too interested in that.” The marriage lasted less than a year. Her second husband, Dominique’s father, and her third, the diplomat Jan Schumacher, were white men. Throughout those later marriages, she was known as Alice Mason — because she was a fan of the actor James Mason.
Her life as a socialite and a real estate agent to wealthy Manhattanites was a paradox: Alice Mason, the seemingly white real estate broker, got her clients into buildings that would never have accepted her as a Black woman.
The actions of Alice’s family largely abetted the ruse. In her father’s obituary in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1975, Alice is listed only as “Alice” — with no last name — while her sister, Marie Christmas Rhone, is mentioned as “Mrs. Marie Rhone.”
While Marie, who lived in Harlem, led a very different life, she was very much in on the secret. She had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was active in local politics as she worked as a schoolteacher. The two sisters remained close, even as they hid their relationship. Marie “was the only family member that my mom spoke to throughout her whole life,” Dominique said. “She called on the second phone number we had at home, and they’d have a secret conversation.” When Dominique answered the phone, Marie would say she was an associate of Alice’s named Mrs. Gonzalez. “I used to say, ‘Mrs. Gonzalez calls a lot!’” Dominique said.
With Marie well established in New York political circles and Alice throwing parties for presidents, they sometimes found themselves in the same room.
Dominique remembered that at a fund-raiser for David Dinkins, New York’s first Black mayor who held office in the early 1990s, she and Alice sat on a sofa next to another woman.
Dinkins told the group that he wanted to thank one person in particular: a woman nicknamed “Merry Christmas.” Dominique knew her mother’s surname had been Christmas, and at first she thought he was referring to Alice. But she came to realize that he was referring to the woman they were sitting with. It was her Aunt Marie, but she didn’t know it until then. “My mother’s looking straight ahead, and Marie is looking straight ahead,” Dominique said. “I turned to Mom, like, ‘Really?’ She looks at me like, ‘We’re not even going to touch on the subject here.’”
Alice publicly acknowledged Marie and her family years later, after the publication of Lawrence’s book. In one interview, she noted that Marie’s daughter, Sylvia Rhone, then the president of Elektra Records, was herself a prominent figure. “I just met her about three weeks ago,” she said. “I had actually seen her when she was 4 or 5 years old, and I haven’t seen her since. But she’s a great success, and I’m proud of her.”
Though they weren’t close, Sylvia, who is now in her 70s, said she was also proud of Alice from afar. “She had only one choice if she was going to be successful,” Sylvia said during a recent phone call, adding that she thought it took “a lot of guts” for Alice to accomplish what she did in real estate. But what she admired most, Sylvia said, was Alice’s political work, like her backing of President Carter. “When she was doing her political thing, she was always doing it with a civil rights story behind it, and she always supported those people running for president who were supportive of the Black community,” she said.
After the release of Lawrence’s book, Alice tried to wave away the revelation. “There are many people with family members who live on both sides,” she told New York magazine. “I’ve led this life for over 45 years, and it’s all a state of mind.”
Her race became fodder for gossip and tabloids, but it didn’t hurt her real estate business or cost her friends, Dominique and Alice’s former employees said. The world had changed. For all her fears, and for all the work she had invested in hiding her true self, by the time her secret came out, it had lost its power.
But Alice was deeply embarrassed nonetheless. The secret she had labored for years to keep, even at the expense of family ties, had suddenly and rudely been exposed by a guest at one of her parties. She blamed Dominique; in her mind, Lawrence attended the engagement party and everyone learned she was Black. The only person who could have outed her to him, she said, was her daughter. “She was just really mad,” Dominique said. Dominique told her mother that she had never revealed her secret, but Alice remained upset. “She thought I was a traitor.”
Lawrence could’ve pieced together Alice’s background in any number of ways — through his other interviews for the book, through a confidante who let it slip. But now, decades later, Dominique believes Lawrence was tipped off merely by instinct. “Black people know Black people, even if you’re very, very … you know,” she said. “There’s a gamut of colors.”
‘A Standstill’
Lawrence’s book was hugely influential, and Alice’s true identity continued to be a hot topic of conversation for years. At a Harlem Book Fair talk in 2006, Lawrence said that when he was writing, he hadn’t realized he was exposing a secret. He said he was merely researching the Christmas family because they were well known in Philadelphia, and when he asked his sources if there were any surviving Christmas children, he learned that there were two sisters living in New York, one on the Upper East Side and the other on the Upper West. “But nobody told me that the one that lived on the East Side had been passing for white,” he said.
He recalled that someone from New York magazine had called him to confirm that Alice was Black after his book was published. “I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure of my facts, but I didn’t know that she was living a different story.’” Lawrence died in 2021.
By the 2000s, luxury condos had become popular and fewer wealthy buyers needed Alice to navigate co-op boards. Her parties dwindled to once a year. In 2009, well into her 80s, Alice finally closed her firm. “Things sort of just came to a standstill, so there wasn’t really any business,” Dominique said. “Literally, the next day I left.” Now, Dominique lives in Spain and is retired.
For Alice, retirement brought a feeling of hollowness. “She didn’t have joy and pastimes,” Dominique said. “So when she retired, it was kind of like, ‘What do I do with my days?’”
Last December, I became interested in Alice’s life story. I called her — and she answered. I introduced myself and asked whether she’d like to be interviewed. There was a long silence, and then the sound of the phone hanging up. I wrote Alice a handwritten note and was on my way to the post office to mail it when I opened Instagram and saw that Dominique had announced her death. Alice died in her rental apartment on Jan. 4, 2024. She was 100.
The mother and daughter never fully repaired their relationship, and Dominique is still trying to process the loss. But Dominique’s posts on Instagram tried to reflect the best of Alice: “Forty years ago,” she wrote, “my mom was an entertaining icon.”
The post A Real Estate Queen and the Secret She Couldn’t Keep Hidden appeared first on New York Times.
