AirMail: Alice Mason, a celebrated hostess and realtor, hid a family secret.
Alice F. Mason, the pearl-wearing doyenne of Manhattan real-estate agents, who entertained President Jimmy Carter and a cavalcade of high achievers at bi-monthly black-tie dinner parties on the Upper East Side, had a secret she guarded assiduously for nearly half a century.
Even quick-witted friends such as Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, and Gloria Vanderbilt were unaware that Alice was Black.
Light-skinned enough to pass for white, she made a pragmatic decision to conceal her heritage upon moving to New York, in 1952, when racial prejudice was rampant. Civil rights and social mores evolved over time, but the Galanos-clad real-estate agent to the stars remained mum on the topic of her race.
I had the unlikely good fortune of being included in dozens of Alice’s power dinners, and Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair columnist, whispered to me once that our hostess might be Black, but I didn’t believe him.
A longtime Manhattan-society fixture, Alice turned 100 in October, wearing pink pajamas, in the cozy, eight-room rent-controlled apartment on East 72nd Street that she has occupied since 1962, when the rent was $400. (It’s now around $2,000.) She closed her Madison Avenue real-estate brokerage in 2008, during a downturn in the luxury market, and began writing a candid memoir that remains unpublished. The 334-page manuscript begins with an unvarnished truth: “I was born on October 26th, 1923, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania into a bourgeois family of color.”
(Alice was outed as Black in Lawrence Otis Graham’s 1999 book, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, but I do not recall the subject ever coming up in conversation with her.)
Her father, Lawrence Duke Christmas, was a dentist and charter member of the University of Pennsylvania chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black fraternity. He was from Fayetteville, North Carolina. “The family was so fair skinned, they were called the ‘White Christmases,’” Alice wrote, “but of course the ‘one drop’ applied.” (The racist “one drop” rule, a relic of the Jim Crow era, asserted that a person with any African ancestry was considered Black.)
Alice and her three siblings led sheltered lives, mingling only with other Black families whose fathers were doctors, dentists, or lawyers. “I never interacted socially with a white person until I was 16 and went away to Colby College in Waterville, Maine,” she recalled. During her junior year at Colby, where she studied sociology and psychology, her parents decided she should marry Joe Christmas, a distant cousin who was blond and had hazel eyes. “My mother who was a very pretty olive-skinned woman … was very race conscious,” Alice wrote. “She 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 only six months.
She forged a new identity for herself in New York, changing her last name to Mason, inspired by a distant crush she had on the British actor James Mason. She studied Pythagorean numerology, believing in a mystical relationship between numbers and destiny, and added a middle initial, “F,” to her name, to give it a “numerological vibration” and improve her chances of worldly success. It seems to have worked.
Alice spoke frequently on the phone with her sister, Marie Christmas Rhone, a darker-complexioned schoolteacher who lived in Harlem and who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. According to Alice’s daughter, Dominique Richard, the two sisters agreed to never be seen together in public lest anyone should spot the family resemblance. (Dominique herself only learned of her racial heritage at age nine, when she met her Black grandparents for the first time.) Indeed, Alice neglected to mention Marie’s existence to Dominique, who was in her 20s when she discovered she had an aunt in New York City. Throughout her childhood, if the phone rang and Dominique answered first, Marie would announce herself as “Mrs. Gonzalez.”
The compulsion to obscure one’s racial background in New York—a city of perennial, ambitious self-reinvention—was not uncommon among Black people who could “pass” as white during the 50s, when such distinctions could be critical for professional success. It was only when Anatole Broyard, a Louisiana-born Creole of mixed race who was a revered book critic for The New York Times, was on his deathbed that his children learned of his deception regarding their heritage.
During her early days in New York, Alice, a terrific dancer, supported herself by teaching the salsa, merengue, rumba, and cha-cha to Broadway and Hollywood actors before going into real estate. She found a glamorous penthouse for Marilyn Monroe with balconies overlooking the East River at Two Sutton Place, and they became fast friends.
Petite, perspicacious, and disarmingly polite, Alice was an ace gin-rummy player and a shrewd judge of people’s motives and foibles, skills that helped her to excel professionally and socially. “I had irrepressible joie de vivre and bubbly enthusiasm that was contagious, and a natural irreverence,” she wrote, “so people were attracted to me and they shed their inhibitions, and so no matter how famous and high profile they were they loved laughing and talking with me as I added fun to their lives.”
In the 1960s the most coveted Upper East Side co-op apartment buildings were controlled by WASP-heavy boards, who declined to admit Blacks, Jews, and Irish, and anyone with the misfortune of not being included in the elitist Social Register, the society bible, which routinely expunged those who divorced. When Alice failed to get Alfred Vanderbilt Jr., the thrice-married railroad heir, into a Fifth Avenue co-op, she recognized a void in the market and set out to become the go-to broker for otherwise eligible prospective buyers.
“I became a success almost overnite because I really made a study of the establishment to figure out how to outwit them,” she wrote. Her barrier-breaking quest would have been impossible if anyone knew she was Black during such an exclusionary era. Making good use of her degree in sociology and psychology, not to mention her firm belief in astrology, she waged a genteel war. “I just did everyone’s [astrological] charts: the sellers, the buyers and the board members to find their weaknesses.”
Her commitment to helping her clients went well beyond the usual duties of a broker. When she was asked by the wealthy Jewish philanthropists Alice and Jack Kaplan to get them past the WASP gatekeepers at 760 Park Avenue, Alice persuaded everyone in her office, and yoga class, to repeat the mantra “You want the Kaplans, you want the Kaplans.”
Shortly thereafter she married a Dutch diplomat whose close friend Arturo Peralta-Ramos was head of 760’s co-op board. “He said it was the strangest thing,” she wrote. At the board meeting everyone had been dead-set against letting the Kaplans in, but then Peralta-Ramos’s wife had gone into a trance and could not stop saying, “We want the Kaplans, we want the Kaplans, we want the Kaplans.” So the board approved their application. A few days later, confided Peralta-Ramos, his wife could not remember the incident taking place at all.
“There was no other Broker who could compete with that,” wrote Alice.
Alice’s conspicuous success, driven by her ingenious wiles and tenacity, became an external manifestation of her own private deception about her color. Just as she pretended to be white to gain access to New York’s power elite, so she helped her clients to enter the snooty limestone-clad co-ops on Fifth and Park Avenues where eager outsiders had feared to tread.
Intrigued by her ingenuity, Alfred Vanderbilt wrote fulsome letters of recommendation for Alice’s clients to impress haughty co-op boards. He nicknamed her “Fluff,” telling her, “Alice, you have a mind like a steel trap. Nobody would accuse you of being a ball of fluff.”
Her familiarity with the occult arts proved especially useful in the mid-70s, when she encountered a certain peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. “Jimmy Carter was the first politician I ever met,” she recalled in a 2010 interview. “I was sitting next to him at dinner at ‘21’ and he asked if I would support him. I said, ‘I’m an astrologer so I’ll look up your chart, and if you have energy in it, I’ll consider supporting you.’ He had so much energy in his chart.”
She threw herself into championing Carter’s cause and, according to Mason, raised more than any other individual—$252,000—for his successful 1976 campaign for president, thereby earning his enduring gratitude and devoted friendship. After their stint in the White House, the Carters were frequent guests of honor at Alice’s dinners, a distinction that burnished her prowess as a businesswoman and Upper East Side hostess.
Alice confided the secret of her heritage to her close friend, Carmen Dell’Orefice, the model. “My hat has always been off to Alice,” says Dell’Orefice, who attended all of Alice’s black-tie dinners for 40 years. “She worked hard, and she overcame and navigated every prejudice.”
“It was a feather in anyone’s cap to be invited to one of Alice’s spectacular dinner parties, filled with intellectuals and artists,” Dell’Orefice adds. “If they had known her background, they might have rejected her. But she outlived them and outsmarted them.”
Christopher Mason is the author of The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House Scandal and the TV host of Behind Mansion Walls on Investigation Discovery. He also writes and performs musical toasts and roasts. www.christopher-mason.com
Give the Gift of First-Rate Journalism
This holiday season, give the gift of AIR MAIL for 50% off. It’s an easy gift that will suit everyone on your list.
