A real estate queen and the secret she couldn’t keep hidden from the world

Alice Mason was throwing another one of her black-tie dinner parties in 1990.

For years, she had 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 had kept for much of her life.

A Manhattan real estate agent to the elite, Alice typically held six dinner parties in a year, almost always with 56 attendees — half women, half men, but not many couples. Her guests, as one person recalled, were “the A-list of A-lists”: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barbara Walters, Gloria Vanderbilt, Alan Greenspan, Norman Mailer, Estée Lauder, and Mary Tyler Moore.

In her private life, Alice was huge a believer in numerology, and with the middle initial F, her name added up to 22, “the most powerful number,” she bragged to her friends, according to her only child, a girl she named Dominique Richard.

During the 1970s, Alice’s interests expanded beyond the life of a socialite into the realm of politics, but she always maintained an underlying mystique.

Around this time, she became friends with Carter, the future U.S. president, who appeared at some of these fancy dinner parties, with Alice Mason raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for his 1976 campaign. Alice would call 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 years later.

“We couldn’t have won without you!” Carter wrote to Alice Mason on Nov. 16, 1976, just two weeks after winning the election. Later, in 1992, she hosted a fundraising dinner for Bill Clinton when he was running for president, and reportedly raised $1.5 million.

“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.”

Then came 1990, when Alice Mason threw a party for her daughter Dominique, who had just gotten engaged.

More than 30 years later, Dominique recalled how the “glamorous and fabulous” gala ruined her relationship with her mother after someone accompanying one of the party guests sparked a permanent rift between them.

F Stands for Fluffy

Alice Mason built her storied career, as well as her own life, on beautiful illusions that made her a legend in New York’s real estate market.

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. She later moved to New York and 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, 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 socialite Jeanne Murray Vanderbilt.

Murray and her husband, 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 career. Impressed, Alfred 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 nearly impossible. 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 set up an Upper East Side penthouse for Alfred. Realizing the profitability of this deal, she began making these same deals for her rich friends. Around 1958, she founded her own firm, which she’d call Alice F. Mason Ltd. The F was fake, though she told people it stood for Fluffy, a lovingly sarcastic nickname given to her by Alfred.

Over time, Alice became one of New York’s most powerful brokers — the person you called if you couldn’t get past the co-op board.

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.

Although Alice helped dozens of clients find 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 legendary dinner parties, which were frequently documented in New York magazine, The Daily News, and the Times.

She 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. Architect Philip Johnson, journalist Diane Sawyer, Chanel executive Kitty D’Alessio, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr. and diplomat Richard Butler were all guests.

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, and “charmed her to death,” Dominique said.

They married in 1957, and three years later, in May 1960, Dominique was born.

But the couple divorced before Dominique turned 1, and as a child, she went back and forth between her parents. Her father lived a quiet life, but her mother relished in the social set.

“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.”

After Dominique graduated from Barnard College in 1982, tensions grew due to Alice’s domineering personality.

“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 began dating after college, and eventually got engaged.

Alice immediately started party planning. 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, writer Lawrence Otis Graham, whose later revelations would shake the mother and daughter to their core.

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 Graham’s presence planted the seed for the rift to come.

Graham 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 resume 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 experienced.

Graham was heralded as a rising literary star after writing the 1995 book, “Member of the Club: Reflections on Life in a Racially Polarized World.”

In 1999, around a decade after attending Dominique’s engagement party, he published “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class.” Graham explored the lives of Black elites, who spent summer vacations in Martha’s Vineyard and enjoyed privileges unavailable to Black people with darker skin.

The book was a who’s who of Black high society, and on Page 268 was Alice Mason.

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 said 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. 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.”

In Philadelphia, Lawrence Christmas was a successful dentist, a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of the 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.

The family was called “the white Christmases,” because of their fair complexions. Alice was the third born of four children. Because of her bright complexion, Alice’s mother urged her to pass, leaving her family behind for a future in white society, Dominique said.

Passing refers to a person of mixed-race heritage who present themselves as belonging to a different racial group, typically to avoid discrimination.

In 1943, Alice married a distant cousin, Lt. Joseph Christmas, in a ceremony at her family’s home.

Tensions gripped the marriage because Joseph didn’t agree with passing his family off as white, and the couple divorced after one year. Alice’s second husband, Dominique’s father, and her third, diplomat Jan Schumacher, were white. She never changed her name from 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.

Only years later did Alice finally publicly acknowledge her race and her real family.

Following the revelation in Lawrence’s book, Alice did her best to distance herself from the controversy.

“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 made headlines in the tabloids, but it didn’t hurt her real estate business or cost her friends. The world had changed. For all she had invested in hiding her true self, by the time her secret came out, it had lost its power. But Alice was still deeply embarrassed.

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 in 1990 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.”