She was once born Alice Christmas on Oct. 26, 1923, in Philadelphia “to a bourgeois family of color,” as she wrote in an unpublished memoir. Her father, Lawrence Duke Christmas, was once a dentist; her mom, Alice (Meyers) Christmas, controlled the family. In Alice’s telling, the circle of relatives was once so light-skinned that they had been referred to as the White Christmases.
Yet Alice’s international was once circumscribed and sheltered, she stated, and she didn’t have interaction with any white other folks till she attended Colby College, in Maine. It was once her race-conscious mom who made up our minds that Alice will have to “pass” and are living her lifestyles in the white international, in order now not to face the generation’s prejudices towards other folks of colour. Her mom organized a wedding with a light-skinned cousin named Joe Christmas. Joe was once now not all in favour of passing, alternatively, and Alice was once now not all in favour of marriage — therefore the divorce. By the past due Nineteen Forties, she had moved to New York City, figuring out nobody there.
She quickly christened herself Alice F. Mason. She favored the actor James Mason, and the F stood for Fluffy, an incongruous nickname given to her through Mr. Vanderbilt as a result of she was once the rest however. It was once additionally a potent mixture of letters, in numerology phrases.
Ms. Mason’s secret got here out in 1999, when her circle of relatives ties had been famous in “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class,” through Lawrence Otis Graham. But it was once hardly ever a bombshell. No one appeared to understand or care. “There are many people with family members who live on both sides,” Ms. Mason informed New York mag. “I’ve led this life for over 45 years, and it’s all a state of mind.”
In addition to her daughter, she is survived through a grandson.
Ms. Mason closed her company in 2009, when she was once 86. The wealthy now not wanted her specialised wisdom. Park Avenue, with its fussy, archaic regulations, had ceded a lot of its cachet to the glassy new condos being constructed downtown, to which the price tag for access was once merely cash.
She by no means left the rent-stabilized rental the place she held her storied dinners, in a century-old construction on East 72nd Street. (In Manhattan actual property parlance, it was once a vintage 8, a gracious prewar format that integrated 3 bedrooms and two maid’s rooms.) In 2011, the developer Harry Macklowe bought the building for a reported $70 million and started to flip the devices into condos, purchasing out the tenants to achieve this.
But Ms. Mason refused to surrender her rental. When she moved there in 1962, the lease was once $400 a month. At her dying, it was once $2,476. The rental beneath her, in the identical line, was once not too long ago on the marketplace for slightly below $10 million.