Lawrence Otis Graham, Best Selling Author of Our Kind of People, dies at 58

[get these nets]

Aug. 21, 2022

The Draw of the Vineyard​

More members of New York’s Black political Establishment are making a late-summer sojourn to the island.​

By Errol Louis

The rising stars of New York’s Black political Establishment, still growing accustomed to their power, made the wise decision to put a trip to Martha’s Vineyard on the agenda this year. For nearly a century, the annual summer gathering of Black upper-middle-class artists, scholars, lawyers, doctors, and executives has been a hub of cultural events, academic panels, and informal social bonding. In recent years, it’s also been a good place for politicians to pick up campaign donations.

It’s a trip that requires some planning: It’s not always easy to get a ticket on the ferries that service the Vineyard, and only a few daily direct flights from New York — and almost no available hotel rooms on the island in August (a recent search on Airbnb found weekend stays going for between $979 and $10,000 a night).

So it’s a big deal that Mayor Eric Adams arrived on the island and stayed overnight to attend a fundraiser in Edgartown sponsored by DeNora and Mark Getachew. Attorney General Letitia James, Assemblymembers Alicia Hyndman and Latrice Walker, and activist Tamika Mallory showed up for quiet meetings. (“I listened and learned. I spoke and informed. I gave money and received support. I laughed so much with friends,” Mallory posted on Instagram.)


The private fundraisers and informal meetings are a chance for the state’s leaders to network without pressure from needy constituents, pushy lobbyists, and nosy journalists.

“I’ve been trying to get [Assembly Speaker] Carl Heastie to come here for years. This is his first time,” said Hasoni Pratts, a political consultant with a home in Oak Bluffs, who co-sponsored a fundraiser for Heastie and separate events for several other candidates. “This isn’t like the Latino political conference or the Black Caucus weekend. It’s a much more relaxed environment — not as stuffy and transactional as the usual events.”

Pratts also hosted Brooklyn’s own Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a leading candidate in the race to become the next Speaker of the House, in his first-ever Vineyard fundraiser. Jeffries was in town to headline California congresswoman Barbara Lee’s 17th Annual Martha’s Vineyard weekend, which included Representative Gregory Meeks of Queens, Joyce Beatty of Ohio, Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, Lisa Rochester of Delaware, and Terri Sewell of Alabama.

The fascinating story of how and why generations of Black professionals have flocked to the Vineyard every August is chronicled in Our Kind of People by author-attorney Lawrence Otis Graham, who died last year at age 59. Graham, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law, was an insightful analyst of race and class; he once took a break from his corporate-law job to work undercover as a busboy at an all-white country club in Greenwich, mercilessly exposing its snobbery in a New York cover story.

Oak Bluffs, on the north coast of the Vineyard, has become a place where Black middle-class overachievers come to relax, connect, and network, free from the tensions, glass ceilings, and subtle snubs of their mostly white workplaces and neighborhoods back home. This month, members of Jack and Jill, the invitation-only Black youth organization, held mixers for teenagers — along with a session on SAT prep. Recruiters from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase were on hand for low-key meet-and-greets with university students, many of them from historically Black colleges. And hundreds of members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority gathered at Inkwell Beach, which they turned into the “Pinkwell” for a day.

The 2022 season started with a bang, when ex-president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama — who own a 29-acre estate in Edgartown — made a surprise appearance at the 20th annual Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival to introduce Descendant, a documentary produced by the Obamas’ film company, Higher Ground. The festival included Viola Davis, broadcaster Tiffany Cross, the Reverend Al Sharpton (the subject of a documentary), Tyler Perry, and of course Spike Lee, who owns a home in Oak Bluffs and has a forthcoming film about NFL ex-quarterback Colin Kaepernick.


In addition to the film festival, Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee hosted a sold-out fundraiser for Wes Moore, the former CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation who is the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland.

I ran into my friend Patrick Gaspard, the former White House political director for Obama, who now runs the Center for American Progress think tank and was part of a panel in Oak Bluffs on Black women in the workplace that included Yamiche Alcindor, the host of Washington Week on PBS. Political commentator Bakari Sellers moderated a panel on Black philanthropy; former Bronx assemblyman Michael Blake put together a conference on tech and politics; and the Council of Urban Professionals, a civic and corporate networking organization, convened its summit.

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas was in the Vineyard, as was Deidre DeJear, the Democratic nominee running for governor of Iowa. So was Representative Karen Bass, the leading candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. There was buzz around Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Representative Nikema Williams of Georgia, both considered young up-and-comers likely to wield significant influence in Congress (Williams doubles as state chair of the Georgia Democratic Party).

“The reason why I open up my network is to help those who don’t have those connections or resources, but they really want to do good — they really want to be good public servants and their values are in the right place, but they just don’t have the network,” says Pratts. “Running for office is hard, and a lot of people don’t have the opportunity to do any type of self-care. But when they come here, at least they get a few hours to do self-care, even if it’s just sitting by the pool or going to the beach. So that’s also part of the donation.”

Culture, conferences, teen mixers, professional networking, personal rejuvenation, and a stream of Black money to politicians accumulating dramatic levels of power. Somewhere, Lawrence Otis Graham is looking down and smiling

 

[DrBanneker]

Aug. 21, 2022

The Draw of the Vineyard​

More members of New York’s Black political Establishment are making a late-summer sojourn to the island.​

By Errol Louis

The rising stars of New York’s Black political Establishment, still growing accustomed to their power, made the wise decision to put a trip to Martha’s Vineyard on the agenda this year. For nearly a century, the annual summer gathering of Black upper-middle-class artists, scholars, lawyers, doctors, and executives has been a hub of cultural events, academic panels, and informal social bonding. In recent years, it’s also been a good place for politicians to pick up campaign donations.

It’s a trip that requires some planning: It’s not always easy to get a ticket on the ferries that service the Vineyard, and only a few daily direct flights from New York — and almost no available hotel rooms on the island in August (a recent search on Airbnb found weekend stays going for between $979 and $10,000 a night).

So it’s a big deal that Mayor Eric Adams arrived on the island and stayed overnight to attend a fundraiser in Edgartown sponsored by DeNora and Mark Getachew. Attorney General Letitia James, Assemblymembers Alicia Hyndman and Latrice Walker, and activist Tamika Mallory showed up for quiet meetings. (“I listened and learned. I spoke and informed. I gave money and received support. I laughed so much with friends,” Mallory posted on Instagram.)


The private fundraisers and informal meetings are a chance for the state’s leaders to network without pressure from needy constituents, pushy lobbyists, and nosy journalists.

“I’ve been trying to get [Assembly Speaker] Carl Heastie to come here for years. This is his first time,” said Hasoni Pratts, a political consultant with a home in Oak Bluffs, who co-sponsored a fundraiser for Heastie and separate events for several other candidates. “This isn’t like the Latino political conference or the Black Caucus weekend. It’s a much more relaxed environment — not as stuffy and transactional as the usual events.”

Pratts also hosted Brooklyn’s own Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a leading candidate in the race to become the next Speaker of the House, in his first-ever Vineyard fundraiser. Jeffries was in town to headline California congresswoman Barbara Lee’s 17th Annual Martha’s Vineyard weekend, which included Representative Gregory Meeks of Queens, Joyce Beatty of Ohio, Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, Lisa Rochester of Delaware, and Terri Sewell of Alabama.

The fascinating story of how and why generations of Black professionals have flocked to the Vineyard every August is chronicled in Our Kind of People by author-attorney Lawrence Otis Graham, who died last year at age 59. Graham, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law, was an insightful analyst of race and class; he once took a break from his corporate-law job to work undercover as a busboy at an all-white country club in Greenwich, mercilessly exposing its snobbery in a New York cover story.

Oak Bluffs, on the north coast of the Vineyard, has become a place where Black middle-class overachievers come to relax, connect, and network, free from the tensions, glass ceilings, and subtle snubs of their mostly white workplaces and neighborhoods back home. This month, members of Jack and Jill, the invitation-only Black youth organization, held mixers for teenagers — along with a session on SAT prep. Recruiters from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase were on hand for low-key meet-and-greets with university students, many of them from historically Black colleges. And hundreds of members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority gathered at Inkwell Beach, which they turned into the “Pinkwell” for a day.

The 2022 season started with a bang, when ex-president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama — who own a 29-acre estate in Edgartown — made a surprise appearance at the 20th annual Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival to introduce Descendant, a documentary produced by the Obamas’ film company, Higher Ground. The festival included Viola Davis, broadcaster Tiffany Cross, the Reverend Al Sharpton (the subject of a documentary), Tyler Perry, and of course Spike Lee, who owns a home in Oak Bluffs and has a forthcoming film about NFL ex-quarterback Colin Kaepernick.


In addition to the film festival, Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee hosted a sold-out fundraiser for Wes Moore, the former CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation who is the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland.

I ran into my friend Patrick Gaspard, the former White House political director for Obama, who now runs the Center for American Progress think tank and was part of a panel in Oak Bluffs on Black women in the workplace that included Yamiche Alcindor, the host of Washington Week on PBS. Political commentator Bakari Sellers moderated a panel on Black philanthropy; former Bronx assemblyman Michael Blake put together a conference on tech and politics; and the Council of Urban Professionals, a civic and corporate networking organization, convened its summit.

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas was in the Vineyard, as was Deidre DeJear, the Democratic nominee running for governor of Iowa. So was Representative Karen Bass, the leading candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. There was buzz around Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Representative Nikema Williams of Georgia, both considered young up-and-comers likely to wield significant influence in Congress (Williams doubles as state chair of the Georgia Democratic Party).

“The reason why I open up my network is to help those who don’t have those connections or resources, but they really want to do good — they really want to be good public servants and their values are in the right place, but they just don’t have the network,” says Pratts. “Running for office is hard, and a lot of people don’t have the opportunity to do any type of self-care. But when they come here, at least they get a few hours to do self-care, even if it’s just sitting by the pool or going to the beach. So that’s also part of the donation.”

Culture, conferences, teen mixers, professional networking, personal rejuvenation, and a stream of Black money to politicians accumulating dramatic levels of power. Somewhere, Lawrence Otis Graham is looking down and smiling

I wonder if this is partially why DeSantis threw those illegals up there. Talk about political stunting, and I don't even defend illegal immigration

 

[invalid]

Oak Bluffs, on the north coast of the Vineyard, has become a place where Black middle-class overachievers come to relax, connect, and network, free from the tensions, glass ceilings, and subtle snubs of their mostly white workplaces and neighborhoods back home. This month, members of Jack and Jill, the invitation-only Black youth organization, held mixers for teenagers — along with a session on SAT prep. Recruiters from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase were on hand for low-key meet-and-greets with university students, many of them from historically Black colleges. And hundreds of members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority gathered at Inkwell Beach, which they turned into the “Pinkwell” for a day.

The 2022 season started with a bang, when ex-president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama — who own a 29-acre estate in Edgartown — made a surprise appearance at the 20th annual Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival to introduce Descendant, a documentary produced by the Obamas’ film company, Higher Ground. The festival included Viola Davis, broadcaster Tiffany Cross, the Reverend Al Sharpton (the subject of a documentary), Tyler Perry, and of course Spike Lee, who owns a home in Oak Bluffs and has a forthcoming film about NFL ex-quarterback Colin Kaepernick.


In addition to the film festival, Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee hosted a sold-out fundraiser for Wes Moore, the former CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation who is the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland.

I ran into my friend Patrick Gaspard, the former White House political director for Obama, who now runs the Center for American Progress think tank and was part of a panel in Oak Bluffs on Black women in the workplace that included Yamiche Alcindor, the host of Washington Week on PBS. Political commentator Bakari Sellers moderated a panel on Black philanthropy; former Bronx assemblyman Michael Blake put together a conference on tech and politics; and the Council of Urban Professionals, a civic and corporate networking organization, convened its summit.

While black folk are decrying "the culture" in the aftermath of that rappers death in LA, there is another black culture that is affirming, dynamic, uplifting and excelling on the opposite side of the country that they don't even see. The geographic locations themselves speak to the polemic distance between the two Black Americas. The sad thing about it is, those that are decrying "the culture" would not even want to align themselves with the other. I'm at a point where I don't even know what it is they want.

 

[invalid]

I can't officially verify this so make of it what you may but there have been whispers in dark corners saying that it was suicide. If true, very sad to hear.

 

[get these nets]

Nice that they put up a monument .

Time flies, he passed away almost 2 1/2 years ago. Just saw a brief segment of the ceremony. The last woman who spoke referred to him as Larry. They must have REALLY been good friends.

Rest in Peace to him. I feel for the children. Has to be rough for them.

 

[Neuromancer]

I'm surprised he died so young.

 

[DrBanneker]

I can't officially verify this so make of it what you may but there have been whispers in dark corners saying that it was suicide. If true, very sad to hear.

You never know what people are going through. Incredibly tragic if true.

 

[invalid]

Sylvia Rhone is one of the few that I've heard that had white passing family members who actually did well.

Here she is, Alice Mason.

Alice Mason, Real Estate Fixer and Hostess to the Elite, Dies at 100​

She was the queen of Manhattan real estate when power brokers jockeyed for places in stately co-op buildings. Her dinners for them made the gossip columns.

Alice Mason at a White House event in 1977, during the Carter administration. She was an ardent fund-raiser for Jimmy Carter’s presidential runs in 1976 and 1980.Credit...


Alice Mason, a real estate broker and hostess whose talent at social engineering reworked the populations of Manhattan’s most restrictive co-ops — the tony apartment buildings that lined Park and Fifth Avenues — and for a time altered the nightlife of what used to be known as New York society, died on Jan. 4 at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.

Her daughter, Dominique Richard, announced the death.

When she was a young woman in the 1950s, Ms. Mason taught dance — rumba, salsa, cha-cha — and her earliest real estate clients were actors, like Marilyn Monroe and Rex Harrison. But when she met Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, a horsy scion of the railroad clan, she found herself unable to place him in certain buildings.

Vanderbilt money, as it happened, was too new for certain communities in the 1950s. And so she began to study the peculiar social structure of the Manhattan cooperative. (She eventually found Mr. Vanderbilt a penthouse on East 79th Street.) By the 1980s, the Reagan years, she was a master at the game, running her own firm, Alice F. Mason Ltd., when even newer money was ascendant and the leveraged-buyout kings and their wives needed help passing muster with the gatekeepers of exclusive buildings like 740 Park, once home to the Rockefellers and the Bouviers.

“The 1980s were the last gasp of New York’s old hierarchy, when the oldest and the new richest families traded the palatial apartments that symbolized the underlying continuity of the city’s evolving elite,” Michael Gross, whose 2005 book, “740 Park: The Story of the World’s Richest Apartment Building,” mapped that evolution, said by email. “Alice was more matchmaker than real estate broker. She knew the buildings, the co-op boards and the buyers and greased the wheels for all concerned.”

For the fashion mogul hoping to buy a $10 million apartment in a Fifth Avenue co-op, Ms. Mason’s instruction was to donate $10 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, because the co-op board president was a member of the Met’s board. To prepare a Saudi prince for his co-op board interview, she tricked him into thinking that the event was a cocktail party in his honor, knowing his pride would never accept the real purpose, which was to let his potential neighbors look him over. For the wife of a furrier who had grown up in the outer boroughs and had an accent to match, Ms. Mason’s suggestion was to pretend to have a cold and stay mum and let her husband do the talking during the board interview.

And then there were the dinners, black-tie affairs in her elegant Upper East Side apartment to which Ms. Mason summoned the city’s power brokers, a fizzy mix of moguls, journalists and authors, diplomats and heads of state. The evenings were strictly choreographed: 60 guests seated at eight small tables strewn throughout her apartment and sized so that guests had to pursue a single topic together, rather than chat in pairs. Ms. Mason disliked small talk and discouraged it among her guests.

There were regulars like Norman Mailer, the burly author, and his wife at the time, Norris Church Mailer; Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan, and her husband, the producer David Brown; Gloria Vanderbilt and Barbara Walters; and Aileen Mehle, otherwise known as Suzy, the syndicated gossip columnist, who noted the nights’ doings in her column. As Ms. Mason told The New York Times in 1982, “I really prefer achievers because I’m interested in world affairs and politics, not small talk.”

The editor Tina Brown found the dinners addictive, as she wrote in “The Vanity Fair Diaries,” her 2017 memoir of her years running that magazine, even as she complained about the food. She found herself rapt on one typical evening — “a pop-up book of Reagan-era money,” she called it — as Carl Icahn, the corporate raider who had just stripped the assets of T.W.A., argued with Malcolm Forbes about the morality of corporate takeovers, their voices rising alarmingly until Norman Lear broke in over the shouting, declaring that he was going to take over the conversation.

 

[invalid]

Part 2:

Ms. Mason, left, at an event in the late 1990s with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and Ms. Mason’s daughter, Dominique Richard.

President Ronald Reagan’s tax reforms were the topic on a night in 1985 when, as Charlotte Curtis reported for The Times, Alexander Haig was the guest of honor. Laurence Tisch, head of the Loews hotel chain, was worried about a recession, and a teenage “Princess Chantal,” Ms. Curtis wrote, “who would be queen of France if the Bourbons had kept their heads, was merely perplexed. ‘It is all very confusing,’ she said politely, and nobody disagreed.”

Politicians and their fixers were always in the mix. Ms. Mason was an ardent Democratic fund-raiser whose greatest political passion was Jimmy Carter, for whom she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Despite her no-nonsense mien, she believed in the occult practice of numerology, and Mr. Carter’s numbers were stellar, in her reading. She predicted his presidential win in 1976 and, to her despair, his loss four years later to Reagan.

Ms. Mason held nine dinners each year. Many grumbled when they were summoned, but almost no one declined an invitation.
“It was all part of the world-weary affect of elite New Yorkers to profess boredom with the scurrying of New York society while being absolutely determined not to miss a single second of it,” said the English journalist Christopher Mason (who was not a relation). To his surprise, he became a regular.
“I was by far always the least powerful person there,” Mr. Mason said by phone, “but I had nonstop anecdotes, so I was a reliable dinner partner.”

One night stood out for him. He was seated in the den, at a table with Claus von Bulow, the Danish-born man about town who had been acquitted, on appeal, of trying to murder his wife, the heiress Sunny von Bulow; Philip Johnson, the modernist architect; and Agnes Gund, the arts patron. “Isn’t New York extraordinary?” Mr. Mason recalled Mr. von Bulow saying. “Isn’t it absurd? What are we all doing here, dressed in black tie at the home of a Realtor?”
It was Mr. Johnson who answered: “Oh, it’s very simple. I’m here because I’m a famous architect. Christopher’s here because he writes about famous people. Aggie is the president of MoMA. And you’re here because you’re a famous murderer.” There was a pause, Mr. Mason remembered, and then Mr. von Bulow roared with laughter. The conversation moved on.

Ms. Mason was a social arbiter, but she was not social. Her pleasures were work and high-stakes gin rummy. In between commissions, she lived on her card winnings. She preferred the single life, though she tried marriage three times. Her first marriage, to a distant cousin, lasted six months. Her second, to Francis Richard, a Frenchman who had moved to New York to open a Berlitz language school, and with whom she had her daughter, Dominique, lasted three years. Her third, to Jan Schumacher, a Dutch diplomat, was the briefest, at three months.

Ms. Mason with her third husband, Jan Schumacher, and her daughter in an undated photo. For most of her working life, Ms. Mason kept a secret.

“I really considered marriage a very boring thing,” she told New York magazine in 1984. “I mean, I don’t think companionship is that marvelous. I never feel lonely.”
For most of her working life, Ms. Mason also had a secret: She was a Black woman passing as white. Even her name was a fiction.

She was 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 a dentist; her mother, Alice (Meyers) Christmas, managed the household. In Alice’s telling, the family was so light-skinned that they were known as the White Christmases.

Yet Alice’s world was circumscribed and sheltered, she said, and she didn’t interact with any white people until she attended Colby College, in Maine. It was her race-conscious mother who decided that Alice should “pass” and live her life in the white world, so as not to face the era’s prejudices toward people of color. Her mother arranged a marriage with a light-skinned cousin named Joe Christmas. Joe was not keen on passing, however, and Alice was not keen on marriage — hence the divorce. By the late 1940s, she had moved to New York City, knowing no one there.

She soon christened herself Alice F. Mason. She liked the actor James Mason, and the F stood for Fluffy, an incongruous nickname given to her by Mr. Vanderbilt because she was anything but. It was also a potent combination of letters, in numerology terms.

Ms. Mason’s secret came out in 1999, when her family ties were noted in “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class,” by Lawrence Otis Graham. But it was hardly a bombshell. No one seemed to notice or care. “There are many people with family members who live on both sides,” Ms. Mason told New York magazine. “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 by a grandson.

Ms. Mason closed her firm in 2009, when she was 86. The rich no longer needed her specialized knowledge. Park Avenue, with its fussy, archaic rules, had ceded much of its cachet to the glassy new condos being built downtown, to which the ticket for entry was simply money.

She never left the rent-stabilized apartment where she held her storied dinners, in a century-old building on East 72nd Street. (In Manhattan real estate parlance, it was a classic eight, a gracious prewar layout that included three bedrooms and two maid’s rooms.) In 2011, the developer Harry Macklowe bought the building for a reported $70 million and began to turn the units into condos, buying out the tenants to do so.

But Ms. Mason refused to give up her apartment. When she moved there in 1962, the rent was $400 a month. At her death, it was $2,476. The apartment below her, in the same line, was recently on the market for just under $10 million.

Alice Mason, Real Estate Fixer and Hostess to the Elite, Dies at 100

She was the queen of Manhattan real estate when power brokers jockeyed for places in stately co-op buildings. Her dinners for them made the gossip columns.

www.nytimes.com

^^^^^^^^

That last paragraph, I have a lot of questions.

 

[DrBanneker]

Part 2:

Ms. Mason, left, at an event in the late 1990s with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and Ms. Mason’s daughter, Dominique Richard.

President Ronald Reagan’s tax reforms were the topic on a night in 1985 when, as Charlotte Curtis reported for The Times, Alexander Haig was the guest of honor. Laurence Tisch, head of the Loews hotel chain, was worried about a recession, and a teenage “Princess Chantal,” Ms. Curtis wrote, “who would be queen of France if the Bourbons had kept their heads, was merely perplexed. ‘It is all very confusing,’ she said politely, and nobody disagreed.”

Politicians and their fixers were always in the mix. Ms. Mason was an ardent Democratic fund-raiser whose greatest political passion was Jimmy Carter, for whom she raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Despite her no-nonsense mien, she believed in the occult practice of numerology, and Mr. Carter’s numbers were stellar, in her reading. She predicted his presidential win in 1976 and, to her despair, his loss four years later to Reagan.

Ms. Mason held nine dinners each year. Many grumbled when they were summoned, but almost no one declined an invitation.
“It was all part of the world-weary affect of elite New Yorkers to profess boredom with the scurrying of New York society while being absolutely determined not to miss a single second of it,” said the English journalist Christopher Mason (who was not a relation). To his surprise, he became a regular.
“I was by far always the least powerful person there,” Mr. Mason said by phone, “but I had nonstop anecdotes, so I was a reliable dinner partner.”

One night stood out for him. He was seated in the den, at a table with Claus von Bulow, the Danish-born man about town who had been acquitted, on appeal, of trying to murder his wife, the heiress Sunny von Bulow; Philip Johnson, the modernist architect; and Agnes Gund, the arts patron. “Isn’t New York extraordinary?” Mr. Mason recalled Mr. von Bulow saying. “Isn’t it absurd? What are we all doing here, dressed in black tie at the home of a Realtor?”
It was Mr. Johnson who answered: “Oh, it’s very simple. I’m here because I’m a famous architect. Christopher’s here because he writes about famous people. Aggie is the president of MoMA. And you’re here because you’re a famous murderer.” There was a pause, Mr. Mason remembered, and then Mr. von Bulow roared with laughter. The conversation moved on.

Ms. Mason was a social arbiter, but she was not social. Her pleasures were work and high-stakes gin rummy. In between commissions, she lived on her card winnings. She preferred the single life, though she tried marriage three times. Her first marriage, to a distant cousin, lasted six months. Her second, to Francis Richard, a Frenchman who had moved to New York to open a Berlitz language school, and with whom she had her daughter, Dominique, lasted three years. Her third, to Jan Schumacher, a Dutch diplomat, was the briefest, at three months.

Ms. Mason with her third husband, Jan Schumacher, and her daughter in an undated photo. For most of her working life, Ms. Mason kept a secret.

“I really considered marriage a very boring thing,” she told New York magazine in 1984. “I mean, I don’t think companionship is that marvelous. I never feel lonely.”
For most of her working life, Ms. Mason also had a secret: She was a Black woman passing as white. Even her name was a fiction.

She was 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 a dentist; her mother, Alice (Meyers) Christmas, managed the household. In Alice’s telling, the family was so light-skinned that they were known as the White Christmases.

Yet Alice’s world was circumscribed and sheltered, she said, and she didn’t interact with any white people until she attended Colby College, in Maine. It was her race-conscious mother who decided that Alice should “pass” and live her life in the white world, so as not to face the era’s prejudices toward people of color. Her mother arranged a marriage with a light-skinned cousin named Joe Christmas. Joe was not keen on passing, however, and Alice was not keen on marriage — hence the divorce. By the late 1940s, she had moved to New York City, knowing no one there.

She soon christened herself Alice F. Mason. She liked the actor James Mason, and the F stood for Fluffy, an incongruous nickname given to her by Mr. Vanderbilt because she was anything but. It was also a potent combination of letters, in numerology terms.

Ms. Mason’s secret came out in 1999, when her family ties were noted in “Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class,” by Lawrence Otis Graham. But it was hardly a bombshell. No one seemed to notice or care. “There are many people with family members who live on both sides,” Ms. Mason told New York magazine. “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 by a grandson.

Ms. Mason closed her firm in 2009, when she was 86. The rich no longer needed her specialized knowledge. Park Avenue, with its fussy, archaic rules, had ceded much of its cachet to the glassy new condos being built downtown, to which the ticket for entry was simply money.

She never left the rent-stabilized apartment where she held her storied dinners, in a century-old building on East 72nd Street. (In Manhattan real estate parlance, it was a classic eight, a gracious prewar layout that included three bedrooms and two maid’s rooms.) In 2011, the developer Harry Macklowe bought the building for a reported $70 million and began to turn the units into condos, buying out the tenants to do so.

But Ms. Mason refused to give up her apartment. When she moved there in 1962, the rent was $400 a month. At her death, it was $2,476. The apartment below her, in the same line, was recently on the market for just under $10 million.

Alice Mason, Real Estate Fixer and Hostess to the Elite, Dies at 100

She was the queen of Manhattan real estate when power brokers jockeyed for places in stately co-op buildings. Her dinners for them made the gossip columns.

www.nytimes.com

^^^^^^^^

That last paragraph, I have a lot of questions.

If it was rent controlled with increases tied to say, the CPI it would make sense. Now she is gone it will revert to market.

 

[invalid]

If it was rent controlled with increases tied to say, the CPI it would make sense. Now she is gone it will revert to market.

My question is why she wouldn't let the developer buy her out? Especially, since it doesn't appear that she owned it.

 

[DrBanneker]

My question is why she wouldn't let the developer buy her out? Especially, since it doesn't appear that she owneMarkey.

Pride. What other elite spot could she afford? I am sure she had money but commissions from sales in the 80s aren't crap in today's inflated NYC property market.

Remarkable story though. Funny how her first marriage broke because the distant cousin was like 'fukk passing'

 

[invalid]

Pride. What other elite spot could she afford? I am sure she had money but commissions from sales in the 80s aren't crap in today's inflated NYC property market.

That's crazy to me. Her daughter should've sold before her mother passed. If an identical unit right up under hers sold for $10 mil, she should've at least tried to negotiate $1-2 mil. Something. At least recoup all the rent that she paid over the years.

All to hold onto a world that doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah, her cousin said "you can have this shyt".

I think her father was president of the Philly Alphas.

 

[get these nets]

Ms. Mason, left, at an event in the late 1990s with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and Ms. Mason’s daughter, Dominique Richard.
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Rest in Peace to her.

Now, to by-pass me being Jason Terry'd (as I always am about this particular topic), was this her biological daughter?


In the "historic Rules of Passing" entry in LOG's book, he said that those who passed would often not have children of their own.

 

[invalid]

Rest in Peace to her.

Now, to by-pass me being Jason Terry'd (as I always am about this particular topic), was this her biological daughter?


In the "historic Rules of Passing" entry in LOG's book, he said that those who passed would often not have children of their own.

I think that's her biological daughter by her second husband.

She said her family was known as the "white Christmases" back in Philly so the chances of having a throwback kid was probably very low. Though her daughter still retains some black features to me.