She was born Alice Christmas on October 26, 1923 in Philadelphia “into a bourgeois colored family,” as she wrote in an unpublished memoir. Her father, Lawrence Duke Christmas, was a dentist; her mother, Alice (Meyers) Christmas, took care of the house. According to Alice's story, the family was so light-skinned that they were known as the White Christmases.
However, Alice's world was circumscribed and protected, she said, and she did not interact with any white people until she attended Colby College in Maine. It was her mother, aware of her race, who decided that Alice should “pass” and live her life in the white world, so as not to face the prejudices of the time toward people of color. Her mother arranged a marriage with a light-skinned cousin named Joe Christmas. However, Joe was not interested in passing away and Alice was not interested in getting married, hence the divorce. In the late 1940s, she had moved to New York City without knowing anyone there.
She soon baptized herself Alice F. Mason. She liked the actor James Mason, and the F in her stood for Fluffy, an incongruous nickname given to her by Mr. Vanderbilt because she was none of those things. It was also a powerful combination of letters, in terms of numerology.
Ms. Mason's secret came to light in 1999, when her family ties were highlighted in “Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class,” by Lawrence Otis Graham. But it wasn't a bomb. No one seemed to notice or care. “There are a lot of people with family members who live on both sides,” 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 his daughter, he is survived by a grandson.
Mason closed his business in 2009, when he was 86 years old. The rich no longer needed his specialized knowledge. Park Avenue, with its archaic and demanding rules, had ceded much of its prestige to the glassy new condominiums being built downtown, for which the entrance ticket was simply money.
He never left the rent-stabilized apartment where he held his historic dinners, in a century-old building on East 72nd Street. (In Manhattan real estate parlance, it was a classic eight, an elegant prewar layout that included three bedrooms and two utility rooms.) In 2011, developer Harry Macklowe purchased the building for $70 million and began converting the units into condominiums. , buying the tenants' participation to do so.
But Mrs. Mason refused to give up her apartment. When she moved there in 1962, the rent was $400 a month. At the time of her death, it was $2,476. Her apartment below her, on the same line, was recently on the market for just under $10 million.
