While cherry blossoms line the streets and the crowd at the restaurant’s café spills onto the sidewalk enjoying the April weather, Mason reveals her plans to be a shut in. “I have scheduled a lunch this Wednesday at La Grenouille; that will be my last time out,” she declares taking a juicy bite of grilled salmon. “I won’t be leaving my apartment after this week. It is being renovated over the next year and a half. There are workers and strangers roaming about and I can’t have my things unattended. I have to protect my art and my home; it’s more important than fresh air. If I really need air, I can open my windows.”

That home has served her well, and was central to Mason’s rise. In it she held monthly dinner parties for 60 people at a time that helped make her the first bold-faced woman in real estate, and a social force to be reckoned with in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Ultimately, her home became her office. Her right to remain in the eight-room rent-stabilized home at 150 E. 72nd Street after Harry Macklowe purchased the building is well documented.

It’s a bit ironic that a woman who made a spectacular career out of knowing the ins and outs of every exclusive co-op in New York lives in a rental and considers that to be one of her smartest decisions. “When I moved there in 1962, I paid $400 a month, and didn’t even have a lease until ’74. Then they asked me what I wanted to pay and I said $500. Now it is going condo, but I pay just $2,089 a month and my social security covers it. I will never have income again, but I will live there for the rest of my life, and it is probably my greatest asset. It even has a wood burning fireplace.”

When Mason came to New York in the early ‘50s, things in the real estate world were quite different than they are today. “It was cheap to live here until the ‘80s,” she insists. “In 1973 New York almost went bankrupt and inflation didn’t really happen until around 1982.”

To say that Mason was a woman with drive is an understatement, and though she has never admitted it publicly, she changed her name upon her arrival to New York when she wanted to reinvent herself. “My maiden name was Christmas, but I did what people in Hollywood did at the time, I came up with a name I thought would work. James Mason was my favorite actor, so I went with that.”

Marilyn Monroe was no doubt a key inspiration as one of Mason’s first real estate clients, for whom she found two apartments. She befriended the actress after landing her first job in real estate with a small firm called Gotham Realty. Her memory for numbers is uncanny as she rattles off figures and addresses from half a century ago. “We did a lot of short term sublets for movie stars; I also got a $120 per month place for Paul Newman at 405 E. 54th Street, and later a $90 4th floor walk-up for Ben Gazzara,” she recalls. “Marilyn was here making The Prince and the Showgirl; she was very sweet and vulnerable. It took her a year to find something. I got her an apartment at 2 Sutton Place, then another at 444 E. 57th Street. She was very lonely because she was seeing Arthur Miller and he was married. She would call me for no real reason. One night she called me at 11 p.m. to tell me the water was running in her bathroom. She just wanted to talk to someone.”

Mason also became friendly with Lorenzo Lamas and Ricardo and Georgiana Montalban, but the Hollywood connection was not the key to her meteoric rise. “It wasn’t easy getting actors into buildings; they were considered unreliable,” she notes. She believed her real break had come when Alfred Vanderbilt, whom she had met through an actress friend, Dody Heath, was searching for a new place to live after his divorce. “I was excited that I would have my first co-op client. I thought, ‘nobody would turn down a Vanderbilt!’” She was wrong. Mason attempted to get him into 19 E. 72nd Street, but he was flatly rejected. “They said ‘our residents are from the 1600s; the Vanderbilts were the robber barons of the 1900s. We won’t take him.’ That’s the way they were in the 1950s. The top buildings were all social register.”

In 1958 she opened her own firm and set about methodically learning every detail about the city’s best buildings. “You have to know who is who and what’s what; who doesn’t like who,” she maintains. “Most brokers don’t know anything, but I made it my business to analyze the nuances of every building.” And she succeeded in that business. “Because she knew how to work it, she really changed the rules,” observes David Patrick Columbia, author of the website New York Social Diary. “She knew the history of each apartment, and who would be or could be on the board of every building. She would find the most sympathetic person on the board and work them first, and she would tutor her clients, telling them how to answer specific board questions. If they would object, she would say, ‘Do you want to be in the building or not?’ She is very astute about people and she really changed things with co-op boards, including breaking down racial and ethnic barriers.’”

Mason instinctively knew if a client would get into a building or not. “Alice had a client she took to 740 Park Avenue, and on the way out of the showing, the woman rudely said to the doorman, ‘Get me a cab.’ Alice turned to her and said, 'Now, you will never get into the building because of the way you just spoke to the doorman. He will tell them.’” Vanderbilt was accepted at 31 E. 79th Street with Mason’s guidance, and he soon introduced her to William S. and Babe Paley, who became clients and huge stepping-stones in her career.

“I met Bill and Babe through the Vanderbilts, and then I met the world!” she says.

As her connections grew, Mason parlayed them into social strength by hosting dinner parties that soon became among the most coveted invitations. Her first one was in 1956. It’s a testimony to her personal charm that though it was held in her small one bedroom, Vanderbilt and Monroe both showed up. “I didn’t have enough chairs, but I had a queen-size bed, so I put three settings on each side and three at the foot of the bed, which took care of nine guests. People just sat on the floor. We served paella and salad. I wasn’t trying to compete with rich people in beautiful homes, but I had the right people and that’s what counts.”

By the time she moved into her current apartment, word had spread, and by the mid ‘70s, Mason’s parties took on another dimension when she entered the political arena. Ted Sorenson’s wife, Gillian, worked for Mason, and in 1975 asked if they could hold an intimate fundraising party for the governor of Georgia. Jimmy Carter was seated next to Mason, and it was a symbiotic match made in heaven: she brought her considerable influence to his campaign, and he leant additional gravitas to her sphere. “He asked me to help him, and I didn’t really know what that meant,” she smiles. She figured it out quickly. Her tactics involved using the reverse directory and sending letters to residents of every building she had sold in—a helpful demographic to be sure. “Even a lot of them who called back and said they were Republicans sent a check; I was a well known persona,” she explains. She wound up raising more money for the future president than any other single citizen, a feat that she considers one of her biggest triumphs. The next year, she threw a $500-per-head fundraising dinner for Jay Rockefeller. “His parents were friends but when I asked his mother if they would like to come and pay, she said ‘I have to speak to Mr. Rockefeller.’ They wound up getting their friend Louis Marx to spend $5,000, which covered them and some of my media pals like Tom Brokaw.” Later, a single dinner she held for Bill Clinton raised $1.5 million. Carter and the Clintons became guests at her personal dinners, along with the likes of Alexander Haig, Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace, Diane Sawyer, and clients such as Steve Ross and Alfred Taubman—all fodder for society columns.

“An invitation to one of Alice’s dinners was one of the hottest tickets in town,” recalls Renée Morrison, a socialite of that time. “I was young and it was an honor to be invited. I remember the art on her walls was as colorful as her guests. There was quite a potpourri of diplomats, CEOs and socialites. It was like a think tank. The conversation was incredible to say the least. One night I spoke with Ken Auletta, another evening I sat next to Carl Bernstein.”

According to the New York Post’s Steve Cuozzo, who broke the story about Macklowe’s purchase of her 72nd Street building, the parties were ideal business tools for the climate of those times. “Alice Mason was queen of residential real estate and her famous dinners provided a perfect stage for what was essentially a drawing room way of doing business,” he notes. “In the ‘80s, when she was at the height of her influence, the rich clustered in enclaves on Fifth Avenue, East 72nd Street, and exclusive buildings like River House. Prime apartments and townhouses were traded among the elite with mostly old money. Today, the city is awash in new and international money and condos have changed everything. The wealthiest people now want to live in places that were unimaginable 25 years ago, from Tribeca to Harlem. What was once a secretive business is now a spectator sport.”

For Mason, the parties certainly helped business (she admits to inviting the occasional board president), but they were also what made her heart beat fast. She sat eight people to each 42’ round table, for maximum intimacy. “My parties were my romance,” she sighs. “It was intoxicating to walk into a room like that. Famous people all want to meet other famous people, but they don’t want to go to a party with a lot of schleppers, so I had to be ruthless.”

As for traditional romance, she was married three times—first to a third cousin at age 19, next to her French teacher, and finally to a Dutch diplomat. They were all short-lived, but the second produced her daughter Dominique, who worked in her office until its close in 2008. Though she no longer holds her dinners, she has kept her friendships and remains fiercely loyal. At the mention of Mia Farrow’s difficult end with her client Woody Allen, Mason bristles. “Maybe they weren’t even really together those last few years,” she scoffs. “He didn’t seduce Soon-Yi; she invited him to a ballgame. Besides, he wasn’t her father, André Previn was. Woody lived in a two bedroom on the east side and wasn’t interested in her children. Mia lived in a huge place on Central Park West with so many children—it was like a zoo! She wanted to be his muse and in his films and she got that. Woody is much happier now.”

And Mason is happy too. “Nothing is more overrated than companionship,” she insists. “In the end everyone always wanted to get married, so I figured, why go out with them in the first place? I like to go to bed at 8 p.m. and wake up at 6 a.m. to watch Morning Joe. If I had a husband he wouldn’t like that. I’m never lonely; I love my own company. I’ve met everyone and I’ve known two presidents well. Who else do I need to meet?”