Alice Mason was throwing one of her black-tie dinner parties. For yearsfb777, she’d 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’d kept for much of her life.

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

“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.”

ImageAlice typically held six major dinner parties each year.Credit...Ana Beltrán Vázquez for The New York Times

This party, circa 1990, was for her only child, Dominique Richard, who had just become engaged. More than 30 years later, Dominique doesn’t remember much about the party, just that it was “glamorous and fabulous,” as usual. What stands out now is what it meant for her relationship with her mother. One guest’s plus-one would cause a permanent rift between them.

In New York’s real estate scene, appearances matter. The deft placement of a rug or a lamp can create an impression that helps make the sale. Alice Mason built her storied career in part on beautiful illusions, and this guest would lay bare the way she had staged her own life.

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