The newspapers’ discovery of the marriage between Leonard and Alice Rhinelander set off a frenzy of New York City-based reporters headed up to New Rochelle hoping to find and interview the young couple. William Lawby, a reporter for the New York American admitted a year later in 1925 that he “saw it as a good news story” and worth chasing down the couple.

New York City’s main tabloid, The Daily News filled its Saturday, November 15 papers with multiple stories about Leonard and Alice Rhinelander who had supposedly fled their New Rochelle apartment on Pintard Street to escape the growing media attention.

That same day the press began to report that Leonard’s family lawyers were considering what legal action to take, if any, to address Leonard’s marriage to a woman who might not have been white. The New York Evening Journal reported on the 15th that “Rhinelander Match Probed by Lawyers.” Who knew how true this was?

Rhinelander Love Nest Found?

Sunday, November 16, 1924, New York Daily News

All kinds of rumors began to appear in the press. Grace Robinson, ace female reporter for the Daily News, asserted that Alice and Leonard had fled to Connecticut “busy dodging press!”

While Sunday’s newspapers included the rumor that the Rhinelanders sought sanctuary in Connecticut, reporters who had started digging into Alice’s family’s origins now proclaimed that when Alice’s English father George Jones became a naturalized American citizen, his naturalization papers identified him as “colored.” And the 1915 marriage certificate of Alice Rhinelander’s older sister Emily categorized Emily and her spouse as “colored.” Yet, strangely enough in the eyes of Daily News reporter Grace Robinson, the Jones family attended an “exclusive” Episcopal church in nearby Pelham Manor, a church “attended by fashionable Pelham Manor’s smartest residents!”

In New Rochelle that same Sunday, November 16, we don’t know if the Joneses and the newly-wed Rhinelanders attended church that morning. We do know that Sunday found the Jones family hosting a new visitor who was not a reporter. That Sunday, a Rhinelander family lawyer made his way to the Jones family home in New Rochelle after multiple days of headlines about the Rhinelander wedding in newspapers near and far.

Beware of Lawyers

That day, the Jones family and Leonard greeted a man named Leon Jacobs who identified himself to them as Leonard’s lawyer. But who exactly was this Leon Jacobs? Was he really Leonard’s lawyer? Or, did he work for Leonard’s father Philip Rhinelander?

Leon Jacobs worked in downtown Manhattan in a law office surrounded by a larger office made up of different Rhinelander family entities. The larger office included offices related to various estates of Rhinelander family members as well as the headquarters of multiple Rhinelander owned or managed mortgage companies. While Leon Jacobs maintained he did not work for Leonard’s father Philip Rhinelander, we do know Jacobs managed the properties of some of these estates and companies. And, while we know about this visit of a Rhinelander-affiliated attorney to the Jones’s family home where Alice and Leonard hid out from the press, we know little about what was discussed. Jacobs would later claim he traveled to New Rochelle because wanted to see the couple with his own eyes.

Curious about what happens next? Watch out for the next installment. Can’t wait? Then you’ll want to read my previously published book on Alice and Leonard Rhinelander, Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). https://uncpress.org/book/9780807859391/property-rites/