Jane Kendall Mason

In 1964 she suffered a stroke that left her semi-invalid for the rest of her life. After the stroke, M.F.K. Fisher described her in a 1968 letter as "a hopeless and completely helpless paralytic and ex-alcoholic cared for like a rare orchid." Fisher and Mason's husband engaged in an affair at that time.

In 1940 she divorced her first husband, George Grant Mason, Jr., who was a member of the Civil Aeronautics Board in Tampa, Florida. A month later she married Republican politician and lawyer John Daniel Miller Hamilton, two days after he resigned as executive director of the Republican National Committee. This marriage ended after she had an affair with the editor of Reader's Digest. Then she married Arnold Gingrich in 1955, who she had previously been involved with while also being involved with Hemingway. She and Gingrich lived at different residences in New York before settling in Ridgewood, New Jersey in 1962.

In 1935, while on safari in East Africa, she had a romantic dalliance with Colonel Richard Cooper, a British officer who owned a coffee plantation in Tanganyika.

She survived a suicide attempt in 1933, jumping off the balcony at her Cuban residence, and underwent months of intensive psychotherapy.

Former U.S. First Lady Grace Coolidge referred to Mason as "the most beautiful debutante who ever entered the White House." American portraitist Howard Chandler Christy called her "one of the very best types of American girl." Ernest Hemingway, with whom she was close friends and occasionally romantically involved, referred to her as "about the most uninhibited person I ever met." She and Hemingway began an affair in 1932.

In 1932, she wrote an article titled Resorting to Havana for Vogue.

In September 1931 Mason and her husband were introduced to Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, while sailing on the SS Île de France.

In 1927, at the age of eighteen, she married George Grant Mason, Jr. in an elaborate society wedding at her family's estate. Mason, a graduate of Yale University, was from a wealthy family and served as head of Pan-American Airways' Caribbean operations in Cuba. The Masons moved to Jaimanitas, a large estate west of Havana that was staffed by nine servants. It was here that Mason became known as a glamorous and eccentric socialite, hosting parties and attending events at clubs, casinos, and horse races.

Jane Kendall Mason (1909 - 1981) was an American debutante, socialite, and outdoorswoman.

Mason was born Jane Welsh in 1909. A decade later, her mother Elizabeth, a divorceé who sang at private parties for members of New York City's upper class, began a relationship with the divorced Wall Street tycoon Lyman Kendall, who was worth an estimated $20 million. Kendall and her mother married, and he legally adopted Mason. The family moved to Tuxedo Park, New York and maintained residences in Miami and Washington, D.C., and sailed to Europe for extended stays.