Several years later, the Rhinelander marriage officially ended with a divorce in Las Vegas
Life after the trial was depressing for both Alice and Leonard
Upon divorce, Leonard became a recluse. Even before the trial began, Leonard was shunned and excluded him from all “clubs” to which he had previously belonged, and disowned by his family, barred from the grouped family business until he obtained the divorce. The Detroit Free Press reported his removal from the New York Social Register, on which his family was listed: “Kip stands outside the fold the symbol of a family that is proud shame. Kip now stands on a social register par with his Negro bride, who last spring sailed into the March supplement of the register for one fleeting cruise under her husband’s colors, but was dropped overboard in the next edition.”
In the end, Leonard never recaptured the life he had before Alice and certainly not the type of life he had with Alice. He died at the age that is young of in February of 1936 without ever falling in love again and without remarrying.
Alice lived until she was 89 years old, but never partnered with another man. In 1989, when Alice passed away, she left us with one last reminder of just how she really “died” more than sixty years earlier in 1925 at her infamous trial’s end: she buried herself with a headstone that read “Alice J. Rhinelander.”
Such was my understanding of “passing” in marriage before I had any personal experience in it: I knew to what lengths Alice Rhinelander had gone, despite being deeply in love, not to have to endure it. Yet even the most heartrending of tales often fail to bring home the enormity of day-in, day-out anxiety and deception that “passing”–whether for interracial couples or for homosexual couples–entails.
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