by Deirdre Bair
Their two-year age difference (Mae, born April 11, 1897; Al, born January 17, 1899) made their attraction and subsequent marriage unusual, for in those years marriages of Italian and Irish girls generally followed particular patterns. Italian girls often married as young as fourteen and usually to older men who had left school at the earliest possible date to begin stable working lives. They were seldom attracted to mere boys like Al who had not set off on a secure path of lifetime employment and who therefore could not set them up in their own homes. Irish girls married a bit later, usually between eighteen and twenty-one, and because Irishmen were slow to marry, they often found husbands among other nationalities, most often English or German. Men of those origins were grudgingly accepted by the parental generation, but when Irish girls began increasingly to accept husbands from eastern and southern European backgrounds, primarily Slavic or Italian, such unions were stigmatized. These brides were still looked down upon by other Irish girls who had succeeded in marrying one of their own kind.
Mae was twenty and a good catch for a nice fellow, but there was a bit of a problem with finding one in her Irish community. Most of the Irishmen in her milieu were well along in their thirties and still unmarried, leaving many of her girlfriends fretting that they might become old maids. It was no fun to be young, vital, and, truth be told, horny. In an era when birth control was risky, so many of the girls in her neighborhood found ready partners among the Italians, Germans, and Croats, whose ethnic enclaves abutted theirs and who were all keen to marry young. For some of these men, an Irish wife meant “marrying up” in social mobility, even though most of their Irish brides thought they were “marrying down,” but it was enough for them that these husbands could be counted upon to treat them with respect and give them children. Their parents might have balked at such unions, but for Al and Mae’s “American” generation there was a certain thrill attached to the otherness of the unknown.
For Al and Mae, the difference their nationalities made in their social standings was so pronounced as to make their marriage almost impossible. He lived among other Italian families in a crowded apartment above his father’s barbershop in a building that was little more than a slum. She lived in a row house on a nice street of other Irish households just like hers, where lace curtains decorated windows that sparkled with cleanliness. He was a poor boy who was aware of the insults leveled against Italians, even though he was so big and tough that no one dared to say them to his face. The kindest slur Italians routinely faced was to be called garlic eaters, but the usual remarks were far uglier.
Although Al’s father was a barber who had his own business, it was in an enclave where his only customers were poor Italians like himself. Mae’s family was upwardly mobile Irish, well-off and proud of it, and when her father, Michael, was alive, he went to work every day in a starched white shirt to his job as a railroad clerk that brought him into daily contact with “Americans” of every ethnic stripe. Her mother stayed at home and tended to the family, while Al’s mother spoke no English and took in piecework and boarders. Mae’s mother came to New York from Ireland with her parents and as a young woman went directly from their home to her own without the usual stint as a housemaid. Bridget Gorman Coughlin never worked outside her married home, and the only people who ever lived in it were her husband and their seven children.
Irish girls were often better educated than their husbands, for even if they were not high school graduates, they usually stayed in school until they were sixteen and legally permitted to quit. English was their native language, they were known to keep themselves and their households clean, their children were well disciplined, and like their Italian mothers-in-law they went faithfully to the Catholic church. Also like Italian women, they were deferential to their husbands in all or most things; at least this was the surface impression they gave. Al Capone did not consciously follow this line of thinking about Irish girls, for his views on women, regardless of ethnic origin, were strongly colored by his rounds among prostitutes in the ubiquitous brothels where he collected earnings.
Like that of his brothers and everyone else who had reason to frequent brothels, his attitude was why not sample the wares. The women Al bedded represented many different nationalities and were all trained to be deferential to their male customers, leading him to believe that all women were naturally compliant and complacent. By the time he met Mae, he had been with many women but had never taken the time or had any reason to consider their individuality. Still, he was wise enough to know from the moment he met Mae that she was different.
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His initial attraction was to her looks, but when he got to know her, he discovered that she was independent and quick-witted, had a keen sense of fun, and was as attracted to him as he was to her. She liked to laugh and have a good time, and her descendants use words like “spunky,” “ambitious,” and “fun loving” to describe her, citing how she got herself a good job and loved to go dancing, even if the only places in her part of Brooklyn qualified as dives where respectable girls usually didn’t go. Mae loved that Al was as light on his feet and as good at trading quips as she was, but even more she recognized that he shared the qualities of determination and ambition and the desire to better oneself that she had. She found these traits—coupled with his fundamental intelligence—attractive. In later years, long after Al Capone’s death, when the man had become an outsized legendary figure, some of the people who had known him during his early years in Brooklyn were asked for their memories of what he had been like as a young man. They told the same general story about him and Mae: that he only looked elsewhere for a mate because he had been spurned by the Italian girl he wanted to marry. In their interviews and conversations, they created a composite of several neighborhood candidates for the girl with whom Al was so besotted that she broke his heart. Al’s second- and third-generation descendants find these accounts puzzling, for they have no family stories with even a vague resemblance to this legend. They know of none who could have been the paragon of virtue and beauty these old-timers remember. Mae hardly ever talked to her grandchildren about her memories of Brooklyn, and when she did, she only joked about pranks and escapades and never spoke of other girls.
According to those who knew young Al in Brooklyn, the family of the girl who allegedly spurned him came from a Neapolitan village near that of his parents. Although her parents had settled on the same street in Brooklyn, the story has it that they thought themselves a cut above the Capones, so when Al asked for the daughter’s hand in marriage, the father rudely rejected him. As the story has been told and retold over the years, all sorts of details have been added to it: the girl was a great beauty, and her father was a person of substance and such community prominence that Al could not retaliate when his suit was spurned. He was supposed to have become so distraught by the rejection that he became morose and, when he met Mae, was depressed and on the rebound. None of this has ever been substantiated.
Al had indeed developed quite the eye for beautiful women of any age, and no doubt he was aware of anyone who was as attractive as this girl (or this composite of several Italian girls). Some did marry as young as fourteen, but the girl most likely to be at the origin of this story was barely thirteen if that. And for this episode to have fit into the time line of Al’s life, it would have had to happen when he was fifteen or sixteen and in no position even to think of taking a wife. He probably did have a schoolboy crush on a nice-looking girl that over the years was turned into a tragic tale of unrequited love that threw him into the arms of an older woman who was practically a foreigner. In reality, Al Capone was not morose and depressed when he met Mae Coughlin: he was enchanted.
Mae, her sisters, and her older brother were so close in age that they all socialized together, and one of their favorite outings was to go to a neighborhood club on Saturday nights where they could have a few beers and dance. Al had learned how to treat women with politeness and respect by watching how Johnny Torrio behaved toward his “Am
erican” wife, Ann, a non-Italian from Kentucky of English-Irish descent. Torrio adored her and was famed among his criminal counterparts for honoring her by going home every night to eat dinner and spend the early evening, after which he went back to his social club to check on the nightly take of his bars and brothels.
Al copied Torrio’s treatment of women as much as he could, but at first it was in his own clumsy fashion. He had an extra reason to turn on the charm with Mae, for he had begun to work for Frankie Yale early in their courtship and had been in a barroom brawl over a woman that left him with several ragged facial gashes, a sinister visage, and the nickname Scarface that he hated for the rest of his life. He tried never to be photographed in profile and always made sure to turn his head to his “good side,” so any photographer who wanted to stay in his graces was swift to cooperate. In those early days, he had not yet begun to use the face powders and other cosmetic cover-ups that he favored in later years, so Mae saw him as he was and loved him anyway.
Torrio passed him on to Frankie Yale, who was born in Calabria as Francesco Ioele but whose name was pronounced so like the famed university that somewhere along the way he adopted the same spelling. Among his other attributes (all of them ruthless), Yale had a warped sense of humor, so when he set up a sleazy bar in Coney Island, he called it the Harvard Club. When he needed a shill to lure customers in, he asked his pal Torrio for a recommendation, which was how the almost-eighteen Al Capone got the initial job, after which he worked his way up to bouncer and finally bartender.
He learned from Yale just as he had learned from Torrio, but unfortunately for him Yale’s approach to business was not nearly as refined. Torrio favored mediation, negotiation, and inclusiveness. He used reason to get his way, and if it failed, he let others use violence on his behalf. Yale dealt in brute force, instilling fear in everyone whose lives he touched as he terrorized whole neighborhoods with extortion, protection, loan-sharking, and kickbacks. Torrio was a small man who favored clothes in fine fabrics and quiet good taste; Yale was a big man who liked flashy clothes and jewelry that he completed with thick fat cigars and fedoras. Al admired Yale’s clothing choices and made them his own as soon as he could afford them.
And so he went to work in a joint where cheap drinks led to nightly fracases on the tiny dance floor and where violence was the usual response to any real or imagined slight. On the night his face was slashed, Al thought he was paying a compliment to an attractive young Italian girl when he told her she had a nice ass. Her brother, who was very drunk, took it as an insult and thought he had no choice but to defend his sister’s honor, even though he was much smaller than the big guy. One story has it that he slammed a bottle against the table and used the jagged edge to slice across Al’s cheek. Others have him whipping out a knife to inflict the damage. Some argue that the scars were such that only a broken bottle could have made them because there were three scars and his attacker was too small to have reached him three separate times; others say he threw a chair at Al and, when his legs became entangled in it, whipped out the knife and struck three times.
Afterward, there was no reprisal by Al or anyone else on his behalf because the fellow who cut him was allegedly Frank Gallucio, another low-level employee in the Torrio-Yale criminal axis. Both bosses told Al to apologize for the insult and made Frank apologize for the cutting (however it happened), and the matter ended right there. The scars were real, but how Al got them is still debated almost one hundred years later.
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Al and Mae were so attracted to each other that shortly after their first meeting they were sexually active, meeting in the darkest recesses of the box factory, as they had nowhere else to be alone. Mae became pregnant, and their first child, Albert Francis Capone, always called Sonny, was born two months prematurely on December 4, 1918, to Mae Coughlin in her family home at 117 Third Place, Brooklyn. She did not marry Alphonse Gabriel Capone until December 30, and then not in his modest Italian parish but in hers, the large, impressive—and staunchly Irish—St. Mary Star of the Sea. Sonny was baptized there, even though baptisms of children who were conceived before their parents married were seldom permitted, never celebrated, and, if conducted at all, were without prior announcement in the parish bulletin; nor were the parents permitted to invite guests to the ceremony.
In that neighborhood and especially in that particular church, marriages between solidly working-class Irish girls and itinerant Italian men were especially frowned upon, and their different nationalities figured largely in why Al and Mae did not marry until after their only child’s birth. Mae’s widowed mother, Bridget Gorman Coughlin, was largely responsible for the delay, because she was adamantly against what was commonly considered a “mixed marriage.” In the world of her church and her Irish culture, Italians were “colored” and never to be associated with, let alone married. It was a somewhat uneasy pregnancy that resulted in a premature birth, which leads Mae’s grandchildren to think that Mrs. Coughlin was so against her favorite daughter’s union that she deliberately set obstacles before the marriage, such as making the couple wait to see if the pregnancy would end with a live birth. In that Irish culture, there was always the possibility that if the child survived, it could be sent away for adoption, but both Mae and Al were determined that this would never happen.
Granted, most unmarried Irish-American girls were sent, like their counterparts in Ireland, to “relatives elsewhere” or to a convent where the nuns would quietly arrange for an adoption. All this was very different from the culture of Italian families, where illegitimate babies were often kept in the family even if their birth mothers had to pretend to be their sisters or where babies were given to childless relatives who adopted and raised them as their own.
If Mae’s family had been in Ireland, they would have dealt with the shameful disgrace by following the tradition of sending her away until the infant could be adopted. But this was America, and immigrant parents, no matter what the country of origin, found that things were different here, because the values of the old country were often not respected by their children. Mae stayed determinedly in her home, and Al remained in his, hoping that Mrs. Coughlin would relent and let them marry before the child was born. She, in turn, stubbornly held to the belief that something—unspecified to be sure—would happen before the birth. However, there was a certain degree of timidity, if not fear, in her attitude toward Al Capone, who was already rumored to be starting his climb in the hierarchy of the criminal world, and that kept her from insisting on any overt and drastic action.
Even though they were unable to marry, once the pregnancy was recognizable, they managed to court sedately in the Coughlin house but only when Mrs. Coughlin was not at home. Family thinking is that if Mae’s father had been alive, he would have permitted the marriage much earlier if only to save face. The resistance came from his widow, who was ferociously protective of her children and the larger reputation of her family within the community. She was in a quandary, because Mae made it clear that despite her mother’s objections she was going to marry Al Capone. Of all her children, Mrs. Coughlin was closest to Mae, who was as much her friend and confidante as her daughter. Theirs was an enduring lifelong relationship in which they openly discussed topics that were not usually the stuff of conversations between the generations, and the topic of Mae wanting to marry Al was high among them.
Al visited the Coughlin house throughout the pregnancy whenever Mrs. Coughlin was out, when he was welcomed by Mae’s siblings because they all enjoyed the exciting household drama their sister’s boyfriend created. When Mrs. Coughlin finally agreed to see him, she was grudgingly tolerant at first, always polite and reserved, knowing of his terrible temper and probably preferring not to cross him. Mae’s brother Walter was usually friendly, but he was always on his way out of the house and bent on following his own interests; only her sisters and the young Danny were enthralled by the exotic creature who was her boyfriend, and they usually tried to hang around while he was there. A
ll the Coughlin girls were “musical,” so Al’s visits were often lively. Al didn’t seem to mind if he and Mae were seldom alone on these evenings, for once she became pregnant, she was an object of respect more than a desirable sexual partner. Once her pregnancy began to show and she had to quit her job, Al contributed to the household.
Once Mrs. Coughlin realized how determined Mae was, she employed a new excuse about wanting them to wait until Al’s future was more secure. She found another reason to stall the marriage when the United States entered World War I: as a single man, Al had to register for the draft, and he did so in September 1918, when Mae was in the early months of her pregnancy. Marriage would have brought a natural deferment, but Mrs. Coughlin still hesitated until after the baby was born. The marriage finally took place on December 30, almost four weeks after Sonny’s birth. With Mae still weak and worried about her sickly baby, and both families uncomfortable and puzzled by the unorthodox union, it was not the happiest of occasions.
Contrary to some accounts, there was no wedding reception afterward, and Bridget and her children, including Mae, simply went home without inviting other friends or relatives (particularly Al’s) to join them. Al did not move into a bedroom on the second floor of the Coughlin house until some time later, after his mother-in-law had begun to like him for the charming and attentive husband he was and also for the financial support he contributed to her family, for Mae followed the custom of the time and stayed at home to care for the baby. Al continued to work as a box cutter and do whatever other “odd jobs” he could find, which usually meant carrying out various tasks for the gangster Frankie Yale. Most likely, claiming the extra money came from vaguely described odd jobs was his way of keeping what he was really doing from his mother-in-law, and perhaps his wife as well.