Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [3]
Golf, a 1920s craze, became a passion—though, as ever, Capone played by his own rules. Wearing baggy grey plus fours held up by a belt with a diamond buckle, pockets bulging with guns and hip-flasks, he and “Machine Gun” McGurn and “Killer” Burke played for $500 a hole. They used each other as human tees and wrestled, played leapfrog and turned somersaults on the greens. On one occasion, accused—almost certainly with reason—of cheating, Capone drew a gun on one of his bodyguards. Danger was never far from the surface with Capone, even during a friendly game of golf.
At the same time Capone courted the press, developing close relationships with several journalists. The Chicago Tribune’s crime correspondent, James Doherty, found Capone neither entertaining nor articulate, but more than willing to be profiled. He was aware, Doherty wrote, that a positive public image would “make better business for him.” Another Tribune writer, Jake Lingle, a police reporter and, in his spare time, an avid gambler, was well known for his friendship with Capone. But this intimacy with the underworld was dangerous: in 1931 Lingle was shot dead, probably by a rival of Capone’s. Subsequent investigations revealed that he had been in Capone’s pay.
Perhaps the most useful of Capone’s press connections was Harry Read, city editor of the Chicago Evening American. In return for exclusive interviews (and generous vacations), Read coached Capone on his image, encouraging him to show his softer side. Read, like Doherty, realized that it was the violence of Capone’s world to which the public objected, not his specific crimes. Too many people liked having a flutter on the horses or a stiff drink to condemn Capone for supplying their needs. As Doherty said, Capone “was giving them a service they wanted. No one minded about them trading booze; it was all the killing that brought about their undoing.”
When the English journalist Claud Cockburn interviewed Capone in 1929, at the Lexington Hotel in Chicago, his new headquarters, he described entering the gloomy, deserted lobby and being stared at by a receptionist with the expression “of a speakeasy proprietor looking through the grille at a potential detective.”
After being frisked, Cockburn rode the elevator up to Capone’s six-room suite on the fourth floor. “Bulging” henchmen stood idly around; cash was stacked against the wall in padlocked canvas bags; the initials AC were inlaid in the parquet floor. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington hung alongside ones of “Big Bill” Thompson, Chicago’s corrupt mayor, and the movie stars “Fatty” Arbuckle and the Vamp, Theda Bara. Capone’s office looked like nothing so much as that of a “‘newly arrived” Texas oil millionaire,” wrote Cockburn—but for the submachine gun behind the mahogany desk.
Cockburn asked Capone what he might have done if he hadn’t “gone into this racket.” Capone replied that he would “have been selling newspapers on the street in Brooklyn.” Growing increasingly agitated, distractedly dipping the tips of his fingers in the silver bowls of roses on his desk, he railed against the un-Americanness of the Sicilian mafia (Capone’s family came from Naples, but he was always proud to say that he had been born in America), its primitive, unprofessional mano nero intimidation tactics. “This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it,” he shouted, pushing his chair back and standing up, holding out his dripping hands towards Cockburn.
In January 1920 it became illegal throughout the United States to manufacture, transport, sell or possess—but not to purchase or consume—alcohol. For all the recalcitrance with which Americans greeted it, Prohibition was