'Angelita' Cucciniello, at the time of her entry in the Mineralava competition. (Source: Findagrave.com)
One hundred years ago, on 28 November 1923, eighty eight young women from America and Canada were huddled in their rooms at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, readying themselves for a most important event. All had been personally selected by Rudolph Valentino, in conference with local dignitaries in their home towns, as their city’s Most Beautiful Girl. That night, they were to parade before thousands of people at Madison Square Gardens, hoping to win the Grand Prize and a possible role in Valentino's next picture. Some had come from privilege, others were recent high school graduates or shopgirls, but few would have had such humble beginnings as Chicago winner’s, Angela Cucciniello. She was known to her friends as ‘Angelita.’
Early Life
The port of Messina, as it appeared at the time of Angelina's birth.
Between 1900 and 1910, some two million Italians immigrated to the United States. Bruised by the open resentment of their Northern countrymen, who considered them backwards and rustic, feeling left behind following the unification of Italy, and beaten down by a series of natural disasters, Southern Italians made up the bulk of this wave.
Joining them in May 1901 was 38-year-old Carmine Cucciniello, a jewellery machinist from Messina, the port town that sits near the easternmost tip of Sicily. It was common for Italians to work in America during the warmer months before returning home for the winter. This was the path that Carmine also took, at least initially.
Carmine must have found America to his liking. When he returned to Messina a few months later, it was to tell his wife Concetta that he planned to move over permanently. Once he had sufficient means, he would send for her and their three small children, and they would start a new and more prosperous life in America. Coming from a culture that prized family above all else, it must have been an agonising decision, and unbeknownst to them all, the family was soon to get a little larger. Angelina Cucciniello was born on 6th July 1902, by which time her father had already settled in his new land.
The Cucciniello family's immigration card upon arrival to America in 1904. (Source: Familysearch.org)
Poor Concetta would never live to see America or to know her youngest daughter, dying some time shortly after Angelina's birth. Carmine returned to Messina in 1904 to gather his now motherless children, including the two-year-old Angelina, whom he had probably never met. Together, they travelled to Boston aboard the steamer Romanic, arriving on 11 September 1904. Tragic though the reason for this move was, it may have saved their lives. Only four years later, Messina was virtually destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in which half the population perished.
Life in Little Italy
Chicago's Little Italy, as Angelina would have known it as a child. (Source: Casa Italia Chicago)
By 1910, the Cucciniellos had settled at 1162 West Polk Street, right at the centre of Chicago’s Little Italy. They lived in a tenement building alongside other Italian immigrants and a smattering of Greeks and Russians. Wealthier Chicagoans would have described the area as a slum, and widely regarded Southern Italians as second class citizens. In response, the immigrants became a close-knit community who remained fiercely proud of their homeland and loyal to their 'paesani', or family and countrymen.
It is likely that Angelina received much of her education at the nearby Our Lady of Pompeii parish school, which opened in 1912. School was not compulsory until age seven, and few girls were educated beyond the eighth grade. Angelina's own teenage siblings were already hard at work, her brother Modesto doing odd jobs at the jewellery factory, and her sisters Clementina and Carmela working as factory hands in a box factory. Such thankless, low-skilled and poorly paid work was all that was available to young people of their station. Outside of church, with its the regular cycle of lavish feast days and sacraments, there would have been little respite from the drudgery. Fortunately for Angelina, there was also the Garden Theatre, the movie house five minutes' walk from the family's apartment. For fans of silent film - and among immigrants, they were legion - there were no language barriers. Even a young Italian like herself might ascend to fame and fortune in their new land.
North Dearborn St in the early 20th century (Source: Library of Congress).
Such aspiration was far from the minds of the Cucciniello family in the troubled years to come. In 1917, shortly after she was married, Angelina’s eldest sister Clementina had a mental breakdown. She was sent to Traverse City State Hospital for the Insane in Michigan, where she was to remain indefinitely. Angelina's other sister, Carmela, was also married in 1917 and gave birth to a son in 1920. Tragically, the child barely lived past his first birthday, and her marriage soon disintegrated. Meanwhile, Modesto was now training to be a jewellery machinist like his father, poor health having kept him from serving in World War I.
Perhaps it would be the youngest daughter Angelina - or Angela, as she now preferred to be known - who would ‘make it’ in America. By 1920, the seventeen-year-old was working as a typist for a mail order firm. This was a significant step up from her sisters: a skilled position that probably required a stint at a secretarial school, a large investment for an immigrant family. She was now living an apartment at 1103 North Dearborn St, in an area dominated by young American-born white collar workers. Attempting to defy poverty and tragedy, Angela was on the up-and-up.
The Mineralava Competition
The Midway Dancing Gardens, where the Mineralava contest took place. (Source: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation)
Though Rudolph Valentino visited Chicago as part of the Mineralava-sponsored dance and beauty contest in June 1923, there was almost no mention of it in major newspapers. Valentino always had a contentious relationship with the Chicago media, whose reportage on him was at best contemptuous and at worst, outright racist.
Stoked by the ‘yellow press,’ anti-Italian sentiment was on the rise, and Congress was already moving to restrict Italian immigration. For many in the conservative Chicago establishment, the idea of an Italian-American superstar was abhorrent. For the city’s sizeable Italian population, on the other hand - to see a fellow Southern Italian like Rudolph Valentino succeed beyond their wildest dreams must have been incredibly inspirational.
In order to enter the beauty competition, Angela had professional portraits taken at Daguerre Studios, an investment that paid off when she was named one of the six finalists to compete before Valentino himself. On the evening of June 14th, she made her way to the Midway Dancing Gardens, a fantastical modernist temple of entertainment designed by Chicago’s own Frank Lloyd Wright. When Valentino locked eyes and announced that she was the winner, Angela's excitement and astonishment must have been complete. No doubt it also gave Valentino pleasure to select a paesano, which is not to suggest undue favouritism. Angela’s photographs show a beautiful and unselfconscious girl with an easy smile, who fully deserved her win.
After the Prize
Angela, at front left, with her fellow Mineralava Beauty contestants. (Source: Donna Hill collection)
It was not until November that Angela would join the other contestants on the trip of a lifetime: the finals of the Mineralava Beauty Contest in New York City. She was presented to new President Calvin Coolidge, and to the Acting Mayor of New York. Upon arrival, the girls were given suites in the palatial Waldorf-Astoria. It is no wonder that Angela looked a little lost among her fellow beauties.
On November 28th, a brass band escorted the contestants to Madison Square Gardens, where Valentino’s 88 Beauties competed for the grand prize. Though Angela did not win, she had made her mark just by being there.
Whereas some contestants parlayed their experience into stage or screen appearances or other new careers, life went on much as normal for Angela upon her return to Chicago. With herself and other family members to support, she did not have the luxury of dabbling in show business. Instead, she quietly went back to her office job, and moved to an apartment at 6623 Ingleside Ave in the Woodlawn neighbourhood - an even more affluent and middle-class area than her previous address.
For a national competition winner, life must have been surprisingly lonely at times. We do know of one friendship she cultivated, though we can only speculate how it developed. Angela had taken to reading to a middle-aged blind woman, Mrs Rose Garrity, who described her as having a particularly beautiful speaking voice. Perhaps they were fellow churchgoers; perhaps Angela knew Mrs Garrity's son Bert, who was a few years her junior. Whatever the circumstances, Mrs Garrity was friendly enough with Angela to receive a Christmas card from the girl she knew as 'Angelita' as the festive season approached.
On the morning of Tuesday 23 December 1924, Angela rushed to catch her daily streetcar from the corner of Marquette Road and Cottage Grove Avenue, a major intersection about five minutes’ walk from her apartment. With Christmas only two days away, the streets must have been especially busy. As she crossed Cottage Grove, she did not notice a truck turning the corner. Its driver hit the brakes; the truck skidded along the icy road and could not stop in time. An ambulance arrived. Rescue efforts continued as she was transported to Washington Park Hospital. It was too late. She lost her life, aged only twenty two.
Poverty had scattered the Cucciniellos. Angela’s father had moved to Missouri in 1919, probably in pursuit of work. Clementina was in no state to render assistance, and Modesto and Carmela proved hard to track down. It appears it was Angela's blind friend, Rose Garrity, who raised the alarm and somehow managed to identify the victim. Perhaps she missed an expected visit from her; perhaps, hearing of the dreadful accident that had occurred earlier in the day and fearing the worst, she alerted authorities. By the following morning, Christmas Eve, newspapers reported that 'Chicago's Most Beautiful Girl' had been killed in a truck accident.
It appears Modesto was the first family member to be located and told the news. It took several days to track down Carmela, and for Carmine to make the sorrowful journey from interstate to farewell his youngest daughter - a journey reportedly paid for by Mrs Garrity, who would also host the wake for the young woman who had shown her such kindness.
Source: Chicago Tribune, 24 December 1924.
The ‘yellow press’ soon realised that Angela was worth more to them in death than she had been in life. Newspapers across America featured syndicated articles about her passing. The Chicago Tribune, which had hitherto ignored her existence, published a heartrending, highly embellished story that contradicted even their own reportage, claiming that Angela’s body had lain unclaimed for four day and was headed for a potter’s field before Mrs Garrity’s timely intervention. Such claims were an insult to the spirit of 'paesano'. A family friend angrily provided receipts to the Chicago media, proving that it was Modesto Cucciniello who had met his sister's funeral expenses.
On 27 December 1924, on the coldest day of Chicago’s coldest winter in two decades, Angelita was laid to rest at Mt Carmel Catholic Cemetery, following a service at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church that was attended by her friends, her father, and Carmela and Modesto.
The Cucciniello family's luck did not improve in the coming years. Carmela died only four years after her sister, at the age of 34. Her eldest sister Clementina remained institutionalised until her death in 1991, aged 100 - a dubious distinction in what must have been a troubled life. Modesto never married, and died in Los Angeles at the age of 70 after years of poorly-managed diabetes took its toll. Carmine’s later life remains a mystery, but he appears to have passed away in the late 1920s, not long after making the last of many attempts to gain American citizenship.
At centre, the cup presented to Angela Cucciniello by Rudolph Valentino.
Today, one precious physical memento remains of Angela’s short life: the silver cup she was awarded by Rudolph Valentino at the Midway Dancing Gardens in 1923. How this artifact survived must be an incredible tale. Was it preciously held by Angela’s family or friends, souvenired by a roommate; pawned, lost, discarded? We will probably never know. It is now safe in the collection of Tracy Terhune. One hundred years after it was awarded, it took pride of place at the annual Valentino Memorial service in Hollywood, California in 2023, where Angela’s story was recounted by historian Donna Hill. Though her life was even shorter and more tragic than that of Valentino himself, 'Angelita' is remembered, just like the star who gave her her own small measure of fame.
With thanks to Donna Hill for generously granting permission for the use of photos from her collection.