At 20, Alfonso slowed down long enough to marry Carroll McDaniel, a disarmingly beautiful American, seven years older than him, from a small South Carolina town. Fon first saw her in New York at El Morocco and was enchanted. The first time they met, they barely spoke a word to each other. She was with a group who didn’t care for him. But he remembered her. The next day he made certain to get her alone. Always impulsive, he asked her to marry him two hours later. She did so in 1949. They had two children, Alfonso and Andrea.
From the outset, Fon’s marriage to Carroll was tempestuous and difficult. His mother was said not to approve of her, perhaps as Charlotte Hays writes in The Fortune Hunters, she saw too much of herself in the ambitious young American. Carroll befriended the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who remained lifelong pals, and entertained on a lavish scale. Fon, meanwhile, had become more and more impulsive. She was not fond of his rowdy friends, nor his constant traveling, and Fon’s Latin eye tended to rove.
At the time of his final race in 1957, he and Carroll were separated, but not legally divorced.