Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  At different times in his twenty-year rule Mussolini had shown himself open to various approaches and realignments, but only in order to widen his scope for political manoeuvre and reduce the number of his potential opponents. When these moves towards the left ended, as they almost always did, in failure, he soon forgot them and fell back into the profound disillusion he felt for his fellow Italians, at least of his own generation. “But how could he love his fellow men? With a kind of ruthless clairvoyance, he sees them as they really are. Because he rules over them he wants to improve them; he has formed an abstract idea of Italy which is so grand and sublime that the rest of us, actual Italians, cannot help falling short of his ideal.”34

  He was surrounded by crowds of adoring Italians, but by now he had given up the belief that he could mould them according to his notions of strength and virility, ideas of which he himself was utterly convinced but which, as Sarfatti implies, were destined to remain abstractions. Now his hopes rested on the coming generations who would grow up enveloped by his legend. The children who belonged to the Fascist youth movements such as the Balilla formed in the 1920s would grow up to become adult Fascists; it was they who would create the powerful and dominant nation of which he dreamt. And in addition to this belief, he put his hope in numbers, huge numbers: power equalled mass, the Italians had to procreate, the target was sixty million and more of them by 1950. Also the Italians who had emigrated overseas should breed plentifully so that eventually, by sheer strength of numbers, they would take over the countries where they lived. Guided by this vision of the future, Mussolini devised prizes for couples who married and went on to have large families. He introduced “mass weddings” and made sure that cameramen, photographers and journalists broadcast the events to the world. Hundreds of couples would enter the church, where a mass marriage would be celebrated. There would always be officiating priests, since the Catholic Church was an integral part of the vision, but the dominant factor was always the Fascist state. Mussolini never released his grip on the country’s younger generations. He started to receive official delegations of mothers from the largest families in the country in order to bestow awards on them; on each occasion he would stress the number of special provisions his government had made for large families. He was aware that the Church pursued a similar policy, and was therefore careful never to let up the pressure: the newly born belonged to the regime before they belonged to the Church. On this point he was insistent. As late as 1937, eight years after the signing of the Lateran Pacts with the Vatican, Mussolini still felt the need to address a crowd of adoring mothers from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia in the following terms: “As Italian women and Fascist women you have special duties to perform: you must look after our homes (the crowd shouts out with one voice: Yes! Yes!); with your unceasing care and never-failing love, it is you who are first responsible for shaping the young – may there be many of them, may they be strong! (The crowd cries out enthusiastically: Yes! Yes!) It is you who will breed and mould the generations of soldiers and pioneers who will defend our empire. I ask you: the education you give the young – do you promise it will be Roman, do you promise it will be Fascist? (The crowd screams out: Yes! Yes!).”35

  In addition to having to encourage adoring crowds of mothers who were busy breeding a new generation of Italians, Mussolini found time, in his meticulously planned daily routine, for another category of women – his lovers. As soon as the weather started to get warmer, he would take himself off to the beach at Castel Porziano. Angela Curti was one of the women officially allowed through the sentry point at the entrance to the estate. On her return to Milan she would relate her adventures to her daughter. Mussolini had acquired a new motorboat, named “Alcione”, and had asked her to go with him on its first trip. They were alone together on the beach at Castel Porziano and boarded the gleaming vessel; some bodyguards had immediately approached them, but Mussolini sent them away with an imperious gesture. He started the motor and steered the boat out to open sea, heading in the direction of Anzio and Nettuno, with one eye on the horizon and the other on the woman beside him, enjoying her amazement at the speed of the boat over the waves.

  Chapter 16

  The Brand of Fascism

  No one could resist his magnetism: he was intransigent, unbending, with a fierce attention to detail; he always demanded the utmost of the men he worked with, he chose them individually and he moulded them into a single team. This was how Mussolini liked to see himself, but it’s actually a description of Arturo Toscanini, the greatest conductor of his generation, at the head of what was considered to be the world’s finest orchestra. Take away the mutual respect which governs the relationship between a conductor and his players and the music they play with its message of freedom and they could also be the characteristics of a tyrant. Only the practice of art can allow the exercise of such power. Toscanini had stood as a candidate for Mussolini’s party in 1919, and his name in the electoral list had won eighty-four votes, but he had subsequently distanced himself in disgust at the violence of the Fascist squads. He ran La Scala in Milan, the most famous opera house in Italy, and had turned it into a temple or fortress where Fascism was powerless to penetrate. His international reputation as a conductor – he was renowned not only for his interpretations of Verdi but also, among the opera-going public, of Wagner – made him one of the most famous Italians in the world, and as such protected him. Unable to oppose him, Mussolini sought to exploit his fame in the interests of the regime: in 1925, on a visit to La Scala, he took Toscanini’s arm and made sure he was seen by the audience thronging the foyer. Toscanini was displeased and didn’t change his views.

  The maestro vs. the Duce, Act One. On reflection, Mussolini decided to leave Toscanini at the head of La Scala – after all, his worldwide fame was useful for the country. On 14th May 1931 Toscanini agreed to conduct a concert in Bologna. The local Fascists had invited party gerarchi and other leading figures to the event and demanded that the Fascist anthem ‘Giovinezza’ (‘Youth’) be played at the beginning of the evening. Toscanini refused, and said that if they insisted he would cancel his appearance. The local bigwigs rapidly consulted among themselves and were inclined to avoid an outright conflict – better to snub the maestro by refusing to attend the concert. They forgot to take account of the extremists in the party, however: a squad of thugs took up their positions in front of the theatre and, as Toscanini stepped out of his car, four of them – Vannini, Gelati, Remondini, Ghinelli – set upon him, kicking and punching him. Afterwards, they joined a procession of Fascists who were singing the anthem as they marched through the streets. The incident caused a huge scandal in the international press.

  Toscanini paid little attention to the attack, merely sending a telegram of protest to Mussolini, who didn’t even bother to reply. Many years later, in the interview with Ludwig, he declared that Toscanini had deliberately chosen to “ratchet up the tension. On the same day he was attacked in Bologna – an uncouth act of aggression I find entirely deplorable – he rejected two proposals of mediation I had made to him. Sometimes you just have to find a formula for agreement. Did you notice the other day how I approached the naval negotiations with France? I started off with a threatening speech, but I still reached an agreement.”1

  In Mussolini’s view, some kind of political compromise was needed, but Toscanini refused to accept one. The regime issued an official announcement stating that a citizen had slapped Toscanini’s face because of his refusal to perform the anthem. The police then withdrew the conductor’s passport, triggering another scandal in the world’s press, at which point they gave it back. The regime’s special police – the OVRA – started to take an interest in the case. They kept Toscanini’s house under surveillance; his visitors had to report to them before entering, and were then registered and automatically marked down as enemies of the regime.

  The maestro vs. the Duce, Act Two: open conflict. Toscanini took to accepting invitations to conduct wherever he thought liberty
needed defending. He went to Tel Aviv to conduct, without payment, the inaugural concert of the Israel Philharmonic, formed by Jewish musicians who had escaped from persecution. The leading radio station in the world, the NBC in the United States, offered him the conductorship of a new orchestra in New York which would broadcast live concerts; the seventy-year-old maestro accepted with the alacrity of a young man. On 25th July 1943 he was in the middle of a concert when some stunning news arrived; his friends decided not to tell him until the concert was over. But during the interval someone had left a radio on outside one of the dressing rooms and, as he walked by, Toscanini heard; he paused a moment, listened, and then merely uttered: “At last.” In the space of a few hours Italy had got rid of Mussolini; the country was filled with mass demonstrations, cathartic, liberating.

  The maestro vs. the Duce, Final Act. Toscanini decided to intensify his personal campaign against Fascism by conducting numerous concerts intended to raise funds to support the war effort and to aid the refugees who had to flee the conflict as the military front moved north through the peninsula. The concerts were extraordinarily successful – on one occasion, in Madison Square Garden, there was the largest audience ever seen for a concert of classical music. Fiorello La Guardia, the Italo-American mayor of New York, put programmes for the evening signed by Toscanini himself on sale, and even succeeded in selling at auction the conductor’s baton. The NBC then suggested to Toscanini that he make a high-quality film of one of his concerts, in the same radio studios from which they were regularly broadcast all over the world; Toscanini, with his characteristic enthusiasm for new technologies, accepted immediately. He got the players, the singers and the choir together, took up his baton and started to play, for the first time with cameras filming the event.

  As part of the programme he had deliberately chosen two pieces by Verdi: the overture to La Forza del destino and the Inno delle nazioni, the Hymn of the Nations which the composer had created for the London exhibition of 1862. In the latter piece he also changed a verse in the text, replacing with his own pen a line with “O Italia, o Italia, o patria mia tradita” (“O Italy, O Italy, O my betrayed country”). He also included in the concert the Internationale, which on the orders of Stalin was no longer sung as the anthem of Soviet Russia; for Toscanini it had always been the anthem of the workers’ and peasants’ movement, of world socialism from its beginnings. But his inclusion of the piece later caused problems: when it first came out, Toscanini’s film, entitled Hymn of the Nations, was a huge success in the United States and in the newly liberated cities in Europe, but once the conflict was over and the Cold War had begun, Hollywood insisted that the part containing the Internationale was cut. Only copies without the offending part were sent to the archives with the intention that just the doctored version would survive rather than the actual concert which Toscanini gave – a futile attempt at censorship, given that nowadays a full copy of the original film has been recovered and is freely available for viewing on the internet.

  Mussolini regarded the attack on Toscanini as an accidental distraction as he tried to establish his credentials as an intellectual and patron of the arts, a connoisseur of painting and music and literature. En route to this goal of adding yet another facet to his myth, he sought to correspond frequently with various writers and poets and philosophers – such as D’Annunzio, Ada Negri, Giovanni Gentile, Emma Gramatica. Fired by his ambitions to be seen as a writer, Mussolini composed three historical plays between 1929 and 1931 – Campo di maggio, Villafranca and Cesare – though “composed” is exaggerated: he hired the services of a collaborator, who was not exactly a ghostwriter – there was no secrecy about the partnership – but who provided material support with the actual writing of the pieces. Giovacchino Forzano had been suggested to Mussolini by D’Annunzio and proved to be obedient and enthusiastic; he thanked the Duce for having taken him on as his “executant” and was unfailingly grateful to his leader for having given him the opportunity to contribute. Mussolini would send him notes, ideas, settings and plots. The three plays were about, in turn, Napoleon, Camillo Benso, Conte di Cavour and Julius Caesar, each seen at a moment in their careers when they had to face defeat because of betrayal: “The three historical dramas which Mussolini wrote in collaboration with Forzano clearly show his tendency to project his own self-image and deeds onto different historical contexts – the theme of the solitary leader, intent on the great goal he is pursuing but also aware of the lack of understanding and moral failings of the men who surround him and who should be helping him, conscious too of the need to exploit and force every opportunity to his own advantage…”2

  Mussolini’s cultural ambitions also lay behind the interviews he gave to Ludwig between 23rd March and 4th April 1932. But while he was intent on developing new aspects of his image, he also started to play down one which had turned out to be disappointing. The “Duce as musician” had certainly contributed to the aura which surrounded Mussolini, and many admirers had sent him valuable violins as a token of their devotion. Writing long after the fall of the regime, Paolo Monelli sought out some of the now elderly people in the Romagna who had once heard him play the violin; from their accounts he draws up a description of someone who was “an enthusiastic but mediocre amateur who’d taught himself to play, or at most had had a few basic lessons from the men who played the fiddle at village festivals… Mussolini played the violin more to let off steam than interpret the melodies of the piece as the composer had conceived them…”3 We’ve seen how Margherita Sarfatti took her revenge on his serial infidelities by maliciously asking him to play in front of Toscanini; now that their relationship was in decline, she was delighted when he chose to play for her, even over the telephone.

  Playing the violin had also provided a link between Mussolini and an accomplished French pianist, Magda Brard. She was born in Brittany in 1903 and had an international reputation as a keyboard virtuoso; she lived a secluded and mysterious existence in a villa – more splendid than Sarfatti’s in the same area – on the shore of Lake Como. Using her fame as a pianist, she had set herself to seduce Mussolini – not such a hard thing to do – and after their affair came to an end did all she could to hide it for nearly half a century. At the end of the Second World War she found herself in difficulties, from which only the personal intervention of the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti had managed to rescue her: the then Minister of Justice had promised to repatriate her to France, removing her from the jurisdiction of an Italian court where she’d been accused of collaboration. In this way the double game which Brard had been playing came to light: as one of Mussolini’s mistresses and as an activist in the Resistance who by virtue of her network of contacts had succeeded in rescuing various leading Partisans of Christian Democrat sympathies, such as Enrico Mattei, the future president of Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (the National Hydrocarbon Corporation, known as ENI), as well as industrialists in the north who had given their support to the anti-Fascist forces, such as the steel magnate Enrico Falck. In 1932 Brard had given birth to a daughter, Vanna, whom her husband, Michele Borgo, had at first refused to acknowledge as his offspring, thus giving rise to various rumours that the girl was yet another illegitimate child fathered by Mussolini. Her birth certainly coincided with the most intense period of Mussolini and Magda Brard’s affair. During the 1930s Brard used to have several signed photographs of Mussolini on display, as if by chance, around her house; they served to impress any visiting party gerarchi and made it easier to obtain the favours she needed from them in playing her double game. The historian and journalist Roberto Festorazzi succeeded in obtaining an interview with Magda Brard towards the end of her life, when she was in a rest home; despite her great age and physical decline, she showed no regret and talked about herself and what she had done with satisfaction: “‘Yes, that’s right – Mussolini was my lover.’ ‘Did you love him?’ ‘I admired him. He was full of energy and a very good musician – he would play the violin while I accompanied him at the piano.
I had a photograph of him with a signed dedication, but I destroyed it…’ […] She repeats with emphasis and with undiminished self-confidence: ‘I am Magda Brard!’ […] The tales of the old lady in her nineties might now be seen as senile delusions – if only the doctors and nurses and all the others who surrounded her had realized the wizened old woman was just telling the truth.”4 Brard’s virtuoso technique at the keyboard certainly served to cover up her lover’s amateur efforts on the violin. Mussolini could dare to play in her company, just as he could within the privacy of the Villa Torlonia, but he knew he wasn’t up to performing in public in the way that he played tennis or rode a horse or drove his Alfa Romeo. Quietly, without any publicity, he stopped playing the violin, although, addicted as he was to providing “political” explanations for all his actions, he did once give a highfalutin one: “I gave up playing the violin two years ago, for my own sake. Playing the instrument at first used to refresh me, and then it would agitate me. After half an hour of playing the violin I’d feel calm, after an hour, disturbed. All poisons work like that. I’ve given the beautiful violins which have been presented to me to talented youngsters who don’t have the money to buy their own instruments.”5

  Ludwig’s interview with Mussolini came out at the end of 1932 in several countries and became a worldwide best-seller. In Italy it was published by Mondadori in a very large print run. But the publication of the interview was not a straightforward matter: Mussolini realized that he had allowed himself to speak too freely in reply to Ludwig’s questions, but too late to have the first edition withdrawn, since it sold out so rapidly. He couldn’t stop or change the foreign editions, but he insisted that subsequent Italian editions came out in a revised version, with the excuse that Ludwig’s use of the Italian language was incorrect, even though the journalist had written the book in his native language, German, and the text had been translated. Mussolini’s claim that he was genuinely cultivated contradicted other declarations he had made which showed his real nature, such as his comment in a letter written on 8th January 1928 that he was not cultured in a general sense but “systematically”, in other words, culture was a means, not an end, a tool or weapon for his advancement rather than a mere “adornment”.