Claretta
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CLARETTA
Copyright © 2017 R.J.B. Bosworth
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bosworth, R. J. B., author.
Title: Claretta : Mussolini’s last lover / R.J.B. Bosworth.
Description: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016044930 | ISBN 9780300214277 (cloth : alkaline paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Petacci, Clara, 1912–1945. | Petacci, Clara, 1912–1945—Diaries. | Mussolini, Benito, 1883–1945—Relations with women. | Mistresses—Italy—Biography. | Women fascists—Italy—Biography. | Italy—History—1922–1945—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women. | HISTORY / Europe / Italy. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Presidents & Heads of State.
Classification: LCC DG575.P455 B78 2017 | DDC 945.091092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044930
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mimmo Franzinelli
Then there are her relatives, who are usually poisonous. They need jobs, recommendations, subsidies, expensive operations or interminable cures for incurable diseases, and embarrassing interventions to get them out of various spots of trouble. To part with an old mistress can be one of the most difficult, delicate, and expensive operations in a man’s life, often much more troublesome than a church annulment. It is such a formidable task, at times, that many timid men go without a mistress for fear of not being able to get rid of her when the time should come.
Luigi Barzini, Memories of mistresses: reflections from a life
CONTENTS
Introduction: Ghosts, diaries and a dictator’s lover
1Sex and the coming dictator
2A dictator’s distractions: His Muse and other bedfellows
3And so . . . pause . . . to bed: Predatory Dictator meets Catholic Girl
4Sex, love and jealousy: Politics and the family
5Warring in public and private life
6The winter of a patriarch and his Ducessa
7Death in the afternoon
Conclusion: A diarist’s tale
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Illustration credits
1. Claretta enjoys the seaside.
2. Leda Rafanelli as new woman.
3. Margherita Sarfatti, confident bourgeois.
4. Ida Dalser, bringing Paris fashion to Milan.
5. Benittino, son of Ida Dalser and Mussolini’s unluckiest child.
6. The Mussolinis as they settled in the Villa Torlonia.
7. Edda marries Galeazzo and the social pages are delighted.
8. Ingénue in the office? Bianca Ceccato.
9. Mother with staying power: Angela Cucciati.
10. Elena Curti, philosophy student, loyal to the end.
11. Alice Pallottelli as a young woman.
12. Magda Brard, the Duce’s pianist.
13. Cornelia Tanzi rebutting postwar allegations of horizontal collaboration.
14. Giulia Carminati as stern Fascist.
15. Magda Fontanges with the snap in her prose.
16. Every inch a princess: Maria José.
17. Mussolini and female admirer (the image was suppressed under the dictatorship).
18. Rachele making a rare public appearance with the Duce.
19. Nonno Duce (another officially suppressed image).
20. Claretta around 1940, putting on weight and respectability.
21. Claretta the cartoonist, with herself as doggie listening to her master’s voice.
22. Marcello Petacci and car.
23. Zita, Benghi and Ciccio.
24. Villa Schildhof, Naifweg, Obermais.
25. Francesco Saverio and Myriam on her wedding day.
26. Myriam and Armando marry in Santa Maria degli Angeli.
27. The mature Claretta, with the heavy and non-modernist furniture of the Villa Camilluccia.
28. Myriam and Armando with fags (in the Camilluccia grounds).
29. Claretta soulfully reading a Mussolini autobiographical piece that ignored her and her family.
30. Villa Fiordaliso and Claretta’s bed ready for the next guest.
31. Claretta facing exposure, 1945.
32. Ben and Clara hung.
33. Francesco Saverio, Giuseppina and Myriam at Claretta’s reburial in Rome, March 1956.
34. Claretta and the now mouldering Petacci tomb, Campo Verano.
35. Rachele Mussolini contemplates the past.
INTRODUCTION
Ghosts, diaries and a dictator’s lover
In the memory of the wide world, Claretta Petacci occupies a single, visual, niche.1 It is the macabre image of her hanging upside down at Piazzale Loreto in Milan on 29 April 1945, her skirts chastely pinned but her upper chest bloodied and bullet-holed. Diminutive in contrast with those Fascist bosses who shared her fate, she swung dead beside her lover and Duce, Benito Mussolini, while a vengeful crowd bayed its hatred and derision. Her naturally curly dark hair was now tangled; for one classically aware observer, its dishevelled state reminded him of the Medusa, even though, he added, her pretty face remained unblemished.2 The expensive black kid shoes (size 33), which she had worn the previous day on her small and delicate feet, were lost. But, as would be revealed by a later exhumation, there lay meticulously sewn into the shoulder pads of her camisole ‘an antique diamond ring, a gold locket studded with 17 small diamonds spelling out the letters C and B. Inside was preserved a tiny note with the motto “Clara, I am you and you are me. Ben 24 April 1932–24 April 1941” and a miniature gold box containing a rosary acquired at the sanctuary of Santa Rita at Cascia in Umbria’.3
Such detail may endlessly fascinate Italians, but the rest of the world has scarcely shown more than a passing interest in Petacci’s fate. To be sure, some mutterings were immediately voiced about the ‘barbarity’ of the scene at Piazzale Loreto, with pious assertion that the innocent lover had not deserved the cruel dictator’s fate. On 3 May 1945 Lord Birkenhead wrote to the London Daily Telegraph in execration of ‘the horrendous Saturnalia’ of Piazzale Loreto, where Claretta had been hung ‘like a hen, beaten, bound and put on sale’; her fate had amounted to ‘the most savage and cruel exhibition of the century’.4 The American poet, Ezra Pound, during the war an unapologetic propagandist of Fascism, and in 1945 locked up in a US military prison before being incarcerated for a decade at a lunatic asylum in Washington, mourned the sacrificial deaths of ‘Ben and la Clara’ in his Pisan cantos.5 In the 1960s the world-wandering, New Zealand-born ‘Count’ Geoffrey Wladislaw Vaile Potocki de Montalk (he claimed Polish aristocratic descent), effusively hymned a ‘dear heroine’, who had bravely sacrificed herself for love.6 Sardonically driven by the expectation that Fascist sex could swell audience numbers, in 1975 the BBC sponsored a play archly entitled Private affairs: Caesar and Claretta. In its presentation, the young Helen Mirren enhanced her career playing Claretta as she followed her road to P
iazzale Loreto. According to a review in The Times, Mirren was notably convincing when, portraying the events of 27 April 1945, ‘layer after silk layer slithered to the floor as she prepared for bed’ or when, the next morning, ‘she left for what she believed to be liberation she was so excited she had no time to fetch her knickers from the bed and gave a hideous little giggle of hope as she went out of the farmhouse’.7
Shortly afterwards, the Scottish dramatist Robert David MacDonald brought Claretta and Hitler’s partner, Eva Braun, together in a work entitled Summit conference. Dedicated to Rolf Hochhuth and saluting The representative, with its bitter critique of Pope Pius XII’s attitude to the Holocaust, as ‘the most important European play since the war’, Summit conference explored the Holocaust with greater attention than it did Italian Fascism. ‘Clara’8 was represented as the female version of a timeless Italian Machiavel: ‘I am the Duce’s whore, and that is what they call me,’ she was portrayed as saying. ‘I am a scandal but at least I am a public scandal. Every month, I give 200,000 lire to the poor, and they look at my clothes and smell my scent and they spit – and take the money.’9 The play was revived at the Lyric in London in 1982, on this occasion with another distinguished actor, Glenda Jackson, playing Claretta, but met with poor reviews. An acerbic critic wrote that ‘it suggests something Giraudoux might have written on a bad day’.10 Still less successful was a racehorse called Petacci – it may be wondered how the callers pronounced the filly’s name – which ran unplaced a few times in 1977–8 and was then sent to stud.11
Such were mere flickerings of posthumous international interest. No doubt, then and later, further fleeting attention was aroused when a film or a book or a scandal was reported from Italy. In 1974–5 Carlo Lizzani’s romanticised Mussolini: ultimo atto (‘The last days of Mussolini’) targeted a global market through the deployment of international stars, with Rod Steiger as the Duce12 and Henry Fonda as Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, archbishop of Milan. However, the role of Claretta fell to the less well-known Lisa Gastoni and not, as was originally rumoured, to Liz Taylor (with Richard Burton and not Steiger to play Mussolini).13 Ten years later, the Neapolitan director Pasquale Squitieri directly (and sympathetically) portrayed Petacci’s life in a film called Claretta, with a semi-documentary beginning. He employed his partner, Claudia Cardinale, in the title role, her performance winning a silver medal at the Venice Biennale of 1985.14 Squitieri, a cinematographer with many contacts on the Italian political right, readily persuaded Claretta’s surviving younger sibling, Myriam,15 to be interviewed. But no international stars joined them and the film caused few ripples outside Italy.
Popular historical accounts in languages other than Italian remain sparse, with the most recent, Roberto Olla’s translated Il Duce and his women (2011), dwindling to the end of its narrative around 1936 and therefore, despite some description of Claretta, scarcely focusing on her.16 In his avowedly revisionist biography of Mussolini, the journalist Nicholas Farrell, who took residence in the Duce’s home town of Predappio and regularly writes for the Spectator in critique of the Italian left, preferred brevity to detail. ‘Italian women,’ he maintained, ‘. . . queued up – literally – to make love’ to Mussolini. Claretta, Farrell added, possessed the requisite qualities of ‘big breasts’ and ‘powerful hips’ and, in his opinion, little more needed to be known about her.17
As such remarks demonstrate, Claretta’s story has frequently aroused foreign stereotypes about Latin lovers, with the assumption that every Italian male, and certainly any in power, aimed to live in a perpetual ‘bunga bunga’ party. Typical was the leaked report published in the Guardian that, when preparing for a state dinner with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the British premier David Cameron joked that the main agenda in Rome was ‘jacuzzis and whores’.18 Cameron’s apparent assumptions were little different from those of American ambassador Joseph Kennedy (himself no model of uxorious care) three generations earlier, when, in March 1939, he counselled that the quickest way to keep Italy onside in the deteriorating international situation would be to despatch ‘six American chorus girls’ to Rome to divert Mussolini and Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law, minister of foreign affairs and alleged competitor as a sexual athlete.19
But, if the world has largely forgotten Claretta, Italy remembers. Scarcely a week passes without some further reference to her on the web or in the news. In 2015, for example, fans learned that a 1939 Alfa Romeo Sport Berlina, the very car that Claretta and her brother Marcello had driven to their deaths in April 1945, had been auctioned in Paris for $2.1 million.20 A few months later, a (clunky) 1936 Bianchi bicycle, allegedly a February 1943 present from ‘Ben’ to his lover, was put on eBay by a Foligno-based seller for a cheaper but still pricey €250,000.21 More melodramatic was a set of reports in 2011–12 that Petacci’s ghost had appeared four times on the lakeside at Salò, ‘capital’ of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (RSI; Italian Social Republic), the puny regime of a puppet dictator between 1943 and 1945. Dressed in a flowing 1930s-style gown, ‘tall and beautiful’, the apparition, perhaps seeking sweetness still, had become visible just outside the elegant Vassalli gelateria looking out over Lago di Garda. In April 2012, at a delicate moment in national political history, with the Berlusconi era coming to an end, the spectre spoke up to condemn rightist infighting and leftist temptations. Two Sicilians and two Lombards, it was reported, heard the ghost whisper to perpetually bickering Italians: ‘Ben said, do stop it now!’ Massimo Merendi, chief of the Associazione National Ghost Uncover [sic], was engaged to examine the case further, it was promised, but the truth of Petacci’s presence could not be doubted.22
Memory flourishes at other sites along Lago di Garda, where at Salò in June 2015 a museum and ‘study centre’ for the RSI opened, amid controversy, for visits and seminars.23 There and elsewhere in the neighbourhood, maps advise how to find ‘twenty places important in the RSI’. The most beauteous is the Villa Fiordaliso, where Petacci, her parents, Japanese diplomatic staff and an SS guard lived in 1943–4 in what must have been a crowded house. The villa was initially built for its German owner, Otto Vèzi, in 1907 in full ‘Liberty’ (Art Nouveau) style, thereby forming a small part of those developments that led Italian nationalists to bewail the fate of the Gardasee, as they bitterly rechristened the area around the lake. After German defeat in the war, in 1928 it was bought and enlarged by the wealthy Lombard Botturi-Polenghi family. In recent decades it has been lovingly restored by its owner, Max Tosetti, as has the adjacent Renaissance Torre San Marco.
Each is set on the lakeside just below the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the extensive palace where the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio indulged himself and his syncretic tastes through his declining years.24 Today the Villa Fiordaliso is a centre for lavish weddings and dinners, while overnight guests are offered the opportunity ‘to sleep in Claretta’s bed’, still furnished as it was in 1944.25 (A sceptic might note tartly, however, that she and the Duce rarely passed a night there; whatever quick coitus they managed between 1943 and 1945 usually occurred in the Torre San Marco.) Nonetheless, among those said to have enjoyed the contemporary lavish facilities at the villa and/or to have been emotionally moved by their historical resonance are Laurence Olivier, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale and ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf. Silvio Berlusconi has also relaxed ‘in this room of sighs’, a popular historian has confided with a nudge and a wink. ‘And of just one thing we can be sure. He was not alone.’26
A hardcover copy of the romantic popular biography, Roberto Gervaso’s Claretta: la donna che morì per Mussolini (‘Claretta: the woman who died for Mussolini’), is made available by the management of the hotel for contemplation and written commentary.27 Sadly, the more celebrated guests seem to have forgone this opportunity, although visitors who have reflected on their meeting with Claretta’s spirit have arrived from as far afield as Australia, New Zealand, Kazakhstan and Venezuela. They have kept their opinions for the most part apolitical and sentimental
(with possible national differences): ‘Our unforgetable [sic] day. The Italians really know how to live’ (a couple from Dallas, September 2002); or the more ecstatic French couple ‘E et G, une nuit torride, inoubliable, et pleine de sentiments, faits partagées à deux. Peut-être avons-nous ravivé l’idylle magnifique entre Claretta et Il Duce’ (July 2004). Another French pair were briefer one month later, recording: ‘Calme, douceur et volupté.’ Other sentiments were prosaic: ‘We did sleep in a very historical room but I was here with my wife lovely Margie and not with a lover like Claretta’ (a couple, perhaps German, perhaps not, from Munich, September 2007). More directly connected with the Mussolini–Petacci story were two Italians who recalled lyrically: ‘I am yours . . . You are mine . . . for ever if God wants it . . . so Ben and Claretta wrote . . . so you and I write.’
Thirty kilometres north along the lake, the Villa Feltrinelli has been converted into a larger and still more up-market hotel whose staff acknowledge that Mussolini’s bedroom is always the first to be booked. There, the Duce and quite a few of his extended family lived in 1943–5. But the presence of his wife, Rachele, ensured that Claretta never stretched languorously on this bed. Quite a bit further north at Obermais/Maia Alta above Merano in the German-speaking sector of the Trentino-Alto Adige, locals still readily identify a ‘castle’ as the ‘Villa Petacci’ (actually called the Villa Schildhof and erected in 1911), and are sure there was regular sexual congress there. They are deluded. The villa was acquired in April 1943 from two Hungarian noblemen by Claretta’s brother Marcello, and acted as a redoubt for the whole family at a difficult moment later that year and in 1944–5 (then minus Claretta).28