This time, Maria José ‘was again here undressed, with still less on. She wore a green scarf on her head and sunglasses. Her breasts were all but jutting out.’ She lay down and turned over and over; ‘with her bum in the air, she wriggled and rubbed up against my legs and gazed at me’. But, again, according to Mussolini, he failed to rise to the occasion and was left to regret that she now believed either he ‘was impotent or he was a complete idiot (fesso)’. On a third day she returned and quickly focused the conversation on ‘sex and male virility’. But even that was a failure. ‘Nothing. I was the head of government and she the princess’. And it was no different on a fourth and fifth occasion. Claretta by now was agog but Mussolini’s chat drifted onto other issues, even if, perhaps aroused by the talk of his manhood, they did make love twice before leaving.74
On occasion thereafter the topic recurred, with Mussolini now deciding that Maria José actually was ‘repellent’, physically and intellectually.75 More wistfully, he recalled, with his own coy euphemisms, that time when ‘my little cock did not wake up, not at all, nothing. Rather, it went back into its cage. The more effort she made, the more he retreated.’ His penis, Claretta joked naughtily, must be a republican. Mussolini gave a laugh at that thought and went on to list his three failures to get an erection, the others being with Sarfatti (as already noted), and with a ‘Russian’ (perhaps Balabanoff?), when he was in Switzerland as a young man.76
It is hard to know what to make of the tale about Maria José, especially given that the lavish circumstantial detail of surroundings, dress and actions offers corroboration. Moreover, in 2011, it was revealed that, forty years earlier, Romano Mussolini had agreed, if a little vaguely, that the Mussolini family had always known of the ‘intimate sentimental relationship’ that, around 1937, had linked dictator and princess.77 Yet, Claretta in her writings was recording her older lover’s boasting, when he and she were preparing to have sex and arousing each other. Until the appearance of Maria José’s diary, ‘nonproven’ may be the best verdict to give about the contention that the wife of the heir to the throne was ready and willing to be another of the dictator’s partners.
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Three further women in the Mussolini story need introduction, since he had children with each of them. His substantiated final tally of paternity was five legitimate children with Rachele, and illegitimate offspring with Fernanda Oss Facchinelli, Ida Dalser, Bianca Ceccato, Angela Cucciati, Ines De Spuches, Magda Brard (probably), Alice Pallottelli (probably two) and Romilda Ruspi: nine children from eight different mothers, while in 1940 Claretta Petacci did fall pregnant, but ectopically: no child resulted.78 Here was a dictator who sought almost literally to be the pater patriae, a personal fount of national demographic growth. Somewhere in the background was his anxious desire, as expressed to his social superior Sarfatti, to be ‘continued’, almost as if he could not believe he had conquered without the proof of children. No doubt he insistently talked in a crudely patriarchal manner of ‘taking’ his women. Yet he tended to be solicitous of his lovers while they were pregnant and, in a majority of cases, kept some sense of paternal duty towards his illegitimate sons and daughters. He could be ruthless, especially with women whom he understood to be experienced and promiscuous and with whom he had not fathered offspring, although even then he scarcely made complete breaks with Brambilla and Tanzi and, in his way, with Sarfatti.
Of the mothers of his children, he imprisoned Dalser and sloughed off Oss Facchinelli. Yet, when the Second World War began to wreak havoc on his regime and nation and fret his personal sense of authority and purpose, Mussolini retained ties with Ceccato, Cucciati, Brard, Pallottelli and Ruspi, and conserved some knowledge of De Spuches. Even as the Petacci family added complications to his affair with Claretta, his other partners acted as though they belonged to Mussolini sub-families, and he did not disdain the thought. No wonder the most insistent theme in Petacci’s diary is jealousy and Claretta’s hope that she could drive her partner into simplifying his partnerships and their ramifications or, better, could absorb him into her own family.
Magda Brard may have been the most culturally talented of Mussolini’s lovers, with the presumed exception of Sarfatti. She may also have led the most complex life, as revealed – somewhat obscurely – by the archives and in an interview that Roberto Festorazzi obtained from her in early 1998 when he admitted she was in mental decline (she died shortly afterwards, on 9 June).79 Magdeleine Marie Anna (‘Magda’) Brard was born on 17 August 1903 (like Mussolini her star sign was Leo), in a town in Brittany. Her family was wealthy and established, with her father, Alfred, serving as a Radical senator in Paris, while enriching his family through a number of private and public business ventures. Probably a Freemason like most Frenchmen of his class, he was still in office in the 1930s. His two sons pursued successful military careers in the navy (Roger Brard rose to the rank of admiral) and air force.80
As a girl, Magda was a precociously talented pianist. She graduated from the Paris Conservatory at the age of twelve and began giving concert performances, touring the United States in 1919 and, in 1922, playing live at the Met in New York. Precocious in love as well as music, in March 1920 she was united in a high-society Paris wedding to Edmondo Michele Borgo, a rich motorcycle entrepreneur from Turin, where the couple soon based themselves. He was twenty years her senior.81 They had a son, Reginaldo, in October 1926, and – more controversially – a daughter, Vanna, on 7 January 1932. From at least 1945 until her death, Brard would insist that Mussolini was a great lover and was the girl’s father.82 Whatever the case, by the time of this birth the Borgo marriage was collapsing, with a formal separation agreed in 1936. Six years later, doubtless as an indication of the social cachet of those involved, the Sacra Romana Rota approved dissolution on the grounds of impotentia generale, an unlikely determination given the two children. Magda was now pregnant with a second daughter (to be called Micaela), to Enrico Wild, a rich Swiss businessman and a believer in spiritualism. Transferring after the war to Nice, they married in 1947 (she was his fourth wife). Again the result was unhappy: Wild died suddenly in April 1955, amid rumours of mutual drug-taking and foolish investments by Magda; suicide has not been ruled out.83
Photos show Brard with somewhat untidy ringlets, although her elaborate hairstyles from girlhood suggest bourgeois expenditure on her appearance. She had dark eyes and, for her concert performances, favoured a silk gown and pearls. Another image exists of her playing ball in a modest period bathing costume, which displays a compact figure and shapely legs.
During the 1920s Brard had not accepted that marriage should signal her professional retirement. With the confidence of her class and rejecting Fascist blather about women preferring to be exemplary wives and mothers, Brard continued to give concerts, even when she was pregnant. So, during the summer of 1926 she was in Rome, and there had the self-confidence to write to the dictator suggesting a personal performance. Despite Ceccato’s memory of him snoringly asleep at La Scala as Aida resounded, Mussolini liked to think of himself as a capable violinist – in 1927 regime propaganda published a tract entitled Mussolini musicista – and, throughout his life, he did play his instrument and grow emotional over it and other music. As his propagandist explained a little ambiguously: ‘Mussolini is certainly not a musician in the strictly technical sense nor a virtuoso violinist. But he is something better and greater: an instinctual musician.’84
Whatever his skill, on the evening of 22 June Brard was invited to play at the Villa Torlonia. She did well. In a series of missives, Mussolini hailed her as ‘a magician of the pianoforte’ and, with more intimate slant, ‘a woman who evokes perfect harmony’.85 This being Fascist Italy, the police now began became interested in this French subject, with her high political contacts, noting happily at first that she was ‘of fervent Fascist sentiments’ and a great ‘admirer of His Excellency Mussolini’. In February 1927 they added in stuffy bureaucratic phrasing that, evidently recovered from the birth of
her son, she had spent an hour or so in ‘the well-known apartment’ in the Via Rasella, not leaving until after midnight. An anonymous spy now reported that she ‘greatly feared the rivalry of another signora [Sarfatti]’, who had begun to treat her with suspicion and jealousy.86 There was also a further problem in Brard’s career, since Mussolini took over the role of a patriarchal husband in discouraging her from performance and banning the Italian press from reviewing her concerts.
By December 1927 Brard was protesting vivaciously against such censorship, telling the Duce that, in his heart, he must comprehend that her ‘art’ was the ‘fruit of years of hard work’ and was what ‘gave happiness to her family’.87 Already, hostile informants had reported that Magda had disclosed at a reception in the French embassy that Mussolini ‘ate like a pig’ and ‘other worse things’.88 Rumours began to spread that Brard was a spy for her motherland, all the more after her concert career ended in 1931, just as she fell pregnant with Vanna. In March 1933 Umberto Ricci, the prefect of Turin, having earlier signalled the deplorable way she lived ostentatiously beyond her means, now accused her of being a ‘con woman’, ‘who tried to exploit the friendship which she boasts of having here and in Rome for financial gain’.89
The police now threatened Brard with the loss of her PNF membership and the essential green light it gave to all profitable business dealings. She was only saved after she appealed – personally, vociferously, repeatedly and at length – to Mussolini. Invoking his ‘sainted mother’ as an initial rhetorical step, she talked of persecution and illness before growing ever more emphatic: ‘I swear to you on my children’s heads that I am completely innocent’ of any and every charge.90 Her rhetoric worked. Her enemy, Ricci, was retired early and in November 1933 she regained her party card, with a positive judgement that she was ‘a profoundly Italian woman’, heavily and beneficially involved in business affairs.91 She now successfully launched an Accademia della musica in Turin with state approval, and did not forget to send Mussolini personal thanks for his ‘exquisite goodness’ in her support.92
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Brard remained the academy’s director until 1943, with little sign of active involvement in politics or of new contact with Mussolini. In his bedtime musings with Claretta he only remembered her once, as a name in his list of multiple lovers at the Via Rasella.93 Family gossip from the 1990s, taken seriously by Festorazzi, that, in 1940, she plotted to frame a deal whereby Italy and France could become allies in the Second World War, can be discounted.94 Yet, in 1944–5, she did resurface in the archives of the RSI, to which she had adhered. At her Villa Roccabruna, above Como, she sponsored a salon of regime notables, including German generals and the minister of the interior, Guido Buffarini Guidi. There, in 1945, Gina Ruberti, the widow of Mussolini’s son, Bruno, who had died as a test pilot during the war, and her parents found sanctuary.95
But Brard’s new correspondence with the Duce (they had one face-to-face meeting at Gargnano in July 1944) revolved around her pleas to the dictator – whom she addressed in the proper Fascist manner as Voi (the second-person plural, rather than the more intimate tu, or the derided third-person singular Lei) – for special treatment. ‘You have known me personally for twenty years,’ she stressed, ‘and you are aware of my sentiments about being Italian and my love for the patria of which you are the symbol.’ However much approached with such grovelling phrasing, her sometime lover and possible father of her second child had now, in her mind, become the patron who owed his client something. So she wrote about her son, Reginaldo, who had been caught up in Germany and needed to come home. At the Duce’s obliging request, he did. After this little personal victory, as late as April 1945 Brard was still importuning Mussolini to bend the rules in accelerating state approval of her marriage to a foreign citizen whose third wife may have been Jewish.96
A few weeks later Brard herself was under arrest, held alongside Fascist chiefs who had survived the war in Como’s San Donnino prison.97 She was quickly released, however, following intervention by French diplomatic and military personnel. Was this a hint that she had after all been a spy? Or had she been the secret aide of anti-Fascists in difficulty during the war? Or, most likely, was it just that her French family were people who mattered in that country? In any case, Brard left quickly for Paris and then went on to Nice. She never returned to Italy. Ninety-five at her death, among Mussolini’s lovers she had indeed been a woman of many parts.
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In all the romantic literature about Mussolini’s women, perhaps the silliest title, but one that well expresses the depth of nostalgia for the Duce’s body in Italy, has been given to a study of Alice Pallottelli, another woman, like Brard, with high cultural connections, if as an administrator not a performer. Whatever else Pallottelli may have been, she should not be hailed as ‘Mussolini’s Joan of Arc’, as the subtitle of a 2010 biography had it.98
Alice de Fonseca was born in Florence on 6 October 1892. Her father Edoardo, known as ‘Professor Fonseca’, was the owner of a publishing house specialising in the figurative arts and music, that he would pass on to his daughter and her husband, Count Francesco Pallottelli Corinaldesi (born in March 1884, less than a year after Mussolini).99 Alice Corinaldesi de Fonseca Pallottelli, as she was formally known after her marriage, was therefore much the same age as Rachele Mussolini, Giulia Alliata and Giulia Brambilla. Her first child, Virgilio, who was destined to accompany Mussolini and Claretta on their last journey along Lake Como, was born in Paris in 1917. According to Mimmo Franzinelli, Alice Pallottelli was ‘tall, blonde, elegant, a fluent and correct speaker’, who affected ‘aristocratic style’, whether in her successive ‘luxurious residences’ in Rome (most accessibly from 1927 to 1936 in the Villa Virgilio, Via Nomentana 377, just opposite the Villa Torlonia)100 or in the family’s Villa Gloria at Fabriano in the Marche, a town to which she and her husband long gave patronage.101 A photo of her in the USA in 1923 shows her with bobbed hair, a stylish hat and well-cut floral gown and to have a pert nose, wide mouth and gleaming eyes; she plainly occupied a place many rungs up the class ladder from the determinedly rustic Rachele Mussolini.102 Sexually she was no ingénue but rather, like the majority of the dictator’s partners, experienced and worldly-wise. She was also a durable partner, fulfilling the role of what is best defined as a sub-wife.
Naturally, Mussolini got around to telling Claretta how their sexual contact had begun. It was spring 1938 and the Duce was feeling romantic. ‘Look, the swallows are back. It is poetic to see them for the first time with you’, he told his young lover in jovial affection, before ruminating on Pallottelli, with whom he was still having sex. ‘As for Pallottelli, I never really loved her’, he began. ‘I knew her for the first time at Genoa shortly after I had taken office. She was in the hotel with her husband and sent me a posy of flowers with a card saying “From an Italian woman in gratitude”. Then the next morning I met her in the lobby, we chatted, and little by little things started.’ Following his move to the Via Rasella, he broke with her when she went off to stay for a week with D’Annunzio at his palace, the Vittoriale, on Lago di Garda (such a meeting could have had only one purpose). At first Pallottelli had not believed Mussolini’s rejection but for five years they did not see each other. ‘Then she turned up again saying she needed help for her son. So everything started again.’103
On Christmas Day 1932 Pallottelli was delivered of a son, Duilio, fifteen years the junior of Virgilio. A daughter, Adua (her name that of the Ethiopian town where Italian forces had suffered humiliating defeat in March 1896, later ‘avenged’ by Fascist arms in October 1935), followed in January 1936. Alice Pallottelli claimed each was sired by Mussolini and the Duce agreed, at least for most of the time, despite residual doubts about Duilio. He certainly could display paternal concern when he learned that one or other of the children were sick.104 Duilio, he told Claretta, must be his given the way Pallottelli had grasped him at the moment of ejaculation, while Adua, he was sure, was ‘the prettiest littl
e girl in Rome. A real delight. Just like Anna [Maria],’ his last legitimate child. Pallottelli, however, he assured Petacci dismissively, was now a ‘stale crumb’ (vecchia ciabatta), ‘poor woman’.105 Yet, despite her ageing, he did not cut off contact. In December 1940 Claretta was still chivvying Mussolini with the ‘nausea’ that she felt on realising that he had again slipped away to Pallottelli’s flat (located conveniently near the Villa Torlonia).106
Of all Mussolini’s partners apart from Claretta, Pallottelli has left the deepest archival trace. It provides evidence not so much about sex as business and, notably, the patronage that Mussolini’s lingering lovers always expected that the Duce would provide for them and theirs. The story lasted through the Fascist ventennio. In 1923–4 Pallottelli was happy to act as the sophisticated woman with global cultural contacts, emphatic that she could benefit Fascism with her speeches on a tour of the USA. She duly earned thanks from Mussolini who told her that ‘female propaganda always works the best’. The Duce also suggested beguilingly that she pass by his office before leaving so they could talk about ‘final preparations’.107
Matters were not always so happy, however. In 1927 the file of scabrous gossip in Mussolini’s desk drawer was expanded with anonymous denunciations of the Pallottellis, who were reported to be living off the elderly, eccentric and celebrated Russian pianist Vladimir de Pachmann (1848–1933). Pallottelli herself was reported to have established ‘intimate relations’ with such significant figures in the regime’s cultural life as Giacomo Paulucci di Calboli and Senator Riccardo Bianchi. Both Pachmann and Count Francesco were said to be homosexual, a not uncommon claim in this literature, if one not necessarily to be believed.108
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