Claretta
Page 18
In turn, Myriam’s presence provoked rumours that Mussolini enjoyed her favours as well as those of her sister (indeed, along with her sister), a scandalous charge made immediately after the collapse of the regime in July 1943155 and reiterated first by Margherita Sarfatti and again by some recent popular historians.156 But, even though in May 1938 Claretta recorded Mussolini looking at Mimi with a frighteningly ‘male eye’ for the first time,157 there is no direct proof that the younger sister ever had intercourse with her sister’s lover, and circumstantial evidence is strongly hostile to such suggestion. Myriam herself certainly took pains to pass on to her sister pledges by the dictator about the depth of his love for Claretta, while mostly confining her conversation in their presence to a deferential ‘yes’ and ‘no’.158 When still only fourteen, she was asked by the Duce to articulate his assurances to her sister that he did not really love Ruspi.159 Whatever Myriam’s self-interestedness and cynicism in personal relations (and, as will be seen below, they were considerable), it is all but impossible to believe that the jealous Claretta would have tolerated a sister in her bed and, as has been noted, Mussolini was not a man much given to collecting teenage lovers.
As the 1930s drew to their close, the member of the family more likely to preoccupy the lovers was Claretta’s father, Dr Francesco Saverio Petacci, with the dictator generously ready to give counsel about his fortune and career. On 31 October 1937, for example, Mussolini offered Claretta priggish advice to give her father: Dr Petacci needed to ‘make more of a splash and creep out of the shadows’, Mussolini suggested, especially since the Duce wanted to elevate him to the Senate (a promotion destined never to happen). Everyone pushed themselves forward, Mussolini remarked, and Dr Petacci should hold more public conferences, thereby getting himself better known. To quite a degree, he could fix matters, Mussolini added encouragingly.160 Meanwhile, the Duce did quickly exploit the advantages of having a doctor in house, explaining late in November to Claretta, who was feeling ill, that her father knew that his ulcer had been caused by the ‘psychic damage’ of the Matteotti affair: she must not allow herself to be swayed by her own phobia about disease.161
Soon the topic of favours for her father recurred in the lovers’ bed-chat, with Mussolini promising that a senatorial toga would arrive in ‘1939’. But, in the interim, the dictator had arranged for Dr Petacci to be hired by the Rome daily paper, Il Messaggero,162 as a regular expert medical commentator, with a healthy remuneration of between 2,000 and 2,500 lire per month. He would also get Claretta’s brother, Marcello, promoted, he pledged in giving mode, and bring him to Rome along with his patron in Milan, Professor Mario Donati. It might be a disadvantage that Donati was Jewish but he had a Christian wife and children, Mussolini had noted, and so the dictator, setting aside his anti-Semitism where the family opposed it, could back him with money and influence. ‘I shall always do what I can,’ he assured Claretta in disarmingly loving (and less than racist) mode.163
As for the contract with Il Messaggero, that was a simple matter of a nod and a wink from the Duce. On 9 January 1938 the Sunday edition of the paper duly carried a less than punchy piece by ‘Dott. Francesco S. Petacci’ on ‘Somatic disharmony’ and the functioning of the heart, with lessons on how a balanced lifestyle could keep it in prime condition.164 The story goes that Mario Missiroli, one of Italy’s most celebrated journalists and a regular but generally unacknowledged author of the paper’s editorials, rang the owners, Mario and Pio Perrone, to protest against the ‘incomprehensible medical articles’ which were now being published. When he was told that the author was ‘Claretta’s father’, he turned so green that Dr Petacci had to be urgently summoned to his aid.165 Mussolini, by contrast, assured Claretta warmly that her father’s piece was ‘really excellent, bursting with sentiment and science’.166
In March Dr Petacci moved on to ‘the use and abuse of wine’ in an article headed ‘Defence of the race’. The regime, he was glad to say, closely monitored the health of the nation and was especially aware that the young were vulnerable to excess. Yet, he enthused, ‘the Italian of today has a firm pulse and a will of iron and has largely surpassed other races in his chastity and sobriety’. Such progress was displayed in the fighting spirit of Italian soldiers, the devotion to labour of Italian workers, in women’s fidelity to maternity and all Italians’ ‘deep and united devotion to the family’.167
A number of commentators have remarked that Francesco Saverio was nonplussed by what was happening and would continue to happen within his own family.168 Certainly the worthy sentiments that he expressed in his writings, with their laboured mixture of Catholicism, Fascism and science, made few concessions to his elder daughter’s life choices (nor to those that Myriam would soon make). In the spirit of the times, Dr Petacci was painfully ready to salute his country’s dictator, writing in the aftermath of the Munich conference, for example, that ‘no one more than a doctor can appreciate the extension and grandeur of this victory of civilisation [under the regime’s governance] through the Italic genius made flesh in the Duce’.169 As in this case, most of his moralising was decidedly unoriginal; without knowing about the crisis that would afflict his daughter in August 1940 (or evincing any sense of the continuing poverty of many Italians), he advised sapiently in April 1939 about taking convalescence from an operation seriously and being sure in those times to keep clean, eat well and avoid high emotion.170
Dr Petacci was deeply impressed by new research on vitamins, declaring that a balance in their intake was crucial for bodily health (and, as will be seen, he was ever ready to inject the Duce or members of his family with what he deemed appropriate supplements to their diet in that regard).171 In May 1939 he was sufficiently self-aware as a citizen of the new Roman Empire as to find time to reflect on ‘colonial health consciousness’, arguing in phrases that few European imperialists would have eschewed that doctors must pursue a mission to the Ethiopians. ‘To educate and cure the indigenous means to protect the European [settler], too; human reclamation [bonifica] and the reclamation of the soil can transform vast regions into the Promised Land,’ he wrote with hackneyed metaphor. ‘After freeing the natives from slavery,’ he added, ‘it is necessary to raise their spirit and consciousness from centuries of brutalisation.’ There were plenty of other health dangers in the tropics, he admitted, but the Italian, with his ‘natural frugality’ and preference for vegetables over meat, was better equipped than the British to rule such places.172
Dr Petacci was a Fascist, at least in the sense that, in October 1940, he wrote personally to the Duce to cheer on the attack against Greece and urge revenge of the early losses.173 However, his articles in Il Messaggero did not overtly mention the Jewish question despite being composed at the height of the anti-Semitic campaign. Nor did the outbreak of war do anything to arrest Petacci’s earnest scientific expositions to what may be assumed were his less than numerous readers. It was typical that his first article after Italian entry focused on an accurate definition of the various blood types; his next piece reviewed issues raised in the diagnosis and treatment of high blood pressure.174 Apart from his colonialist thoughts, the nearest he went to overt racism was an article in January 1941, where he explored what he viewed as the British mistrust (and exploitation) of Australian soldiers, with their convict blood and fiercer fighting qualities.175 He was still writing naively in March 1943 to praise the way that war promoted science, while urging that, in ‘this world pervaded by destructive madness, civilised man’ drew his fighting spirit from a union of love of the patria and faith in God, best illuminated by ‘one light only, that of Rome’.176
In 1940 Dr Petacci was encouraged further to raise his professional profile through a book entitled Life and its enemies.177 Sales were helpfully guaranteed by a government order to purchase by all hospitals, public libraries, school libraries and dopolavoro (Fascist after-work) clubs. Similarly, the director of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro was persuaded to distribute the work as part of his institutio
n’s advertising campaigns.178 The book’s content must have surprised few who had absorbed the articles in Il Messaggero. Mussolini was inevitably hailed, in particular because of his achievement of the draining of the Pontine Marshes outside Rome: ‘in only fifteen years of the Regime, the formidable will, the profound sense of humanity, the understanding of one Man, has brought to fruition what was long the platonic aspiration of doctors and health-workers’ (plainly, in Dr Petacci’s mind, the best of prophets). The achievement in the Rome hinterland amounted to a marriage of the spirit of St Peter and that of Mussolini, Petacci concluded in not altogether obvious concatenation.179
When it came to the detail of his text, Dr Petacci’s sentiments were still more detached from the reality of his own family’s behaviour than were his press articles. Some present-day women, he wrote, deplorably deviated from their ‘holy mission’ of maternity, surrendering to a ‘neurotic instinct for pleasure and an anxiety to live’. Such indulgence was dreadfully bad for ‘the moral, political and social power of the nation’. Church and state must combine to prevent it and to educate young women better. Cities, he ran on with less blatant hypocrisy, except that related to his lifetime in an expanding Rome, could grow too big and thereby prevent citizens from seeing the sun and bathing in the sea in what was the naturally healthy fashion. Lazzaro Spallanzani had already preached about the way the sun killed bacteria in 1769, he added in what reads as a yearning for his flat in the street named after that medical pioneer, instead of the grandiose new family dwelling on Monte Mario.180
After some sardonic comments on the male tendency to a Faustian search for perpetual youth (but with no reference to prescriptions of Hormovin), Dr Petacci did include a chapter on race, with warnings against the degeneracy to be found in every ‘coupling between a white man and a Negro’. Similarly, he added briefly, ‘if a marriage occurs between a Jew and an Aryan, it will not be fecund’; the ‘Jewish race’, he assured his readers, had been enfeebled by over-frequent intermarriage. Yet Dr Petacci drew the line at Nazi ideas (though he did not specify them as such). He was emphatic that ‘state-fostered breeding’ was abhorrent and unnecessary. Given the natural purity of Italian women, the natural virility of Italian men and the general national commitment to the family, he was sure that ‘the Italian patria will continue to multiply its hearths’.181
Not through his own daughters, hindsight might remark. Already by the end of 1940 Marcello and Myriam were behaving in a way that brought them negative attention in the highest circles of the regime, however much they were favoured and protected by the dictator. As ‘Ben and Clara’ continued to negotiate their relationship in wartime (Mussolini also had Alice Pallottelli and Romilda Ruspi to consider, and would soon expand his multiple family ‘duties’ via renewed contact with Angela Cucciati and Elena Curti), the Petacci family were tracing their own way through a complex world where a devotion to Fascist ideology did not fill all of their lives; a world where, for the moment, their social rise proceeded as planned and where more than one tragedy was in the making.
5
WARRING IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE
Sadly for Mussolini’s treasured hopes to be greater than Napoleon – and his confident predictions to Claretta in June 1940 that the war would be over in ‘four days’! – by 1941, despite the waves of regime propaganda, it was clear for all to see that Fascist Italy was incapable of waging a ‘parallel war’ as an equal partner with Nazi Germany. Defeats were occurring on every front. The new empire in Africa Orientale Italiana had quickly proved a mirage, despite the dictatorship’s killing fields there. On 18 May the viceroy, Amedeo, duke of Aosta,1 who had initially commanded more than 370,000 men, surrendered the main Italian force to what was little more than a rag-tag British imperial army, aided by Ethiopian irregulars; an Italian residue fought on until defeated at Gondar in November. In Libya, British troops swept the Italian enemy out of Cyrenaica by the end of January 1941, leaving Fascist power to be resuscitated by Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps, who reached Tripoli in the following month. In Greece, the Italian attack had quickly been blunted, with Chief of Staff Pietro Badoglio sacked in retribution by the Duce in November 1940. Only when the Germans moved into the Balkans in March 1941, taking Athens on 27 April, could Fascist forces, the ‘ignoble second’ of the Axis,2 claim the most hollow of victories.
With every month the war was becoming more deeply ideological and global and therefore less adjusted to the compromises, ambiguities, parochialism and falsity of Fascism. The Germans attacked the USSR in Operation Barbarossa on 21 June and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December, Italy in each case following obediently where its greater partners led, with Fascist troops brutally doing the Nazis’ work for them in the Russias.3 For a time, in 1941–2, victory seemed possible, while the Germans swept ever further east and the Japanese advanced across the Pacific. However, the vicious battle for Stalingrad, which raged from August 1942 to January 1943, led to Nazi defeat and the falling back of Axis forces towards the west. Similarly, the Japanese thrust began to be repelled after the US success at Midway Island in June 1942 and, although continuing to fight with bitter determination, Imperial Japan thereafter went into retreat. By the beginning of 1943 it was very likely that, unless the liberal–communist alliance broke, the USA and the USSR, and such lesser allies as Britain, were going to win the war.
Well before then, perceiving no way to stop Anglo-American armies advancing across Libya until, finally, on 9–10 July 1943, they landed their forces in Sicily to paltry Italian resistance, Mussolini sought to persuade Hitler to arrange some sort of compromise peace with Stalin. The grim news entering many Italian households from their emigrant relatives in the USA – that, after Pearl Harbor, Italy had gone to war with ‘paradise’ and forced Italo-Americans to abandon their past enthusiasm for Mussolini – made the situation worse. Italian soldiers, often enough peasants more committed to their families than to the nation or the dictatorship and its ideology, longed to go home.4 By 1943 Italy’s claims to be the least of the Great Powers were plainly feebler than they had been during the First World War, with Fascism less able than liberalism had been to steel a national fighting spirit, marshal a modern war economy and identify war aims. Militarily speaking, Mussolini had indeed proven a Sawdust Caesar and had enough self-knowledge, somewhere beneath his denials and ascription of Fascism’s failures to anyone but himself, to realise the fact. To July 1943 Italian casualties amounted to a little over 200,000, high enough for family mourning but scarcely on the scale of the horrendous tolls that were afflicting, and would continue to afflict, other combatants in the Second World War.5
If the Italian military were less than brilliant abroad, Fascism similarly staggered on the domestic front. One secretary of the Fascist Party succeeded another: Ettore Muti, who had ousted Starace in October 1939, was a year later replaced by Adelchi Serena. Despite Serena’s reputation for administrative efficiency, he was dismissed after a short fourteen months, replaced by Aldo Vidussoni, a twenty-seven-year-old of slight experience and worldly knowledge but with a fondness for boxing. Vidussoni lasted until April 1943, when Carlo Scorza, a Tuscan ‘Fascist of the first hour’, took over, soon to report that the party was in a state of dissolution. ‘Laxity and confusion’, Scorza advised, were the disastrous actual watchwords of the national war effort.6
Typical was the fact that the regime had proved unable or unwilling to impose a fair system of rationing on its people – bitter proof of which was given when, at the time of Scorza’s appointment, the prefect of Turin, the nation’s most industrialised city, banned the killing of cats for food since they were needed to keep the rat population under control.7 As the leading British economic historian of the war summed up, ‘Stagnating production and raging inflation soon made Italy’s situation hopeless’; its production of the crucial weapon of the war – aircraft – was, he underlined, ‘risible’.8 No wonder Walther Funk, the Nazi economic chief, told Goebbels just as the titanic battle in the ea
st was launched: ‘The Italians are a thorn in [my] flesh. Always demanding more than they are entitled to, and indulging in state-sponsored black market currency dealings. What a nation!’9 By the time the Fascist Grand Council turned against their Duce on the night of 24 July 1943, Mussolini was a dictator who had lost his regime’s and his nation’s plot.
* * *
As will be seen further below, among those accused of business misdemeanours was Marcello Petacci. Meanwhile it was not the Petaccis but the Mussolinis who endured a death in their ranks. On 7 August 1941 the Duce’s second son, Bruno, was killed as a bomber test pilot in the skies above Pisa.10 Mussolini had only infrequently shown much personal interest in his two elder sons, although the files of his secretariat did preserve secret police reports on them.11 On the rainy day that Bruno married Gina Ruberti on 29 October 1938,12 the dictator had slipped away from the ceremony to his office, to find Claretta ready for him by 7 p.m. in the Sala dello Zodiaco. Earlier, she had been in the crowds who cheered the celebrities as they processed into the church of San Giuseppe on the Via Nomentana and had nervously registered that Mussolini had smiled at the comely wife of Colonel Pessutti, who was also there.
But that wedding evening, her main rebuke fixed itself on Pallottelli and Ruspi, with an irritable Duce stating coarsely that he would have sex with the latter whenever the spirit moved him and do so in the same spirit that drove him when he went to the toilet. Eventually, however, the dictator grew maudlin about the events earlier in the day, vowing that he felt greater tenderness for Bruno than Vittorio. ‘He’s still a child,’ Mussolini fretted:
He’s married too early, he could have waited . . . But now there is no more Bruno. From the head of the table I shall look at his usual place and it will be empty. A great melancholy. Yes, it is true. He’ll be back. But it’s not the same thing. The family is breaking up. Soon we [he and Rachele!] will be left alone.