Claretta
Page 19
As the evening passed the Duce did not manage to shrug off his gloom at the decay of his career as paterfamilias. There was no comforting si for Claretta to register. Instead, at 9 p.m., her lover slipped away to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at a city cinema, a bruised and melancholic patriarch in need of light entertainment.13
Bruno was enough of a dictator’s son to enjoy driving fast cars and motorcycles, and had been involved in a fatal accident in April 1938 when he ran over a poor, elderly woman. Police investigation (Bruno was another whose phone was tapped) concluded, however, that the accident had been the victim’s fault. At much the same time, Bruno escaped a charge from a serving maid that he had made her pregnant, allegedly excusing himself with the remark that his father had often behaved similarly; nothing should therefore be made of it and he did not intend to help the woman involved. In January 1940, despite what a romantic biographer has called his ‘timidity’, Bruno did accept the office of president of the National Fascist Boxing Federation, and earlier had given every sign of enjoying his bombing raids over Ethiopia and Spain. He was also alert to the possibility of making money from his flying skills. However, in February 1941, in something of a dampener, his father sent Bruno a lengthy file of commentary from the English press on his ‘stupidity’.14
Whatever the distance between father and son in actual life, Bruno’s death struck the Duce hard. According to Roberto Festorazzi, the Duce ‘was never the same man again’.15 Certainly, in the aftermath of his son’s demise, Mussolini swiftly produced a seventy-page statement of grieving entitled Parlo con Bruno (‘I talk with Bruno’). Sales were pressed on the public (the secret police detected at least one Italian complaining resentfully how the papers carried on and on about Bruno, but ‘when one of us dies, they don’t even bother to publish the name’),16 and translations into a number of foreign languages were urgently arranged.17 Other family pieties manifested themselves. The secret police reported that Bruno’s widow had collected the sheets and pillows on which he had slept during a last night at the Albergo Nettuno in Pisa and presented them as a holy relic to his sorrowing mother.18 Parlo con Bruno was an odd mixture of personal eulogy and Fascism, couched in a rhetoric that owed much to Catholic versions of sainthood. Bruno, readers were told by their Duce, was ‘a Fascist born and bred . . . intransigent in his faith’, he had lived a perfect life cycle from one war to another. The sacrifice of his blood was immense, ‘worth more than all my own, present, past and future’. ‘Only blood raises a man to the purple of glory,’ the dictator insisted.19
But Mussolini’s lamentation over his dead son was not confined to his legitimate family circle. News of the air crash arrived just as the Duce was readying himself for another of his seaside trysts with Claretta. Deserted for the moment, she prayed that ‘God help my love in such torment. God give him the strength to endure.’ Over the following weeks, she continued to offer herself as a support, in reward being employed as subeditor, examining the text of Parlo con Bruno before publication.20 It was not a task that anyone thought of asking Rachele, or indeed Ruspi, to do.
Claretta did her best to combine respectful sorrow and sexual solace. On Christmas Eve 1941 she gave her partner a miniature of his son in a silver frame, a present that moved him deeply and elicited a promise that it would stand on his desk in perpetual memory.21 The next day, however, Mussolini was growling churlishly that he hoped by Christmas 1942 to be ‘dead and buried’ and thus ‘no more filled with disgust at this contemptible humankind’.22 On 28 December it was Bruno’s loss that depressed him most, with him telling Claretta that, at home, he could not shrug off his dismay at his son’s absence; evidently he was a Fascist dictator worse afflicted by family loss than by the death toll being endured by his people.23 The Germans, he predicted, making a characteristically misanthropic link between private and public disaster, would deservedly lose the war in the USSR, where many of their soldiers were being frozen alive.24
Throughout 1941 and 1942 Petacci’s diary entries were mostly short and as fixated as ever over Mussolini’s ‘betrayals’ of her with Ruspi (his dalliances with this partner Claretta usually reckoned to be confined to fifteen minutes), Pallottelli and other women. Claretta was never assuaged by the Duce agreeing, for example, that Alice Pallottelli was a ‘viper’ and swearing that he would have long ago given her up but for the fact that he had fathered her daughter and youngest child.25 For all Claretta’s editorial work on Parlo con Bruno, and for all the information that she received about the regime’s military losses, the private not the public dominated her world. When, in early March 1941, Mussolini toured the Albanian front and phoned her regularly with excitedly positive detail of the fighting qualities that he found in the soldiery there and affirmation that direct experience of battle was making him a boy again, most important for her was his pledge that, for almost a week, he remained ‘chaste, totally chaste’. Naturally, such virtue did not last, with him confessing, ‘after five days I could not resist any more . . . and the first woman to offer herself I took’.26
Claretta was anguished as usual at the news. After she put the phone down she wrote that ‘her heart had swelled with bitterness and pain’. Sometimes she now spelled out her own feelings in the diary with greater detail than in the past, reflecting, for example, a few days before Mussolini’s escapade in Albania, that she needed a longer convalescence from her operation: ‘So many things have wrecked my illusions and peace of mind and I am tired: tired, tired of thinking, seeing, feeling, suffering, in short, [tired] of everything.’27 Yet, despite the depression seeping into each of their minds, the couple did not break their relationship. Rather there were a few signs that the dictator was beginning to rely on his partner for something more than sex (where, in any case, her si had become relatively infrequent). To be sure, on 12 June 1941 they enjoyed sex twice, ‘in the afternoon, a full one’. On 6 August they managed to get away to the seaside and had coitus there, but Claretta diagnosed in his distracted technique a recent new betrayal.28 On 26 October he kept her waiting for hours at the Sala dello Zodiaco and, when he appeared, he was tired and cranky over a quarrel with Rachele. They did have sex, but, Claretta noted, ‘without any desire on my part; I didn’t have the courage to refuse him’. Then he settled down to sign photos of himself (sent out in their hundreds every day during his regime). ‘You can be my secretary,’ he remarked with what may have been a patronising acknowledgement of her skills as a scribe.29
Even Petacci’s Catholicism might be useful. Albania may have been bracing but the Italian march to Athens did not go as Mussolini had hoped and, when he returned from the front, he asked Claretta, almost plaintively, to ‘go to church and pray. All the auspices [at the front] are good and everything promises well, but it is good to pray. Will you do it? Great.’ In reward he added that he had returned from his military mission ‘purified’. He could therefore swear (as he had so often done before): ‘I shall love you as you want, with tenderness, absolute dedication and a great purity, a new love, a boy’s love. I shall love you in a way that you cannot imagine.’30 Three weeks later, however, Claretta was bitterly registering the meetings that he had with Ruspi, Pallottelli and Elena and Angela Curti (whom he rudely called ‘the cow from Milan’). The couple’s wrangling resumed.31
Nonetheless, on 22 January 1942, the Duce grew mournful at the Villa Camilluccia while he and Claretta listened again to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony together. Added to a recurrent depression were frequent wartime bouts of flu and other minor illnesses, for which Dr Petacci was ever ready with useful diagnoses. Music could soothe Mussolini’s troubled mind and Bruno, his father was sentimentally sure, would have been equally moved by the Beethoven.32 But Claretta was a substitute. His relationship with her could allow some private sweetness to offset the bitterness of what he had half admitted was his failure as a Fascist dictator: ‘You are a comfort to me. I’ve always been a loner, I don’t have friends, I don’t have brothers . . . I did have one, my friend [Arnaldo] and I
lost him and my son [Bruno]; he, too, left me. I am always alone, really alone. I only have you,’ he repeated obsessively. He then took up his own violin to play a little of the Beethoven, hymning Claretta sentimentally: ‘My darling, my little darling, who shares my tormented life with me.’33
* * *
The multiple disasters of the Fascist war effort were now drawing critical public attention to Mussolini’s affair with Claretta, blatantly a liaison more serious that his earlier sexual adventures. Late in May 1941 Ciano and Bottai – two sleek, bourgeois Fascists of the new generation who frequently met in the comfortable clubhouse of Rome’s Acquasanta golf course – spoke on the subject. The former made a record of the conversation. Bottai, Ciano wrote, ‘is pessimistic about our internal situation which, in his opinion, is characterized by the formation of two groups that . . . are extra-legal with a strong and dangerous influence on the Duce’. Donna Rachele and her friends constituted one such faction, he underlined, and ‘the Petaccis and their satellites’ the other. ‘Like all outsiders [Ciano wrote the word in English], these people intrigue against those who hold legal and constitutional power.’34 Six months later, Ciano was more specific, documenting the charge by Guido Leto, the head of OVRA (the secret political police), that Marcello Petacci’s schemes and escapades were ‘doing the Duce more harm than fifteen [lost] battles’.35
The Petaccis were not the only people who sought advantage from sexual bonds with the Duce. Claretta’s diary regularly recorded monies that Mussolini was arranging to pass, with no observable dent in the national budget, to Ruspi and Pallottelli, no doubt to assist his illegitimate children but not merely for that. As already noted, the business deals of the Pallottellis have left a substantial archival record in the variegated worlds of musical performance, mining in Ethiopia, clientelism at Fabriano and the recovery of a driving licence after a fatal accident. From 1938 Edda Ciano was also receiving 3,000 lire per month to spend charitably and without budgetary review.36 But the Petaccis were a greater object of gossip, one reason being their transfer to the Villa Camilluccia, which stood out in its grandiosity and social ambition, and through the fact that, whenever Mussolini wanted to visit his lover there, he had to drive across the city as he had not had to do when Ruspi, Pallottelli, Claretta and, before her, Sarfatti, resided in the immediate environs of the Villa Torlonia. Mussolini may have been trying to adjust Claretta’s role in his mixture of public and private life in a positive sense. But regime opinion increasingly read rumours of the affair as a sign of their ruler’s physical and mental decay.
As the young architects had promised, the Petacci property was built in a way that ‘was decisively non-traditional’ for a ‘genteel’ dwelling place.37 A historian has estimated that the villa cost 1.73 million lire, ‘a robust tally’ and proof that the Petaccis had joined the high-society whirl.38 Contemporary rumour contended that a Bechstein piano was added to the place’s furnishings during the war at a cost of 130,000 lire.39 Claretta’s papers do contain a copy of a thirty-year loan that her mother took out with the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro for 226,838.27 lire in regard to the purchase of the villa.40 Giuseppina Persichetti, with her family background in real estate, was pleased by the transfer from rented accommodation, with Claretta noting wryly that her mother thereby ‘had won the thirty years’ war’.41 She was thought to be especially delighted by the vast salone, although the modernist effect was contradicted by its twenty armchairs and the placement of large nineteenth-century furniture there and elsewhere in the house, as well as such family treasures as small tables made in the Republic of Venice.42 There were accompanying rumours that Dr Petacci had been left deeply in debt.43 A more common assumption, however, was that the dictator (that is, the nation) and not the Petaccis had paid for it.44
The architects did give their services for free,45 presumably hoping that, in their profession’s world of patrons and clients, one good turn at the social heights of the regime would deserve another. They were certainly destined for success after 1945, with their best-known work being at the Italian capital’s Leonardo Da Vinci airport and the Olympic village that housed athletes during the Rome Games of 1960. Back in the war years, perhaps the provision of an underground level – technically an ample servants’ quarters but also equipped as an air-raid shelter in a city notoriously lacking in them – enhanced the notoriety of the Villa Camilluccia and the Petaccis. The place was an obvious target for resentful sack after 25 July 1943 and, even before that, one courageous and sarcastic graffitist scrawled on its walls Scuola di Mistica Fascista (‘School of Fascist Mysticism’: a genuine regime organisation with that pompous title had been launched in Milan in 1930).46
Mussolini himself, predictably under-impressed by ‘Fascist modernism’ up-close and a natural heretic towards the regime’s architectural ideology, muttered that the building looked ‘a little Bolshevik’, and he probably did not use the grand mosaicked bath, standing isolated on the floor of the bathroom. Presumably he relaxed better in Claretta’s bedroom, with its pink furniture, baby-pink telephone and king- (or Duce-)sized bed, although the mirrors on every wall may have been off-putting.47 His own visits were confined to afternoons and evenings. He and Claretta did not spend a night together there, although when the villa was occupied by the Carabinieri in July 1943 it was reported that they found an extensive supply of Hormovin in the medicine cabinet.48
* * *
By 1942 another member of the family was gaining notoriety in the news and gossip of the regime: Claretta’s sister Myriam, the sometime piccola idiota and chaperone. She had turned eighteen in May 1941, being thereafter launched into Roman high society and the louche world of cinema, with its trumpeted Fascist centre at Cinecittà out along the Via Tuscolana. According to one star, Doris Duranti, who by this time was the very public lover of Alessandro Pavolini, promoted to become the radical Fascist secretary of the party under the Salò Republic, cinema was a world of champagne, sex and cocaine. No hint of rationing restrained such ‘joys’ in wartime, she contended, while in 1942 she boasted that she was the first Italian woman to show (some of) her breasts on screen.49
Film, then, might not seem the ideal career path for a gently reared Catholic girl or a sternly Fascist one. But it was for Myriam. Always ‘Mimi’ within the family, she adopted a number of different professional names, from the humble Maria to the aristocratic Miria di San Servolo, eventually becoming in her Spanish exile Miria Day. Some say that it was Mussolini who suggested the aristocratic-sounding Miria di San Servolo,50 with its hint of a Freudian reference to the lunatic asylum on the island of San Servolo in the Venetian lagoon, a place where, by the 1930s, only males were confined; women like Ida Dalser suffered their cruel fate at the nearby island of San Clemente. More starchily the Petaccis maintained that San Servolo referred to a castle near Trieste, which family legend stated had once belonged to their ancestors, the Petazzis, nobles under the Holy Roman Empire.51 A little naively, Marcello liked to maintain that the family’s escutcheon was composed of twelve gold coins set on a red background.52
Myriam’s Catholic mother allegedly nourished the ambition that her younger daughter could prove the Eleonora Duse of the regime;53 Duse had been an internationally celebrated actor in Liberal Italy and a durable and generous lover of Gabriele D’Annunzio. Giuseppina’s phrasing was unfortunate, however, since Roman wits mocked Myriam as a potential Eleonora Duce.54 After all, before she turned to cinema, Myriam, despite a lack of training in formal singing, had made an appearance as the maid in Cherubini’s one-act comic opera La locanda portoghese, with the performance twice broadcast on Fascist radio at dictatorial command.55
But cinema offered more prestige and better financial return than comic opera. Adapting an established pattern to new circumstance, Giuseppina Persichetti chaperoned Myriam’s visits to Cinecittà, sitting herself in a corner and reciting her rosary throughout filming. Piety was her constant comfort although, when bombing threatened and she descended to an air raid shelter, she
kept up her confidence both by telling her beads and by sipping from the flask of brandy she always carried with her.56 Film boss Luigi Freddi, writing after his own career as a Fascist had been superseded by anti-Fascism, remarked cattily that, at Cinecittà, Giuseppina looked like a ‘mixture of a boxer and a caryatid’, embodying the ‘resolute and interfering matriarchy’ of the provinces.57 Freddi was equally dismissive of Myriam’s acting skills and physical attractions, stating that she was a child of the ‘petite bourgeoisie, full of its incorrigible habits, with an artificial vivaciousness and an insipid gaiety’, incapable of taking on the style and character of anyone but herself. She was, he thought, the sort of girl who popped up in ‘second-class hotels’ at ‘Cortina, San Remo, Stresa, Rapallo, Capri and Rimini’, and that her only appeal lay in her ample breasts and seductively swinging hips.58
Myriam’s first film role was in Le vie del cuore (‘Paths to the heart’), directed by Camillo Mastrocinque (born 1901), a distinguished director who earned greater fame after 1945 with an eclectic mix of horror and comedy; the great Totò became one of his stars. Le vie del cuore was a historical romance, set in the 1870s. Myriam played Duchess Anna, a wronged noblewoman, who lost her own child in melodramatic circumstances and was rendered barren. By the film’s end, however, she had reconciled with her (elderly) husband, agreeing selflessly to mother the son of another woman. Reviews varied, growing much more hostile after 1945 than they had been before. The comments of two sometime-Fascist journalists, one positive under the regime, the other afterwards not, were typical. From his viewing in 1942, Guido Piovene prophesied fawningly that Myriam would take ‘an elevated part in the coming growth of our cinema’.59 Aldo Palazzeschi, in 1948, noted instead her ‘tubby figure’ and ‘stubby neck’, dismissing any future for her as a star.60