Claretta
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Le vie del cuore was one of the films chosen for official screening at the 1942 Venice Biennale, an event rendered less lavish than in the past by the war but still boasting the presence of Alessandro Pavolini (at that time minister of popular culture) and Joseph Goebbels.61 Scuttlebutt suggested that the applauding audience at the premiere of Myriam’s film was composed largely of secret police and sailors stationed at the port; the latter were dragooned into attending by Marcello Petacci, who held a position as a naval surgeon there.62 However, the local paper, Il Gazzettino, gave its readers mixed messages about the film. A first review on 4 September hailed Myriam as gifted with ‘a singularly artistic temperament and refined sensibility’; she took her place among recent ‘precious acquisitions’ of the nation’s cinema. A more extensive account nine days later, by contrast, found the plot unconvincing and the screen work inadequate, politely hoping that Myriam could find a better role next time. Viewers of Le vie del cuore soon fell away in numbers, and no Venice prize was won.63
But Myriam’s career continued to blossom; she appeared in three more roles over the next twelve months. Again she was cast as a young noblewoman unhappily married to an older man – this time instructed in the ways of the world by ‘an expert in women’s psychology’ – in the 1942 L’amico delle donne (‘Women’s friend’), directed by Ferdinando Maria Poggioli. This comedy, loosely based on a story by Alexandre Dumas, fils, elicited some ironical gossip about its title given the Petacci family connection, and this reached the ears of Giuseppe Bottai.64 An anonymous reviewer in Vittorio Mussolini’s magazine, Cinema, observed ironically that Miria di San Servolo was most occupied during the film in changing outfits.65 According to Luigi Freddi, screenings in Rome cinemas were interrupted by the throwing of stink bombs and the shouting of imprecations linking peto (‘fart’) and Petacci; the film closed within a fortnight.66
Poggioli re-employed Myriam in his next film, Sogno d’amore (‘The dream of love)’, but work on it at Cinecittà was unfinished in July 1943, when Mussolini was sacked by King Victor Emmanuel III. On this occasion, tittle-tattle alleged that completion had been slowed by Miria di San Servolo’s flightiness. Poggioli committed suicide by gassing himself in Rome in 1945.67 Myriam’s final role was in L’invasore (‘The invader’), directed by Nino Giannini with assistance from Roberto Rossellini. The film, another historical romance where aristocratic husband and wife (Myriam) were reconciled after much derring-do, was ready for screening in 1943,68 but not actually shown until 1950. By then Rossellini, who had become a leading anti-Fascist through such celebrated works as Rome: open city (1945), adapted it for new times. Giannini, by contrast, openly backed the Repubblica Sociale and did not resume a directorial career after 1945, although he lived until 1978.
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Myriam’s stardom under the regime was therefore confined to historical romances in the Telefoni Bianchi (‘White Telephone’) vein that much Fascist cinema preferred. The majority of the regime’s films aimed at schmaltzy entertainment: at forgetting present troubles as much as remembering the Fascist revolution. Certainly Myriam’s roles were scarcely vehicles of overtly totalitarian propaganda.69 Historical research has nonetheless shown how Cinecittà pullulated with secret police, evidence that someone in the regime feared that film could express seditious unspoken assumptions,70 even if raffish actors were not always punished for their vagaries.71
Myriam’s cinematic career was one source of public gossip. At least as great a source of scandal was her early marriage, her first husband being the ‘Marchese’ Armando Boggiano. They met at the elegant ski resort of Cortina when Myriam was still only eighteen; two months later they were engaged. Boggiano was more than ten years her senior and had already gone almost completely bald. He must have been smitten, however, and was soon writing her a thirty-two-page love letter.72 Oddly the Boggiano family is not listed by the main Italian repository of noble descent, the Libro d’oro della nobiltà italiana.73 But, as Doris Duranti snobbishly recorded, the cinema world was beset by a circle of counts and marquesses whose titles were sometimes more assumed than real.74 Maybe Boggiano was one of them. For Claretta, ever more obsessively imagining the Petacci family supplanting the Mussolinis (except for one), there may have been pleasure in this demonstration that Galeazzo Ciano, from his father’s death in 1939 2nd count of Cortelazzo and Buccari, was matched in title by Myriam’s partner.
Whatever the authenticity of his noble status, Boggiano was the son of a rich textile magnate in Liguria, with an associated import–export cotton business, trading with the east.75 Money was not his problem; according to Myriam, in 1942 he readily lent her brother 1.5 million lire so that, in April 1943, Marcello could purchase the Villa Schildhof at Obermais – looking out over the town of Merano and the surrounding Alps – from Francesco Paolo Conte Pálffy and Rodolfo Conte Erdödy, men belonging to the top echelon of Hungarian aristocracy. Popular memory is today sure that Mussolini frequently visited Claretta there, despite little actual evidence of such meeting.76 (Recollection of sexual athleticism is not confined to ‘Ben and Clara’, with contemporaries also claiming that Count Pálffy retained five local women friends, each being granted a separate garden space in the villa’s extensive grounds to work on during his long absences.77)
Boggiano was even more generous to his wife than he was to her brother, buying her more than one fur coat, including the leopard-skin she wore at the wedding reception.78 As an elegant young man about town, the marchese did not bother to join the Fascist Party until around the time of his marriage and, malicious observers maintained, was most renowned for what he regarded as his especially clever cat (a preference for felines over canines being something he shared with Mussolini). The cat’s name was Nerone-Caligola (‘Nero-Caligula’), with his owner suggesting he carried imperial blood. As a matter of respect to this noble creature, Boggiano insisted that his friends and lovers write regular letters to it. Nerone-Caligola, he maintained, was cheered by personal mail.79
Despite wartime rationing, Myriam’s and Armando’s wedding was celebrated in style on 22 June 1942, with a religious ceremony at Santa Maria degli Angeli (still today a nationalist church, proud of Italian imperialism), up the Via Nazionale from Dr Petacci’s medical practice. Giuseppina and Claretta took pains to don rich furs for the occasion, despite the summer heat, while Francesco Saverio – whose hair had by then gone white (perhaps a reflection of his stressful family life) – wore a cutaway morning coat. Wedding photos show Myriam luxuriously attired in lace (Marcello Petacci’s partner stressed that it was ‘ancient and Venetian’ in origin and had belonged to the Boggiano family); her dress was said to be her mother’s and it was equipped with a very long train.80 However, although possessed of blue eyes and golden-brown hair and capable of looking beautiful in her publicity photos, Myriam had the disadvantage of a rather plump figure.81 Both she and Armando smoked.
On 22 June the vast interior of Santa Maria degli Angeli (once the Baths of Diocletian) was covered with sweet-smelling flowers.82 Afterwards guests stepped around the corner to the nearby Grand Hotel, where, it was later recalled, mountains of ham and caviar, cakes and chocolate, were washed down by the choicest wines and the best champagne. Official rationing rules were ostentatiously ignored. Made hungry, at least in their fears, by wartime austerity, high-society guests consumed the offered comestibles like locusts but had remembered to provide rich gifts to the new couple, Mussolini sending an elegant set of twelve silver plates. Rumour said that the dictator phoned Il Messaggero at midnight after the wedding to be informed just how the paper’s social pages intended to describe the event; as a prominent Fascist remarked morosely: ‘Mussolini took more interest in the marriage of the Petacci woman’s sister than in the marriages of his own children.’83 A honeymoon at Budapest followed. Myriam claimed in her memoirs to have become pregnant within a year, only to lose the child after a ‘banal accident’ in April 1943,84 but rumour whispered that sexual relations had not long prospered.
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nbsp; The marriage was riven with greater problems. Myriam upbraided Boggiano for being drunk on their wedding night and maintained that the two were living largely apart by the end of 1942, although were partially reconciled by a ritzy skiing holiday at St Moritz (by no means prevented by the war).85 Despite such marital contentment, Myriam had not given up living in the Villa Camilluccia,86 and was equally determined to proceed with her career as a film star. Moreover, Giuseppina Persichetti was soon lamenting that she, to her disgust, was expected to become a loyal correspondent of Nerone-Caligola.87 By July 1943 relations between Myriam and Armando were precarious and were not to be assisted by the Badoglio regime’s rapid sequestration of the Boggiano family’s landed property.
Gossip published in the Italy that had been liberated by the Allies contended that Boggiano was ‘a pure-blooded nobleman, good at sport, vain, and an idiot’, while hinting that his chief erotic predilection was not heterosexual.88 Under the RSI the couple formally separated in April 1944 (and eventually had a Swiss divorce in 1951) but, according to Myriam, remained good friends, an attachment that lasted until Boggiano’s death in September 1985. Certainly the terms of his settlement with her look generous, with rich Boggiano family jewels to a composite value of 1.4 million lire passing into her hands and Armando agreeing to pay 10,000 lire per month as an allowance. The legal agreement in this regard was signed on 25 June by both Myriam and, typically, Giuseppina Persichetti.89
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In her memoirs, Myriam remarked that her family always believed in the slogan of the Dumas père character d’Artagnan: ‘One for all, and all for one.’90 They did indeed frequently hunt as a pack, familism outweighing Fascism in their lives. But the Petacci making the greatest public splash before and during the war until July 1943 was neither Claretta nor Myriam, but Marcello. Over the years he has had a bad press. The chief witness in his defence has been his father, who, in 1961, edited a collection of Marcello’s scientific papers as a doctor; they covered such topics as the social origins of TB, prostate cancer, the cardio-renal effects of syphilis, heart attacks and ulceration brought on by twisted veins, and in other matters where his expertise as a naval surgeon had provided insight (and there is a half-hint of relevance to the Duce’s medical problems).91 Francesco Saverio provided these studies with a glowing biographical preface, which included positive references from such distinguished doctors as Mario Donati, Giuseppe Galli and Antonio Ciminata, and a list of hundreds of successful operations that Marcello had performed on patients who ranged in age from two to seventy-six.92
According to his father, Marcello graduated young from Rome University in 1932 (he must have transferred from Pisa) and thereafter concentrated on clinical work in the Italian capital. The younger Dr Petacci was equally devoted to the regime’s institutions, worthily instructing about 150 members of the Balilla (the Fascist male scouting organisation) in ‘anatomy and first aid’. His trinity, his father swore, was composed of ‘science, patria and family’. In March 1935 Marcello joined the navy and was called up for the Ethiopian war. He did not serve there, however, rather remaining in Italy on a lecture circuit. Thereafter he passed a series of exams promoting him up the officer ranks of its medical service. In 1937–8 he was based in Milan, working under Professor Mario Donati and acquiring further expertise at the Umberto I hospital at Monza, even when that post entailed operating late at night. Donati was a distinguished figure of international reputation, a converted Jew, expelled from his university position in 1938 because of the racial laws, but able to survive in wartime Milan running a private clinic, his persecution regretted by Francesco Saverio in his eulogy for his son.93 Mario Donati’s brother Pio had been a socialist member of the Chamber of Deputies between 1919 and 1923 and was an avowed anti-Fascist, perishing in exile in Brussels in 1927. Under Nazi racial threat after September 1943, Mario Donati found sanctuary in Switzerland, returning to Italy following the war. He then regained his university and hospital posts, only to die in 1946.94
It was while Marcello was working in Milan that he began his relationship with Zita Ritossa, a woman who did not belong to the highest social classes of that city. She had been born to the Ritosch family at Parenzo in Istria on 23 September 1914 (now Poreč, Croatia) and her father was said to have remained even in the late 1930s uncertain how to express himself in formal written Italian. He was, however, reasonably well off and had an international profile in the wine trade.95 His daughter shared her first name with Zita of Bourbon-Parma, married in 1911 to the Habsburg Archduke Charles of Austria-Este, who, in 1916, was crowned as the (last) Habsburg emperor. The name suggests that the Ritosch family, at the time of her birth, were not yet Italian nationalists. Parenzo and Istria were annexed by Italy through the Paris peace settlement (to be lost again after 1945). However, by the 1930s, Zita, who had been educated by the Ursuline nuns at Gorizia, had Italianised her surname and worked for her living as a seamstress at the Sartoria Ventura, which is still open for business in Milan.
In her postwar memoirs, Ritossa disclosed that she met Marcello by accident in 1937 when she was suffering from tonsillitis. At first she found him annoyingly fond of boasting of his success with women, and immediately jealous of her. However, they quickly decided to live together and, in 1938, he took her to Rome to meet his family, meticulously planning the event, she observed, like a ‘pilgrimage’. There she received the grudging approval of Giuseppina Persichetti, who told Zita sternly, in her ‘hoarse voice’, that Marcello needed ‘guidance’, his mother being always the best person to supply it.96
Zita, who was proud of her own independence, retreated to Milan – perhaps to avoid such maternal instruction – where she and Marcello started a family: their son Benvenuto Edgardo was born on 5 December 1939. This name allegedly tied the Petacci heir to his aristocratic Petazzi ancestors in Trieste,97 but the child was always known in the family as ‘Benghi’. The delivery occurred at the couple’s Milan flat in the presence of both Dr Petacci senior and his wife, with the latter supervising her grandson’s premature arrival, Zita remembered, while fervently fingering her rosary beads. Marcello’s father, by contrast, was usually ‘meek’ and mild, although he did once pursue Zita around the family home toting a large syringe, determined to inject her with some health-giving liquid.98
Shortly after the birth Benghi suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, which left him with learning disabilities: he would remain under his mother’s care until his death in 1977.99 His condition may have been worsened by his alleged observation of his father’s execution at Dongo in April 1945. His younger brother Ferdinando – ‘Ciccio’ to the family – grew more sturdily and is still alive in 2016.
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By the outbreak of the war Marcello had acquired joint qualifications to serve in the navy and in Italian universities. In August 1941 he was promoted to the rank of major and stationed thereafter at Venice where, his father proudly reported, his skills as a surgeon saved many lives.100 Back in January that year, on a day when Mussolini was absent, admiration for her brother set Claretta off on what she must have thought was deep reflection in diary commentary that characteristically mixed family, Fascism and her obsessive love for the Duce: ‘The sky is grey like my heart and soul’, she wrote:
Only Benghi can make me laugh. [But so can] Marcello, that big boy, full of enthusiasm, with lots of projects always off and away, bold and energetic. I start thinking, thinking of how he dreams of working for Italy and has done seven hundred operations for you [Mussolini] without a single death. I understand that it is possible to be a doctor and an Italian at the same time, just like the heroes of the Risorgimento and the young devotees of your revolution. When the patria is in need, there is just this one powerful mother who as never before sets moving the living, breathing blood, who drives [us] forward and makes demands [on us]. I think with infinite sadness of the evil done by the cowards who surround you and of how many young lives have thus been swept away, and my throat constricts with pain.101
It has already been noted that, even before she had sex with Mussolini, Claretta zealously advanced her brother’s career with the dictator and thereafter regularly kept the Duce abreast of Marcello’s multiple schemes. In March 1938 Mussolini told her hearteningly that her brother’s writings beautifully demonstrated ‘the Fascist sentiment’ of the Petacci family. ‘Very good. You must keep these carefully. They’re very important,’ he advised.102 Similarly, the Duce took pains to congratulate Claretta on the promotions that Marcello won in the navy, predicting that one day he would reach the elevated rank of medical general; ‘you see, I do everything you want,’ he added as a generous patron might.103
In January 1939 the Petaccis contrived to have Myriam and Marcello accompany their sister on an assignation with Mussolini to the ski slopes of Terminillo, with some preoccupation from Claretta that the Duce might display too much interest in Myriam. Marcello proved an incompetent skier, but he was offered avuncular dietary advice by Mussolini, who pronounced, from his own medical knowledge bank, that ‘nutrition must vary with age’. The ideal, according to the Duce, was ‘to eat a lot of spaghetti at twenty, less at thirty, to move towards vegetarianism at forty and to give up meat almost entirely at fifty’.104 Mussolini was not always so genial. In September 1939 he passed to Claretta a police report on scandals where Marcello was allegedly involved. Whether true or not, the dictator said, he must not in future allow himself to be accused of ‘nepotism’, a charge fostering gossip that he was declining into a ‘second childhood’.105
Records do exist intimating that Marcello was not a wholly austere practitioner of medicine. Nino D’Aroma, a journalist responsible for many of the regime’s newsreels, stated after the war that the younger Dr Petacci was ‘a kind of eternal burbler, full of a hundred thousand deals’, a man ‘lacking any brake and hence insufferable, ready to spice his conversations with the grossest lies’.106 One fantastic scheme that he favoured was a ‘scientific’ process that would automatically regenerate the oil used in automobile engines.107