Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

4. HANGING OUT WITH MUSSOLINI

There was nothing furtive about Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s sex life. In fact, he could have been a Democrat. He had all the wham, bam thank you ma’am of a JFK or a Lyndon Johnson.

During his teens, he admitted to undressing every girl with his eyes. Even before he was eighteen, when he was at school in Forlimpopoli, he would visit the local brothel. In an early fragment of an autobiography written during one of his frequent periods of imprisonment, he described having sex with a whore whose “flaccid body exuded sweat from every pore”.

It also told how he seduced his cousin and a number of her friends, but these encounters were usually quick and unpleasant. He described his first brutal sexual encounter with a country girl named Virginia. She was “poor… but she had a nice complexion” and “was reasonably good-looking”.

“One day I took her upstairs, threw her onto the floor behind the door, and made her mine. She got up, crying and insulting me between her sobs. She said that I had violated her honour. I probably had. But what sort of honour can she have meant?”

These passages are, of course, omitted from his official autobiography published in 1939.

His first steady sexual partner was the Russian socialist agitator Angelica Balabanoff. She was fourteen years his senior and soon got tired of the violent, egotistical youth.

When he was nineteen, Mussolini spent four months working as a schoolteacher in Gualtieri. There he met a woman named Luiga. She was the wife of a soldier, a beautiful girl of twenty and he treated her ruthlessly.

“I accustomed her to my exclusive and tyrannical love,” he said. “She obeyed me blindly, and I did what I liked with her.”

He bullied and abused her, and once stabbed her in the thigh. He always made love to her savagely and selfishly in a way that characterized all his affairs.

Mussolini saw himself primarily as a man of action. He could not hang around in a small Italian town, teaching a class of forty children. He had to get out and make his mark on the world. In June 1902, he travelled to Switzerland without a penny. He slept under bridges, in public lavatories and, occasionally, with a medical student, a Polish refugee whose lovemaking he said was “unforgettable”. Around this time he contracted venereal disease from a married woman who was “fortunately older and less strong than I was” and who, as always, “loved me madly”.

He returned to Italy to become a journalist and political agitator, getting himself arrested regularly. During a brief period of freedom in 1909, he was living at his father’s house when he fell in love with Augusta Guidi, the older of the two daughters of his father’s sullen mistress, Anna. He decided that he would marry her, but she thought he was much too unstable. She married a man with regular work as a gravedigger instead. So Mussolini turned his attention to Augusta’s younger sister, Rachele, who gossips referred to as his half-sister.

Mussolini had just finished his one and only published novel, The Cardinal’s Mistress, which was serialized in Il Popolo d’Italia. It was not well received, but Rachele liked it. One of the most sympathetic characters, the maid who gives her life to save her mistress, was called Rachele.

One night, after they returned home to his father’s house from an outing to the theatre, Mussolini demanded that Rachele be allowed to live with him. Anna, her mother, would not countenance it, so Mussolini produced a pistol and said: “You see this revolver, Signora Guidi? It holds six bullets. If Rachele turns me down, there will be a bullet in it for her and five for me. It’s for you to choose.”

Anna gave the couple her blessing. A few days later, Mussolini rented two cramped damp rooms in Forli.

“We moved into the place one night,” Rachele recalled. “I remember how tired and happy he was perhaps a little uncertain of my reaction because the marriage papers were not yet ready. But I understood I saw the man of my heart there before me, eagerly awaiting the only gift life could give him — my love. His young face was already lined by his daily struggle. There was no hesitation. I went with him.”

Life together was hard. Mussolini was offered a job as editor of a newspaper in Brazil which he was tempted to take; but Rachele’s pregnancy, with the first of their five children, prevented him from accepting it.

Rachele, Mussolini and their growing brood lived together in the two rooms for three years. He became the Secretary of the Forli Socialist Federation, and used his wages to fund his own weekly paper La Lotta di Classe — “The Class Struggle”. He wrote all four pages of it himself, drank wine with his friends and, occasionally, pinched the bottom of a pretty girl. But for the time being he remained faithful.

He also wrote another novel, this time about the Archduke Ferdinand who committed suicide with his seventeen-year-old mistress at Mayerling. It remained unpublished. Like The Cardinal’s Mistress, it was practically soft porn. Throughout his life Mussolini had a taste for cheap and erotic novels.

Gradually, La Lotta di Classe became influential. As his message spread, Mussolini began to spend more time away from home. The temptation this put in his way proved irresistible.

By the time Mussolini came to power, he was insatiable. He compulsively sexually confronted any women who came up to his hotel room, or the flat he had in the palazzo in the Via Rasella. There were no ifs or buts and no niceties. He simply took them with a frantic passion. He rarely bothered with a bed, preferring to do it on the floor or against the edge of his desk. The act was perfunctory. He would not bother to take off his trousers or his shoes. The whole thing would be over in a minute or two.

As a young man he had preferred intellectual women, especially schoolteachers, but as he grew older, anyone would do provided they were not too skinny. He liked his lovers to smell a lot. He particularly liked the smell of sweat, though a strong scent was good too. He was not that clean himself, often dabbing himself with Cologne rather than washing with soap and water. He often did not bother to shave; once he even turned up unshaven at an official reception fir the King and Queen of Spain.

The sexual act was always performed purely for his own gratification. He thought of neither the woman’s pleasure nor her comfort. But the women did not seem to mind. Without the tiniest preamble, he would launch himself on female journalists, the wives of party members, actresses, maids, countesses and foreign visitors. Afterwards, they would speak of their sexual encounter with him with pride. Many said they enjoyed his no-nonsense approach. They liked the brutal carnality of it. As he reached a climax, he would curse violently; then, for a moment, he would be tender. Sometimes, when he lifted himself from a woman’s body, he would take up his violin and play something beautiful. The whole experience of sex was unselfconscious and animal though, once he was satisfied, women seemed to perceive in him a deep affection.

One of his casual lovers said that, at first, she was repelled by his clumsy attempt at foreplay, which amounted to roughly squeezing her breasts before he forced himself upon her. But afterwards, she found herself going back to him because she was unable to resist “a man of such importance”.

Mussolini had a free hand because Rachele did not want to come to live in Rome. She was conscious that she looked and talked like a peasant. In Rome, she felt gauche and out of place. She also knew of his many mistresses. Often, when he said he was visiting his family, he was staying with one of them, Margherita Sarfatti. But it did not bother her. He loved his family and the marriage was a happy one. Hard-working and longsuffering, she was the perfect Fascist wife.

His love of sex and children was soon turned into public policy. He urged a doubling of the birth-rate. Italy needed large families, he said, to have more soldiers. He imposed a tax on

“unjustified celibacy”, while employers were told to discriminate in favour of family men.

Hypocritically, he imposed severe punishment for adultery — harsher for women than for men. Closer to his heart, he made it an offence to infect anyone with syphilis. He was also against modern dancing, which he complained was “immoral and improper” and he tried to regulate Rome’s decadent night life. The pope applauded, but complained that there were still nude shows in defiance of the law.

Il Duce was deeply devoted to his five children and the Italian press portrayed him as uomo casalingo — the perfect family man. But it was hard to hush up some of his not-so-homeloving activities and scandalous stories about his sexual activities leaked to the foreign press.

One of his early mistresses was a neurotic woman named Ida Dalser. They had lived together on and off until 1915, when he abandoned her. She had a physically deformed and mentally retarded son, Benito Albino, whom Mussolini acknowledged as his own although he had a horror of deformity and illness.

When Mussolini broke off the affair with her, she had to be confined to a mental hospital. From as early as 1913, she began claiming that he had promised to marry her. Sometimes she changed her story and claimed that she had actually married him — and she was not going to be bought off with maintenance money for the child. When he was still a journalist on Il Popolo d’Italia in Milan, she stood outside the offices with her son and shouted up to Mussolini to tome down if he dared. His response was simple and direct. He came to the window with a pistol.

Later, she set fire to a room in the Hotel Bristol in Trento, screaming hysterically that she was the wife of Il Duce. She died in a mental hospital in Venice in 1935. Their son Benito was confined to an asylum in Milan, where he died in 1942.

Mussolini seduced the anarchist intellectual Leda Rafanelli in 1913. Only later did she discover that he was married. He explained that Rachele did not mind his infidelity. He wanted to continue the affair, claiming that every good newspaper editor needed a talented woman as an official mistress.

Another woman who Mussolini said “loved me madly” was Margherita Sarfatti, the art critic of Avanti! She became the editor of the Fascist magazine Gerarchia, ghosted articles in American magazines for him and wrote his official biography, which ends with a description of “his eyes shining with an interior fire”. The affair lasted into the 1930s. She was his official mistress, Clara Petacci’s only serious rival, but she eventually fell foul of Mussolini’s anti Jewish legislation.

In 1937, the French actress Fontanges, who was also a journalist under her real name Magda Coraboeuf, came to Rome to interview Mussolini for La Liberte. After the interview, she refused to return to Paris until he had made love to her. He did so, violently. The first time they had intercourse, he tried to strangle her with a scarf.

“I stayed in Rome for two months and Il Duce had me twenty times,” she told the press.

Desperate to hush up the story, Mussolini made it clear to both the police and the French embassy that Mademoiselle Coraboeuf had outstayed her welcome. Magda reacted violently. She tried to poison herself. When that failed, she shot and wounded the French ambassador, who she blamed for having lost her “the love of the world’s most wonderful man”. She was arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for malicious wounding. In her flat, police found over three hundred photographs of Mussolini.

After the war, she was imprisoned again for having been an agent for the Axis powers. She eventually succeeded in poisoning herself in Geneva in 1960.

Mussolini was not incapable of sustaining a long-term relationship, though. In 1932, he was being driven to Ostia in his official Alfa Romeo when, at the roadside, he saw a pretty young girl waving and shouting “Duce! Duce!” as he went by. Mussolini told his driver to stop. He got out and walked back to her.

When he spoke to her, she started trembling with excitement. Her name was Clara Petacci. She was the wife of an Italian Air Force officer, whom she later divorced. Mussolini had him posted to Japan to get him out of the way.

Clara was twenty-four (Mussolini was fifty-three) . She had green eyes, long, straight legs and heavy breasts which Mussolini adored. Her voice was husky and her teeth were small, but she learned to smile with her lips only slightly parted. She was a hypochondriac, sentimental, rather stupid and utterly devoted to Il Duce. He felt the same about her, even taking time off from making the trains run on time to be at her bedside when she had her appendix removed after a near-fatal bout of peritonitis.

But when it came to sex, he was no more gentle and considerate with her than he had been with any of his other lovers. Mussolini gave her a flat at the Palazzo Venezia, where he would have sex with her between one meeting and the next. Perversely, the relationship worked. She stayed with him for the next thirteen years and, when escape was possible, she chose to die at his side in 1945.

She knew that he would not leave his wife and family for her, and she knew that he was not faithful to her. Nevertheless she would wait in her apartment, hour after hour, reading love stories, drawing designs for new clothes, painting her nails, or simply staring out of the window or into the mirror. Often he would not turn up until ten o’clock at night. Sometimes not at all, and she would curse the old countesses he was making love to on the black velvet sofa downstairs.

While she tolerated these little peccadilloes, she constantly worried about losing Mussolini’s love. She fretted that he might go back to an old mistress or find a new one. Angela Curti or Margherita Sarfatti were two names that constantly cropped up; and she heard that there was another woman called Irma who was trying to take him away from her.

Sometimes she would berate Mussolini about his other lovers. He would grow angry and insult her. She would cry, which would make him more angry still.

She asked Zita Ritossa, her brother’s mistress, how she could keep Mussolini’s love. Zita advised her not to make herself so readily available to him. Clara said she had already tried that, but it did not seem to bother him.

Indeed, by 1939, Mussolini was trying to get rid of her. He told Princess di Gangi of Sicily that he found Clara “revolting”. In the spring of 1943, the police guarding the entrance of the Palazzo Venezia were given orders not to let Clara in. She pushed past them, only to find Mussolini cold and unforgiving.

“I consider the affair closed,” he said. It was the kiss-off line he had used a hundred times before with other mistresses.

But Clara cried and he softened. He tried on several other occasions to dismiss her, but the outcome was always the same. The war was going badly, he would say, and his liaison with her made him look weak. It would not matter if he had hundreds of mistresses, but his devotion to just one had led to harmful gossip. One of his officers said that Clara was “doing Il Duce more harm than the loss of fifteen battles”.

While Mussolini gave Clara practically nothing — a small present now and again, and occasionally 500 lire to buy a dress — the hard-pressed Italian tax-payer thought that Mussolini was using their money to keep his mistress in luxury, while they suffered the deprivations of war. In fact, it was Roman shopkeepers and businessmen who were keeping her in expensive clothes and perfumes in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with Il Duce.

“I won’t come in the day any more,” Clara begged. “Just after dark. For a few minutes, just to see you and to kiss you. I don’t want to cause a scandal.”

The real scandal, though, was her family. Before the war they had built a luxurious villa in the fashionable Camilluccia district. It had black marble bathrooms. Knowing which side their bread was buttered, they lavished special attention on Clara’s bedroom. The walls were mirrored and the huge silk-covered bed was raised on a dais. But when Mussolini visited and was asked whether he liked the place, he replied: “Not much.”

Clara’s mother suggested that she ask Mussolini to pay for the villa, but Clara refused even to suggest it. However, everyone assumed that he had picked up the tab.

Even if they did not receive direct patronage from Il Duce, the Petacci family were clever enough to use their position to their advantage. Clara’s brother Marcello, a naval doctor, for example, made a fortune smuggling gold through the diplomatic bag.

In July 1943, when the Allies landed in Sicily, Mussolini was voted out of office by the Fascist Grand Council. The next day he was arrested by order of King Victor Emmanuel III. Clara was arrested too and imprisoned in the Visconti Castle at Novara. There she spent her time writing love letters to her beloved Benito — who she addressed as “Ben” — and filling her diaries with memories of the wonderful times she had had with him.

“I wonder if you’ll get this letter of mine,” she wrote, “or will they read it. I don’t know and I don’t care if they do. Because although I used to be too shy to tell you that I loved you, today I’m telling all the world and shouting it from the roof-tops. I love you more than ever.”

The letters never reached him. They were intercepted by the censors Mussolini was rescued by the Germans and set up a puppet state in Northern Italy. Clara, determined to rejoin him, persuaded the nuns who were looking after her to smuggle a letter out to the German headquarters in Novara. They sent a staff car to fetch her.

Although the Germans did not trust her, they thought they could use her. They found her a villa on Lake Garda where Mussolini could visit her every day. Her guard at the villa was the young and charming Major Franz Spogler, who reported directly to Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.

However, the Germans’ plans fell a little flat because Rachele learned that Clara was around. Her jealous outbursts meant that Mussolini could see little of his mistress. But occasionally, in the evenings, he would leave his official Alfa Romeo outside his office to allay suspicion and drive over to see her in a small Fiat. Their meetings were cold and sad.

Twice he told her that he did not want to see her any more. On both occasions, she began to cry and, yet again, he relented.

Eventually Rachele could take no more and went to see Clara herself. Clara sat in silence while Rachele berated her. Then, when Rachele’s ranting finished, Clara said quietly: “Il Duce loves you, Signora. I have never been allowed to say a word against you.”

This placated Rachele for a moment. Then Clara offered to give her typed copies of the letters Mussolini had sent her.

“I don’t want typed copies. That’s not why I came,” Rachele shouted and flew into a rage again. She hurled abuse at Clara. With her face growing redder and redder, Clara phoned Mussolini.

“Ben, your wife is here,” she said. “What shall I do?”

Rachele grabbed the phone and forced Mussolini to tell Clara that he had known beforehand that Rachele had been planning to come to see her. Rachele told Clara that the Fascists hated her almost as much as the partisans did.

Both women ended up crying. When Rachele eventually left, her parting curse was: “They’ll take you to the Piazzale Loreto” — Milan’s haunt for down-and-out prostitutes. This is exactly what happened.

As the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula, Mussolini left Rachele to make a last stand at Valtellina. When they parted in the garden of their villa, he said he was ready to “enter into the grand silence of death”.

His advisers told him that he should fly to safety in Switzerland or Spain. A former mistress, Francesca Lavagnini, invited him to join her in Argentina, while (tiara suggested that they stage a car accident and announce that he had been killed.

Mussolini rejected all these proposals. Once he had made sure Rachele and his family were safe, he urged Clara to flee to Spain. The Petacci family went, but Clara herself refused to go.

“I am following my destiny,” she wrote to a friend. “What will happen to me I don’t know, but I cannot question my fate.”

Together Mussolini and Clara fled north to Como. There, Elena Curti Cucciate, the pretty, fair-haired daughter of his former mistress Angela Curti, joined them. Mussolini went for a walk with her, which sent Clara into paroxysms of jealousy.

“What is that woman doing here?” she screamed hysterically. “You must get rid of her at once. You must! You must!”

He didn’t. Instead, Elena and Mussolini travelled on in a German convoy, but Clara caught up with them when they were stopped by a partisan road block on the road to Switzerland. The partisans said that, to prevent unnecessary bloodshed, they would allow the Germans through — but not any Italian Fascists. Clara urged Mussolini to disguise himself as a German and make his escape. Then she burst into tears. He donned a German greatcoat and helmet and climbed on board a German lorry. As it pulled away, Clara ran after it and tried to clamber on, but one of Mussolini’s ministers grabbed her. It took all his strength to pull her off the tailboard.

Someone, however, had spotted Mussolini at the road block. In the next town, the convoy was searched and he was found. The redoubtable Clara caught them up again, only to be arrested herself. At first, she pretended that she was not Clara Petacci but a Spaniard. She even asked the partisans what they would do to Clara Petacci if they caught her. But soon she confessed.

“You all hate me,” she told her interrogators. “You think I went after him for his money and his power. It isn’t true. My love has not been selfish. I have sacrificed myself for him.” She begged to be locked up in the same jail as him.

“If you kill him, kill me too,” she said.

Orders were given to take Mussolini and Clara to Milan. When the two cars carrying them met up on the road, they were allowed a few moments to talk. Clara was absurdly formal.

“Good evening, Your Excellency,” she said.

Mussolini was angry to see her.

“Signora, why are you here?” he demanded.

“Because I want to be with you,” she replied.

The prisoners and their escorts arrived at Azzano at a quarter past three in the morning. They were to stay at the home of a partisan family called the De Marias.

At about four o’clock the next night, a man in a brown mackintosh named Audisio turned up, saying that he had come to rescue them. They were driven to a nearby villa where they were ordered out of the car. Their “rescuers” were Communist partisans who had been ordered to execute Mussolini, along with fifteen other leading Fascists.

Clara threw her arms around Mussolini and screamed: “No! No! You mustn’t do it. You mustn’t.”

“Leave him alone,” Audisio said, “or you’ll be shot too.”

But this threat meant nothing to Clara. If Mussolini must die, then she wanted to die too and she clung on to him.

Audisio raised his gun and pulled the trigger but missed his target. Clara rushed at him and grabbed the barrel of the gun with both hands. As they wrestled, Audisio pulled the trigger again.

“You cannot kill us like this,” Clara screamed.

Audisio pulled the trigger a third time, but the gun was well and truly jammed. So he borrowed a machine gun from a fellow partisan and sprayed them with bullets. The first shot killed Clara. The second hit Mussolini and knocked him down. The third killed him.

Their two bodies were thrown onto the back of a lorry, on top of the corpses of the other Fascists who had been executed. They were driven to Milan. In the Piazzale Loreto, they were strung up from a lamp-post by the feet. Clara’s skirt fell down over her face, leaving her lower half naked. A partisan stood on a box and tied the torn hem of her skirt up between her legs to preserve some of her modesty. Curiously, though Mussolini’s mistress was widely hated, many men who were there that day remarked on Clara’s face. Even beneath the dirt and smears of blood, they said, she was remarkably beautiful.