The Pope and Mussolini (40 page)

Events in Spain were also leading to greater collaboration between the Duce and Hitler. An electoral victory by Spain’s leftist Popular Front in the spring of 1936 triggered a military rebellion. The Church,
long identified with the old elites and now with the rebellious officers, quickly became a target of popular anger at the revolt.
⁵

Spain had worried the pope ever since the king’s abdication five years earlier. In 1933 the pope issued an encyclical criticizing the Spanish government’s efforts to curb Church influence.
⁶
Yet Pius was inclined to work with the more moderate government elements to find a solution. His efforts were thwarted both by anticlerical extremists in the government and by the hostility of many in the Spanish Church hierarchy who were opposed to any compromise with the leftists.
⁷

The outbreak of the civil war in July 1936 brought unspeakable horrors. Seven hundred priests, monks, and nuns were killed. Priests’ ears were cut off and passed around as if they were trophies from a bullring. Nuns’ rotting remains were dug up from their graves and left exposed—French newspapers published photographs. Monasteries were transformed into socialist headquarters, religious services were banned, and almost all of Barcelona’s churches were set ablaze. On August 12 Cardinal Pacelli went to the Spanish embassy to protest.
⁸

Although Francisco Franco, leader of the Spanish military revolt, has sometimes been compared with Mussolini, the Duce had no particular affection for him. Franco wasn’t much of a general, he thought, cowardly keeping far from the front. And the sadism of the Spanish forces was appalling. “For them,” Mussolini remarked, “executing a thousand men is like eating a plate of macaroni.”
⁹

Motivated less by ideological camaraderie with Franco than by a desire to limit the international influence of the leftist government in France, Mussolini soon found himself conferring with the Nazis on how best to help the insurrection. In October the first Russian airplanes, tanks, and other supplies began arriving to shore up the Spanish government. The Italian Catholic press urged Mussolini to send Italian troops to aid the rebels.
¹⁰
By year’s end, he had dispatched thousands of blackshirted militia and soldiers to help Franco.
¹¹

The pope did not share in the enthusiasm for the war. He was horrified by the bloodcurdling accounts of anti-Catholic atrocities but balked at endorsing an armed revolt against an elected government.
Nor was he eager to see Mussolini embroiled in a war that would push him further into Hitler’s arms.
¹²

JUST AS HE WAS GETTING
the first reports of civil war in Spain, the pope received more disturbing news from Germany: the Nazis were planning to put hundreds of German monks and nuns on trial on charges of sexual perversion. Over the next year, the highly publicized trials would receive front-page coverage in the German press. “Corrupters of Youth Clad in Cassocks” screamed one headline. “Bottomless Depravity in the Monastery” declared another. The priests were accused of luring children in their charge into sexual acts and seducing vulnerable young women as well. To make matters worse, German authorities had renewed their case against the Jesuits, accused of illegally exporting funds.
¹³

Then came the upsetting news that Mussolini was sending his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, to Berlin for talks on strengthening the links between the two countries. Ciano had risen through government ranks at dizzying speed. By age thirty-two, in 1935, he had become minister of press and propaganda. The following year Mussolini shocked the diplomatic world by appointing him to the government’s most prestigious post after his own: minister of foreign affairs. Increasingly, if unconsciously, Ciano tried to imitate his father-in-law’s mannerisms. But his high-pitched, nasal voice could not reproduce the Duce’s booming, staccato speech. Romans took to calling him derisively
il Ducellino
, “the little Duce,” or
generissimo
, a playful combination of
genero
, “son-in-law,” and
generalissimo
, the military’s highest rank. “The son-in-law also rises,” quipped an American diplomat. Easily impressed with power, in over his head, and a sucker for flattery, Ciano was putty in Hitler’s hands.
¹⁴
That October, three months after the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, Ciano signed a secret cooperation agreement with the Third Reich. Thus the Rome-Berlin “axis” was born.
¹⁵

A new American ambassador to Italy, William Phillips, arrived in Rome around the same time. At their first meeting, Ciano made a good
impression on him—he was affable, laughed a good deal, and spoke excellent English. But Phillips soon began to have doubts about Italy’s youthful foreign minister. “In appearance,” he wrote, “he looked astonishingly boyish, although inclined to be plump.”
¹⁶
Of medium height, Ciano had a round face and “well-oiled black hair,” slicked back “in typical Italian fashion.” He was clearly ambitious but had “no standards morally or politically.” Ciano reveled in his position as Fascist potentate and the Duce’s son-in-law. But the other Fascist leaders detested him, resenting his unmerited rise to power and his love of
la dolce vita
. Most of all, they were angry that Mussolini had apparently chosen him—without bothering to consult them—as his political heir.
¹⁷

Ambassador Phillips had a very different impression of Mussolini. Upon entering the “vast, empty hall with polished floor” for their first meeting, he spied a figure at the far end, sitting at a desk. “A short, thick-set and powerfully built man came forward to meet me,” he recalled. “Complete baldness seemed to exaggerate the size of his head.” What most struck the ambassador were the Duce’s eyes, which, when he wanted to make a point, “suddenly seemed to expand and the whites to protrude.” They spoke in English, Mussolini’s recent private lessons having served him well. Phillips would later observe that when wearing his Fascist uniform, the Duce seemed a commanding figure, but on those rare occasions when he saw him in civilian dress, he looked like a “sturdy peasant” and “a very rough customer.”
¹⁸

Roberto Cantalupo, Mussolini’s ambassador to Spain, meeting with him for the first time in many months, saw a man who, in the wake of his Ethiopian victory, seemed dramatically changed. Heavier, his neck thickened, and his face enlarged, his skin was bright red from the summer days he spent on the beach. With Ciano at his side, his every word seemed false, as if meant for a large audience. The Duce’s distance from Cantalupo, who had known him for years, appeared immense. After a few uncomfortable minutes, Cantalupo departed, but Ciano caught up with him before he left the building.

“How did you find him?” asked Ciano.

“I didn’t find him. I found someone else,” Cantalupo replied.

Ciano smiled. “You know, he has tasted great glory and sees the rest of us from on high as little, little. He lives in a world of his own.… Perhaps it’s for the best that we leave him up there on Olympus, where he can do great things. As for the rest of us … we’ll take care of the things of this world.”
¹⁹

Giovanni Bottai, one of the Fascist leaders closest to Mussolini, had a similar experience on his return from Ethiopia. “Not the man, but the statue, stood before me,” he wrote in his diary. A “hard, stony statue, from which a cold voice emerged.”
²⁰

The Duce’s composure cracked briefly when he suffered an unexpected blow: his youngest child, seven-year-old Anna Maria, contracted polio. She struggled between life and death as the Duce looked on helplessly. Finally she recovered, although the signs of the disease remained with her. At a press conference during her illness, when foreign journalists presented Mussolini with a doll to give her, tears rolled down his famously masklike face.
²¹

But his daughter’s illness did nothing to soften him. He had little use for advice. He insisted that when his ministers and other officials came to see him, they speed-walk across his immense office to his desk, give a Roman salute, and hand him the papers he had requested. After answering his questions, and without offering any unsolicited comments, they would salute again, turn around, and hustle out.
²²
They were lucky if they escaped without triggering his wrath. Navarra, Mussolini’s assistant, who waited outside the room, regularly heard the Duce’s thundering denunciations. When angry, he banged his fists on his table and convulsively spread and closed his legs, scraping his heels against a footrest under his table. Before long, Navarra reported, the footrest was completely worn down.
²³

Mussolini felt that nothing was impossible if he willed it.
²⁴
Italy could become one of the world’s great nations, if Italians followed his orders. But amid all his dreams of conquest and glory, he worried that Italians were by nature a weak people, ill suited for his martial designs. At a Grand Council meeting in December, he mused that one day he
would have to “march the troops into Naples to sweep aside all the guitars, the mandolins, the violins, the organ grinders.”
²⁵

Mussolini was increasingly leaving day-to-day matters to his associates, but not only because he had to deal with more consequential matters. He also had a new mistress. Clara Petacci was twenty-four years old when their affair began in earnest in 1936; Mussolini was fifty-three. Her family lived in a large apartment close to Mussolini’s Villa Torlonia. Her father was a Vatican physician, caring for assorted monsignors, functionaries, and papal guards. Less than two years earlier, she had married, in a wedding graced by many Vatican dignitaries and presided over by Cardinal Gasparri himself. The marriage did not last long.

A buxom, vivacious young woman, with green eyes and curly hair—the product of dozens of curlers applied each night—Clara had small teeth and a low, warm, husky voice. She lived for the afternoon calls that summoned her to Palazzo Venezia. To minimize gossip, she would take a taxi to an agreed-upon spot, where she met a motorcycle policeman and hopped into his covered sidecar. At the service entrance of Palazzo Venezia, she was met by Mussolini’s trusted assistant, Quinto Navarra, and escorted to the special apartment Mussolini had reserved for her. There she would lie on a sofa in the Zodiac room—so called because of the gold-painted image on the sky-blue vaulted ceiling. As she waited for the Duce—who typically arrived after six
P.M.
—she passed the hours reading, listening to records, drawing designs for her clothes, and filling up voluminous notebooks with her daily diary, recounting in loving detail her every encounter with the great man.
²⁶
In the closet she kept a dozen bright-colored, frilly dresses and an assortment of gaudy hats. Navarra, who brought her tea, occasionally stopped by to chat.
²⁷

Although Mussolini had had a long trail of lovers, Clara Petacci represented something new. It was not so much that his former lovers were closer to his own age and were plain as often as they were pretty; rather, he developed an unusual emotional dependency on Petacci. Not that he in any way regarded her as an equal—he showed not the least interest in her views. The hundreds of pages of her published diaries give no indication that he cared about her opinion on anything but her total devotion to him. But he found that he could not live without this attractive young woman, without her doting devotion and sexual availability. At a time when his horror at the prospect of getting older was growing, she provided him with a feeling of youth regained; and in the wake of his daughter’s brush with death, and his sense of isolation during the Ethiopian war, she offered him freedom from the pressures of constantly having to pose as the Italian superman.
²⁸

Clara Petacci

(
photograph credit 18.1
)

THE FRONT PAGE OF THE OCTOBER
1, 1936,
New York Times
carried surprising news: Eugenio Pacelli was to sail the next day from Naples to New York for an extended American visit. Never before had anyone
so high up in the Vatican visited the United States.
²⁹
Speculation swirled in the world’s capitals about why the pope would be dispatching his secretary of state to America. None took seriously the Vatican’s claim that the visit was purely “personal.”