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?”