De-Caesarizing Benito

MUSSOLINI (304 pp.)--Paolo Monelli--Vanguard ($4).

On Oct 29, 1922, Benito Mussolini was called to office as Head of the Government of Italy. "Excuse my appearance," the new boss told King Victor Emmanuel, "but I come from the battlefield." Mussolini referred to his Fascist Party black shirt, not the striped pants ("too long and tight") or the frock coat ("sleeves . . . too short") which he had borrowed from his pals. As for his "battlefield," this, too. was the property of friends: it was they who had made the historic "March on Rome" the preceding day, while Leader Mussolini stayed snug in the office of his Socialist newspaper, Il Popolo d'ltalia, under protection of the Milan police.

Forty thousand ardent Fascists gathered in Rome to hail the new head, stomped by his palace window looking upwards eagerly. But a lady visitor had come to see Mussolini, and the head was in no position to review his followers.

Author Monelli, no professional historian but a veteran newspaperman, has written a biography that often verges on caricature. Obviously ashamed of his people's long allegiance to Mussolini, Author Monelli does his best to de-Caesarize Italy's 20th century Caesar. In destroying the legend of Mussolini as hero, he occasionally seems to build up another legend of Mussolini as utter boob. But with that qualification in mind, Mussolini can be enjoyed as a highly readable biography.

Birth of a Legend. "What a character!" sighed his wife Rachele, when she heard of her Benito's sudden rise to power. Most Italians echoed her words, wondered what sort of oddity their new ruler was. They knew he was the son of a Romagna blacksmith and had come up the hard way, going to jail for his political activities, suffering poverty in Switzerland. They knew little of his real character--e.g., that he could be bullied by anyone who took the trouble. They knew still less of his chronic ailments (syphilis, stomach ulcers) and his antipathy to taking baths, changing his shirt, or shaving.

He became popular at once. He seemed ready to work hard and cooperate with other parties, and his chief desire was to be "respectable." When the lights burned late in Mussolini's palace, it was often because he had got his hands on "lists of subscribers to opposition papers" and was busy marking down those who were to be "beaten up until they bled." But, asserts Author Monelli, some of Mussolini's followers were far tougher than he. When his old Socialist enemy, Giacomo Matteotti, was murdered by some of his Fascist pals and Mussolini was blamed for the act, the situation scared the striped pants off him. Sobbing in the arms of one of his women, the chief cried: "Dear Matilde, my worst enemies could not have done as much harm as my friends!"

In the style later perfected by Adolf Hitler, he often rolled on the floor, bit his nails, beat himself over the head, and he "lived in dread of seeing his executioners burst open the door to shoot him."

A group of his "friends," appalled by such weakness, staged a second March on Rome and cornered their cowering, unshaven chief in his palace. "What do you expect me to do with a corpse under my feet?" Mussolini wailed. "A fine head of a revolution, if you're afraid of a corpse!" bellowed an angry follower.

Life of a Balloon. More afraid of his friends than of his enemies, Mussolini began to do his utmost to appease the friends. As Biographer Monelli sees it. he was terrified into terrorizing Italy. In 1925, "the Fascist regime became a regime of force," all opposition was suppressed, total censorship clamped on the newspapers. His followers made sure that the Duce's balloon of a phony identity was not punctured by public scorn. They kept him surrounded by "policemen in various disguises" playing the equally phony role of "fanatical admirers." These cops, known as "the Presidential Division," became so expert at exaltation that sometimes even Mussolini suspected they were not on the level.

His tougher followers drove him half-crazy simply by knowing that he was incapable of being the man he pretended to be. When the Duce tried to conduct the Ethiopian war from his office chair, Marshal Badoglio only growled: "What fool in Rome is telegraphing this rubbish to me?" and curtly cabled back: "Leave me alone."

Historians who believe that great decisions are the result of historical necessity rather than of the acts of individuals will find in Monelli's account of Mussolini's life a stiff argument to the contrary. Personal vanity, swollen to monstrous proportions, made Italy Germany's ally in World War II. Mussolini detested Hitler, but, as he said frankly: "It's too late to drop him. I don't want them to say abroad that Italy's cowardly." Of all Mussolini's millions of spouted words, none has a greater ring of sincerity than his cry-from-the-heart against his Nazi rival: "I am tired of acting as his rear light!"

Death of a Lover. As the war advanced, the Duce became more and more of a rear light. He spent hours doodling at his great table or concocting headlines for the morning papers. According to Monelli. he even began to lose interest in one of his chief pleasures--that of "receiving" a woman in his office every afternoon. If she was unattractive, the Duce talked to her; if she was pretty, he hurled her onto the carpet ("You can't refuse a man of that importance," said one such lady), and then went straight back to his desk while an attendant picked up the hairpins. A few privileged ladies were rewarded by hearing the great dictator play them a violin sonata, but they received money (out of state funds) only if they frankly asked for it.

Claretta Petacci was the exception to the general rule. Mussolini made love to her in his usual perfunctory way ("He doesn't even take his boots off," she once complained), but he showed his affection by installing her in his private apartments a few steps away from his office, where she would "lie for hours on end, waiting for a visit from her master, reading and daydreaming." From childhood on (she was 29 years his junior), Claretta had slept with Mussolini's photograph under her pillow; to be his mistress had been her sole ambition; he was "her first and only real love."

Author Monelli's book is never better than in the account of the last days of Mussolini and his doxie. Utterly defeated, universally despised, the sick and whipped dictator began mouthing extracts from a Life of Jesus and discovering "surprising analogies between his own fate and that of Christ." Too vain to surrender to the British, too indecisive to accept German protection, Mussolini blundered into the waiting hands of his bitterest enemies, the Italian partisans. By the time they dragged him, in pouring rain, to the wall against which he and Claretta were to be shot, he was much too obsessed with fear and misery to give a thought to anyone's feelings but his own. He never answered, and probably never heard, Claretta's last plaintive appeal: "Are you glad I followed you to the end?"

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