LITMIR.BIZ

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second child, Vittorio, I will relate something light. Call it gallows humor. The story is told that Winston Churchill was talking to his son-in-law Vic Oliver—an entertainer who had married the Churchills’ daughter Sarah. The prime minister didn’t like him in the least. Trying to make innocent conversation, Oliver asked him what figure in the war he admired most. Churchill answered, “Mussolini.” Astonished, Oliver asked why. Said Churchill (again, according to legend), “Because he had the courage to have his son-in-law shot.” (In reality, Ciano was almost certainly a better man than Mussolini, although that is not much to brag about.)

      Vittorio Mussolini was born in 1916, six years after Edda, a year after their parents’ civil ceremony. Before World War II, when he was still a very young man, he made a name in the movies. Before that, he was a pilot—like Galeazzo, and like the second Mussolini son, Bruno. Vittorio flew in the Ethiopian war, and in the Spanish Civil War (for Franco and the Nationalists, of course), and in the world war.

      He actually appeared on the cover of Time magazine, in October 1935, four years before Edda. But he and Bruno were merely adornments, flanking their dictator father, who had just invaded Ethiopia. They are wearing their military finest, looking stern and imperial. Vittorio looks maybe a little less stern and imperial than his father and younger brother—he looks pudgier (historians and chroniclers always nag him about his weight) and slightly awkward.

      In 1936, he wrote a book about his Ethiopian experience, Voli sulle Ambe, which is to say, “Flights over the Ethiopian Highlands.” The book begins excitedly, with Mussolini’s Blackshirts darkening—blackening—the bridges of a ship. They are about to sail away to war, and a crowd is hailing them. The air is festive, already triumphal. The Blackshirts sing a chorus, full-throated: “Sing, sing, don’t get weary, to Abyssinia we want to go!” The book is replete with happy photos of African children, obviously delighted to be under Italian rule, and heroic Italian pilots, posing in front of their propellers.

      It was the film world that Vittorio most relished. The third Mussolini son, Romano, writes, “My father was interested in the Italian cinema and considered it an extraordinary means for spreading propaganda. My brother Vittorio, who was a great fan and connoisseur of movies, had many long conversations with my father about directors and actors and kept him abreast of all the important developments.” In a paper on Italian attitudes toward America, Umberto Eco, the novelist and scholar, writes, “Vittorio belonged to a group of young Turks fascinated by cinema as an art, an industry, a way of life. Vittorio was not content with being the son of the Boss, though this would have been enough to guarantee him the favors of many actresses: He wanted to be the pioneer of the Americanization of Italian cinema.”

      Vittorio did a good deal of writing about film, and edited a journal called Cinema. As Eco says, he “criticized the European cinematographic tradition and asserted that the Italian public identified emotionally only with the archetypes of American cinema. . . . He genuinely loved and admired Mary Pickford and Tom Mix, just as his father admired Julius Caesar and Trajan. For him American films were the people’s literature.”

      In 1937, Vittorio’s father sent him to Hollywood, where he struck a deal with Hal Roach, the famed producer. Roach was probably most famous for Laurel & Hardy, the comedy team, and “Our Gang,” a.k.a. “the Little Rascals.” He and Vittorio formed a company called “R.A.M.,” which stood for “Roach and Mussolini.” They were to make movies out of grand operas, beginning with Rigoletto. Today, you can go on the Internet and find a film of Vittorio being introduced to the Little Rascals. Darla sits in his lap. Buckwheat shakes his hand. Alfalfa and Spanky express their enthusiastic interest in making movies with him. This all seems rather surreal, with the world war just around the corner.

      Immediately, Roach took some heat for collaborating with Vittorio Mussolini, and, by extension, the dictator. He defiantly told a reporter, “Benito Mussolini is the only square politician I’ve ever seen” (“square” meaning honest, straightforward). But the pressure mounted, and Roach quickly went back on the deal, buying Vittorio out.

      In the next few years, Vittorio wrote some movie treatments and did some producing. He used a pseudonym, Tito Silvio Mursino, an anagram of his actual name. Among his collaborators was Roberto Rossellini, who would go on to great fame as a director. During the war, they made war movies, including Un pilota ritorna, or “A Pilot Returns” (1942).

      Vittorio had a role in the war, in addition to his flying and movie-making: He served as a liaison between Italy and Germany, rather as Edda did, before her husband’s downfall. Vittorio writes of shuttling between the two countries. And he says, “It was known that Hitler and the other German leaders liked me and held me in some regard.” In the end, he was on the run, like other Mussolinis. He writes, “In the war it had been possible to do one’s duty because of the thought that one was fighting for one’s country” and might die with honor. Now, however, “there was only fear left, that boundless, cold, useless fear of dying without much hope of resisting with arms or words.” And if he died, it would not be “at the hands of a foreigner, but at the hands of men born in my own country, men who would insult me in my own language and—which was worse—would think of me as a real enemy.”

      He hid out for months, then sneaked out of the country. He went to South America, as more than a few Axis figures did. Wearing a disguise, and carrying a false passport, he sailed to Argentina. When he got there, he told the press, “I never had any interest in politics. I have less now, and you can be sure I have no intention of mixing in Argentine politics. I am just another Italian immigrant.”

      For a decade or so, he traveled back and forth between his adoptive country and his native country, and eventually resettled in Italy. He became a great defender of his father’s legacy, a keeper of the flame. He did this by means of several books, including the one from which I have been quoting—written in 1961 and published in English as Mussolini: The Tragic Women in His Life. Those tragic women were Rachele, Edda, and the final mistress, Claretta Petacci. (Ida Dalser was arguably more tragic than all of them.) Whatever else can be said of Vittorio, he wrote well and interestingly, as his remarks about dying may suggest. He died in bed in 1997, at 80.

      Bruno was born two years after Vittorio, in 1918. Like his older brother and his brother-in-law, Ciano, he flew. But more than they, he was a very serious and gifted pilot, something of an ace. He began in the Ethiopian war when he was 17. Then he flew for Franco in Spain. The newsreels show him looking the part: dashing, tough, carefree. An American announcer said, “In the wake of squadrons of Fascist planes lie crumbling skeletons of former homes. Destruction rains from the skies on houses that cave like eggshells. Terror rules the land. And the peace of the world hangs in the balance as the red shadow of war lengthens over Madrid.” Outside the sphere of war, Bruno set speed records. In January 1938, he and two other Italian pilots made a historic flight from Italy to Brazil. Before he left, his mother said to him, “Please, go slowly.” He answered, “Of course, mamma, you know I will. I have snails in my engines.”

      Later in 1938, he married Gina Ruberti. “The bride,” reported the Associated Press, “comes from a family of ardent Fascists.” A year and a half later, the couple had a daughter, Marina.

      In the course of the war—August 1941—Bruno was test-piloting a plane (a P.108 bomber). It crashed, killing Bruno and others. He was 23. His mother later told Romano about the mourning that resulted—her own and others’: “What hit me hardest was il Duce’s excruciating silence. It was as if he had turned to stone.”

      Mussolini, in fact, took time to write a little book, Parlo con Bruno, or “I Speak with Bruno.” As the title indicates, he addressed his dead son personally. He starts by telling him about the funeral procession: There were so many people who wept for him. “Countless people.” Young and old, known and unknown. Thousands of arms rose to salute him. Little country girls knelt down. There was “profound grief, general, spontaneous. Why? Not because you were called Mussolini. They called you, and call you still, Bruno.”

      The dictator quotes his older son, Vittorio, on the subject of Bruno’s love for music. Bruno enjoyed discussing the merits of this or that soprano, or this or that tenor, says Vittorio. Most people loved the tenor Beniamino

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