The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (76 page)

Though a devoted family man, Mussolini was still a Fascist. He bossed and occasionally beat Rachele, and even threw things at his beloved daughter Edda.

However, Rachele was equally capable of violence. When
Il Duce
returned home drunk one night and ran amok in their apartment, smashing what few furnishings they had at the time, Rachele warned him the next day, “If ever you come home again in that state, I’ll kill you.” Knowing she meant it, he gave up alcohol for good. On the other hand, Mussolini was never so intimidated by his mistresses.

Magda Fontanges, a French journalist with whom he had an affair, wrote in
Liberty
magazine that one of Mussolini’s first acts of courtship was to choke her jokingly with a scarf.

Of all
Il Duce
’s mistresses, the dark beauty Clara Petacci was by far his favorite. Their relationship lasted over 10 years. Although he loved her dearly, he was permanently bound to Rachele and his family and refused to leave them.

Clara understood this and managed to console herself with the luxurious apartments Mussolini provided for her. It was in one of these love nests that Rachele finally confronted Clara. Livid throughout the brief meeting, Rachele sarcastically noted the luxury in which her husband kept his “whore,” and told Clara that one day “they’ll take you to Piazzale Loreto”—a meeting place for down-and-out prostitutes. It was an accurate prediction, for the Piazzale Loreto was the place Clara’s and
Il Duce
’s bodies were hung by their heels after their execution. For a while, Clara’s skirt dangled around her face, until it was tied in place for the sake of modesty. She and Mussolini had spent their last night together in a farmhouse, and although the partisans would have let her live, she insisted on dying with her lover. Loyal to the end, she flung herself in front of Mussolini at the instant the first shots were fired.

MEDICAL REPORT:
Mussolini contracted syphilis while living in Tolmezzo, perhaps from his landlady Luigia. He was so distressed about having the disease that he almost shot himself. A friend intervened at the last minute and convinced him that it would be wiser to see a doctor. He was never cured, and it has been speculated that his bungled war efforts resulted from brain damage caused by the disease. Syphilis, unless properly treated, is known to result in megalomania and exaggeration of emotions, traits which were plainly visible in
Il Duce
’s character.

HIS THOUGHTS:
“Woman is to me an agreeable parenthesis in my busy life; they never have been more, nor can they ever be less. Today [1927], I have no time to punctuate my life with other than work, but in the past, now the long-ago past, when I was free to pick and choose my style of writing, I often found the parenthesis a pleasant way to punctuate.”

—M.J.T.

Evita

EVA PERÓN (May 7, 1919–July 26, 1952)

HER FAME:
A legendary Argentinean political figure, Eva Perón, popularly called “Evita” (“Little Eva”), was the wife of dictator Juan Perón. She wielded unprecedented power for a woman in her country, acting as de facto minister of health and labor from 1946 to 1952.

HER PERSON:
María Eva Duarte was born in Los Toldos, a poverty-stricken village on the pampas, about 150 mi. from Buenos Aires. Eva was the fourth child born to Juana Ibarguren as the result of her unmarried liaison with Juan Duarte, a married minor landowner.

Faced with a bleak future, Eva left

for Buenos Aires at age 14 hoping for a

theatrical career. At first her regional

accent and undisciplined manner

worked against her, but eventually she

became one of the leading actresses on

the radio. She was tall for an Argentine

woman—5 ft. 5 in.—with dyed honey—

blond hair, large dark-brown eyes, an

attractive face, and a tendency toward

plumpness, which she determinedly

controlled. She was barely literate.

Her ambitions led her to cultivate the

company of Juan Perón, a widower and a

colonel, whom she met in 1943. She

Juan and Eva Perón in 1945

moved in with him and two years later

married him on Oct. 21, 1945. With Eva at his side, Juan Perón became president-dictator of Argentina. Not content to be a conventional first lady, Evita unleashed her venom on the rich and her personal enemies alike, but she won the hearts of the poor of Argentina, whom she called
los descamisados
(“the shirtless ones”). They revered this peasant who stood before them in regal attire, and backed her as she promoted women’s suffrage, organized workers, and under the guise of the María Eva Duarte de Perón Welfare Foundation pumped millions of dollars of government money into welfare programs (and her Swiss bank accounts). When she died of cancer of the uterus at age 33, Evita was mourned as a saint.

SEX LIFE:
Eva Perón had a very complex personality, being as vindictive as she was charismatic, and she used sex as a means to obtain wealth and power, which were no doubt her true loves. With little chance of advancement from the lower classes a woman in Argentinean society had only one tool—sex—and Eva knew how to use it. When she married Juan Perón, she sought to conceal all evidence of her past, and what remains is often mere rumor and gossip.

It has sometimes been assumed that she began her career in Buenos Aires as a prostitute, but despite the fact that she later tried to legalize the red-light district, it is unlikely that she ever worked the streets. Instead, she became the mistress of a series of men in an upwardly mobile progression. It is known that she posed for cheesecake photographs, which were later rounded up and destroyed, and she was supposed to be “good on her knees.” In other words, she offered her men fellatio.

Nevertheless, she was unable to shake off the tag “little whore.” There is a story—possibly apocryphal, but still illustrative—told about an incident which occurred on an official trip to Milan, Italy. While traveling in an automobile with a retired admiral, she was jeered by an angry mob. She turned to her companion and cried, “Do you hear that? They’re calling me a whore.” To which the admiral allegedly replied, “I understand perfectly. I haven’t been to sea in 15 years, and they still call me admiral.”

SEX PARTNERS:
Information on the men in her life is less clouded, but there are still discrepancies. At age 14 she offered her sexual services to a second-rate tango singer named José Armani, if he would take her to Buenos Aires. Armani agreed and she was on her way. (The story was later changed, and popular singer Agustin Magaldi became credited as her first lover.) Eva soon realized that a tango singer was not much help in the big city, and by the time she was 15 she had latched onto Emilio Karstulovic, the owner of an entertainment magazine and a man-about-town. Soon she gravitated toward more useful men, like photographers and producers. Those who knew her say Eva was basically a shrewd, cold, asexual woman whose interest was power, not love. Yet she did have charm, and she used it on Rafael Firtuso, the owner of the Liceo theater, who cast her in one of his productions, and on a soap manufacturer, who provided her with the best in cosmetics.

Then came Perón. Juan Perón was a handsome ladies’ man with a penchant for teenage girls. Eva was 24 and he 48 when they met. They made love their first night together and before long she had convinced her new lover—a man who supported Hitler and Fascism—that he could rise from the military to be head of government.

She became not only his inspiration and champion but his brain trust.

After Eva’s death Perón founded the infamous Union of Secondary School Students, which quickly became the means by which young girls were procured for his pleasure and that of his officers. The union was highly organized, with branches in every secondary school in the country. Officers scouted comely prospects and sent the most alluring to regional “recreation centers.” These centers included luxurious quarters and a permanent staff of doctors to handle pregnancies and venereal diseases. Perón had his own private recreation center, where he often spent his afternoons with some teenage girl far from home and unable to resist the powerful president of the country. In 1955 Perón was ousted from Argentina by a coup and settled in Madrid. He returned to power for a brief period in 1973, but without the figure of his wife in her furs and diamonds, he could regain little popularity.

Although most evidence indicates that Eva was faithful to her husband during their marriage, there was one instance where a man’s power and wealth were too great to resist. She first met Aristotle Onassis during WWII, in connection with sending food parcels to Nazi-occupied Greece. When Eva was traveling through Europe in 1947, Onassis made a special effort to meet her.

After a formal lunch he asked one of her escorts to arrange a more private meeting with Eva. He was promptly invited to her holiday villa on the Italian Riviera. No sooner had he arrived than they got into bed and made love. Afterward, she cooked him an omelet and Onassis gave her a check for $10,000 to donate to one of her favorite charities. He later described the omelet she had cooked that afternoon as “the most expensive I have ever had.”

The legend of Evita continues, and in the late 1970s a musical play based on her career, written by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice, won international acclaim. In
Evita
, Eva Perón captures her audience singing, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina. For the truth is I shall not leave you.”

HER THOUGHTS:
“If a woman lives for herself, I think she is not a woman, or else she cannot be said to live … we women carry things to greater extremes than men.”

“It is natural for a woman to give herself, to surrender herself for love, for in that surrender is her glory, her salvation…. No woman’s movement will be glorious and lasting … if it does not give itself to the cause of a man.”

—A.L.G. and the Eds.

The Red Book With The Plain Brown Wrapper

MAO TSE-TUNG (Dec. 26, 1893–Sept. 9, 1976)

HIS FAME:
The principal architect of

modern China, Mao rose from the

peasantry to rule a quarter of the world’s

people for a quarter of a century, and he

left a body of political writings that

insured his place in history as one of the

leading Communist philosophers.

HIS PERSON:
Born in the village of

Shaoshan in Hunan Province, Mao was

the oldest son of wealthy peasants. After

graduating from Hunan Normal School

in 1918, he went to Peking, where he

studied Marxism. Three years later he

became one of the founders of the Chinese Communist party. Mao turned his

attention to the peasants and organized

Mao and Chiang Ch’ing in 1945

them into an army skilled in the tactics

of guerrilla warfare. By 1934 Chiang Kai-shek’s rival Kuomintang forces had surrounded the peasant Red Army. To escape, Mao led his 100,000 followers on a 6,000-mi. retreat marked by starvation, battle, disease, and death to a safer area in northwest China. When the “Long March” was over a year later, only 5,000

of those who started had survived the journey. Mao eventually emerged as the most powerful man in the party, and in 1949 he defeated Chiang and established the People’s Republic of China.

A good part of Mao’s success as the foremost leader in China’s long revolutionary struggle can be attributed to his unwavering identification with the masses. Though he personally deplored the harsh life he saw around him, he retained many peasant habits, and he articulated the discontent and longings of his people. He was also a serious student of the Chinese classics, a heavy reader, and an accomplished speaker and writer. Despite his accomplishments, he was a bit of a slob. He cared nothing for his personal appearance (and during his youth he didn’t care about his body odor), was indifferent to what he ate, smoked until his teeth blackened, talked openly about his bowel movements, and once even dropped his pants while in the company of Europeans to cool off on a hot day. Yet he turned these evident drawbacks into strengths. He inured himself to physical hardships and deprivations, was largely impervious to personal criticism, and retained a strong sense of humor. He was probably one of history’s least egotistical great leaders.