EW: Gavin and Vogue Mag, Sittin’ in a Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G… “He’s ’embarrassingly handsome.’ He’s ‘lithe, ardent, energetic.’ He is ‘at ease with his own eminence.’ This sounds like the writing of a sixteen-year-old girl in the full-tilt grip of a crush for the ages, you know, the true and eternal love that no one else in the world has ever experienced and that you couldn’t possibly understand, but it’s actually Maya Singer, an apparent adult who is a contributing editor at Vogue magazine.”
Perhaps one of the more curious responses to Mussolini was the manner in which so many women reporters were taken in by the swashbuckling glamor of the Italian dictator. It is, at first glance, rather ironical that women would respond to a man who had contempt (albeit political, not physical) for the female sex. As he candidly told Emil Ludwig, women must always be the underlings, lest their trivial hearts of milk unman the will to power and produce a “matriarchy.” Yet the Italian maestro was shrewd enough to wear a different mask when confronting the opposite sex. In 1923, whether by coincidence or design, the International Suffrage Alliance convened in Rome. Mussolini’s hypocritical support for the feminist cause did much to endear the “amazons of the press” to his regime. His appearance at the convention hall was described rapturously (“graceful, extremely quick … great charm and radiance”) by the novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes, who was brought to tears of joy upon his entrance. When he told the convention that he would grant the vote to Italian women (within a short time he was to make Italy’s franchise worthless) the audience was ecstatic. Fascist supporters made much of the rising status of women in Italy, and Italian officials made life easier for women journalists, all of which paid handsome news dividends. Women reporters, generally concentrated on Mussolini’s personality and physical features, and those who met him personally showed a tendency to melt under his charm. “I was entirely disarmed by his personality,” said the wife of one correspondent. “Expecting to meet a cold, dispassionate, overbearing person, I was arrested by a certain wistful quality in his expression—the expression of a man who is very human.” The Byronic magnetism of Mussolini was as irresistible as the pagentry of the marching fascisti. The response of Ida Tarbell, who called Mussolini “a despot with a dimple” and described how he “kissed my hand in the gallant Italian fashion,” was typical of the many female writers who were graced by a personal interview with the Blackshirt Valentino. Perhaps Alice Rohe had the last word when one of his sex scandals made the papers: “Il Duce knows how to get what he wants from women, whether it is a grand passion or a grand propaganda.”
Nothing changes.