Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [70]
Over the fireplace of Marilee’s cozy library was the Dan Gregory-style painting I mentioned earlier, a gift to her from the people of Florence: showing her late husband, Count Bruno, refusing a blindfold while facing a firing squad. She said that it hadn’t happened exactly that way, but that nothing ever did. So I asked her how it happened that she became the Contessa Portomaggiore, with the beautiful palazzo and rich farms to the north and so on.
When she and Gregory and Fred Jones arrived in Italy, she said, before the United States got into the war, and against Italy and Germany and Japan, they were received as great celebrities. They represented a propaganda victory for Mussolini: “‘America’s greatest living artist and one of its greatest aviators and the incomparably beautiful and gifted American actress, Marilee Kemp,’ he called us,” said Marilee. “He said the three of us had come to take part in the spiritual and physical and economic miracle in Italy, which would become the model for the world for thousands of years to come.”
The propaganda value of the three of them was so great that she was accorded in the press and at social events the respect a real and famous actress deserved. “So suddenly I wasn’t a dim-witted floozy anymore,” she said. “I was a jewel in the crown of the new Roman emperor. Dan and Fred, I must say, found this confusing. They had no choice in public but to treat me more respectfully, and I had fun with that. This country is absolutely crazy about blondes, of course, so that, whenever we had to make an entrance, I came first—and they came along behind me, as part of my entourage.
“And it was somehow very easy for me to learn Italian,” she said. “I was soon better at it than Dan, who’d taken lessons in it back in New York. Fred, of course, never learned Italian at all.”
Fred and Dan became heroes in Italy after they died fighting more or less for the Italian cause. Marilee’s celebrity survived them—as a very beautiful and charming reminder of their supreme sacrifice, and of the admiration many Americans had, supposedly, for Mussolini.
She was still certainly beautiful, by the way, at the time of our reunion, even without makeup and in widow’s weeds. She should have been an old lady after all she had been through, but she was only forty-three. She had a third of a century still to go!
And, as I say, she would become Europe’s largest Sony distributor, among other things. There was life in the old girl yet!
The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only useless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn’t catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.
After Dan Gregory’s death, her regular escort in Rome was Mussolini’s Oxford-educated and unmarried Minister of Culture, the handsome Bruno, Count Portomaggiore. He explained to Marilee at once that they could have no physical relationship, since he was interested sexually only in men and boys. Such a preference, if acted upon, was a capital offense at the time, but Count Bruno felt perfectly safe, no matter how outrageously he might behave. He was confident that Mussolini would protect him, since he was the only member of the old aristocracy who had accepted a high position in his government, and who virtually wallowed in admiration at the upstart dictator’s booted feet.
“He was a perfect ass,” said Marilee. She said that people laughed at his cowardice and vanity and effeminacy.
“He was also,” she added, “the perfect head of British Intelligence in Italy.”
After Dan and Fred were killed, and before the United States got into the war, Marilee was the toast of Rome. She had a wonderful time shopping and dancing, dancing, dancing, with the count, who enjoyed hearing her talk, and was always the perfect gentleman. Her wish was his command, and he never threatened her physically, and never