Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [161]
As of eleven P.M., August 4, Britain and Germany were at war. Marconi’s station at Poldhu sent a message to all Admiralty ships, “Commence hostilities against Germany.” A team of Marconi operators began eavesdropping on all German transmissions and by the end of the war collected more than eighty million messages.
Almost at once German torpedoes began sliding through the seas off England. Marconi’s annual report for 1914 stated, “Calls for assistance have been received almost daily.” The wireless cabins of ships became prime targets. In 1917 a German submarine attacked the SS Benledi and focused its fire on the ship’s wireless room, as its Marconi operator tried to reach an American warship for help. The warship arrived, the submarine fled. Afterward the Benledi’s captain went to the wireless cabin and found the operator still in his chair, everything in place, save for one macabre detail. His head was missing. In all, the war would kill 348 Marconi operators, most at sea.
AS MARCONI’S FAME increased and his empire expanded, his relationship with his mother, Annie, his most stalwart supporter, became more distant. She died in 1920 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. Marconi did not attend her funeral. Degna wrote, “The past had been dead for him a long time.”
He grew estranged as well from Beatrice. They spent more and more time apart, and soon Marconi entered an affair with another woman. For a time Beatrice and Marconi tried to preserve the illusion that their marriage was intact but eventually abandoned the effort. Marconi sold their house in Rome, and Beatrice and the children moved into the Hotel de Russie.
Marconi’s affair came to an end, but Beatrice had had enough. She asked Marconi for a divorce. With reluctance, he agreed. They took temporary residence in the free city of Fiume, where in 1923 the divorce was granted. Two years later Marconi wrote to Beatrice that he was on the verge of marrying again. He was fifty-one years old; the prospective bride was seventeen. The idea that Marconi would suddenly feel driven to marry and, presumably, start another family struck Beatrice as ironic, given that he had been so consumed with work that he had barely paid attention to her and their children. She suspended her usual warmth and cordiality. “I would like to wish you every happiness but this news distresses me for I wonder after all the years we were together when your own desire expressed continually was for freedom to concentrate on your work as your family impeded and oppressed you, why you should suddenly feel this great loneliness and need of a home—this craving for fresh ties!! These ties were eventually what broke up your home and ended in our divorce. I fail to understand.”
Marconi did not marry the girl. He immersed himself in work and spent more and more time aboard his yacht, Elettra. He again fell in love, this time with a daughter of one of Rome’s most aristocratic Catholic families, Maria Cristina Bezzi Scali. The family had ties to the so-called “black nobility,” men who swore allegiance to the pope. Marconi asked her to marry him, but an obstacle immediately arose. Vatican law forbade marriage between a divorced man and a confirmed Catholic; only an annulment would allow them to proceed. Marconi investigated and found that one basis for annulment was if a man and woman married with the intention of not adhering to Catholic marital law. He might succeed, he discovered, if he could convince a church tribunal that he and Beatrice had agreed before their wedding that if the marriage proved unhappy they would seek a divorce. To make this argument, however, he would need Beatrice’s help.
For the sake of the past, she agreed. As her time to testify neared, Marconi coached her on exactly what to say. His letters reprised his tendency to be oblivious