"I ORDER THAT THERE BE NO PUBLIC OBSERVANCE OF MY BIRTHDAY."
So read a memorandum boldly scrawled by Benito Mussolini last week, shortly before he achieved age 46. Next morning, spruce and whistling, he stepped from his Roman residence, slipped behind the wheel of a low-slung Alpha Romeo roadster. Venturesome, a correspondent asked why there would be no public birthday observance, received for his pains a blasting, withering glance.
"Rest assured it is not because I dislike being a year older!" flashed II Duce as he engaged the gears. "No—my reason is that nothing must interrupt the ordered rhythm of Fascist work. There are enough holidays on our Italian calendar already —in fact too many!" and letting in his clutch the Dictator vanished, inconsistently, for a birthday holiday. Speeding to the seacoast he boarded a waiting seaplane, was soon soaring around the toe and heel of Italy, headed at last up the Adriatic in a flight of over 1200 miles.
Waiting at sheltered Riccione on the Adriatic seaside were Donna Rachele Mussolini and 22-month-old Babe Romano, indisputably Il Duce's favorite son, often called by him "the first child of my second series." Waiting also was a spandy new speedboat. So far as observers could see, the birthday celebration proper was in two parts: 1) Donna Rachele sat placidly on the beach; 2) Dictator Benito and Babe Romano went out morning and afternoon in the speedboat, dashed thrillingly through spume-flecked waves.
Toward evening Babe, Donna & Duce motored inland to spend the birthday night at their rustic farm, the Villa Carpena. Lights were doused early. Next day the dutiful Duce bade his spouse a crisp farewell, sped back to his chosen busy bachelorhood in Rome. There, after buying a red carnation—just now his favorite boutonniére—the Dictator settled down to work, found an appalling piece of work to do.
On his broad, carved desk in the gloomy Palazzo Chigi lay incriminating documents, the report of an investigation which Il Duce had ordered into the affairs of one of the Fascist Government's leading fiscal advisers, the Chemical & Dye Tycoon of Northern Italy, potent Deputy Ernesto Belloni, recently Mayor of Milan, repeatedly assigned as an Italian expert at the War Debt aid Reparations conferences. Evidently the report on Signer Belloni was damning. With characteristic decision Il Duce dashed on paper an order dismissing the Dye Tycoon "from every political and public activity, indefinitely."
Fascists dismissed for scandalous cause have always been dropped into a well of silence. If the press were allowed to expose the rascality of ex-Fascists, sooner or later the public might suspect that some Fascist in good standing is a rascal top. Last week the press gag was crammed in tight, as Dictator Mussolini dismissed Tycoon Belloni in disgrace. But rumor cannot be stifled. Soon it was believed that: