The Divo and the Duce

Front matter

THE DIVO AND THE DUCE

PROMOTING FILM STARDOM AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN 1920S AMERICA

GIORGIO BERTELLINI

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

Introduction: “Nothing Like Going to an Authority!”

PART ONE. POWER AND PERSUASION 1. Popular Sovereignty, Public Opinion, and the Presidency 2. Cultural Nationalism and Democracy’s Opinion Leaders

PART THREE. THE DUCE, OR THE ROMANCE OF UNDEMOCRATIC GOVERNING Archival Sources Abbreviations

Selected Primary Sources Index xi

235 237 239 297 303

NAY RY Y

© p

10. 11. 12.

13-14.

16-17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Pickford, Fairbanks, and friends giving the Fascisti salute, 1927 2 Douglas Fairbanks in Rome at the Circo Massimo 2

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks at the Roman Forum, 1926 2 Mary Pickford sending Liberty Bond films to President Wilson, 1919 35 President Wilson planting the seeds of his peace treaty, 1919 43 Advertisement for The Little American, 1917 60

Douglas Fairbanks speaking about Liberty Loans, Subtreasury

building 65

Rodolfo Di Valentina, a “new style heavy,’ 1918 90

Valentino's appealing gallantry in The Married Virgin, 1918 93 Valentino as Jimmy Calhoun in The Delicious Little Devil, 1919 96 Valentino stifling the cries of an innocent wife in Eyes of Youth, 1919 97 Key figures at Metro Studios, 1920 101

Tango scenes in Buenos Aires and in Paris, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1921 104

Valentino's spiritual conversion in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1921 107

Advertisements for The Sheik, 1921 122

Herb Roth’ illustration for “What Europe Thinks of American Stars,” 1923 130

Herbert Howe on the box office as ballot box, 1926 132

Valentino and Elinor Glyn as collaborators, 1922 135

Valentino as “caveman” and as tender lover, 1922 136

Frontispiece in Valentino’s How You Can Keep Fit, 1923 141

Valentino and Rambova as tango dancers on the Mineralavatour 142 x ILLUSTRATIONS

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

40-41. 42. 43.

44. 45-46.

Rube Goldberg’s cartoons about Valentino in Photoplay, 1925 143 Illustration inspired by Valentinos new goatee, 1925 146

Cartoon about Valentino in boxing match, 1926 152

Crowd outside the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, 1926 156 Valentino and Caruso in heaven, composograph, New York Evening Graphic, 1927 157

New York Blackshirts with the Duce’s wreath for Valentino’s coffin, 1926 159

Woodrow Wilson headlined as “the supreme duce of the free peoples? 1918 167

The Blackshirts compared to the KKK, 1922 171

Richard Washburn Child, Washington, DC, 1924 176

Prince Gelasio Caetani, 1922 183

“Mussolini: Idol of Women?” by Alice Rohe, 1927 192

Cartoon about Mussolini versus Valentino, 1926 196

Fascist leader David Rossi (Bert Lytell) in The Eternal City, 1924 200 The Eternal City advertisement, 1924 201

On the set of The Man of the Hour, Villa Torlonia, 1927 210

The operators of Fox-Case outfit no. 1 filming The Man of the Hour, 1927 210

An initial draft of Mussolini’s speech and its final English version 211 Published frames of Mussolini from The Man of the Hour, 1927 214 Program for Benito Mussolini in The Man of the Hour and Sunrise, 1927 215

Fox Movietone ad featuring celebrities, 1928 218

Title screen and close-up of Mussolini in Mussolini Speaks,

1933 224

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study took (way) more than a decade of research, writing, conference presentations, and rewriting. Out of curiosity and, admittedly, inertia, I could have gone for a few more, but it was time to share my findings with readers. What follows may offer an indication of the volume of my debts.

A large-scale research project requires large institutional shoulders, and I feel privileged to work at the University of Michigan. I would like to thank the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA); the Office of the Vice President for Research; and my two departments, Film, Television, and Media (FT VM), formerly known as Screen Arts and Cultures, and Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL), for their steady financial support and multiple accommodations. The generous resources of an associate professor fund enabled me to acquire primary materials (i.e., microfilms) and scores of secondary sources, as well as to travel to archives in the United States and Europe. An ADVANCE faculty summer writing grant allowed me to hire two amazingly competent copyeditors, Ken Garner and Rebecca Grapevine, who polished my prose. Three spring and summer grants from the Rackham Graduate School were also fundamental for compensating three remarkable graduate students, Courtney Ritter, Pierluigi Erbaggio, and Roberto Vezzani, who assisted with research and with compiling the bibliography. Outside funding came from a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University and a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society (APS). I wish to thank Barbara J. Grosz, then dean of the Radcliffe Institute; Judith Vichniac, director of its Fellowship Program; and Linda Musumeci, director of Grants and Fellowships for APS.

In Ann Arbor, I was also spoiled by an incredibly efficient library system that delivered in-house and interlibrary-loan volumes practically to my office door. I am grateful to all the indefatigable librarians at Michigan for making research xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS such a pleasurable adventure. This system could be improved only if, say, after the delivery of every ten books, they served an espresso macchiato. Over the years, I relied on the unwavering support and enthusiasm of different department chairs, Markus Nornes, Caryl Flinn, Johannes von Moltke, and Yeidy Rivero of Film, Television, and Media, and Michéle Hannoosh and Cristina Moreiras-Menor of Romance Languages and Literatures. In FTVM I have also been blessed to count on the exceptional professionalism and, most importantly, the friendship of Mary Lou Chlipala, the carpooler from “Up North” and a perfect house guest, the archivist-librarian-cum-magician Phil Hallman, and our departmental grand master Marga Schuhwerk-Hampel. I also wish to thank all my colleagues in FTVM and RLL for their support and help with bibliographic and scholarly suggestions, particularly Richard Abel, Matthew Solomon, and Johannes von Moltke, as well as Vincenzo Binetti, Alison Cornish, Karla Mallette, and Paolo Squatriti. A special thank-you also to Dario Gaggio, from Michigan’s Department of History, for the generosity of his insights.

The research for this project accompanied me for years in the classroom and in many exchanges with both graduate and undergraduate students. I am deeply grateful to the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program at the University of Michigan. Under its aegis, I benefitted throughout the years from the help of a tremendous group of undergraduate students. I would like to mention here some of the most dedicated ones, including Jessica M. Oyler, Sara Cecere, Olivia Glowacki, Katharine Rose Allen, Nicolette De Simone, and, especially, James Hamzey. James continued to work after his employment ended and helped me with the bibliography before Roberto Vezzani completed the task. Roberto Vezzani and Pierluigi Erbaggio also enlightened me with their doctoral dissertations on, respectively, the American circulation of Italian fiction and of nonfiction films produced during Fascism. I am also grateful to other students who took my seminars American Cinema and Race, Screening Fascism, Stardom, and Cinema and Propaganda. I am happy to mention Jim Carter, Syed Feroz Hassan, Vincent Longo, Simonetta Menossi, Dimitrious Pavlounis, Emily Saidel, and Marissa Spada. A very special thanks to the graduate students at NYU-Italian Studies during my tenure as a Tiro a Segno Fellow. Their contributions to our seminar on 1920s masculinity were extraordinary. I am happy to single out particularly Noelle Griffis, Karen Graves, Marcella Martin, and Jacobus “Jaap” Verheul.

Tracking film prints and photographs has not been terribly difficult because I have been aided by talented and professional researchers and archivists. I wish to thank Nico de Klerk, Ronny Temme, Jan-Hein Bal, Leontien Bout, and Annette Schulz from the EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam); Gabrielle Claes, Jean-Paul Dorchain, Jill De Wolf, and Clémentine De Blieck at the Cinematek (Brussels); the archivists at the Cinémathèque française (Paris) and the Centre national du cinéma et de limage animée (CNC; Bois dArcy); and Maria Chiba and Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films (Paris). I am grateful also for the help I received from

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii the Cineteca di Bologna, especially Andrea Meneghelli; and from the Museo del Cinema (Turin), especially Roberta Basano, Paola Bortolaso, Carla Ceresa, and Donata Pesenti Campagnoni. At the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I was lucky to be aided by Stacey Behlmer, Marisa Duron, Faye Thompson (who went out of her way to be of help), Jonathan Wahl, and Elizabeth “Libby” Wertin. In Los Angeles I also worked fruitfully at the UCLA Film & Television Archive Research and Study Center (ARSC) and at the University of Southern Californias Cinematic Arts Library. At the Museum of Modern Art, I relied on the superb professionalism of Ashley Swinnerton. At the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) at the Library of Congress, Rosemary C. Hanes suggested a wealth of titles and research paths.

For research into paper documents, I am also grateful to the archivists at the Special Collections at UCLA, USC, the University of Chicago, the Center for Oral History at Columbia University, the Baker Library at Harvard University, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton, and the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. My research was also fruitful at the Center for Migration Studies (Staten Island), thanks to Mary Elizabeth Brown, and at the Archivio Prezzolini (Biblioteca Cantonale, Lugano), with the help of Diana Rüesch and Karin Stefanski. In Rome, I spent an amazingly productive summer because of the generous assistance of Loredana Magnanti, Vincenzo Troianiello, and Alberto Cau of the Archivio Storico Capitolino; Caterina Arfé of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Stefania Ruggeri and Paola Busonero of the Archivio Storico Diplomatico of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri. They went out of their way to accommodate my endless requests and my often difficult schedule.

For help with the process of reproduction and publication permissions, I am grateful to Giuseppe D’Errico of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Rome; Nicola Immediato of the Archivio Storico Capitolino (Rome); Daniela Loyola and Paolo Danilo Audino of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato; Jean-Paul Dorchain of the Cinematek (Brussels); Kristine Krueger and Faye Thompson of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Thomas Lisanti and Jeremy Megraw of the New York Public Library; Rosemary Hanes of the Library of Congress; and Ashley Swinnerton of MoMA.

I began giving talks on the subject back in 2001, at Berkeley, when I was invited by Barbara Spackman. That initial talk became my first essay on the topic, which I published in the Journal of Urban History in 2005 in a special issue edited by Donna Gabaccia, who had also invited me to present it at the University of Pittsburgh. Barbara and Donna, along with Gaylyn Studlar, Jacqueline Reich, Ruth Ben Ghiat, and Giuliana Muscio, taught me in countless ways how to research male stardom and political authority. Gaylyn also generously gifted me her splendid collection of photographs of Valentino. Over the years, I presented various iterations of my research at different institutions and conferences at Harvard University, the Calandra Institute for Italian American Studies, the Columbia Film xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Seminar, New York University, Tiro a Segno Club (New York), the University of Turin, the University of Maryland, Ohio State University, the University of Notre Dame, Michigan State University, Oxford University, the University of Southern California, and the Columbia University Seminar in Modern Italian Studies. I wish to thank the organizers of these invited talks, particularly Krin Gabbard and William Luhr; Stefano Albertini and Ruth Ben Ghiat; Anthony J. Tamburri, Fred Gardaphé, and Joseph Sciorra; Silvio Alovisio and Giulia Carluccio; Saverio Giovacchini and Elizabeth Papazian; Lucy Fisher and Mark Lynn Anderson; Gaoheng Zhang; Joseph Francese and Joshua Yumibe; Dana Renga; Zygmunt Baranski and John P. Welle; Alessandro Carlucci, Guido Bonsaver, and Matthew Reza; and Ernest Ialongo. I also had the fortune of presenting my work at a few Society for Cinema and Media Studies meetings. I wish to thank the participants for their cogent questions, which made me rethink assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in ways that I treasure as models of scholarly exchange and growth.

A number of colleagues and friends have provided encouragement, information, and advice. They may not know, but their contributions at different stages have helped me in no small measure to complete the work. For this, I wish to thank Mark Lynn Anderson, Jennifer Bean, Guido Bonsaver, Francesco Casetti, Sue Collins, Mark Garret Cooper, Kathryn Cramer-Brownell, Raffaele De Berti, Simone Cinotto, Yvonne Elet, Jane Gaines, Ken Garner, Lee Grieveson, Charlie Keil, Rob King, Marcia Landy, Emily Leider, Denis Lotti, Stefano Luconi, Giovanni Montessori, Burton Peretti, Ivelise Perniola, Francesco Pitassio, Matteo Pretelli, Dana Renga, Steven J. Ross, and Matthew Solomon. In particular, Silvio Alovisio, Luca Mazzei, and Giuliana Muscio have been extraordinarily generous with their time and knowledge in replying quickly to my innumerable queries. Gian Piero Brunetta has been unwavering in his support of this project and a model of research curiosity and argumentative lucidity through his many essays on Hollywood and Fascist Italy. Needless to say, however, whatever is on the page is my sole responsibility.

A very special thank-you goes to Richard Abel, who read the manuscript twice (!) and provided masterful feedback and much needed encouragement. Thank you also to Ferdinando “Nando” Fasce (University of Genoa), whom I contacted for his inspiring research on American business and cultural history (and its relationship with Italy). Without ever meeting with me, Nando offered very productive feedback and was a model of long-distance scholarly collegiality. I am also grateful for the productive feedback I received from two anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript for the University of California Press. To put it simply, this book would not exist without Raina Polivka. As the acquisition editor for Film Studies at the University of California Press, she showed an immediate appreciation of the project’s design and appeal, as well as its significance in our fraught media and political climate. I feel very lucky that our collaboration, which started long ago, will continue with the series Cinema Cultures in Contact, coedited with Richard

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XV

Abel and Matthew Solomon, for which this study constitutes the opening volume. At the Press I also relied on Jessica Moll and Elena Bellaart, who did a superb job in overseeing the production process, and on Barbara Armentrout for a truly masterful copyediting. I am grateful to Jessica, Elena and Raina for shepherding the volume through the complex, but most rewarding, process of digital publication. The volume appears in the open-access platform Luminos thanks to a generous Open Access Monograph Publication Initiative Subvention from the University of Michigan.

For personal hospitality, I am grateful to Stefano Bottoni, who provided a Mantuan haven in Brussels, to Ingalisa Schrobsdorff, who arranged for my stay in Washington, DC, to C. Paul Sellors and Ken Garner, who accompanied me in my Dutch and Parisian travels, and to Pierluigi Ercole for being always there. These close friends constantly encouraged me. In particular, Giovanni Cocconi foresaw the existence of a book after hearing me talk about this project nearly twenty years ago and never stopped demanding that his prophesy become reality. I wish to thank my families: Argia Lavagnini, Davide and Elena Presutti, Enzo and Benedetta Bertellini, Irma and Teresa Lavagnini, and Giorgio Cattapan for countless errands and forms of support. Your affection continues to sustain me. Thank you also to Jennifer, Mark, Mayya, and Suheil Kawar for welcoming me into their lives and for their splendid hospitality in Washington, DC, and Beirut. Finally, my greatest debt is to my wife, Leila Kawar, who has not only taught me about politics and public life but also showered me with love, loyalty, and trust while pretending that my prose was always fine and my cooking amazing.

Introduction

“Nothing Like Going to an Authority!”

This element of “Caesarism” is ineradicable (in mass states).

MAX WEBER, 1918'

What problems does foreignness solve for us? [. . .] Is foreignness a site at which certain anxieties of democratic self-rule are managed?

BONNIE HONIG, DEMOCRACY AND THE FOREIGNER, 20017

STARS’ SOVEREIGNTY

In February 1927, in a photograph published in Motion Picture Magazine, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks appeared in the pleasurable company of friends and colleagues amidst ocean breezes on sun-kissed sands at their beachfront property near Laguna Beach. It seemed a serene and much-deserved escape from their bustling careers. Yet, even a casual magazine reader likely could not help but notice that the image told more than the story of two stars’ belated vacation at their second home. Most of the individuals, including Pickford and Fairbanks, smiled for the camera while proudly raising their right arm and stretching their hand to the sky (figure 1).3 A long caption identified their distinct gesture as the “Fascisti salute” and explained that “Doug” and “Mary” used it to “greet visitors at their beach camp in true Italian style” after learning it in Italy during a meeting with none other than Benito Mussolini.

Less than a year earlier, in the spring of 1926, the two Hollywood royals had paid a much-advertised visit to Italy, with stops in Florence, Naples, and Rome, where they expressed enthusiasm for Fascism.‘ In the capital, they met with the Italian dictator, and Pickford greeted the press with what a local daily described as a “saluto fascista.” Likewise, before readying himself for the camera, Fairbanks “proudly placed the fascist pin in his buttonhole, promising to carry it in and out of Italy, as long as he was in Europe,’ to his wifes approving nod.’ Their various public engagements, including a visit to the Circus Maximus and the Imperial Fora, where they posed doing the Fascist salute, were the subject of intense coverage and visual display (figures 2 and 3).°

The meeting with the Duce most likely occurred on May 10, 1926.’ It lasted only fifteen minutes, from 4:30 p.m. to 4:45 p.m., but it gained wide (albeit brief) notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic.’ At Palazzo Chigi, the headquarters of the ithe) Eeoae aaa. Mary and! Daa laara kin Baly from Alc seclici:t) There's ating like soing fa an Authority!) “Aud: now wih their comping, party they greet visitors. at their beach camp in true italian style. Right to left are Mary, Doug, Betty Bronson, Doce Junior, Ted Reed, of the Fairbanks production department, Mrs. Elizabeth Caméron, Mary's secretary, and Roger Lewis of the Fairbanks’ scenario lepartment

Ds ot

FIGURE 1. Pickford, Fairbanks, and friends giving the Fascisti salute, 1927. “Mrs. Doug,” Motion Picture Magazine, February 1927, 58.

FIGURE 2. Douglas Fairbanks in Rome at the FIGURE 3. On a visit to the Roman Forum, Circo Massimo. Douglas Fairbanks Collection, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks give the General Publicity, Academy of Motion Pictures Fascist salute. I] Messaggero, April 29, 1926, 5. Arts and Sciences. Courtesy of AMPAS. Courtesy of Archivio Storico Capitolino, Rome.

Italian government, Mussolini received the two celebrities and conversed with them about moving pictures. He also asked them to use their contacts with the American press to publicize that, contrary to rumor, he and the Italian nation were in great physical and economic health. Italian and American newspapers reported the participants’ mutual displays of respect and exquisite courtesy. They made it clear that the Duce was no less a star than the Hollywood couple, as his guests had recognized when they arrived in Italy. To Italian reporters, Fairbanks confessed his awe of the Duce’s exceptionally energetic personality (“like an airplane propeller”) and charisma (“all you need is to look at him to realize that”).° Similarly, the New York Times duly reported that Fairbanks expressed admiration for “the progress and modernity of Italy” but was much more expansive in recounting how the American actor treated the Duce like a film star. “I have seen you often in the movies,” Fairbanks allegedly gushed, “but I like you better in real life” For his part, Mussolini did not hesitate to treat his celebrity guests as his fans and offered them a Hollywood-like gift: his autographed photograph.”

In 1927, the Motion Picture Magazine caption reminded readers of that special moment and included the memorable line “There’s nothing like going to an authority!” Historians may not be able to identify who uttered the striking phrase; it may have even been an editorial flourish. Considering the arranged unanimity of the gestures and that Pickford and Fairbanks were the hosts, parents, or employers of the scene’s other participants, it is likely that the caption expressed the sentiments of one or the other. No matter who signed off on the caption, in theory, the image and the well-documented Roman meeting with Mussolini should have disturbed contemporary observers. After all, just a few years earlier, Pickford and Fairbanks had raised millions of dollars for Woodrow Wilson's “war for democracy” against Europe's autocratic regimes. Something had changed; now they were publicly flaunting their personal encounter with Europe’s most flamboyant dictator. The unusual pairing of the erstwhile democrats with the authoritarian leader did not provoke outrage or protests—except among a few antifascist dissenters. Instead, the visit summoned curiosity and marvel, as if it were a natural meeting of like-minded celebrities.

The meeting did not have the same meaning for the two parties. The pro-regime Italian press was enthusiastic about the Hollywood duo’s visit since it meant a Hollywood homage to both the archeological beauty of old Italy and Mussolini’s modernizing aspirations. It was an endorsement that the Italian dictator took great pride in, considering the couple’s international fame. Yet, what was the meeting’s significance for Pickford and Fairbanks as American celebrities? What exactly could the notion of “authority,” conventionally associated with political leadership, bestow upon them in the Hollywood context?

In this study, I assume that what occurred in Rome had much more than anecdotal significance. Instead, it revealed a morphological kinship between the popularity of the Hollywood royals and the authority of the Italian dictator. It was a newsworthy event that, I argue, rested on two converging historical phenomena: the rising political import of celebrity culture and the growing popularity of authoritarian political leadership. Even in their contingency, the widely advertised Roman meeting, the Los Angeles beach scene, and the caption reveal the increasing public significance of both film stars and political leaders beyond their respective realms of screen and political culture. This contention begs several questions. How was it possible that in apparently nativist and isolationist 1920s America, a foreign leader like Mussolini, who never set foot in the country, could become a paragon of authoritative leadership? Why did the praise for a foreign dictator's authority in political and popular culture develop at the same time when access to suffrage and civil rights (i.e., the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment), employment opportunities, and consumer choices were expanding? When and how did film stardom and political leadership, as apparently distinct institutions of mass governance, become comparable, parallel, and analogous? Was this phenomenon specifically linked to the immediate postwar period and to the 1920s? After all, about a dozen years later, when the Duce had become widely seen as “a blowhard whose strutting often inspired derisive cackles,” the more ominous Hitler was widely known in America but almost invisible on American screens. U.S. newsreel editors declared taboo most shots of Hitler, not just the close-ups, as his chilling and provocative authority was not to be publicized.”

One approach to comparing Mussolini with 1920s Hollywood stars would rely on a tempting, but limiting, side-by-side analysis of personal charm and appealing performative style. Inherent in this celebrity-centered comparative reading is a top-down approach to stars’ relationship to their followers. Cultural historians might instead argue that personal charisma and performances matter a great deal, but they ought to be placed in dialogue with the social and cultural circumstances that enable certain individuals to emerge as popular authoritarian figures. While I find both the top-down and the culturalist approaches to be productive, I argue that what is needed is a third, complementary one. Comparisons of famous and charismatic individuals in different countries, in fact, overlook the most consistent factor of their popularity: namely, how distinct publicity practices shape stars’ media representations. The effectiveness of these practices is itself informed both by the stars’ charisma and broad social and cultural dynamics, but their mediating role deserves close attention.

Preliminary definitions of publicity are in order. In 1968, historian Alan R. Raucher noted that as a modern profession publicity “sprang from multiple antecedents [. . .] not entirely separate, including press-agentry and advertising, from which in the early 1920s it sought to assert itself?’ Press agentry was a theatrical, ostensibly vulgar, Barnum-like mode of influencing the press with free publicity, often by way of monetary compensation, and was already being practiced during election campaigns. Advertising, in contrast, was a much more explicit strategy of conveying information toward a straightforward commercial goal: promoting and selling products or services. By the early twentieth century, these activities, as well as their names, oscillated between information and commerce, news and products, facts and promotion. At the same time, while indebted to practices of press agentry and advertising, the dissemination of information for promotional purposes also represented a reaction to the news-making practices of Progressive muckraking. Initially Progressives had denounced corporate “secrecy” as detrimental to the public interest. Reacting to these charges, corporations began making use of publicity strategies to defend themselves against damaging criticism. They hired publicity specialists, variously known as “publicity experts” or “specialists in relations with customers,” and “came to sponsor the largest and most important experiments in publicity before 1917’

This date was not a random choice. Raucher points to the start of a process that was eventually affected by a watershed moment in American media history. The US. government’s 1917 decision to enter World War I mobilized a massive institutional and commercial apparatus of pro-American initiatives both domestically and internationally. Publicity was not unknown to the film industry or to political campaigning, of course. Even before there was a Hollywood, moving picture companies had realized that publicity practices could expand the popular aura of screen actors beyond their film roles. Similarly, since the turn of the century, presidential contenders, from the publicity-obsessed Theodore Roosevelt to the media-shy Woodrow Wilson, had turned to publicity strategists to manufacture and broadcast narratives, images, and slogans about their politics and about themselves. The publicity machine of the Great War, however, generated an entire repertoire of new practices of mass communication and public opinion management. In the short term, the war-fueled publicity machine engaged Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and William S. Hart into serving the national interest by selling Liberty Bonds and promoting Wilson to new heights of domestic and, especially, international celebrity. This was a safe, patriotic—and thus virtually unanimous—cause, but a political one nonetheless. In the longer term, such innovations taught the burgeoning film and public relations industry that, through skillful publicity, stars and public leaders could sell a whole range of political and cultural ideas to the public in America and overseas. In ways that became more systematic, institutionalized, and transnational after the Great War, the success of stars’ and politicians’ public management brought mass entertainment, politics, and news ever closer and inaugurated the familiar crisscrossing of attributes between popular and political stardom on both domestic and international ground.

The Divo and the Duce studies how the public notoriety of Hollywood actor Rudolph Valentino, the “Divo,” and Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, the “Duce,” indexed and shaped a broad range of 1920s celebrity-centered publicity initiatives that interwove news-making, media economics, and political communication. While it is attentive to their distinct career trajectories, my approach shows that, despite never having met each other, the Divo and the Duce form a productive pairing. For a few years, from the very early 1920s to Valentino's untimely death in 1926, the two Italian-born icons showcased a comparable type of fame that exceeded each man’s respective domain. With the 1921 release of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, the ideal and passionate lover Valentino was promoted as Hollywood's first truly foreign star. His fame was not limited to fantasies of screen romance. In carefully managed pronouncements to the press, he spoke against womens rights, democracy, the Hollywood industry, and even American masculinity. At first glance, these were not advisable positions to hold due to the potential of alienating the moviegoing public. At the same time, however, Valentino did not touch upon what Thomas Doherty defines as “the controversial issues and causes célèbres of the 1920s—immigration restriction, labor strikes, or [the long public trial against] the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti?” And neither did Mussolini, who, whatever his domestic agenda, was careful not to meddle in American politics, which would have risked damaging his political and diplomatic relationships with U.S. officials.” Still, after the October 1922 March on Rome, the large-jawed, Caesar-like Duce was widely promoted in America not just as anti- Communist exemplar but also as a paragon of antidemocratic male leadership. His fame lasted for little more than a decade, until Italy’s imperial campaigns in East Africa in 1935-36 and his concurrent formation of the Axis alliance with Hitler. Throughout the 1920s, though, Mussolini’s name, image, and opinions pervaded American media through interviews, syndicated columns, (auto)biographical accounts, books, and films. Popular media broadcast his authoritative pronouncements—which Valentino appeared to share—about modern leadership and the importance of traditional gender roles.

With different degrees of success, official and unofficial publicity agents— whether filmmakers, journalists, ambassadors, or newspapers editors—established and managed the Italian duo’s public personas. By repurposing the public relations practices used during World War I and working in the service of press syndicates, Hollywood studios, and business conglomerates, these publicity enablers had diverse purposes that ranged from journalistic self-advocacy to studio advertisements to political and financial gain. I shall refer to them as the architects of ballyhoo, to use a 1920s expression popularized by writer and publicist Silas Bent.” Whatever their individual agendas, their work shared a common repertoire of journalistic and narrative techniques. Of these, the most sensational and Boorstinian one—the publicity stunt—bestowed upon the Divo and the Duce the authority to shape consumer choices and manage modern crowds at home and abroad.”

Focusing on the promotional activities around these two foreign-born celebrities provides significant advantages. First, by looking at Valentino and Mussolini as a pair, and not as representatives of the distinct domains of entertainment and politics, I aim to foster a dialogue between the usually divergent disciplines of film and political studies. These scholarly disciplines have looked at the Divo and the Duce, respectively, as a subversive model of masculinity (film and cultural studies) and as a popular anti-Red Scare icon (history; political studies). Pairing them offers new insights into one of the earliest interweavings of film stardom and political leadership in the emerging celebrity-centered media economy that shaped advertising, news-making, and political communication. As Graeme Turner has noted, the success of celebrity culture is rooted in its ability to “generate large amount of content” and “secure a relationship of interdependency between media outlets?” Over the course of my research, the popularity of Valentino and Mussolini, especially in their outspoken endorsement of antidemocratic governmentality, revealed the emergence of a novel public discourse about authority and citizenship.