The Press: The Ciano Story

“The war’s most devastating document! . . . Explosive! . . . Its secrets, when published, threaten to tumble still more famed figures from high places. . . . Secrets! Perfidies! Private Lives!”

So ran the Chicago Daily News’s ballyhoo on its $75,000 pride & joy: the diary of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s late son-in-law. Last week 70 U.S. papers, and 25 papers abroad, began printing it. Perhaps no document could have lived up to such advance billing; the Ciano diary did not even come close.

The News tailored the diary’s meandering 450,000 words down to a tenth of its length. It also cleaned it up. (Mussolini is quoted as calling King Vittorio Emanuele an “S.O.B.”; the News delicately notes that “the Italian term was more lurid and anatomical.”) Generally, however, the Ciano diary is a long-winded loser’s lament, repeating all the familiar whines (Italy did not want war; Germany betrayed Italy and never told the Italians anything). Its most sensational charge—that Prime Minister Chamberlain submitted a speech to the Duce before delivering it to the House of Commons—will need more documentation than the say-so of the Duce’s discredited son-in-law.

At the tidbit level, the diary does better. Ciano says that Ribbentrop bet him a collection of antique arms against an Italian painting that Britain and France would not go to war if Germany invaded Poland. (Ribbentrop never paid up.) Ciano identifies Adolf Hitler’s mistress during the summer of 1939 as one Sigrid von Lappus, and describes her as having “beautiful quiet eyes, regular features and a magnificent body.”

“Rather Bizarre.” How the diary got out is a better story than any Ciano tells. His wife, Edda Mussolini Ciano, smuggled it across the Swiss border in five thick notebooks strapped to her body beneath her skirts. Swiss guards mistakenly thought she was pregnant. According to her story, the Nazis offered her 100,000,000 gold lire ($5,000,000) for the diary. She said no. Later she offered it to Hitler and Mussolini in return for Ciano’s life—and was refused. By the time the Chicago News and three competitors put in their bids, Ciano was dead, and Edda was in no condition to talk business. The News got the diary from Edda’s Swiss lawyers.

What had happened to Edda meanwhile was told last week by the psychiatrist of the Swiss mountain sanitarium where she is confined.

Dr. André Respond, anxious to hush up local gossip about Edda’s high living, told the press: “Rumors that she escaped one night after her father’s death and returned to the clinic intoxicated are absolutely untrue. Nevertheless, Madame Ciano occasionally does behave in a rather bizarre way. For instance, she likes to walk around barefoot like a gipsy and occasionally at night she will jump from her window into the garden for a stroll in the park and forest. . . .”