The Ugly American

I know this blog is already getting longer than the itemized national debt, but I simply can’t resist delivering up these sparkling and pithy tableau vivant from the past. I could keep you up all night just with funny stories about Mussolini.

Here’s a good one: Did you know that the “Kosher mob” gangster and founder of that ultimate American icon, Las Vegas, Bugsy Siegel, almost blew Muss’ brains out one night at the dinner table? Here’s the 411.

There once was a lady (well, sort of a lady) who was quite a character; the Countess Carla Dentice di Frasso, known as Countess Dorothy di Frasso, born Dorothy Caldwell Taylor in Watertown, New York. Like all American poor little rich girls, she just had to have a title, and Daddy’s money bought her a much older Italian gentleman, Count Dentice di Frasso. Together they poured her money into a run-down but gorgeous villa north of Rome called the Villa Madama. She had affairs with the best and brightest, devoured both Hollywood and Gary Cooper, and was a regular in what was once known as “cafe society.” (That's a photo of her and the Coop.)

But after Coop, the biggest love of her life was Bugsy Siegel, gangster, professional killer, the blue-eyed Lothario who had all the starlets swooning when his New York bosses sent him to Hollywood. Of course, he had a nice Jewish wife he kept tucked away in New Jersey with his two daughters, but, like the Countess, he didn’t let it cramp his style. Hearing that Chicago was going to muscle in on the Hollywood rackets, one more time, (a passel of them had just been thrown in the clink for doing same to the projectionist’s union) the mobsters in New York sent Siegel out to beat them to the punch. He’d grown up in Hell’s Kitchen with actor George Raft, who was mucho big at the time; Raft got him into the homes, and beds, of some of L.A.’s finest. Bugsy went totally Hollywood. In fact, he became so vain he was constantly applying cosmetics to his skin and his, he feared, thinning hair. Which didn’t, of course, mean that he ever went anywhere unarmed.

That’s because he was also a Grade A sociopath, one of the founders of Murder, Incorporated.


But la Countess thought she could make a gentlemen of Bugs. Unfortunately, traveling abroad (so to speak) and dating a countess hadn’t really broadened him much. In fact, he knew about as much about international relations as Warren Christopher. And so, he wasn’t really aware of the fact that the Axis powers, prodded by Germany, had declared war on “World Jewry.” The Japs, of course, had never even seen a Jew. The story is not apocryphal that, before the signing of the Tripartite Pact, the Japanese ambassador to Germany, after touring the new highways, weapons factories and buzzing nationalized industries that had bound the nation together once more in the health and joy of their shared Aryan heritage, commented, “Yes, it’s a wonderful system. But we don’t have any Jews.”

Juden Raus! The hot board game for Nazi kids in 1936. Really.

All of this is a little sad in and of itself, since Mussolini didn’t really go along for the ride on this one. In fact, most people don’t know that, in the beginning, it was Hitler who idolized Mussolini rather than the reverse, while as time passed, of course, Italy fell under Germany’s heavy-handed shadow. Of course Mussolini was a bully; his war of conquest in Ethiopia, airplanes and machine guns against spears, illustrated that full well. But despite his weaker military, Il Duce nevertheless had the balls, at first, to inform the world’s most murderous former house painter that Italy’s Jews were still Italians, and that he had no intention of turning them over to Herr Himmler. In his 18 previous years of iron rule, he’d never shown a whiff of anti-Semitism, and in fact, he made fun of Hitler’s Aryan obsession constantly. Of course, later, after relentless pressure from Berlin, he passed a pile of crap called the Manifesto of Race, stripping Italian Jews of their citizenship and barring them from government jobs. Italians were for the most part appalled. He often said later that he regretted having done it, and that race was a matter of “the heart,” rather than biology. Anti-Semitism as a national policy was never enforced much beyond this, the truth of which can be seen in the fact that there is no Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen in Tuscany. Would that Poland or the Ukraine could say the same.

Nevertheless, he was still Hitler’s closest ally and personal friend, and the countess was swelling up with “society circuit” pride that he was coming to the villa for dinner. Unfortunately, their other dinner guest that evening was that perennial Nazi favorite, Joseph Goebbels, come to soak up a little sun. So, as they were dressing for dinner, when the countess casually mentioned this little quirk of the Axis, Bugsy got very, very pissy. Already feeling she’d put her foot in her mouth, she realized she was going to get a boot up the arse if she didn’t explain it all to him.

At which point, true to his nickname, (totally bug nuts) Bugsy pulled out his favorite pocket .38 Special, waving it in the air, proclaiming that he was going to go downstairs and 'blow that goddamn Wop greaser’s brains out,' then take out the Kraut for good measure. Needless to say, this would have created something of a faux pas at the countess’ table. It took her a lot of diplomacy, and perhaps some quick intercourse, (Bugs was, as the French say, toujours prêt) to calm him down.

No question about it. Jew baiting makes for strange bedfellows.

Pauline Bonaparte & the Cult of Priapus

Or perhaps we should say le culte de priapisme, for I'm speaking of the remarkable and insatiable Pauline Bonaparte (1780 -1825), known today mostly for being Napoleon's sister, born, like him, to relative poverty as part of the very, very petty Corsican nobility. There were thirteen children in all, so it's probable that her formidable mother, Letizia, did a little penis worshipping herself. The family was only French by about a decade and a half, after France took Corsica as a colonial possession in 1768. But with Napoleon's meteoric rise, from victorious general to First Consul to emperor, Pauline followed, reveling in the life of luxury and privilege he showered on his favorite sister.

Unfortunately, she reveled in something else even more, this being her astonishing sexual appetite. She loved her brother, despite the fact that he bitched at her constantly and chose both her husbands; she hated the second one, a powerful Italian noble named the duc d'Borghese. She couldn't wait to get away from him and return to Paris. But it was while she lived with the duke in Rome, in 1804, that the great artist Canova did the sculpture above, called Venus Victrix, or Venus Victorious. A naked Pauline did the posing, which gave her stuffy brother fits.

Of course, the Lefevre painting to the left shows that she usually wasn't painted as a little shepherd girl, a la Marie Antoinette. Her face and form were legendary, and she kept her perfect complexion, all over, with a daily bath in 20 litres of milk mixed with warm water. She was always carried to the tub by one of her male servants; she had a real thing for being carried. Once, as a guest of her late husband's brother, she arrived, hauling her baggage and bathtub, and blithely requested her regular bath. He said he could provide the milk, but not the shower she liked afterwards. So she simply shrugged and had a hole knocked through the ceiling so the servants could pour the water over her. He said the place stank of rainwater and sour milk for weeks till he fixed it. But her regimen must have worked, since the men high and low lined up to be her lover. She rarely turned one away.

But they rarely lasted long. Pauline not only had an insatiable appetite, she also had an obsession with size over skill. Her physician, Dr. Peyre, was already telling her that her constant pelvic pain was due to sexual overindulgence. Unfortunately, he prescribed that she take the waters at a spa in Plombieres, and it was there, when she was supposed to be getting better, that she met Louis Phillippe, the Count de Forbin, who was apparently hung like an ox. She nailed him at once, took him home with her, made him her chamberlain, and was in constant need of his attention. Constant.

At last her pain became unbearable, and Peyre called in a famed gynacolagist and imperial physician, Dr. Halle. His diagnosis was pointed. The princess was suffering from what he called furor uterinus, an over-abused uterus and vaginal canal, which was a nice way of saying nymphomania. Apparently she was in agony, with pelvic pain, headaches and uterine spasms. In his reports to Dr. Peyre, Halle stated bluntly that she must be "saved" by being kept from the cause of the inflammation, a cause he knew full well but refused, for propriety's sake, to name.

Pauline's nickname, especially in England, was "Messalina", a rather cruel reference to the debauched and power-hungry wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. Well, maybe it was better than simply la puta, French for "the whore," although this appellation was generally reserved by the Bonaparte women for the Empress Josephine. Worse, especially in British political cartoons, she was graphically accused of having slept with her own brother, the emperor. If they can be believed in the back-stabbing atmosphere of the court, several people claimed that Josephine had told them of having caught them in the act, and in fact, Pauline never denied it.

Pauline would die a sad death at 45 of stomach cancer. But, despite her frivolity and grotesque spending habits, she was the only one of Napoleon's family who followed him into exile, even though he'd showered money and kingdoms on them all. And she had a sense of humor about her own debauched image. It often took dinner guests some time to realize that the gold cups they were drinking from, that looked so much like reproductions of ancient Roman cups, were, in fact, modeled on Pauline's breast. A glance at the cup compared to the statue above is all that's needed to prove this more than an historical myth.

Pauline, you really rocked!

A Marriage Proposal In Secret Code

This curious love letter is in the Library of Congress, and is written in a secret lover's code, undoubtedly to conceal its true meaning from the Lady's father. Read it through once, then go back and read every other line. (Click the image to make it a little clearer.)