Marilee Kemp and Count Bruno Portomaggiore

Marilee Kemp and Count Bruno Portomaggiore enter a marriage shaped by fascist politics rather than sexual romance: Bruno tells Marilee that he is attracted to men, and Mussolini orders him to marry her as public proof against accusations about his sexuality. Their arrangement gives Marilee a period of comfort and affectionate companionship, but its legal conditions and political purpose eventually prompt her to refuse Bruno’s proposal. In retrospect, she describes the Italian people, not her husband, as her true lifelong companion.

How the Marriage Begins

After Dan Gregory and Fred Jones are killed, Marilee becomes a celebrated figure in Rome. Mussolini’s government presents her, Gregory, and Jones as American celebrities endorsing Italy’s claimed national transformation. The publicity elevates Marilee from the dismissive identity others had assigned her to a figure displayed as a jewel in the dictator’s political spectacle. Gregory and Jones, required to treat her more respectfully in public, find the reversal confusing; Marilee enjoys the change in her standing.

After Gregory’s death, Bruno, the unmarried Minister of Culture, becomes Marilee’s regular escort. He tells her that he cannot have a physical relationship with her because he is sexually interested in men and boys. Though that preference is a capital offense if acted upon, Bruno believes Mussolini will protect him: he is the old aristocracy’s sole member to accept a high government office and openly admires the dictator. Marilee regards him as vain and ridiculous, but he is also, as she later recognizes, the head of British Intelligence in Italy.

Bruno and Marilee spend their time shopping and dancing. He enjoys her company, treats her as a gentleman, and grants her wishes; she remembers him as amusing, kind, and flattering. This intimacy is affectionate without being sexual, and Marilee says she does not care about the uniforms and insignia that surround his public role. The emblems of politics and warfare remain, to her, largely separate from the pleasure of their shared life.

Political Purpose and Legal Terms

The marriage is not simply Bruno’s private choice. Mussolini orders his Minister of Culture to marry Marilee, both to answer allegations that Bruno is homosexual and to place the American actress within the regime’s public image. Marilee later says that Gregory urged her to marry Bruno if she had any love for America. Her transformation into the Contessa Portomaggiore is therefore bound to overlapping political pressures: the regime’s need for appearances, Gregory’s appeal to patriotism, and Bruno’s position as a government minister.

Mussolini also gives Bruno a document for Marilee to sign, designed to quiet aristocrats who would object to an American woman inheriting their estates. Under its terms, she would hold Bruno’s property for life if he died, but could neither sell it nor leave it to anyone else. At her death, the estate would pass to Bruno’s nearest male relative, an automobile dealer in Milan. The provisions make the limits of her security explicit: the title and wealth may be hers to use, but not to control or transmit.

Marilee’s Refusal and Return

Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Bruno proposes marriage and offers Marilee the document. She refuses, thanking him for a happiness she had never known before. The proposal and its accompanying terms awaken her from what she calls a dream; she decides it is time to return to the United States and confront who she is, although she has no home there. The marriage’s material comfort and genuine kindness do not overcome her sense that its terms cannot determine her future.

Her decision is unsettled by the political atmosphere in Rome. The morning after she becomes excited about going home, the news of Pearl Harbor reaches her by radio. The American Embassy announces plans to arrange transportation for American citizens in Italy, while the Italian government responds that the countries’ ties of blood and history should not be broken to satisfy its political enemies. Marilee’s intended departure thus coincides with an international crisis that sharpens the pressures surrounding her American identity and her life in Italy.

Marilee does not learn until the war is nearly over that Bruno is a British agent. She says the revelation makes little impression: his intelligence work, like the military decorations on his uniforms, seems to her like another emblem of warfare, largely unrelated to their companionship. When Bruno is shot, she expects to feel a terrible emptiness but does not. She instead recognizes that her enduring companion and mate is the Italian people, whose affection she returns. Looking back, she calls herself home and credits Gregory’s instability, and the chain of events it set in motion, with bringing her there. The marriage is therefore both a genuine period of happiness and a relationship she can leave behind without mistaking its comfort for her deepest belonging.