Rome

Rome is where Marilee Kemp’s life changes from a public performance arranged by fascist propaganda into a more private life of companionship and a consequential wartime choice. In her account, the city makes her a celebrated American alongside Dan Gregory and Fred Jones, gives her a place among its social elite, and becomes the setting for her relationship with Count Bruno. Pearl Harbor changes the meaning of departure: just as she resolves to return to the United States, an American official asks her to remain in Italy and use her standing with the government.

A Propaganda Stage

Before the United States entered the war, Marilee, Dan Gregory, and Fred Jones arrived in Italy to an enthusiastic public reception. Mussolini presented the trio as evidence of a spiritual, physical, and economic Italian miracle that could serve as a model for the world. Their celebrity was political as well as personal: their presence was used to suggest American admiration for the regime.

Rome’s public attention altered Marilee’s status. The press and social events treated her with the respect due a famous actress, replacing the dismissive identity she says she had been given in the United States. She enjoyed the reversal. As a blonde, she was often placed first when the group made an entrance, with Dan and Fred following as her entourage. This arrangement unsettled the two men, who had to defer to her in public, while Marilee took pleasure in the recognition.

The city also offered her a new language and a visible place in society. She learned Italian quickly, soon speaking it better than Dan, who had studied it in New York; Fred never learned it. These details distinguish her from her companions: in Rome she was not merely the beautiful figure in their publicity, but a capable participant in the social world that surrounded them.

Social Life and Marriage

After Dan and Fred were killed, Marilee remained a celebrated figure in Rome. She described herself as the toast of the city and recalled shopping and dancing with Count Bruno, who enjoyed her company and treated her as a gentleman. Their shared pleasure in dancing gave her a life she remembered as unusually happy. The account presents Rome not only as a political spectacle, but as the setting for affection and ease after the deaths of her American companions.

That private life was nevertheless entangled with the regime. Marilee said that Mussolini ordered Bruno, his Minister of Culture, to marry her, amid suspicions about Bruno’s sexuality and whether he was a British spy. The marriage was accompanied by a document restricting what Marilee could do with Bruno’s property: she would possess it for life if he died, but could neither sell it nor pass it on, after which it would go to his nearest male relative. Bruno’s apparent status and their comfortable life therefore existed within political arrangements over which Marilee had limited control.

Marilee did not learn until the war was nearly over that Bruno was a British agent. At the time, she thought him weak and foolish, but forgave what she saw as his shortcomings because he was kind to her and they lived well together. Her recollection emphasizes the gap between the role he performed in public and the secret he kept, while also making clear that their companionship mattered to her on its own terms.

Departure Interrupted

Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Marilee declined Bruno’s marriage proposal, despite describing him as the only man who had ever proposed to her. She thanked him for a happiness she had never known before, but said the proposal and the document about his estate had awakened her from what felt like a dream. She wanted to return to the United States and face who she was, although she had no home waiting for her there.

The next morning, her expectation of going home collided with the political reality of Rome. After hearing the news of Pearl Harbor, she also heard that the American Embassy was planning to arrange transport for American citizens in Italy. The Italian government publicly promised to assist their departure while arguing against a mass exodus and blaming Jews, Communists, and the British Empire for calls to leave. In this atmosphere, a workman who came to discuss leaking gas pipes revealed himself, when they were alone, as an official from the United States War Department.

The official did not claim to know Marilee’s private views about democracy or fascism. He said that his duty was to ask her, for the good of the country, to stay in Italy and continue to cultivate the favor of Mussolini’s government. Marilee’s planned departure thus became a choice shaped by competing loyalties and political demands. Her transformation into the Contessa Portomaggiore was, in her account, bound up with that decision to remain.

The City in Retrospect

Marilee’s memories make Rome change character from one part of her story to another. It first magnifies her into a propaganda symbol; then it provides a social life in which she dances with Bruno and feels valued; finally, it becomes the place where the news from Pearl Harbor and the American request to stay redirect her future. The city’s hospitality is never separate from the politics that made her useful to Mussolini’s government.

Her later account also recasts the people around her. Dan and Fred had been celebrated alongside her, then died fighting more or less for the Italian cause; their deaths left Marilee as a living emblem of the sacrifice and supposed American admiration that the regime had promoted. Bruno, whom she had taken for a foolish aristocrat, was revealed after the war as a British agent. Rome therefore survives in her narrative as both lived place and constructed image: a world of dances and social entrances whose public meanings were shaped by propaganda, espionage, and war.