La Compagna

In Italy's postwar Constituent Assembly one day in 1946, the roving eye of Communist Leader Palmiro Togliatti came to rest on one of the comrades. "Let's move down a couple of benches," Togliatti suggested to an aide. "I want to sit opposite that comrade with the pretty legs." It was a fateful move.

Two years later, as Togliatti was leaving Rome's Chamber of Deputies, pistol shots cracked in the heavy July air, and Togliatti fell wounded. With a scream of horror, a woman darted forward and flung herself protectively over Togliatti's body. The madman assassin, betrayed perhaps by chivalrous instincts, hesitated to shoot again, and was caught. The comrade with the pretty legs had saved Togliatti's life.

Moving In. By that time Comrade Leonilde Jotti, graduate of a Roman Catholic university in Milan, onetime language teacher, wartime partisan and postwar Red Deputy, had become Togliatti's mistress, though 27 years his junior. So completely did the buxom, black-haired girl from Reggio Emilia capture the affections and feed the ego of the brilliant, moody Togliatti that he got a legal separation from his wife, Rita Mon-tagnana, a white-haired intellectual, and went off to live with Nilde Jotti in a high-walled villa on Rome's Monte Sacro (Sacred Mountain).

The relationship violated the precepts of both church and state, but it got the sanction of the Central Committee of the Italian Communist Party in closed session. Nilde Jotti became known everywhere, even in the pages of the party newspaper L'Unita, as "la Compagna" (the companion) of Togliatti. She traveled with Togliatti to Russia as his "secretary" while Stalin was alive. After Stalin's death, Georgy Malenkov publicly referred to her as Togliatti's "companion," and Anastas Mikoyan even introduced her as "Mrs. Togliatti."

At first, voters of Reggio Emilia's deeply Red 13th district were flattered to have so important a personage as la Compagna as one of their Deputies in Rome. They voted her into Parliament in 1948 and 1953 by handy margins. But as the years passed and Nilde lived high on the remote Sacred Mountain, local Red leaders began to grumble: she spent too much time in Rome and neglected her own people. Legally married Communist wives resented Nilde's special position. Scurrilous jokes circulated about the affair of Togliatti, now 65, and Nilde, 38. And there was the question of the $64,000. In twelve years as a Deputy, Nilde Jotti had made only eight speeches, all brief and all cliches denouncing NATO "imperialism." The local Reds calculated that her pay for each of those eight speeches was $8,000. When the time came to name candidates for next week's general elections, the Reds in the 13th district refused to accept Nilde Jotti as one of their candidates.

Putting on Airs. Rather than risk an open battle, the ailing Togliatti found Nilde a presumably safe seat next door in Communist-run Bologna. But last week in the new district, the old resentment still showed. Local Reds complained that a hard-working Communist Deputy had been moved away to make room for Nilde. Plain folks muttered that Nilde was putting on airs, acting like "some kind of first lady of Communism." At a "Vote for Nilde" rally, only 200 turned up and were clearly bored by Nilde's schoolmarmly lectures on the "dangers" of U.S. missile bases. "But she'll be elected anyway,'' sighed one Bologna politico. "When she finishes talking about international affairs, along comes a local Communist to tell about all the public lavatories the Reds have built in Bologna. That's what wins votes here for all the Communist candidates, even la Compagna.'"

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