That time White Deer ridiculed the Black Shirts

In six months of life as a nabob, praised as a patron and revered as a prince, he had made the equivalent of over a million euros today disappear in revelry and prodigality. Not his money, obviously. In the Italy of 1924, shaken by the Matteotti crime, what catalysed the attention of non-criminal news was in fact the exotic figure of the self-styled last leader of the American Indians, Cervo Bianco, who arrived in Europe according to him to plead before the League of Nations for the because of the natives and ended up in the Bel Paese regimented in a black shirt to pull off a sensational scam in the wake of a collective psychosis. White Deer is actually Edgard Laplante. The mother is Indian but he is not an Iroquois prince at all; his father, Canadian, was a simple bricklayer. In life he made do with shows, selling concoctions as a barker and raising funds for the Red Cross, which he regularly put into his pocket, and as an extra for the nascent film industry. He plays the Indian, and he does it well.

The meeting with a countess who falls in love with him

Chance puts the goose that lays the golden eggs in his hands in the form of the very rich Countess Antonia Khevenhüller who has fallen in love with him, who has a wife left in America, Bertha, and another in England, Ethel Elizabeth, married June 1923 under the assumed name of Tewanna Ray. Laplante met the Austrian nobles Antonia and Melania Khevenhüller, daughter and mother, in Nice: they were on holiday and the American was engaged in a show in which he wore an Indian chief’s dress inside which he kept the Lafayette Warehouse label which he they packaged and which has reached the present day, exhibited at the “Cesare Lombroso” Museum of Cultural Anthropology. As a perfect barker, he convinces the two aristocrats that he is what he is not, boasting of unheard of riches that are unfortunately temporarily blocked in Great Britain, and so he follows them in June to Italy where the two women have their properties. They put at his disposal not only their villa in Fiumicello, near Trieste, but also their money, which he spends and spreads with generous prodigality: this is truly princely.

A season as a nabob squandering his lover’s fortune

He spends the summer on the Ligurian Riviera, in September he moves to Tuscany, at sumptuous lunches and dinners he eats with refinement and drinks like a cowboy, and on the 2nd at the Hotel Danieli he celebrates his thirty-sixth birthday by giving away money as if it were confetti. Not only the countess but the people like it. It ends up in the newspapers, everyone talks about it. He immediately becomes a character, idolized by the crowds for his habit of throwing banknotes and coins from the balcony or from the luxury car, and also by fascism which sees in the exaltation of the pseudo philanthropist the opportunity to regain a virginity that he does not have after the killing of Giacomo Matteotti. In Ancona there is a jubilation of the crowd, in Bari the same, everywhere the hierarchs compete to be photographed together with the Red Indian prince who is also issued a membership card to the National Fascist Party. Everyone falls into the seductive net woven by the irresistible adventurer, enchanted by his words as a philanthropist and by his generosity: Italians want to dream, the Thousand Lire a Month of the song (1938) are distant not only in time, but Laplante is capable of spending them in an evening or to give them as gifts.

The meeting with Mussolini collapsed at the last moment and was denied by Pope Pius XI

In Florence, Richard Ginori, during a visit to his laboratories, had a porcelain bust made which reproduces the features of White Deer in real size; in Fiume which he will reach from Trieste by seaplane to commemorate the feat of Gabriele d’Annunzio and the Flight over Vienna, they proclaim him an “honorary fascist”. He had managed to reach Benito Mussolini in Rome, but an unexpected event due to an institutional commitment of the head of government had caused that meeting to be cancelled; Pope Pius XI, much more prudent, had not received him and had limited himself to sending him an autographed photo of himself. Of the stage in Cagliari, a triumph, writes Emilio Lussu. On October 28, on the occasion of the anniversary of the March on Rome, he delivers a speech that inflames the Black Shirts. And in the meantime he spends, gives away, promises, reassures, cajoles, he doesn’t care about the money that flies away because it isn’t his anyway.

The complaint, the arrest and the double prison sentence

It can’t last, and it doesn’t last. Antonia is no longer willing to tolerate his escapades, which must be neither few nor high-level, if it is true as it is true that he has contracted syphilis. Giorgio Kevenhüller, Antonia’s brother, has just returned from a safari in Africa and notices the monstrous hole in the family’s accounts for what in theory should be a loan. In December 1924 Laplante, kicked out of the villa in Fiumicello, was in Turin and after a short stay in a hotel he was admitted to a sanatorium for venereal disease. Here he is served with a deportation order and on the 13th he goes to nearby Switzerland, to Bellinzona, with a 5-day tourist visa, then to Lugano. But now everything is going to pieces for him. Even Antonia has opened her eyes to her account and to the boasts about the Royal Court and the Prince of Wales who should unlock her stratospheric wealth: in London they know nothing about it. He was denounced by his ex-lover and his brother for fraud and in June 1926 the Lugano court sentenced him to one year in prison: he told the judges that Cervo Bianco was just the name of one of his characters that he continued to play on the stage of life , as an artist. A play, in short.

When he is released from prison, branded as a chronic liar with a histrionic personality, he is taken over by the Italian justice system. The curtain falls on the roaring times of “homage from authority, escorts of honour, ringing of bells, banquets and invitations” and “generous oblations and the fake papal blessing”, as La Stampa writes. In October he ends up behind bars in Turin. The judges gave him five years in prison, but he would serve less than three. In his cell he will have as his fellow prisoner the anti-fascist Massimo Mila who will collect his confidences which he will talk about much later to Ernesto Ferrero, who will write the book “The Year of the Indian” (Einaudi, 2001). Laplante died in Phoenix, United States, in 1944. He was survived by the fable of the White Deer and that of the great collective illusion. As Oreste del Buono and Giorgio Boatti wrote with insight, the Italians of 1924 “invented” Cervo Bianco because «they needed someone onto whom they could project their confused desire for pomp and adventure, a magician who would heal them from the mediocrity of their present, someone to applaud for merits that no one knew exactly, and which consisted mainly of fabulous wealth.”