Anticipation among Moscow’s pleasure seekers was high when advertisements announced the October 20 opening. One magazine even tried its hand at a jingle to capture the mood: “To Maxim’s I will go/With friends to see the show.” But a snag suddenly developed and forced Frederick to put off the opening for several weeks.
A complication that affected Maxim was the property’s location at 17 Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, between Kozitsky Lane and Glineshchevsky Lane: three churches were located nearby. (None of these survived the Soviet antireligious campaigns of the 1930s.) The Russian Orthodox Church saw theatrical performances as inherently frivolous and impious and therefore considered it highly improper to have theaters of any kind close to places of worship. Church hierarchs also insisted that theatrical performances throughout the city be suspended during major religious holidays, even if the theaters were nowhere near churches. Moscow’s secular authorities generally sided with the church, although there was some flexibility in how and when religious policies were enforced. The previous entrepreneur, Adel, had faced difficulties and restrictions because of the surrounding churches during the few seasons he tried to run Chanticleer, and now it seemed that Frederick’s turn had come.
In a case like this, everything depended on personal connections, deep pockets, or both. The Moscow city governor, Major General Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Adrianov, who also had a prestigious appointment at court in St. Petersburg as a member of His Imperial Majesty’s Suite, was officially a pillar of the establishment. He supported the church zealously and at times ordered the Moscow police to prohibit theatrical performances during major Orthodox holidays. Frederick’s desire to open a café chantant in the neighborhood of three churches thus potentially put him at odds with one of the most powerful officials in the city. But the fact that Frederick succeeded after only a brief delay, and that Maxim subsequently became one of the city’s most successful and popular nightspots until the revolution, indicates that someone pulled strings on his behalf. In fact, rumors about this appeared in Moscow’s press less than a year after Maxim opened. The “someone” was not named but was characterized as “influential” and as spending his nights “rather often” in Maxim until seven in the morning. This person was also rumored to be important enough that his activities were of some interest in St. Petersburg itself, which was beginning to look askance at the matter. This is the kind of situation that would have been kept strictly secret in imperial Russia, and there is no public evidence that city governor Adrianov himself was the influential person in question. Nevertheless, his involvement remains a possibility, as does that of someone else of high rank in the city administration, or in the police (the person in question was also clearly big enough not to be easily touchable).
Be that as it may, Frederick’s problem was soon made to disappear, and when Maxim finally opened on November 8, 1912, it was a major event in Moscow nightlife. Crowds of people showed up—from well-known devotees of all such openings to regular folk looking for a new place to have fun—and marveled at how the interior was done up with “great luxury.” In contrast to the somewhat more democratic Aquarium (although the gatekeepers there were actually still quite strict about whom they would let enter), in Maxim Frederick had decided to aim squarely at Moscow’s moneyed classes. He stressed that it was a “first-class variety theater” with a “European program” and promised patrons “Light, Comfort, Air, Atmosphere, and a Bar”; the idea of being served fanciful mixed drinks at a counter was still a novelty in Russia in those days. After the variety show in the theater, patrons were invited to continue with a “cabaret”; there were also private rooms. The evenings began at 11 p.m.; the new establishment’s focus was clearly on what was considered to be entertainment for sophisticated adults.
Maxim’s location may have been problematic from the point of view of the church, but it was nothing if not brilliant in terms of visibility and public access. This was doubtless why Frederick went to the effort of working around the city’s zoning policies rather than looking for a property elsewhere. But he also had to show some ingenuity because of the kinds of shows he put on. Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street is one of the spokes of the Moscow “wheel” radiating from the Kremlin, and number 17 was, and is, only a fifteen-minute walk from Red Square. It lies in the same district as the city’s most celebrated theaters of high culture, including the Moscow Art Theater—forever associated with Chekhov’s plays—and the Bolshoy Theater, one of the great houses for classical ballet and grand opera in Europe. Given this prominent neighborhood, Frederick realized that he would have to find some way to tone down Maxim’s reputation for putting on risqué acts, but without abandoning them altogether.
The ruse he used was to throw a skimpy verbal veil over part of his enterprise while advertising the rest openly. Not long after the November debut, he began to place ads in which he announced that Maxim was, of all things, a “family variety theater.” But he also made clear that after the variety program was over, patrons could see the famous “Maxim cancan quartet” straight from the Moulin Rouge in Paris. This made it seem as if husbands could bring their wives to the earlier evening performances at Maxim without blushing (“family” certainly did not mean children in this case), while everything bawdy, such as the notorious Parisian kick line with its raised skirts, yelps, and flaunted pantaloons, would appear onstage only later.
There were even more risqué performances available, although these were still very tame in comparison to what “adult” entertainment means today. Frederick created a “theme” space in Maxim, an intimate and dimly lit “Salon Café Harem,” as he called it. It tended to attract mostly rich men, who reclined on low settees, smoking Egyptian cigarettes or Manila cigars while sipping Turkish coffee laced with Benedictine, and watched with sated eyes the bare midriffs of Oriental “belly dancers” writhing on the carpeted floor.
However, even if the ads proclaiming Maxim to be a “family variety theater” were sufficient to placate the authorities, who must have watched Frederick’s activities with eyes half shut, they did not fool everyone. One commentator with a professional interest in Moscow’s nightlife thundered that this new café chantant was “shameless” and had reached “the heights of outrageous debauchery” right after its opening. He also heaped sarcastic praise on it for being as successful in fostering a “family” atmosphere as were some of the city’s notorious public baths. And he concluded by wondering how a place such as Maxim could be allowed to exist when some smaller establishments, which were like “innocent infants” in comparison, were closed by the authorities.
This was an intentionally naive and provocative question; the only real mystery was whom exactly Frederick paid and what it cost him to be “allowed” to stay open. Was it enough to treat the “protector” in question to an occasional lavish evening on the house? Or did a fat envelope also have to change hands? As Frederick would demonstrate repeatedly in future years, he had no compunctions about circumventing laws and regulations to protect his interests, especially when it would have been naive, or out of step with the unwritten norms of the time, not to do so.
The extraordinary effort that Frederick expended that spring and early summer, when he was unable to get much sleep because Aquarium stayed open until dawn, must have weakened his resistance, and in June he fell ill with a severe case of pneumonia. For more than two weeks, he was bedridden at home and his life was at risk. Although he recovered, his lungs were weakened, and this condition increased his chance of contracting the dreaded disease again.
Frederick’s illness was also an unhappy reminder of how his wife, Hedwig, had died from pneumonia two and a half years ago. This event had destabilized his family life in a way that he was still trying to resolve at the same time that he was launching the Skating Palace and Maxim in the fall of 1912. By then, Valli Hoffman had been the children’s nurse for several years and, because Frederick was very busy, had primary responsibility for raising them.
It did not take Frederick long to see
that the children had grown very attached to her; they even started calling her “Auntie.” Her interest in him also became apparent. She was around thirty, an age that made her a spinster. Frederick was no longer young either, but he was a vigorous and attractive man who could be extremely charming. He had also become rich and showed every sign of becoming even more successful in the future. By contrast, and in light of how their relationship played out, what Frederick felt for her was probably just affection born of gratitude and familiarity. He may also have imagined that stabilizing his family’s life by remarriage would let him focus even more intently on his expanding business affairs. Their wedding took place on January 5, 1913, in the Livonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in the town of Dünamünde on the outskirts of Riga, Valli’s hometown. A commemorative photograph of the new family appears to capture the relations between them: she looks pleased, almost self-satisfied, whereas he seems thoughtful and wary.
Frederick now had the means for his family to live well. After returning to the city center from Petersburg Highway, he moved his household twice in the same neighborhood, not far from Aquarium, before finally settling into an impressive eight-room apartment (number 13) at 32 Malaya Bronnaya Street. This handsome, modern, six-story building, which towered over its neighbors, was built in 1912 and had been designed by a fashionable architect. Directly across the quiet street is a famous park called Patriarch’s Ponds, which is to this day one of Muscovites’ favorite spots. Frederick also did not skimp on educating his children. In Russia on the eve of World War I, even in a major city like Moscow, only about half of the children of elementary school age received any kind of education. The situation was far worse in the provinces, and although the quality and extent of public education were improving rapidly at the time, illiteracy was still widespread among the lower classes. People with means usually relied on private schools, and Moscow had several hundred to choose from—most quite small, judging by their total enrollment of only some seven thousand pupils. This is the path that Frederick chose. He could even have sent his children to one of the schools sponsored by foreign organizations, such as Catholics or Evangelical Lutheran Germans. All of his children learned a number of foreign languages in addition to Russian and two eventually attended universities in Western Europe; at home they spoke mostly Russian.
Frederick’s businesses required so much attention that he spent little time with his children. Despite this, Mikhail, who was his father’s favorite, recalled Frederick as a loving but very strict parent. One especially vivid event from his childhood was the time, when he was very young, his father tried to instill a sense of responsibility in him by staging a dramatic beating. Mikhail had falsely accused a servant of taking an apple that he had in fact eaten himself, and Frederick, wanting to teach his son a lesson, threatened to punish the servant even though he knew perfectly well who the culprit was. He went so far as to strike the old man several times. Mikhail not only confessed but remembered the lesson for the rest of his life.
The promise of familial stability that Frederick and Valli’s wedding seemed to offer proved short-lived. In his role as the primary talent scout for Aquarium’s variety acts, Frederick was constantly thrown into the company of attractive young women. Although the “casting couch” was hardly Hollywood’s invention, and directors of Russian theaters and cafés chantants were to some extent procurers because they hired female performers with an eye toward having the women entertain male guests offstage as well as on, there is no evidence that Frederick ever abused the power he had over women, either in Moscow or later.
But true love was another matter. Around the time he married Valli, Frederick met a young, beautiful, sweet-tempered German woman named Elvira Jungmann. She was a dancer and singer who had enjoyed considerable success on the variety stages of Western Europe before she came to Moscow to perform. Her appeal and popularity were great enough to be celebrated in a series of publicity postcards issued around 1910 by the Georg Gerlach Company in Berlin, which was famous throughout Europe for producing reams of photographs of personalities from the world of entertainment for the fans who coveted and collected them. Some of Elvira’s postcards were quite risqué for their time and depict a very pretty woman with luxuriant hair down to her buttocks wearing tights, dance slippers, and a form-fitting bodice that shows off her curvaceous figure and remarkably thin waist. But she appeared in other, more demure guises as well, including an American cowgirl costume for an act that she performed on Maxim’s stage in 1912. This might seem very unlikely for Russia at the time, but Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West shows had in fact toured England and the Continent with great success at the end of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth cowboys, as well as Indians, were already very popular in Europe. Elvira was also better educated than one might have expected for a variety theater performer: in addition to her native German, she was fluent in English, knew French, and picked up Russian so well that some natives did not notice she was a foreigner. Less than a year after Frederick married Valli, his affair with Elvira was well under way. She gave birth to their first son, Frederick Jr., on September 10, 1914 (she would call him “Fedya,” the diminutive endearment of “Fyodor”); a second son, Bruce, quickly followed in 1915. Even though they did not marry until 1918, Elvira embraced domesticity and became Frederick’s loyal companion for the rest of his life, for better and especially for worse. The consequences of their affair would be dramatic and lasting for everyone in the family.
Neither the initial successes of Aquarium and Maxim nor the tensions in his personal life slowed Frederick’s ambition to keep increasing the size and reach of his businesses. Starting in the early summer of 1913, rumors began to spread through Moscow’s theatrical circles that the two most successful new entrepreneurs of the preceding winter and summer seasons, “F. F. Tomas and M. P. Tsarev,” were planning a series of bold new business ventures. First, they bought out their third partner, Martynov, for 55,000 rubles, which would be more than $1 million today. Then, they reconstituted themselves as a two-man firm with the aim of bringing under one business umbrella the three properties they had been managing both separately and together—the Aquarium complex, Frederick’s Maxim, and Tsarev’s Apollo (a popular variety theater and restaurant in Petrovsky Park on the city’s outskirts, near Yar). This move represented their first step in trying to become the biggest popular entertainment company in Moscow. The second one would come a year later, when they would incorporate themselves as the “First Russian Theatrical Stock Company,” an innovative concept in Russian popular entertainment. When the financial details of the new company were announced in January 1914, they were impressive: total capitalization was 650,000 rubles, the equivalent of $12 million today, consisting of 2,600 shares priced at 250 rubles, or about $4,600, each. The new company’s plans were equally ambitious, and included opening, both throughout the Moscow region and in other cities, new theaters for drama, opera, operetta, and movies—which were all the rage in Russia at this time, as they were everywhere else around the world. The new company would also include additional investors, a group of Moscow capitalists to whom Frederick and Tsarev would answer as elected directors. That the partners were able to find businessmen to provide the capital they needed to expand is testimony to their success in Moscow’s money circles and to Frederick’s complete acceptance by them. Had the Great War not intervened, they might well have succeeded.
As the fame of Frederick’s properties spread, they became obligatory stops for foreign tourists, including even the occasional American who decided to add Russia to his European vacation. This is what attracted a pleasure seeker with the jazzy name Karl K. Kitchen, who identified himself as a “Broadwayite,” and who was touring European capitals with the express purpose of sampling their nightlife during the winter of 1913–1914. When he came to Moscow, a Russian friend suggested that the first place they should visit was Maxim, which, Kitchen was pleased and surprised to learn, was “presided over by an American.” He had
no idea what was in store for him.
Kitchen’s friend did not think it necessary to warn him about whom he was going to meet. And Kitchen’s reaction after visiting Maxim is a reminder, if one were necessary, of why Frederick was never tempted to return to the United States.
“‘Thomas’s’ is indeed presided over by an American,” Kitchen recalled later, “and a blacker American I never saw in all my life”:
“Mr.” Thomas is a “cullud” gentleman who came to Russia some years ago as a valet to a grand duke. His Highness took such a fancy to him that he started him in business, and to-day “Mr.” Thomas is the proprietor of one of the largest and finest restaurant music-halls in Russia. He expressed himself as delighted to meet a New Yorker and offered to show us his establishment—which saved us ten roubles entrance fee.
As the owner and host at Maxim, Frederick was used to being part of the show. By claiming to have been a personal servant of a son or grandson of the tsar of all the Russias, Frederick was implying that he had been close to and richly rewarded by one of the most important men in the land. This was a far more intriguing story than that he had worked his way up from the restaurant floor, especially if he was telling it to a visiting white American whom it would be amusing to shock.
Frederick could not have failed to recognize the note of disapproval in Kitchen’s reaction to him, which Kitchen preserved in his memoir by putting ironic quotation marks around “Mr.” and by parodying Frederick’s black southern accent. But Frederick remained genial throughout the visit, showing that as master of an impressive domain he could ignore slights from a white American who was ultimately of little consequence.
The Black Russian Page 12