The Black Russian

by Vladimir Alexandrov

  All this aggravated Frederick’s already poor relations with the American officials. He could do little except insist on his version of events. Shortly thereafter, he wrote, in his careful longhand, a detailed response to Ravndal, in which he politely and firmly explained “once more”: “I have no wife in Germany, because I have my wife with me here.” He continued, “As I wrote to you before, I divorced my former wife in Moscow, because she committed a break of marriage in having a Bolshevik Commissar for her lover for about 2 years.” Frederick then explained:

  I divorced this Woman and married my present wife under the Bolshevik Laws, because there were no other Laws, as we were living in the Bolshevik time. Now Sir, I will admit, no Man is supposed to support ones former wife one divorced under such circumstances. What concerns me Sir, I know she is not ill because I have some very near relatives of mine living in Berlin, who inform me exactly about the Life my Child is leading there. As I told you before Sir, my former wife is not the mother of my Daughter Irma, as I had no children at all with her and she only keeps my daughter with her because she thinks I’ll support her for the Girls’ sake, as I would’nt let my Child starve. Certainly if I had a passport, I would go to Berlin and take my Girl away with me, but now as it is, I can’t move from here; what concerns my Documents, which could prove, that divorcing my former wife and marrying my present wife are facts Sir, I’ve told you before, that I’ve been robbed of them in Russia, so that I came here to Constantinople without any papers. Now Sir, begging to excuse me for disturbing you once more with this painful story of mine and hoping, I have well explained everything concerning my connection to this Woman, I remain very respectfully

  Frederick Bruce Thomas

  Borne in Clarksdale Mississippi

  Frederick added the phrase about his birthplace as an afterthought (he used a different pen) to remind the diplomats of his claim to an American passport. However, none of this made any difference; the diplomats did not believe him. The next time one of them wrote to the State Department, he characterized Elvira as Frederick’s “free-love companion.”

  Valli’s resurfacing in Berlin with Irma was not the only dramatic twist in Frederick’s family life at this time. Olga, his oldest daughter, suddenly turned up in Romania, alive, apparently well, and married, with the surname “Golitzine.” On June 13, 1921, she had a telegram sent in French from Bucharest to the American consul general in Constantinople requesting that Frederick be informed of her whereabouts and that she “manque totalement”—“has nothing.” Getting the news must have been a joy and a relief for Frederick because he had heard nothing about her for over two years, ever since she disappeared during the evacuation of Odessa. He had been very close to her and on the eve of the revolution was grooming her to help him in his business. Frederick may well have recognized her new surname because the Golitsyns (there are different transliterations) were one of the most famous and grandest of princely families in imperial Russia; it is likely, however, that Olga’s husband simply had the same name as this family. Frederick did respond to her plea for help. By 1923 he was sending her 1,500 francs a month, which would be equivalent to several thousand dollars today (things had improved for him by then), and he continued to do this for three years, even after she moved to Paris to study.

  Despite his chronic money shortages, Frederick husbanded what he had and insisted on trying to give his family in Constantinople the best life that he could. He bought Elvira new outfits from a local couturiere in Chichli, although he did pass on getting her a fur muff that cost the equivalent of $500. As he told a friendly American tourist, he was having his sons educated “at some of the best schools in the Near East,” which in Constantinople meant those that were private and foreign. In the summer of 1921, Bruce was six, Fedya seven, and Mikhail fifteen. Given their father’s efforts to reestablish himself as an American, and his claim that he intended to return to the United States and place his sons in school, all three must have attended one of the English-language schools in or near the city; there were several to choose from. However, of the three sons, only Mikhail was destined to complete his education and to do so in Prague, which was to become a haven for young Russians in the diaspora in the 1920s.

  At the end of August and the beginning of September 1921, the history of Turkey unexpectedly changed and Frederick’s fate changed with it. Some two hundred miles to the southeast of Constantinople, on the arid Anatolian highland near the Sakarya River—a place that seemed very far from the marble halls of power on the banks of the Bosporus—the Turkish Nationalist army that had formed under Mustafa Kemal’s leadership won a series of bloody battles against the Greek army that had invaded Turkey with Allied help two years earlier. The Turkish victory stopped a Greek march on Angora—“Ankara,” as it is now known—the Nationalists’ new capital, and was a turning point in what the Turks came to celebrate as their war for independence against the Allied occupiers. As a result, Italy and France dropped their plans to partition Anatolia and withdrew from the region. A year later, Kemal would force the Allies to abandon the Treaty of Sèvres, including their scheme to transform Constantinople into an international city, a decision that would affect Frederick directly. For his victory at Sakarya, Kemal, who had already been elected president by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in April 1920, was promoted to the rank of field marshal and given the title “Gazi,” “warrior against the infidels”—an honorific that dated back to the Ottomans.

  These distant rumblings of war and changes on the geopolitical map of Turkey reminded Frederick once again that it was time to seek the shelter of an American passport. Moreover, in recent months his financial situation had finally started to improve. His income increased and he had managed to pay off most of his earlier debts. He had also begun to act more assertively toward his remaining creditors as well as the American diplomats, succeeding even in mollifying Ravndal at times.

  When Frederick went to the consulate general on September 15 to fill out a new passport application he was better prepared. The official who took his information, Alfred Burri, a New Yorker by birth, was also far more conscientious than Allen had been two years earlier. Nevertheless, Frederick still stumbled badly when he came to the all-important “Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence and to Overcome Presumption of Expatriation.” In a spirit of candor that was as misguided as it was surprising, he admitted: “At the present moment I have a growing theatrical business at Constantinople and wish to be near Russia where I wish to go to look after my property in Moscow at the first opportunity.” And as if this were not bad enough, he confessed that though he planned to make a “business trip” to the United States with his “oldest boy” soon, “I have so large a business in Europe & Russia that I must stay near these for some time to come & will keep my family with me.” When Frederick left the consulate general, he may have been satisfied that he had completed an important chore, but he did not realize that he had also made a gift to those in Constantinople and Washington who were eager to deny him the protection he sought.

  Burri’s assessment of Frederick’s case, which he had to forward to the State Department, shows that his feelings were mixed. He acknowledges that Frederick is a very clever businessman and “owns and operates by far the highest class cabaret” in Constantinople. He also sympathizes with Frederick and implicitly distances himself from the prevailing American racial bias.

  Without prejudice it is obvious that a colored man with a white wife suffering no social ostracisms or discriminations over here would not be likely to return to the United States. Furthermore his interests in Russia and elsewhere in Europe, and his fairly popular standing would also tend to keep him away from the United States for years.

  But none of this prevented Burri from using Frederick’s own words to hang him by concluding “that he will never return with his family to the United States for permanent residence.” And Burri’s final assessment of the application was devastating: “In my opinion Mr. Thomas is an A
merican born negro, living with a free-love companion, [who] cannot satisfactorily explain his protracted foreign residence so as to entitle him to American protection; and this Consulate General should be instructed to deny him such protection.”

  Frederick got the passport application out of the way at an exciting time in his life, when he was beginning to make plans for an ambitious new venture that could, with luck, make him rich again. By mid-September the summer season at Villa Stella was winding down. Its Winter Salon could continue to function for a while longer—Vertinsky crooned his decadent songs there to great acclaim in October—but the approach of cold weather meant that Frederick would once again have to move his operation to a properly heated space. What he needed was a place of his own that he could use year-round.

  Frederick found it just off Taxim Square in Pera, an area where many amusements were concentrated, near the northern end of the Grande rue de Pera on Sira Selvi Street, and thus, unlike Stella, in the center of the European quarter. The space was actually the basement of a building that housed the “Magic Cinema,” one of the largest and most luxurious movie houses in the city. From the theater’s elegant, colonnaded main entrance a broad, bright staircase of twenty steps led to a large, well-lit, high-ceilinged hall that could accommodate several hundred people at a time. The far wall had windows and doors that opened onto a broad terrace with wonderful views of the Bosporus (a bonus provided by the steeply sloping terrain where the building stood, which also made it possible to enter the hall from the lower level). Frederick spared no expense in having the space renovated in a luxurious style, with ornate plaster ceilings, richly decorated columns, and polished metal and wood. When the weather warmed up, the terrace would become a spacious garden with gravel paths and cypresses framing the distant views of Asia. He called the new place “Maxim” in a nostalgic nod to its ancestor in Moscow, although its scale was more intimate and it was configured as a classic nightclub rather than a theater: a small stage faced a dance floor that was surrounded by rows of tables; there was also the obligatory American-style bar. For the next five years it would be Frederick’s most successful venture in Constantinople. It would also outlive him by another fifty and earn an indelible place in the history of Istanbul nightlife.

  Word of Frederick’s plan for “a very special amusement rendezvous” first got out in early October and was greeted with enthusiasm by Villa Stella’s many fans. Frederick moved quickly and by the end of the month had hired the drummer Harry A. Carter to lead the enticingly named Shimmie Orchestra during the nightclub’s first, winter season. Carter, a white American from Minnesota, had been performing across Europe and in Egypt for several years and must have been very good at what he did, because Frederick was willing to pay him handsomely—20 Ltqs for an eight-hour workday, the equivalent of about $3,500 a week today; his contract also included “a first-class dinner” every evening.

  Maxim opened on the evening of Tuesday, November 22, 1921. Frederick had designed it to appeal to the upper echelons of the city’s Westernized Turks, Levantines, and foreigners, and they responded enthusiastically: the “greatest artistic event in Pera… extraordinary tour de force… grand luxury… modern comfort… richness that does not exist elsewhere… a fairytale-like atmosphere… a real jazz band.” And all this was thanks to the “genial director,” whose “organizational skills” and “taste for the beautiful” ensured “complete success.” There were no superlatives left.

  The fame and success that Maxim acquired immediately after opening were due not only to Frederick’s talent for serving up an intoxicating mix of first-class cuisine and drinks, hot jazz, beautiful Russian waitresses, and flashy variety acts. He also successfully put himself on center stage as Maxim’s public face and animating spirit. Impeccably turned out in black tie, worldly, poised, with a broad smile and a welcoming word for each new arrival—which he could deliver in French, English, Russian, German, Italian, or Turkish—Frederick relished what he had created as much as any of his nightclub’s most enthusiastic fans.

  It was the rare visitor who did not succumb to his charm or identify it with Maxim itself. “Thomas, the founder, the host… the cheerful Negro with the big smile, who thrived in the gaiety, the din of the jazz band, the dazzling luxury, the women, amidst beautifully appointed tables decorated with flowers and crystal,” was how a Levantine devotee of Constantinople’s nightspots described him. Even a less worldly Turk found himself seduced by the new, electrifying atmosphere that jazz created, although it also overwhelmed him.

  We came into a well-lit basement. This is where the famous Black music was being played. What a crashing of percussion instruments, what a noise, what a cacophony of sound…. One fellow was beating on the cymbals with all his might; another, seized with some rage, kept running his fingernails across a thickstringed instrument, as if he had gone quite mad; while the violin, the piano, and the drum all mixed it up with them…. it reminded me of the wild mystical rituals performed by old [African] Arab pilgrims on their way to Mecca….

  After a while, the lights were turned down and two performers—a skinny bit of a woman and a muscular man, both of them half-naked, adapting their steps to this madmen’s music, kept throwing each other about. Then they stopped, and we clapped our hands and applauded. It was getting late, three o’clock; by now I was no longer in full possession of any of my three senses; neither my head, nor my eyes…. I could no longer feel, hear, or walk; in short I was no longer among the living!

  Frederick won his patrons over by treating them like members of his own select circle. He was a bon vivant with “a heart of gold,” as a longtime fan put it, and often helped people in distress. Fikret Adil, a young journalist, witnessed one such occasion shortly after Maxim opened. It involved one of Frederick’s beautiful Russian waitresses, who styled herself a grand duchess, and who had beguiled a rich young Turk into spending all his money on her. The young man’s despair was so great that his friends began to fear he might shoot the woman. But then Frederick got wind of the situation and decided to get involved. To everyone’s surprise, he discovered that the waitress had fallen in love with the young man; however, since he was now ruined and she had hardly any money left, their future looked bleak. “Then Thomas did something that still brings tears to my eyes,” Adil recalled.

  Maxim was packed that night. Frederick waited for two Russians to finish their dance number, and after they had taken their bows he walked out onto the center of the dance floor.

  He quieted the crowd down, waving his long-fingered hands as if he was stroking everyone, and then announced [in French]:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I will present a number to you that you will not see; you will not see it, but you will know it. Now I will begin. A young man loves a woman. He spends his entire fortune on her until it’s gone. The woman at first pretends to love him for his money’s sake. But then she also falls in love. And tonight she has said: ‘I will work and will support you.’ However, the young man, having lost his fortune, now does not want to lose his honor as well. The two lovers are making up their minds to die.”

  Thomas stopped speaking and looked all around.

  The initial response of Maxim’s audience was confusion and consternation at this strange story. “What’s it to us?” some wondered aloud. But then Frederick replied: “Just this much: in ten minutes, they will be dead. My regards to you, ladies and gentlemen!”

  Suddenly the entire nightclub was in an uproar. One could hear people crying: “No! It cannot be! We must not let them!” Thomas was surrounded on all sides…. A couple of people came up to Thomas, bowed respectfully, and said something to him.

  Thomas called a waiter, had him bring a tray, and using the same hand movements once again quieted the crowd. Then he said:

  “We’ve decided to change the finale of the number that you will not see but will know. They will not die, they will get married. And now I will collect the money that you will give to save them.”

  He first
took the tray to the people who had been speaking to him. One hundred pound, fifty pound, and smaller banknotes were piled onto it.

  After that we returned to the manager’s office. We had forgotten to knock before entering and as we went in we discovered the two lovers embracing. Placing the tray in front of them, we quickly withdrew.

  What Adil witnessed was Frederick’s singular mix of calculation and kindness, which he seasoned, on this occasion, with a generous dollop of melodrama. Frederick was probably genuinely touched, but he also enhanced his reputation without having to spend a pound, embellished a dramatic story by inventing the lovers’ suicide pact, enthralled his audience with his own performance, and forged a bond with his clients that would keep them coming back for more.

  Within a few months after opening Maxim, Frederick was able to tell Ravndal that business was “going very well,” but then he added—“taking present conditions into consideration.” His immediate concern was the economic crisis that was ravaging the city. But he also realized very clearly that he was in a tiny oasis surrounded by a swarm of threats and that his situation was still precarious from a variety of perspectives. Valli had not relented and continued to bombard the American and British diplomats with pleas that “you force my husband to show concern for his child and me,” to which he responded by sending some money. Several merchants were still unhappy with how slowly he was paying his bills. The Allied warships filling the Bosporus were a constant reminder of the menace that hung over the city, as were the armed patrols by the Interallied Police on the city’s streets. After his experience of revolution and civil war in Russia, Frederick took the danger of widespread upheaval seriously, to the extent of stipulating that his contract with the bandleader Carter would be “annulled in case of Marshal law being declared or Maxim being closed by the authorities.”