The Black Russian (12 page)

A maître d’hôtel’s skills would be exercised routinely in any good restaurant that attracted a well-heeled clientele, but at Yar there were times when such skills were challenged and pushed to the limit. One reason was Moscow’s cultural norms, especially among some of the rich and successful members of its merchant class, who valued the ability to demonstrate bravado or unbridled passion in a way that would make people notice and remember their Russian “broad nature.” The other was the reputation Yar acquired as a favorite destination for especially extravagant sprees. The result was some truly memorable escapades. An American writer, Roy Norton, visited Yar around 1911, when Frederick was still working there. Although Norton had already spent some time in Europe studying the
behavior
of “spendthrifts” in various countries, he quickly concluded that Russians were by far the most extravagant, and that Yar was the place in Moscow where one could see them at their best. Norton was especially impressed by one such reveler who decided that it would be fun to play football in the dining room with hothouse pineapples,
which were selling in Moscow that winter for around 44 rubles, or $22, each: around $1,000 in today’s money. He ordered a whole cartload and proceeded to kick them all around, smashing china, overturning tables, and spilling imported champagne. His bill from the proprietor, who approached him with a smile, was supposedly 30,000 rubles, or around $750,000 in today’s money. Frederick told Norton that there are “probably an average of fifty bills a month, paid for one evening’s entertainment, that will average seven thousand five hundred rubles each.”

Within a decade of Frederick’s arrival in Russia, his life was looking very bright. He had a lucrative position at a famous restaurant and his family was about to grow once again: Hedwig was expecting their third child. Irma was born on February 24, 1909, and baptized at home on March 31 by a pastor from the Saints Peter and Paul Church. Frederick’s happiness over Irma’s arrival was poisoned, however, by the debilitating effect that her birth apparently had on Hedwig’s health. As the Thomas family’s oral history suggests, Frederick’s
subsequent
distance from Irma was due to his seeing her as somehow responsible for the loss of his wife, whom he cherished deeply. Irma’s tragic fate and the way she suppressed any recollections of her family past when she grew up also imply that a chasm had developed between her and her father—a situation that darkened her entire childhood and that she was never able to overcome.

There is no direct evidence regarding the nature of Hedwig’s illness after Irma’s birth, although there was much that could have happened to her. Despite improvements in hygiene and the
growing
use of birthing hospitals in early-twentieth-century Moscow, childbirth was still beset with potential dangers for both the baby and the mother, with puerperal fever leading the way and a troop of other ghastly complications following. Hedwig died of pneumonia, with the additional complication of blood poisoning, on January 17,
1910, at the age of thirty-four, and was buried at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery of Foreign Confessions in Moscow, also known as the “German Cemetery.”

Olga was almost eight when her mother died and thus just old enough to understand some of what this meant. But Mikhail was only three and Irma not yet one, so for them their mother’s death was a confusing and distressing event that they could not fathom; also, they would not remember her. Hedwig’s death was Frederick’s first close personal loss since his father’s murder in Memphis. He would continue without Hedwig, of course, but the uncomplicated harmony of the family life he had built with her is something he would never know in quite the same way again.

Frederick’s most urgent task after Hedwig’s death was to find a way to care for his children. His income at Yar was more than
sufficient
for him to hire the domestic help he needed, and the obvious solution was to find an experienced nanny. His choice fell on
Valentina
Leontina Anna Hoffman, and it would prove to be a fateful one. “Valli,” as she was often called, was twenty-eight years old and came from Riga, the capital of Latvia, a small province on the Baltic Sea that had been part of the Russian Empire since the eighteenth century. Her surname and the fact that she knew German as well as English—in addition to Russian, of course—suggest that she
belonged
to the Baltic region’s dominant German population and was educated. Judging by surviving photographs, she was a plain and rather large woman; and given subsequent developments, her
appearance
played a role in how Frederick treated her.

While working at Yar, Frederick had also begun to prepare for the next major step in his life, one that must have been in the back of his mind for years. The tips he received at work continued to be generous and he was accumulating a sizable sum in savings; in fact, he now had more money than ever before in his life. The time was right to decide what to do next—continue like Natruskin until retirement, which was the safe route, or take a calculated risk like
Sudakov and invest in a business of his own. Frederick decided to follow Sudakov’s—and his father’s—example and to bet on his own skills and energy.

The business risks that Frederick faced could not be separated from the bigger ones threatening the entire country, although the energy with which he pursued his personal ambitions suggests that he thought Russia would somehow get through it all. The
Revolution
of 1905 showed the fragility of the Russian Empire’s social and political system, and what happened then could happen again. Although terrorism had declined from 1908 to 1910 in comparison with previous years, over 700 government bureaucrats and 3,000 civilians were murdered during this period (these deaths included the shocking assassination of the powerful prime minister Peter Stolypin in 1911). Strikes by workers demanding political and economic
reforms
dropped in 1910 to their lowest level in several years, with only some 50,000 workers participating in 2,000 mostly small job actions. But this relative lull was hardly a sign that the country’s
underlying
problems had been fixed, despite an economic boom that began around 1910. Strikes increased the following year and would grow to crisis proportions by 1914 as the government continued to suppress workers with blind, stupid brutality. An especially notorious incident occurred in 1912, when troops fired on thousands of
peacefully
demonstrating gold miners in Siberia, killing 147. The Duma demanded a full investigation, but little came of it. By this point in the country’s history, nothing could dispel the impression that the imperial government was dangerously, even catastrophically, adrift.

However, these threats flickering and rumbling in the distance did nothing to dampen Muscovites’ enthusiasm for revelry. Many observers noted that people in the city began to seek pleasure with increasing frenzy as the century’s second decade began. Frederick saw how others around him were making money and was ready to start doing so as well.

In November 1911, Moscow’s devotees of nightlife got some
exciting
news: Aquarium was going to reopen the following spring under new management. After Aumont had absconded with his employees’ money four years earlier, the place had changed hands more than half a dozen times in a complex sequence of rentals and subleases. Some entrepreneurs had good runs initially, but even though the property was one of the biggest and most desirable green spaces in the city, their success never lasted long. To journalists who followed Moscow theatrical life, it seemed as if Aumont had laid a curse on anyone who tried to resurrect Aquarium after him.

An additional surprise was the self-confidence of the unlikely trio that took over the place, none of whom had been a player in the high-stakes game of Moscow nightlife. Two were Russians—Matvey Filippovich Martynov, a businessman, and Mikhail Prokofyevich Tsarev, a former barman who had risen to maître d’hôtel at Aquarium under a previous manager. The third was Frederick, who was very familiar to Yar’s habitués, and who was now calling himself “Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas.”

Launching into this business venture was another major step in Frederick’s process of reinventing himself. To become an
entrepreneur
, he had to give up the security of a very well paying job and to
put his hard-earned money and family’s welfare at risk. But there was a deeper change as well. By adopting a Russian first name and
patronymic
, he was changing the very terms by which the world knew him. This also proved to be more than a gesture of accommodation for the benefit of Moscow’s business world; it became part of Frederick’s identity even in his own family. Two of his grandchildren, who now live in France, did not know his American first and middle names. They believed that “Fyodor” was the only name he ever had because this is how their father, Frederick’s first son, had always referred to him in his family oral history.

Running Aquarium was a large, ambitious, and expensive project. The property had been neglected in recent years and needed
extensive
repairs. At least initially, Frederick and his partners intended to cover the costs by pooling their own savings. Of all the tasks facing them, the most urgent was to book the kind of entertainment that would dazzle Muscovites on opening night and keep them coming back all summer long. Accordingly, in February 1912, when the city’s freezing weather and snowdrifts made spring seem very distant,
Frederick
left for Western Europe to recruit variety theater acts for the coming season. It was typical that he wanted to oversee the crucial process of selection himself rather than entrust it to his partners or to talent agencies. The trip also shows how he quickly emerged as the leading member of the partnership, especially regarding issues of artistic taste. It helped as well that he knew foreign languages, since the others did not.

For about six weeks, Frederick traveled by express trains with a secretary and an assistant to Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, and other major cities to see as many different programs as possible, in the best theaters. Because variety theaters were an international
business
, Russian entrepreneurs like him had to compete with their
foreign
counterparts for the most popular acts and stars. This required
putting on a performance of one’s own—an ostentatious display of wealth, which implied that the theater director was not only rich but in a position to offer generous contracts to potential clients. An entrepreneur would therefore typically telegraph ahead to reserve large suites in famous hotels, such as the Grand on Vienna’s Kärntner Ring or the Ritz in Paris on the Place Vendôme. He would arrange to have the suites lavishly decorated with bouquets of flowers that would impress desirable stars at lunches and private meetings. Finally, he would have to dress and act the part of a rich, worldly sophisticate.

During his first recruiting trip to Europe, as well as the others he made in subsequent years, Frederick did not spare any expense and booked the best acts he could find for Aquarium’s variety stage. He went so far that a journalist in Moscow who got wind of what some of the performers were being paid began to complain that it was too much—presumably because it might lead to a price war among
Moscow’s
entrepreneurs. Two black American singer-musicians, George Duncan and Billy Brooks, who worked for Frederick while on their swing through Russia, remembered that he always tried to impress audiences with acts that were big, often involving five to
twenty-five
performers. Duncan and Brooks even joked that because there were no limits to what Frederick would be willing to put onstage, he would have gone along even if someone wanted to “work twenty or more elephants.” They acknowledged sadly that although they had always prided themselves on their own performances and stage settings, and that when the curtain went up their act looked “big all the way,” “Thomas’ acts with whole carloads of scenery, made us look dwarfed.”

Frederick and his partners launched Aquarium’s new season on April 28, 1912, when the daytime temperature in Moscow finally began to reach the upper fifties. The city’s cold, continental climate made people so eager to get out-of-doors that they were willing to start even when it was still chilly during the day and the temperature dropped nearly to freezing at night. It had been a feverishly busy,
expensive, and exhausting five months of preparations, but now all was ready. The first groups of variety stage performers that Frederick had engaged in Western Europe, and others from various Russian cities, had arrived safely in Moscow. The garden had been
redecorated
with new construction, paint, and numerous flower beds; the restaurant was reorganized; a new staff had been hired. The
well-known
Saburov theatrical troupe, which had begun to perform in Aquarium years earlier under Aumont, was preparing to start its season of light comic plays and musicals in the enclosed theater. Posters announcing Aquarium’s opening and listing the performers had gone up throughout the city, and advertisements appeared in the big newspapers and magazines. All that remained was to open the gates and see who came.

From the first day, people began to stream into the garden. Within a month, it was clear that the season was going to be a success. By summer’s peak, the new managers could scarcely believe their eyes. The box office for the open theater, where the variety acts performed, had to put up a
SOLD OUT
sign most nights; Saburov’s farces played to packed houses; all the tables in the café chantant were still booked after midnight. Several journalists who covered Moscow theatrical life quickly pointed to “Mr. Thomas” as the member of the “
triumvirate
” most responsible for the garden’s sensational success; indeed, the partnership soon began to be referred to as “Thomas and Co.” A reporter who hid behind the pseudonym “Gamma” praised “Mr. Thomas’ good taste” for the acts he booked abroad, and characterized the program he put together on the open theater’s stage as nothing less than “brilliant” (even if he criticized some of the garden’s other entertainments). His summary conclusion is the one that mattered most: “Aquarium has become the favorite place of Muscovites and has left Hermitage”—which was the other big entertainment garden in the city and Aquarium’s only real competitor—“far behind.”

These two establishments would in fact continue to compete in future years, but although Hermitage was always very successful,
Aquarium garnered more attention—and earned more money—because of Frederick’s skillful management and eye for novelty in
entertainment
. And although Muscovites had a rich array of fashionable restaurants, cafés, variety theaters, dramatic theaters, operas, concert halls, and cinemas vying for their attention, Aquarium’s celebrity never faded once “Thomas and Co.” took over.

From the first night that Aquarium opened, one of the keys to its success was Frederick’s ability to provide a range of entertainments that catered to various tastes and pocketbooks. Prominent among these was the pervasive atmosphere of sexual license. It was not that Frederick or his partners promoted prostitution on
Aquarium’s
grounds; there was plenty of this readily available elsewhere in Moscow, including streetwalkers on nearby boulevards. Suggestive performances were also far from the only thing that appeared on Aquarium’s different stages. Nevertheless, the garden quickly became a kind of eroticized zone where those who were so inclined could easily and cheerfully suspend proper morals. Conducive to this were the park-like setting and the feeling of being apart from the city, the spicy performances by attractive showgirls who were also available to mingle with patrons, a leisured clientele in search of dissipation, and the fact that journalists liked to play up the garden’s libertine atmosphere in their reporting.

A frequent visitor to Aquarium captured well the ambience of pleasure and permissiveness that characterized a typical warm summer evening. A refreshing light breeze greets you when you enter from the heat and noise of the street; many small lamps that look like fireflies sway on the trees; the moon—a large, light-filled sphere—floats above; flags cheerfully wave over the kiosks and the stages. The crowds promenading on the sand-strewn paths make a rustling noise like waves gently washing onto a beach. The
beckoning
sounds of an orchestra come from a stage across the way, its
footlights surrounded with a rainbow display of flowers in crystal vases. You see the happy and excited smiles of women clad in light summer dresses, their flashing eyes, their thirst for love, for
happiness
, for wine, “or … maybe just for money,” the visitor concludes with practiced cynicism. The crowd greedily watches the acrobats on the open stage and guffaws at the vulgar jokes of the comedians. Nearby stands an obvious libertine. He is wearing an elegant tuxedo with a boutonniere in his lapel and a bright red handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket. His eyes narrow as he watches a big-haired, big-bosomed blonde pounding out a march on a piano, something very bouncy “and Germanic.” A minute later, he is gazing lustfully at a svelte young woman onstage, a spear thrower barely out of her teens. Then he whispers a playful invitation to a woman who is standing next to him “to come and spend this short summer night with me.” A bald, wrinkled little old man passes by with a dazzling young woman on his arm; she throws her fiery gaze at all the men she encounters, inviting them to follow. Multiple attacks on the old man begin and half an hour later he is alone and on the watch for a new “victim” while the dazzling young woman, with a pink-faced student by her side, is causing a row at the entrance, where she is stridently demanding an automobile. Staid, faithful Muscovites and their wives stand for hours by the open stage on spots they claimed and will not abandon even during intermissions. For their “fifty kopek” entrance fee, they want to soak up as many sights as possible, and they will leave only when the fireworks are over.

Aquarium’s atmosphere naturally had an especially powerful attraction for young men, whether they were Russians or visiting foreigners. Several months after the garden’s opening, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, a boyish-looking twenty-five-year-old Scot who had
recently
arrived in Moscow to take up the post of vice-consul at the British consulate, and who would go on to an adventurous career and a knighthood, made a memorable visit there with an English friend, George Bowen. They had never been to Aquarium before, but they
knew of the place because of how famous it had become that
summer
, and also because their consulate often had disagreements with “the negro Thomas” who “presided over” it, as Lockhart phrased it, regarding “the engagement of young English girls as cabaret
performers
.” Frederick may have been a novice at running Aquarium during its first season, but as his encounter with Lockhart shows, he was anything but inexperienced when it came to resolving a messy situation that involved passion, jealousy, suicide, and the police.

Lockhart and his friend understood very well the moral
gradations
of the entertainment venues that were available at Aquarium, which Lockhart summarized as “a perfectly respectable operette theatre, an equally respectable open-air music hall, a definitely less respectable verandah cafe-chantant, and the inevitable chain of
private
‘kabinets’ for gipsy-singing and private carouses.” One night, already well primed by a boozy dinner elsewhere, they naturally chose the café chantant and took the best box. Despite their “exalted state,” they were initially bored by a string of unappealing acts. Then suddenly the lights were dimmed and everything changed.

However, Lockhart and Bowen were not able to continue their
interesting
conversation uninterrupted. A waiter walked in with a note for the young woman, who read it and asked to be excused for a minute. Shortly thereafter, the young men