The Black Russian (29 page)

After the Allies left, the first thing that changed in
Constantinople
was the appearance of the crowds on the city’s streets. The British, French, Italian, and American naval uniforms that had filled Pera and Galata were replaced by those of the Turkish army and navy. The number of prostitutes working the streets also dropped because the authorities closed many of the city’s “resorts of ill fame.” Shop signs and advertising banners in the European districts began to change in accordance with the new government’s decree that
everything
would now have to be in Turkish, with foreign lettering allowed only if it was smaller.

The fall of 1923 after the Allies’ departure is probably when Frederick sent his oldest son, Mikhail, to study in Prague. Because all hope of getting American recognition now seemed to be lost, it made sense to get him out of (potential) harm’s way by taking
advantage
of the Czech government’s very generous offer to provide young Russian émigrés with a free higher education. By 1922, some
two thousand had arrived in Prague from all points in the Russian diaspora, including Constantinople. Because Mikhail had been born in Moscow and spoke Russian fluently, he was eligible. (It is also likely that he was motivated to leave because there were still unresolved tensions between him and Elvira.) Father and son would never see each other again.

Despite the tectonic political and cultural shifts in the city, Maxim remained popular with both residents and tourists and continued to do very good business for a number of years longer. This appears to have given Frederick a heady sense of liberation and achievement, and unleashed an extravagant streak in him. He liked to tell
visiting
Americans about his remarkable life in Russia; about how in Constantinople he surmounted “difficulties that would stagger the ordinary man”; and how he had “once more mounted the pinnacle of success as the owner and proprietor of the most noted and most popular amusement palace in the Near East.” Before long, he started boasting to visitors that he was “conservatively rated to be worth at least $250,000,” which would amount to $10 million today. Even if this was a two-, three-, or fourfold exaggeration, it still suggests the impressive scale of his success.

For many of Frederick’s clients, his appeal as a host was the infectious, personal pleasure he took in the gaiety that he
orchestrated
in his nightclub. Sergey Krotkov, a Russian émigré musician who worked for him for several years, recalled how Frederick would suddenly decide that it was time for an elaborate spree. He would put on the top hat that had become his signature and would lead a procession of all of Maxim’s employees—waiters, dishwashers,
musicians
, cooks, performers—from Taxim Square down one of Pera’s main streets, to the accompaniment of the band’s drums and the clash and clatter of its cymbals. They would stop at every bar they encountered and Frederick would buy everyone a round of drinks.
Even when he was working in his office at Maxim, he kept a bottle of champagne chilling in an ice bucket on his desk so that he could offer a glass to anyone who came to see him. It was this kind of behavior that led émigrés to see in him the same “broad” Russian nature they valued in themselves.

The other side of Frederick’s expansive generosity was his
continued
insistence on personal loyalty from everyone he included in his circle. The bond this allowed him to forge with his employees was another reason for his success, and Krotkov experienced this as well. Krotkov was a master of the Hawaiian ukulele, an instrument that was sweeping the world in the early 1920s, and was very popular at Maxim. One evening he had been invited to a private event elsewhere before having to perform at Maxim for another boatload of
American
tourists. Krotkov arrived very late for his turn onstage, to find Frederick waiting for him in a rage at the entrance: “Tvoya svoloch!” (“Yours a bastard!”), he yelled in his expressive but grammatically flawed Russian. “My your mug will smash! The Americanas came, and yours not played—your run and play!” “Fyodor Fyodorovich,” Krotkov pleaded, “I know I’m late. Please forgive me, I took a taxi.” He then dashed to the stage. When Krotkov had completed his set, a waiter asked him to come to the bar. Frederick was standing there, his face beaming: “Yours played well. The Americanas listened and clapped.” There were two tumblers of vodka before him. “Yours drink good yet?” he asked.

Frederick’s penchant for spontaneous expressions of good feeling prompted him to host a Fourth of July celebration at Maxim in 1924. The nightclub was filled with American businessmen, merchant sailors, mining engineers, and, as an observer put it, other “American
adventurers
” from every corner of the Near East. Feelings ran especially high and “the jovial American Negro proprietor” was generously “setting up drinks on the house time and again.” Completing the festive setting were a jazz band playing “Last Night on the Back Porch (I Loved Her Best of All)” and a bevy of Greek and Levantine dancing girls.

With Maxim a success, and facing what seemed like a cloudless future despite the revolutionary transformation of Turkey that was under way, Frederick’s thoughts once again turned to growth.

During Constantinople’s summers, temperatures can climb to oppressive heights for weeks, driving many residents to seek cooler locations somewhere on the water. In early summer of 1924,
Frederick
decided to open a new place in Bebek, a quiet suburb overlooking a pretty cove on the European shore of the Bosporus, some five miles north of Galata. Together with a senior employee from Maxim, “Mr. Berthet,” he took over a Russian restaurant called “Le Moscovite” that had a terrace by the water. Frederick renamed the place “La
Potinière
” (“The Gossip”) and began to entice customers with what had been his foolproof formula—dinner and dancing under the open sky, a bar with special cocktails, and his own celebrated self as the host.

However, Constantinople’s weather can be erratic, and that
summer
, shortly after La Potinière opened, it turned disastrous.
Torrential
rains at the end of June flooded parts of the city, transforming the main streets into rivers, damaging houses, breaking windows, and knocking out electricity. There was serious destruction outside the city as well, with bridges in villages washed out and fruit and nut orchards badly damaged. On the heights of Pera, Maxim was not affected too much, and its open terrace remained popular. But the rainstorms apparently damaged La Potinière, and customers stayed away from the place, because after the summer season ended Frederick decided not to reopen it. He had lost some money on his investment, and such a stumble was unusual for him. It must have rankled him that two competitors in Bebek had succeeded where he had not. La Rose Noire, which changed hands several times after Vertinsky first opened it several years earlier, had also moved to Bebek that summer and appeared to be thriving. And the following
year a resurrected Le Moscovite, which now advertised itself as the “ex-Potinière,” had a good season as well.

More—and far more serious—competition was to come.
Tourism
was still on the rise in Constantinople. A noticeable jump
occurred
in early spring of 1925, when hundreds of American and British tourists started arriving every week. During the first half of 1926, the number swelled to twenty-one thousand, which was nearly double the tally for the same period the previous year. Although most tourists spent only a day or two rushing past the famous sights
before
heading off to the Mediterranean, it did not take long for other entrepreneurs to see the potential that Constantinople had and to start dreaming up ways to capitalize on it.

The most audacious plan was to create a rival Monte Carlo on the banks of the Bosporus. In late summer and fall of 1925, word spread through Constantinople that a syndicate headed by Mario Serra, an aggressive young businessman from Milan, had rented for a period of thirty years the Yildiz Palace complex on the northeastern edge of the city as well as the Çiragan Palace on the shore of the Bosporus just below it. This arrangement had been approved at the highest levels of the Turkish government, by the Council of Ministers and President Kemal himself. The jewel of the Yildiz complex was the Şale Kiosk, a palace that had been the sultans’ residence in the late nineteenth century. Its appearance was highly incongruous for Constantinople because on the outside it resembled an enormous Swiss chalet (whence the first part of its Turkish name), whereas inside it was elaborately decorated with carved marble, mother-of-pearl inlaid wood, frescoes, and gilded plaster. Serra intended to transform the palace’s magnificent throne room into a gambling casino and to use the other halls for bars, restaurants, and dancing. In the huge park outside there would be sporting facilities, a roller coaster, and possibly a golf course, while other amusements would be set up by the large lake and in the smaller buildings on the grounds. Plans for the Çiragan Palace involved rebuilding the white marble structure,
which had been badly damaged by fire (it had formerly been the
sultan’s
harem), and turning the entire place into a luxury hotel (which it is today). For all this Serra agreed to pay the Turkish government 30,000 Ltqs a year in rent—that would come to around $1 million now—plus an annual tax of 15 percent on his profits. Because the government of the Turkish Republic was hardly sentimental about the Ottoman past, it was also willing to let him buy some of the luxurious furnishings that remained in the palace, including massive pieces of furniture, handmade rugs hundreds of square yards in size, and mirrors covering double-height walls. The Yildiz project was on a scale that would eclipse not only every other attraction that the city might offer to a rich tourist, but also potentially any other comparable destination in Europe. Indeed, there was talk that it might lead to the birth of a new Turkish Riviera.

Frederick understood what this grandiose plan could mean for him and that he needed to do something about it. He reportedly initially discussed with representatives of the Standard Oil Company of America, which had major long-standing financial interests in the region, the possibility of transforming Hagia Sophia into a casino or a “temple of jazz.” As absurd and blasphemous as this idea may sound—this was, after all, one of the most famous ancient religious buildings in the world—it was picked up by American newspapers at the end of 1926 and the beginning of 1927. One newspaper reported that “a group of business men” in Constantinople had concluded that “the edifice is unsuitable for religious services.” Word spread, and companies eager to take part started to write to the American consulate general in Constantinople. The “American Association of Jazz Bands,” for example, asked “for full acoustic details” of the vast edifice (whose central cupola is taller than a fifteen-story building), and with a “can do” aplomb that was undaunted by any cultural or practical concerns promised “to provide the largest jazz band in the world with the largest number of most powerful saxophones.” However, the Turkish authorities never seriously considered this
appalling project, and it came to nothing. Frederick decided that he would have to expand on his own, and on as big a scale as he could manage. This seemed not only possible but plausible because Maxim continued to pull in crowds with its time-tested entertainments, which now regularly included black jazz bands.

But history was not standing still in the Turkish Republic. In its
ongoing
process of secularization, it abolished the caliphate (formerly, Ottoman sultans had also been Muslim caliphs, but the republic’s experiment with separating the two ended in less than a year). The last representative of the Ottoman dynasty, Caliph Abdülmecid II, left Constantinople for Switzerland by train on March 3, 1924; a week later, he was followed by the few princes and princesses who had lingered behind. The fez was officially abandoned in favor of Western hats for men. On April 17, 1924, the Russian imperial embassy on the Grande rue de Pera was transferred to the Soviet government, marking Turkey’s friendly relations with the Soviet Union (and symbolically confirming Frederick’s now complete statelessness).

There were new laws as well that targeted establishments like Frederick’s and that reflected the Turkish Republic’s attempt to find a path between Muslim traditions and secular Western culture (and to raise revenues). Taxes were introduced on the consumption of alcoholic beverages and on dancing in public: a “First Class” place like Maxim had to pay the equivalent of around $1,500 a month for the latter. Restrictions were also placed on the hours when “dancings” could operate, on the events they could organize without special
authorization
, and on the age of young women who could be admitted. Shop signs that were in Turkish and a foreign language were taxed, with the amount depending on the size of the foreign lettering.
During
the period 1924–1926, operating an establishment like Maxim became progressively more expensive.

It was also becoming more difficult for foreigners to live and work in Constantinople. Xenophobia increased as the Turkish
Republic
dismantled the old privileges that had been granted to Europeans. In 1924 an unsuccessful attempt was made in Constantinople to force employers to replace their Christian employees with Muslims. Two years later a new law required that Turkish workers replace all
foreigners
, including dames serveuses, waiters, headwaiters, cooks—in short, the core group of Frederick’s employees at Maxim. He may have needed to hide behind Turkish partners himself. To verify
compliance
, officials began to check identification papers throughout the city. Early in 1926 a law was introduced mandating the use of Turkish in bars, in restaurants, and on bills; any establishment that persisted in using French would be punished.

All these changes caused great anxiety and hardship for
Constantinople’s
many foreigners, including the several thousand Russian refugees who had stayed behind after nearly two hundred thousand others left. Some of the remaining Russians sought Turkish
citizenship
, as did Frederick. After vacillating for a while, the new republic decided not to grant it to large numbers of stateless foreigners, and this decision forced many more to leave the country. Even though the Russians’ identity papers had lost their meaning when their homeland ceased to exist, they were able to travel on the strength of the “Nansen passports” that the League of Nations started to issue in 1921. Had Frederick not claimed all along that he was an American, he might have been able to get one of these too. Fridtjof Nansen and Frederick actually met on June 9, 1925, when Nansen, the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, went to Maxim during a visit to Constantinople. However, by then it was too late for Frederick to tell the truth, and Maxim was still doing too well for him to want to leave.