The Black Russian (30 page)

By early spring of 1926 Frederick had found the property that would be his answer to Serra’s Yildiz casino. About a dozen miles up the
Bosporus from Constantinople on the European side is a
picturesque
cove with a town called Therapia (now Tarabya) that was popular with wealthy natives and foreigners as an escape from the city’s crowds and summer heat. The rich built luxurious villas; the foreign diplomats built “summer embassies.” There were several good hotels and restaurants right on the water that caught the cooling breezes.

Frederick opened his “Villa Tom” there in early June and
continued
to operate Maxim during that summer as well. He spent lavishly to create a new destination that would give the members of
Constantinople’s
fashionable set everything they could possibly want:
sophisticated
dinners, dancing on a terrace by the water under a moonlit sky, a “Negro Jazz” band, a magnificently illuminated garden filled with flowers, and constantly varying entertainments—a “Venetian evening,” a “Neapolitan program,” an “aristocratic Charleston
competition
,” a “Monster Matinee.” And when the night’s performance drew to a close, there were spectacular fireworks overhead.

At first, Villa Tom looked like a success—the city’s night owls came, enjoyed themselves, and lingered until dawn. But the place had cost a lot to open and was expensive to run. A problem also emerged regarding its location: Therapia was twice as far from the city as Bebek, where Frederick had tried opening La Potinière two years earlier, and the distance seems to have put many people off.
Frederick
realized that he would have to take on the additional expense of providing transportation from Constantinople if he was going to induce clients to make the trip. A few weeks after the opening, he hired and advertised a “luxury boat,” promising to return revelers to the city at 2 a.m. But this did not turn attendance around. Frederick’s income that spring and summer started to falter. He had to cut back on paying bills and other expenses, just as he had several years earlier.

This time, one of his first victims was his own daughter Olga. A year earlier, in July 1925, together with her Russian husband, she had managed to get from Romania to Paris, where she enrolled as a
student. For the previous three years Frederick had been supporting her with a sizable monthly allowance, but when his expenses began to mount prior to opening Villa Tom he stopped sending money to her and, inexplicably, broke off all communication. Olga waited anxiously for several months, until July 1926, at which point she went to the American consul general in Paris, Robert Skinner, for help in finding out what had happened to her father. Skinner, in turn, contacted Allen in Constantinople, reporting that Olga was “very worried” and “absolutely penniless.” Allen’s response was as brief as protocol required: he confirmed Frederick’s address at Maxim and explained that because Frederick had been denied American
protection
, “this office is … not able to exert any influence on him or otherwise interest itself in him.” Following this exchange in late July 1926, nothing is known about any further communication between Olga and her father.

Although the government of the United States had washed its hands of Frederick, many of the people with whom he did business in Constantinople continued to think of him as an American.
Consequently
, when he stopped paying his bills on time, some of his smaller and less savvy creditors began once again to bring their complaints to the officials in the consulate general. A Russian waiter at Maxim, who had managed to circumvent employment regulations pertaining to foreigners, sent a pathetic complaint to Admiral Bristol about how Frederick had stopped paying him his full wages in June, around the time that Villa Tom had opened, and had not paid him for months despite repeated pleas. A merchant who supplied flowers to Villa Tom described how he had waited at Frederick’s office as late as “3 o’clock in the morning” in an attempt to collect the remaining half of the sum owed him, the equivalent of some $2,000 today. The Americans must have been dismayed to see such familiar complaints after their intercessions on Frederick’s behalf. They gave everyone the same response: “This office is unable to offer you any assistance towards collection of the sum which Mr. Thomas is alleged to owe you.”

However, there was a new, ominous development as well:
Frederick’s
bigger and better-connected creditors did not bother to contact the consulate general. Because foreigners like Frederick no longer had extraterritorial protection, there was no reason to involve the American diplomats; Turkish laws were now sufficient to cover any eventuality.

That fall and winter Frederick’s problems got worse. After
closing
Villa Tom for the season, he began to try to salvage his financial situation by refocusing exclusively on Maxim. But on September 26, 1926, the “Yildiz Municipal Casino,” as it was now officially called, opened for business. It did so not only with the fanfare befitting its size and splendor but also with official support from the city
government
, which made it into an even more significant event in the city’s nightlife. Invitations had gone out in the name of the prefect of Constantinople, and his assistant joined Serra in welcoming the six hundred guests at the palace doors and in cutting the ribbon to the gambling salon. Practically the entire diplomatic corps came, as did the city’s military and civilian authorities, the leading members of society, and representatives from the Grand National Assembly, the country’s parliament in Angora. Despite the large turnout, the palace was so vast that it did not feel crowded. The casino was an instant success: men and women flocked to the six baccarat tables and four roulette tables in what a journalist characterized as “probably the most luxurious gaming room in the world.”

Gambling made the Yildiz Municipal Casino a unique
destination
in the city, but the place also had everything else for which Maxim was famous, and more of it—fine restaurants, bars, tearooms, black jazz bands, dances in the afternoon, dinner dances in the
evening
, variety entertainment, and an enormous, beautifully illuminated park overlooking the Bosporus where one could stroll, ride, shoot, and play tennis. Yildiz also stayed open every day from 4:30 p.m. until 2 a.m., or later; it staged lavish special events regularly; and it provided fifteen automobiles to ferry guests back and forth from their homes and the city center.

The money poured in. During its first year of operation, the Casino is estimated to have paid the city government 130,000 Ltqs, which would be around $3 million today; this means that Serra’s syndicate grossed $20 million. Yildiz had completely eclipsed Maxim, and Frederick’s clients began to abandon him at the worst possible time. He tried to continue, but nothing he attempted worked, not even the special evenings that had been exceptionally profitable in the past and that now proved very difficult to organize. He announced a “first grand gala” of the season with a “ball of parasols” only on December 18, 1926; the next such event, featuring a masked ball, was not until two months later, on February 17.

Apart from the debts weighing him down, Frederick was also beset by new and continually shifting legal restrictions, taxes, and penalties. An Englishman who visited Constantinople in 1927
underscored
this: “Obstacles are placed in the way of all foreigners now doing business in Turkey. Fines are imposed upon the flimsiest pretext and there is no redress without endless litigation in
Turkish
courts.” As for the legal system itself, “Laws and regulations are being passed at such a rate that none can keep pace with them.” In fact, early that year, a wave of stringent restrictions swept through Constantinople that were aimed at enterprises like Maxim. The
governor
of the province announced labyrinthine regulations about who could, and who could not, attend public dances, dance together, and receive dance instruction. A week later, several hundred cabarets were closed because they had all somehow transgressed aspects of the existing regulations.

The last glimpse of Frederick and Maxim that we have is a sad one, but it elucidates what went wrong. Carl Greer, a middle-aged
businessman
from Ohio on a grand tour of the eastern Mediterranean, visited three nightspots in Constantinople at the end of April 1927 and compared them. The first was a place near the consulate general
called the “Garden Bar” that he described as “the only prosperous cabaret” in the city. Greer concluded that it was successful because it had “no such thing as a cover charge” and welcomed a range of clients, from big spenders prepared to pay several hundred dollars for a bottle of French champagne to penny-pinchers who nursed a glass of lemonade throughout an entire evening’s show. The
second
place was Maxim, which Greer characterized as “a much more ornate establishment than the successful Garden Bar.” But despite its swanky appearance he found it a “disheartening” sight because “the dance floor stood empty and the number of diners was never as great as the personnel of the orchestra that entertained them.” What had happened was obvious to Greer: after making “a great deal of money during the occupation,” Frederick could no longer attract his former clientele and was “now engaged in the painful process of losing all his profits.” The third place Greer visited was where
Constantinople’s
smart set had moved—the Yildiz Casino, and it elicited all his superlatives: “the show place among the resorts of the East, if not of the entire world … magnificence truly oriental … the gaming room causes any casino in the French Riviera to appear by
comparison
commonplace.” He also noted the crucial detail that there were “three hundred players” gathered around the Yildiz Casino’s tables. In short, the niche that Frederick had inhabited in the city’s nightlife was now gone, and he was trapped, unable to adapt. Maxim could not compete with Yildiz’s splendor and attractions, but neither could Frederick afford to make Maxim more broadly accessible, because of the size of his debt.

In the end, he tried to escape. Around the beginning of May 1927, just a few days after Greer had glimpsed Maxim’s last breaths, and with creditors on the verge of having him arrested, Frederick fled to Angora in the hope that he would be out of their reach. The
distance
from Constantinople was approximately three hundred miles, and the train crept along for the better part of an entire day, with long stops at stations. It was like a grotesque parody of his escape
from Odessa eight years before. Frederick’s best hope was a long shot, as he surely realized. But he had escaped disaster before and was prepared to try once again. He was now fifty-four, and it could not have been easy.

The new Turkish capital was being created out of an ancient but obscure town in arid, hilly central Anatolia, with a population of only seventy-four thousand in 1927. However, it was growing rapidly as the republic expanded its bureaucratic institutions and offered a boom town’s opportunities for entrepreneurs. Frederick found a prominent resident, Mustafa Fehmi Bey, who owned property on the Yeni Çehir hills by the Çankaya Road with a splendid view of the entire city. Their plan was—predictably—to transform this site into a “marvelous summer garden,” a fully “modern establishment” with a “restaurant of great luxury” that would be called “Villa Djan.” The summer season was about to begin and they would have to hurry. Because of his renown and expertise, Frederick would naturally be in charge of the construction, organization, and future direction of the new garden.

Frederick and his new partner got only as far as hiring some of the staff before the money, or the promise of money, gave out. There was also stiff competition from existing establishments run by Russian émigrés. Soon the familiar problems began—debts, broken agreements, and angry diplomats. In June, the French consul general in Angora, who did not know that Frederick had been disowned by the United States, but was aware of his “deplorable” past in
Constantinople
, as he put it, complained to his American counterpart. A certain Mr. Galanga, a chef Frederick hired and then had to dismiss, was stuck in the city because he did not have the money to pay his hotel bill, something that Frederick was contractually obligated to do.

Meanwhile, the expected disaster struck in Constantinople and Frederick’s creditors seized Maxim. In late May, they allowed the
editors
of a magazine called
Radio
to put on a concert of classical music in the former nightclub, although they made a pointed announcement
that no food or drinks would be served. A month later, Frederick’s former place in Therapia reopened under new ownership. It was now identified as “ex-Villa Tom” and, in what may have been a vindictive gesture by someone who knew of Frederick’s past in Moscow, had been renamed “Aquarium.”

Following the collapse of his plans for the Villa Djan, Frederick got a job for a short period as an assistant waiter in a restaurant in Angora. It was his bad luck that a former Constantinople customer happened to be in town and stopped by the restaurant. He saw
Frederick
in his new role and was surprised that the “likable negro” and “ex-proprietor of Maxim” was actually still alive. Frederick put on his bravest face and insisted that he was “flourishing,” but in fact he was earning only 30 Ltqs a month, comparable to $700 today. This was barely a living wage, especially if he was trying to send money to Elvira and his two sons. Frederick was also cocky, perhaps too much so for his own good: he asked the visitor to give word to his creditors in Constantinople that he was quite prepared to pay them, but “on the condition that they come to Angora.”

Whether the taunt provoked them, or they tracked him down on their own, Frederick’s creditors did catch up with him around mid-October of 1927. This time, there were no more discussions or negotiations: he was arrested and imprisoned in Angora. His total debt was a crushing 9,000 Ltqs, equivalent to about $250,000 today. Not only could he not pay any part of it, he did not even have the money to buy additional food to supplement the prison’s meager rations. Frederick’s friends and former employees in Constantinople took up a collection and sent him money so that he would not go hungry. Elvira and the boys survived largely on their charity as well. But life soon became so difficult for them that she made a desperate gamble and, leaving her sons behind in the care of friends, went to Europe to find some way to rectify their situation.