The Black Russian (13 page)

But they were not allowed to forget for long, because an hour later the door was thrown open again.

Several days passed before Lockhart and his friend could relax and accept that Frederick had been right. In the end, they learned something that he had known at least since he worked at Yar (where romantic dramas also unfolded regularly)—Russian police and other officials showed deference to anyone who had rank or social
standing
, and such deference could always be “reinforced by the concrete of hard cash.” Frederick’s years of experience as a waiter, valet, and maître d’hôtel before he took over Aquarium had made him an expert on reading his clients’ desires and fears. By the summer of 1912, he had also become a master of all the written and unwritten rules of running a successful business in Moscow, a business that employed scores of people and entertained thousands every week.

The summer of 1912 was also when Frederick first became rich. In September, when the season was starting to wind down, a reporter managed to ferret out the final tally of how much Aquarium’s partners had earned. It was a remarkable 150,000 rubles net profit, or the equivalent of about $1 million each in today’s money. In less than a year, Frederick had launched himself on a trajectory that would scarcely have been imaginable to blacks, or to most whites for that matter, in Mississippi or anywhere else in the United States, and that put him into the first ranks of Russia’s theatrical entrepreneurs.

From an American perspective, it is also nothing less than
amazing
that Frederick’s race was never an issue as he rose to prominence in Moscow. Even the highly opinionated journalist “Gamma” made only a single, oblique reference to Frederick’s skin color (and the other commentators in the Moscow press did not mention it at all). Gamma tried to be witty, invoking ancient Roman history and
identifying
“Mr. Thomas” with no less a figure than “Julius Caesar,”
adding
that Frederick had “turned black” in Yar and “not in Gaul.” The journalist’s rather pretentious point was that Frederick’s experience
at Yar, where he perfected the skills that allowed him to “rule” in Aquarium, was similar to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, which preceded his becoming dictator of Rome. Frederick’s “blackness” is thus
neither
an explicit racial category nor connected to his American past; it is, instead, a metaphor for superior experience and skill, as well as a simple identifying trait.

Around this time several Chicagoans visited Aquarium—which they characterized as “one of the institutions of Moscow”—and were so “astonished” by Frederick’s “prosperous” and “diamond bedecked” appearance, as well as by the fact that his mixed-race children were “now at school in one of the leading academies of Russia,” that they felt compelled to report their discovery to a local newspaper once they got home. Frederick also demonstrated to them one of the reasons for his success by charming them with his personal
attention
and reminiscences about their city, including the Auditorium Hotel, in which he had worked twenty years earlier. “Good evening, Mr. Blank,” he said addressing each by name. “I can give you better tables if you will do me the honor of moving. How were things when you left Chicago?”

The success and sheer size of Aquarium might have seemed enough to keep Frederick busy, even with his two partners sharing the load. Running the place was also a year-round job, so that as soon as the first season was over he had to start preparing for the next one. In September 1912, he went on the road again, this time to the major Russian cities St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Odessa, to recruit new variety acts for the 1913 summer season. Simultaneously, he was also
making
plans to open a “Skating-Palace” on the Aquarium grounds that would operate during the colder weather.

But Frederick’s ambitions reached farther than Aquarium. His first success had whetted his appetite for more. That fall, rumors began to circulate in Moscow’s theater world that he was in
discussions
regarding a new business, one he would run by himself. The failure of a theater with an attached garden right in the city’s center provided the target.

“Chanticleer” had just ended a disastrous season under the management of Stepan Osipovich Adel, an entrepreneur who was an old hand at running theaters into the ground and ruining his
employees
. When Frederick revealed that he was going to take it over, Muscovites in the entertainment business cheered the news. “This one plays for keeps,” a magazine editor proclaimed about Frederick. “He’ll know how to create a big, solid enterprise.” In a vivid sign of how thoroughly Frederick had become assimilated into the city’s life in personal and not just professional terms, a Moscow
journalist
declared that “F. F. Tomas” had become “our favorite.” Several of these encomiums were accompanied by a flattering photograph: Frederick gazes at the viewer with calm self-possession, one arm
resting
comfortably on the crook of a walking stick; he sports a dapper hat, an elegant suit with a boutonniere, and a big bushy mustache.

Frederick decided to rename Chanticleer “Maxim” after the
famous
belle epoque restaurant in Paris (the name was popular for cafés chantants in cities throughout Europe), and immediately began to plan renovations. When Muscovites went to the theater in those days, no matter if it was to see serious performances of music and drama or light genres such as operetta, comedy, and vaudeville, they expected to feel that they had arrived somewhere out of the ordinary. Unabashed luxury was the norm (except at some artistically avant-garde theaters), and this meant elaborate displays of rich fabrics, gilt, soaring ceilings, glittering chandeliers, and ornate plaster decorations. Frederick did not stray from this formula, and by mid-October 1912 the interior of Maxim was ready and the list of performers complete. When the black Americans Duncan and Brooks saw the place in all its refurbished glory, they were struck by how everything in it was “gold and plush. When you went inside the door you would sink so deep in carpets that you would think that you would be going through to the cellar.”

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.