The Black Russian (14 page)

The extraordinary effort that Frederick expended that spring and early summer, when he was unable to get much sleep because
Aquarium
stayed open until dawn, must have weakened his resistance, and in June he fell ill with a severe case of pneumonia. For more than two weeks, he was bedridden at home and his life was at risk. Although he recovered, his lungs were weakened, and this condition increased his chance of contracting the dreaded disease again.

Frederick’s illness was also an unhappy reminder of how his wife, Hedwig, had died from pneumonia two and a half years ago. This event had destabilized his family life in a way that he was still trying to resolve at the same time that he was launching the Skating Palace and Maxim in the fall of 1912. By then, Valli Hoffman had
been the children’s nurse for several years and, because Frederick was very busy, had primary responsibility for raising them.

It did not take Frederick long to see that the children had grown very attached to her; they even started calling her “Auntie.” Her
interest
in him also became apparent. She was around thirty, an age that made her a spinster. Frederick was no longer young either, but he was a vigorous and attractive man who could be extremely charming. He had also become rich and showed every sign of becoming even more successful in the future. By contrast, and in light of how their relationship played out, what Frederick felt for her was probably just affection born of gratitude and familiarity. He may also have imagined that stabilizing his family’s life by remarriage would let him focus even more intently on his expanding business affairs. Their wedding took place on January 5, 1913, in the Livonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in the town of Dünamünde on the outskirts of Riga, Valli’s hometown. A commemorative photograph of the new family appears to capture the relations between them: she looks pleased, almost self-satisfied, whereas he seems thoughtful and wary.

Frederick now had the means for his family to live well. After returning to the city center from Petersburg Highway, he moved his household twice in the same neighborhood, not far from Aquarium, before finally settling into an impressive eight-room apartment (
number
13) at 32 Malaya Bronnaya Street. This handsome, modern,
six-story
building, which towered over its neighbors, was built in 1912 and had been designed by a fashionable architect. Directly across the quiet street is a famous park called Patriarch’s Ponds, which is to this day one of Muscovites’ favorite spots. Frederick also did not skimp on educating his children. In Russia on the eve of World War I, even in a major city like Moscow, only about half of the children of elementary school age received any kind of education. The situation was far worse in the provinces, and although the quality and extent of public education were improving rapidly at the time, illiteracy was still widespread among the lower classes. People with means usually
relied on private schools, and Moscow had several hundred to choose from—most quite small, judging by their total enrollment of only some seven thousand pupils. This is the path that Frederick chose. He could even have sent his children to one of the schools sponsored by foreign organizations, such as Catholics or Evangelical Lutheran Germans. All of his children learned a number of foreign languages in addition to Russian and two eventually attended universities in Western Europe; at home they spoke mostly Russian.

Frederick’s businesses required so much attention that he spent little time with his children. Despite this, Mikhail, who was his father’s favorite, recalled Frederick as a loving but very strict parent. One especially vivid event from his childhood was the time, when he was very young, his father tried to instill a sense of responsibility in him by staging a dramatic beating. Mikhail had falsely accused a servant of taking an apple that he had in fact eaten himself, and Frederick, wanting to teach his son a lesson, threatened to punish the servant even though he knew perfectly well who the culprit was. He went so far as to strike the old man several times. Mikhail not only confessed but remembered the lesson for the rest of his life.

The promise of familial stability that Frederick and Valli’s wedding seemed to offer proved short-lived. In his role as the primary talent scout for Aquarium’s variety acts, Frederick was constantly thrown into the company of attractive young women. Although the “casting couch” was hardly Hollywood’s invention, and directors of Russian theaters and cafés chantants were to some extent procurers because they hired female performers with an eye toward having the women entertain male guests offstage as well as on, there is no evidence that Frederick ever abused the power he had over women, either in Moscow or later.

But true love was another matter. Around the time he married
Valli
, Frederick met a young, beautiful, sweet-tempered German woman
named Elvira Jungmann. She was a dancer and singer who had enjoyed considerable success on the variety stages of Western Europe before she came to Moscow to perform. Her appeal and popularity were great enough to be celebrated in a series of publicity postcards issued around 1910 by the Georg Gerlach Company in Berlin, which was famous throughout Europe for producing reams of photographs of
personalities
from the world of entertainment for the fans who coveted and collected them. Some of Elvira’s postcards were quite risqué for their time and depict a very pretty woman with luxuriant hair down to her buttocks wearing tights, dance slippers, and a form-fitting bodice that shows off her curvaceous figure and remarkably thin waist. But she appeared in other, more demure guises as well, including an American cowgirl costume for an act that she performed on Maxim’s stage in 1912. This might seem very unlikely for Russia at the time, but
Buffalo
Bill Cody and his Wild West shows had in fact toured England and the Continent with great success at the end of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth cowboys, as well as Indians, were already very popular in Europe. Elvira was also better educated than one might have expected for a variety theater performer: in addition to her native German, she was fluent in English, knew French, and picked up Russian so well that some natives did not notice she was a foreigner. Less than a year after Frederick married Valli, his affair with Elvira was well under way. She gave birth to their first son, Frederick Jr., on September 10, 1914 (she would call him “Fedya,” the
diminutive
endearment of “Fyodor”); a second son, Bruce, quickly followed in 1915. Even though they did not marry until 1918, Elvira embraced domesticity and became Frederick’s loyal companion for the rest of his life, for better and especially for worse. The consequences of their affair would be dramatic and lasting for everyone in the family.

Neither the initial successes of Aquarium and Maxim nor the
tensions
in his personal life slowed Frederick’s ambition to keep
increasing
the size and reach of his businesses. Starting in the early summer of 1913, rumors began to spread through Moscow’s
theatrical
circles that the two most successful new entrepreneurs of the preceding winter and summer seasons, “F. F. Tomas and M. P. Tsarev,” were planning a series of bold new business ventures. First, they bought out their third partner, Martynov, for 55,000 rubles, which would be more than $1 million today. Then, they
reconstituted
themselves as a two-man firm with the aim of bringing under one business umbrella the three properties they had been managing both separately and together—the Aquarium complex, Frederick’s Maxim, and Tsarev’s Apollo (a popular variety theater and
restaurant
in Petrovsky Park on the city’s outskirts, near Yar). This move represented their first step in trying to become the biggest popular entertainment company in Moscow. The second one would come a year later, when they would incorporate themselves as the “First Russian Theatrical Stock Company,” an innovative concept in
Russian
popular entertainment. When the financial details of the new company were announced in January 1914, they were impressive: total capitalization was 650,000 rubles, the equivalent of $12
million
today, consisting of 2,600 shares priced at 250 rubles, or about $4,600, each. The new company’s plans were equally ambitious, and included opening, both throughout the Moscow region and in other cities, new theaters for drama, opera, operetta, and movies—which were all the rage in Russia at this time, as they were everywhere else around the world. The new company would also include additional investors, a group of Moscow capitalists to whom Frederick and Tsarev would answer as elected directors. That the partners were able to find businessmen to provide the capital they needed to
expand
is testimony to their success in Moscow’s money circles and to Frederick’s complete acceptance by them. Had the Great War not intervened, they might well have succeeded.

As the fame of Frederick’s properties spread, they became obligatory stops for foreign tourists, including even the occasional American who decided to add Russia to his European vacation. This is what attracted a pleasure seeker with the jazzy name Karl K. Kitchen, who identified himself as a “Broadwayite,” and who was touring European capitals with the express purpose of sampling their nightlife during the winter of 1913–1914. When he came to Moscow, a Russian friend suggested that the first place they should visit was Maxim, which, Kitchen was pleased and surprised to learn, was “presided over by an American.” He had no idea what was in store for him.

Kitchen’s friend did not think it necessary to warn him about whom he was going to meet. And Kitchen’s reaction after visiting Maxim is a reminder, if one were necessary, of why Frederick was never tempted to return to the United States.

“‘Thomas’s’ is indeed presided over by an American,” Kitchen recalled later, “and a blacker American I never saw in all my life”:

As the owner and host at Maxim, Frederick was used to being part of the show. By claiming to have been a personal servant of a son or grandson of the tsar of all the Russias, Frederick was implying that he had been close to and richly rewarded by one of the most important men in the land. This was a far more intriguing story than that he had worked his way up from the restaurant floor, especially if he was telling it to a visiting white American whom it would be amusing to shock.

Frederick could not have failed to recognize the note of
disapproval
in Kitchen’s reaction to him, which Kitchen preserved in his memoir by putting ironic quotation marks around “Mr.” and by parodying Frederick’s black southern accent. But Frederick remained genial throughout the visit, showing that as master of an impressive domain he could ignore slights from a white American who was ultimately of little consequence.

Kitchen, by contrast, was dazzled by the size of Maxim’s building and especially its main restaurant, which he noted could seat several hundred people and was filling up even before the evening’s performance had begun. He also found the crowd to be “stylishly dressed,” although he quickly added that it was “far from distinguished in appearance.” What he actually meant by this is that he disapproved of the mix of ethnicities that he saw. “‘See that little feller over there,’ said ‘Mr.’ Thomas, pointing to a short man with an Oriental cast of countenance. ‘He’s a Persian silk merchant—one of the best sports we have in Moscow; always orders champagne by the dozen and spends five or six hundred roubles every time he comes in here.’” For Frederick and the Muscovites, money and personal flair trumped ethnicity or race, with the glaring exception of Jews, as far as many Russians were concerned.

Whether Kitchen realized it or not, Frederick was not only showing off but also subtly rubbing Kitchen’s face in his own bias. Surveying the stage in the café chantant, Frederick casually remarked, “The performance won’t be very good to-night”: “One of the grand dukes is givin’ a party at his Moscow palace and I’m helpin’ him out, jest as a friend. I’ve sent half my talent there, but I likes to help out these Russian gentlemen, especially if they is grand dukes. They is great sports and spend lots of money with me.” These are the kinds of glittering connections that were bound to impress any tourist, and especially Americans who had no domestic equivalents to the mystery and glamour of royal “blood.”

Frederick guided Kitchen through Maxim’s other spaces as well, thus giving the visitor a good sense of how the establishment was
designed to keep customers entertained and spending money all night long.

This price would be several hundred dollars per bottle in today’s money, so the Persian merchant must have spent thousands each time he visited. No wonder Frederick called him one of the best “sports” in the city.

Frederick’s easy grace in dealing with a character like Kitchen reflects his self-assurance as well as the pleasure he took in his own success. But foreign tourists were not the only ones he attracted. Frederick was equally smooth when dealing with what he saw as the preposterous claims of someone who wanted a piece of his hard-won profits. Some of the problems he had faced, like the one involving church zoning, required effort and ingenuity; the one that followed was more like waving off a buzzing nuisance.