The Black Russian (23 page)

To find the money he needed to start something like this,
Frederick
turned to partners and moneylenders. Constantinople was a major crossroads for trade between Asia and Europe and teemed with merchants of different nationalities; Greeks and Armenians were especially prominent. Many had profited from the war, and several offered Frederick short-term loans at usurious rates—more than 100 percent interest for six months. Frederick had no choice; he had landed in Constantinople shortly before the beginning of the summer season and could not afford to miss it. Without enough money to buy or rent a suitable building, he decided to open an outdoor
entertainment
garden, on the lines of his Aquarium, although on a humbler scale. Summers began earlier and lasted longer in Constantinople than in Moscow, so if all went well this venture would go on into the fall; after that he would see.

Frederick was also used to working with partners. By May 15, less than a month after he arrived, he had settled on two—Arthur Reyser Jr. and Bertha Proctor. Little is known about Reyser except that he was Swiss, and that he and Proctor, who was English, shared a half interest in the new venture; the other half was Frederick’s. Each half represented a sizable investment—3,000 Turkish pounds (
abbreviated
“Ltqs”), which would be approximately $50,000 in today’s money. Reyser would be a passive partner, not involved in running the business on a daily basis.

Bertha Proctor was something else entirely. A barkeep by
profession
who specialized in men in uniform, she had made a fortune
during
the war running a renowned watering hole in Salonika in Greece that was called simply “Bertha’s Bar.” When the war ended and the British army left Greece for Constantinople, she followed it. Although not exactly a madam, she was remembered very warmly by her many clients as much for her friendly and beautiful bar girls—some of them with colorful nicknames like “Frying Pan,” “Square Arse,” “Mother’s Ruin,” and “Fornicating Fannie”—as for her good liquor.

Bertha’s experience and connections were excellent
complements
to Frederick’s. In her youth she had been a chorus girl and spent years performing in cabarets on the Continent, so she knew the world of popular entertainment intimately. By the time Frederick met her, she was a fleshy, buxom woman of a certain age, with
peroxided
, lemon-yellow hair piled high on her head, who liked to sit on a stool behind her bar, placidly knitting, while observing the scene and directing her girls. Her innocuous appearance was deceptive, however. In addition to being a shrewd businesswoman and diviner of men’s hearts, she was “a top limey spy,” as Lieutenant Robert Dunn, who worked in American naval intelligence in Constantinople, put it. Her job was to eavesdrop on foreigners’ conversations and to report anything of interest to British Intelligence. This was an especially productive pastime during the Allied occupation of
Constantinople
, when the city became “the political whispering gallery
of the world,” in Dunn’s words, and a hotbed of intrigue, rumors, and espionage. Despite her many years abroad, Bertha preserved her thick Lancashire accent: “Look I’ve coom to ask if it’s by your orders that these bloody detectives … they’ve found nawt, lad … it’s damn disgoosting.” With Frederick’s Delta drawl, their conversations must have been an earful.

Bertha’s popularity with British officers—her prices and women were out of reach for the rank and file—would prove a boon for Frederick, both at the start of his career in Constantinople and later. The two decided to give their venture a name that covered both sides of the Atlantic and called it the “Anglo-American Garden Villa”; it was also known as the “Stella Club.” The hybrid name reflected the symbiotic relationship between the two parts of the enterprise:
Bertha
would preside over her bar while Frederick handled everything else—booking variety acts, hiring employees for the kitchen and
restaurant
, and dealing with contractors and wholesalers of provisions.

“Bertha and Thomas,” as the partners became known, found a large parcel of land on the northern edge of Pera in an area known as Chichli. It was across the street from the last stop of the Number 10 tramway line, which made it readily accessible by public
transportation
from the center. But the location was also risky, because in 1919 it hardly looked like part of the city. Only half of it was built up, mostly with shabby-looking two-and three-story houses of brick and weather-beaten wood, while the rest consisted of large fruit and vegetable gardens and empty lots that merged into the countryside a short distance away. However, the parcel was relatively cheap to rent and had a scattering of old shade trees as well as a nice view of the Bosporus (the area is now completely built up with apartment buildings that block all street-level views). There was also a roomy house in a corner of the property, which is where Frederick and his family probably moved after leaving the Pera Palace.

By the end of June, the empty lot had been transformed into a mini Aquarium: several simple wooden structures were built; there
were pavilions and kiosks, neat gravel paths, and strings of electric lights that made the entire place glow at night. Staff people were hired and purveyors of food and drink lined up. An open-air dance floor occupied a central spot, with a stage behind it and tables for customers facing it. The “Stella Club” was on the second floor of one of the buildings. Advertisements had been appearing in local French-and English-language newspapers for several weeks and on Tuesday, June 24, 1919, the Anglo-American Garden Villa opened.

A new era in Constantinople’s nightlife had begun. The
establishment
offered first-class dinners and suppers in a garden restaurant, an American bar, private rooms, a Gypsy band, and variety acts. For herself, Bertha added that she had “the honour to invite all her British friends to be present”; later she extended a more spirited invitation: “Friends of the Salonica Army, Fall In. We are waiting for you.” Frederick also exploited his past celebrity to underscore the attentive personal service and sophisticated cuisine that patrons could expect from him: “Teas, Dinners and Suppers under the special
superintendence
of the well-known Moscow Maitre d’hôtel Thomas.” He would become famous in Constantinople for his signature warmth and the big smiles with which he greeted his customers.

The partners’ gamble paid off. The opening weeks of the
Anglo-American
Villa were very promising, even though expenses were high and the profits were thin. The changeable summer weather was also worrisome. A journalist who admired the place noted
sympathetically
that “the night winds are decidedly incommodating nowadays for outdoor theatrical performances. At Chichli they blow the stage curtain about and even the curtain doors of the bathing boxes,
giving
the public a glimpse of [the performers] Mme Milton and Mme Babajane in their preparations.” But as the weather improved, the number of customers increased; they were drawn by the unique
combination
of Russo-French cuisine, pretty Russian waitresses, dancing to the Codolban Brothers Gypsy band, and a cascade of lively variety acts onstage.

Frederick made even bigger entertainment history that summer. On August 31, the Anglo-American Villa announced what would become a key to his future success and renown in the city: “For the first time in Constantinople a Jazz-Band executed by Mr. F. Miller and Mr. Tom, the latest sensation all over Europe.” Freddy Miller was an Englishman who did parodies of musical acts and sang humorous songs—his most popular was the stuttering hit “K-K-K-Katie”; “Mr. Tom,” a black American, was an “eccentric” dancer with an
amusing
routine. They were not professional jazz musicians, but their comedy act included some jazz interludes. Their performance was a hit and, with Frederick, they get credit for introducing this
quintessentially
black American music to Turkey just as it was beginning to conquer London, Paris, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and everywhere in between. As he had in Moscow, Frederick continued to follow new trends in entertainment closely, and he would import more real jazz to Constantinople in the years ahead. However, even with his nose for innovation, he could not have foreseen how this jaunty music would contribute to the revolutionary transformation of Turkish society that was just beginning.

By the end of the summer, the Anglo-American Villa was
pronounced
a resounding success by the
Orient News
, the authoritative newspaper of the “Army of the Black Sea,” as the British occupiers of Constantinople styled themselves.

But Frederick’s new plan to book acts in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, ran into a serious obstacle. To travel, he would need a passport, and to get one he had to apply to the American consulate general. This would be far more complicated and risky than
appealing
to Jenkins for help in Odessa had been.

Frederick took the plunge on October 24. It was a Friday, the Muslim day of worship, when the city’s usual noise and bustle abated somewhat as the faithful prepared to attend services in their mosques. When Frederick got to the consulate general, which was in the middle of Pera and around the corner from the embassy, he met with Charles E. Allen, the vice-consul.

Allen was a twenty-eight-year-old from Kentucky who had worked at a variety of jobs in the United States—high school teacher, principal, railway clerk—before joining the Foreign Service four years earlier. His first postings had been to Nantes, a small city in western France, and Adrianople, a provincial city in western Turkey—neither a very glamorous beginning to a diplomatic career. As Allen’s actions would show, he was not well disposed toward the black man in front of him, who arrived trailing stories of riches and fame in Moscow, and with a white wife and a clutch of mixed-race sons in tow.

Frederick had to give responses to questions that Allen then typed onto two forms—a standard “Passport Application” and a much trickier “Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence and to Overcome Presumption of Expatriation.” The conversation between them was fundamentally dishonest. Frederick did not bother to be very accurate and made a series of big and small mistakes and doubtful statements about his past, including inventing a sister in Nashville who could supposedly vouch for him. But he was much more careful about his future intentions and said that he wanted the passport to go to Russia and France, where he intended to “settle my property interests en route to the U.S. to put my children in school.” This was an obvious smoke screen and it is unlikely that
Allen believed him. Frederick had no financial interests in France, although he might have fantasized about moving there because Paris was becoming known for its hospitality toward black Americans. And he could not possibly have wanted to return to Russia while the Bolsheviks were in power and a civil war was raging. Frederick (and Allen) also knew perfectly well that he and his family would be unable to lead normal lives in much of the United States, where Jim Crow was riding triumphant together with a reborn Ku Klux Klan, and where his marriage to Elvira would be widely seen as not only reprehensible but illegal. (Constantinople’s English-and
French-language
newspapers regularly ran lurid articles about American racial policies and lynchings.)

Frederick’s biggest problem during his interview with Allen was clearly his decades-long residence abroad, which raised the suspicion that he had expatriated himself. There was little that Frederick could say to mitigate this, but he tried—he claimed that he had intended to return to the United States in 1905, but had gotten only as far as the Philippines. Whether or not Frederick took such a trip is uncertain, although he did mention it to other Americans later and provided some plausible-sounding details. In any event, it would hardly have satisfied Allen’s or the State Department’s misgivings.

For his part, Allen responded to Frederick with negligence, or worse, and did not fill out several important sections on the forms. These omissions would have been enough to invalidate the
application
in the eyes of the State Department, had it been sent. But Allen did not even bother to forward it to Washington; he let the
documents
languish at the consulate general for the next fourteen months. The most likely conclusion is that he had decided to sabotage the application by setting it aside.

Dealing with Allen was just the first of the problems that began to crowd around Frederick that fall. Money was next, and this too would do nothing to improve his standing at the consulate general. Despite the Garden’s popularity during the summer season, its
income
was still insufficient to cover all of the operating costs—food, drink, fuel, housing, and everything else were very expensive in Constantinople—or the loans that Frederick had taken out. When the weather deteriorated in the fall, the Garden’s attendance dropped and its financial problems worsened. At first, merchants tried to get what they were owed from Frederick himself. But when he put them off or evaded them, they (believing he was an American citizen) began to bring their complaints to the American consulate general. They did so not only because the city was under Allied occupation, but also because of the so-called Capitulations that gave the United States extraterritoriality in Turkey. This meant that American diplomats had the right to try their nationals in their own courts and according to their own laws rather than in Turkish courts.