The Black Russian (25 page)

The biggest threat was a new garden, Strelna, that two famous singers, Yury Morfessi and Nastya Polyakova, decided to open just
two short blocks away from Stella, in a strategic location chosen to siphon off Frederick’s clients. Their initiative paid off, leading
Morfessi
to boast that as “‘Stella’ dimmed,” Strelna’s affairs “blossomed” and went “blissfully well.” The drop in attendance at Stella could have been its end, especially because of all the other financial difficulties that were still hanging over Frederick. Only a bit of skullduggery on the part of one of his performers saved him: she denounced Morfessi to the Interallied Police for staying open after a mandatory curfew, and Strelna was shut down.

In addition to competition, however, the new waves of Russian refugees also brought a valuable resource with them—a substitute for the bar girls Frederick had lost when he and Bertha parted ways. Among the refugees were numerous members of the Russian
nobility
. Many of the women who belonged to this class had never had to work for a living and had neither professions nor salable skills. At the same time, quite a few of the younger ones were very attractive, had well-developed social graces, and often knew foreign languages, in particular French. The majority were also destitute and willing to take any work they could find. Restaurant owners like Frederick quickly realized their worth. Pretty and graceful young women, in particular blue-eyed blondes who were “princesses,” “countesses,” or “duchesses,” could be a very effective draw for any establishment trying to attract more customers. This was especially true if most of the clients were men who were used to only waiters—male waiters having been the norm in conservative Ottoman society—and it was even more true if the women whom Turkish men usually saw were olive-complexioned, sloe-eyed, dark-haired, and swathed in fabric from head to toe. Thus it happened that the French term “dame serveuse” came to denote a young Russian noblewoman who occupied a tantalizing place in Constantinople’s collective male imagination—whether that of a Muslim Turk, a Levantine, an Allied officer, a fellow Russian refugee, or a tourist taking in the city’s exotic sights. The thrill a customer would get from being served by a titled woman and
the resulting tips were sufficient reason for many of these ladies to exaggerate their birthright, often quite shamelessly: never did any city in Russia have as many women of blue and even royal blood as Constantinople in the early 1920s. It was also inevitable that the ambiguous status of these young women—underpaid and frequently obligated to dine or dance with any male clients who took a fancy to them—made it easy for many to slip into the demimonde.

The style of dress that these Slavic sirens adopted varied from restaurant to restaurant. In one place they would flaunt their Russian boldness: “white Caucasian jackets, high black boots, thin scarves around their hair and heavy makeup.” In another, they cultivated a softer, decadent seductiveness, as the singer Vertinsky, who had also arrived in 1920, promised at his nightclub “La Rose Noire”: “The serving ladies will whisper to the clients the poems of Baudelaire between the courses. They are to be exquisite, select, delicate and to wear each a black rose in their golden hair.” Some wore dainty aprons that made them look like soubrettes in light comedy, an impression that they augmented with their shyness and apologetic manner.

The reactions to them in Constantinople were predictable. A group of thirty-two widows of Turkish noblemen and high officials sent a petition to the city governor demanding the immediate
expulsion
of “these agents of vice and debauchery who are more dangerous and destructive than syphilis and alcohol.” The British ambassador, Sir Horace Rumbold, explained wryly in a letter to Admiral de
Robeck
, the British high commissioner, that the “little Princess Olga Micheladze” plans to marry “one Sanford, a nice quiet fellow in the Inter-Allied Police…. He has money.” A tourist visiting from Duluth, Minnesota, gushed that the owner of a restaurant “is an escaped
Russian
grand duke, and all the waitresses are Russian princesses of the royal family.” The latter “were pretty and flirted terrifically. I asked one if she spoke any English and the answer, with a quaint accent, was, ‘Sure, I know lots American boys.’” A cartoon in the local
British
newspaper showed a Turk asking a Russian woman: “Parlez-vous
français, mademoiselle?” She replies, “No, but I know how to say ‘love’ in every language.”

At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, more than one visiting foreigner was moved by the sight of an exiled Russian officer rising at his restaurant table with an expression of somber respect on his face to kiss the hand of the waitress approaching him because they had known each other under very different circumstances in their
previous
lives. Princess Lucien Murat, a French tourist in Constantinople, had a series of similar heart-wrenching encounters with a number of people she had known in prerevolutionary Petrograd—“Baron S,” whom she found working as a street bootblack; “Colonel X,” who now manned a cloakroom in a restaurant; and then, at Frederick’s bar, her old friend “Princess B,” whom she had last seen at a ball in Petrograd “in a silvery dress, with her marvelous emeralds in a diadem on her lovely forehead.” “The Princess tells me her lamentable tale, her escape from the Bolsheviks, her flight in a crowded cattle-car.” Meanwhile, her “Boss” hovers around—“an ebony black, who, in the old days, kept the most fashionable restaurant in Moscow where, many a time, the Princess dined and danced to the music of the tziganes.” Princess Lucien’s reaction to seeing her old friend in Frederick’s employ is
revealing
in that it provides a glimpse of a dame serveuse from a point of view other than that of an admiring or lascivious male.

Also revealing, but for reasons of Turkish national pride and what this foreshadowed about the future of the Allied enclave in Constantinople, is the reaction of a sharp-eyed young Turkish
patriot
during a visit to Stella one warm summer evening. Mufty-Zade K. Zia Bey knew the United States well, having lived there for a decade. Together with his wife and a friend, he decided to sample Pera’s nightlife and went to the “café chantant” that was the “best” in the city. When they arrived, Stella was crowded and Zia Bey, who was very proud of his conservative, traditional Turkish values, was immediately put off by its libertine atmosphere, although he was impressed by Frederick’s manner.

Zia Bey also bristled at the way everything about Stella reflected the foreign presence in the city and the secondary role that had been forced on the city’s Muslim natives: “Not one real Turk is in sight. Many foreigners, but mostly Greeks, Armenians and Levantines—with dissipated puffed-up faces, greedy of pleasure and materialism.” Before long, Zia Bey and his wife decided to leave. They relaxed only when they were safely out of Pera, across the Galata Bridge, and back home in “our Stamboul, the beautiful Turkish city, sleeping in the night the sleep of the just; poor Stamboul, ruined by fires and by wars, sad in her misery, but decent and noble; a dethroned queen dreaming of her past splendour and trusting in her future.” Zia Bey’s attitude represented the numerous threats to the foreign world of which Frederick was a part, although there was no reason for him to be aware of them just yet.

With the prominence of the “dames serveuses” in the minds of Constantinople’s male population, it was inevitable that racially tinged insinuations about Frederick’s relations with his Russian waitresses would have begun to spread among members of the city’s American colony. Some intimated that, like “all Negroes,” Frederick was prone to “the greatest sexual excesses” and had “a way of compelling various
of his employees to accept his caresses.” But in fact, as Larry Rue, a reporter from Chicago who looked into the allegations, put it, Frederick’s waitresses considered him to be “the ‘whitest’ employer around” because he not only treated them with respect but allowed them to refuse advances from anyone, including “numerous British officers” who “protested against this high tone morality.”

Frederick did not stop at extending his protective circle around his waitresses and even arranged several galas for their financial
benefit
, which was very unusual in the world of Constantinople nightlife—such events were typically organized on behalf of star performers or the management. His action was a genuine kindness, although it was also shrewd because it put the young women on special display. This was similar to his decision to donate Stella for “A Great Festival of Charity” on July 24, 1920, on behalf of the “Waifs Rescued by the Suppression of Begging Society.” The event had been inspired by one of his star performers, the singer Isa Kremer, and sanctioned by the city’s highest authorities—the Interallied high commissioners. Both Kremer and Frederick were praised lavishly for their initiative. This participation recalls his donation of Aquarium as a staging area for patriotic manifestations in Moscow during the war.

Despite the crowds of customers and enthusiastic press reports about Stella during its second season, Frederick was still unable to make ends meet. New creditors kept trooping to the increasingly
exasperated
diplomats at the consulate general. As the number of complaints mounted, Ravndal’s and Allen’s tone began to change. Initially, they wrote formulaic but polite requests, but Allen in particular began to sound barely civil: “complaints … requiring your immediate
attention
”; “You will furnish me at the earliest possible moment a
statement
”; “inform me immediately.”

Aggravating the situation was that Frederick became the target of extortionists who masqueraded as creditors and pressured the
consulate general to help them get money. In light of Frederick’s tarnished reputation, the diplomats took all such complaints seriously. The worst of these swindlers was Alexey Vladimirovich Zavadsky, a Russian who in June 1920 hired a lawyer, enlisted the help of the
Russian
diplomatic mission in the city (which continued to function on behalf of Russian refugees, with the Allies’ blessing, even though the empire it represented had vanished), and claimed that Frederick had owed him over 300 Ltqs in wages since the previous summer. Despite pressure from the American diplomats to pay the man off, Frederick adamantly refused, labeling it “a case of chantage”—blackmail. But he was unable to erase the diplomats’ impression that all he did was generate trouble for them.

There was worse to come during the fall of 1920 and the
following
winter, when his ex-wife, Valli, suddenly resurfaced. Her affair with the “Bolshevik commissar” had ended unhappily and by early September she had managed to extricate herself and Irma from
Soviet
Russia and get to Berlin. Once there, she immediately set about trying to find and contact Frederick. On September 9, she went to the American Commission’s offices and applied for a Certificate of Identity and an Emergency Passport for herself and Irma,
explaining
that she wanted these in order to join her husband wherever he might be. Berlin was a far from happy place in 1920, with serious food shortages, disastrous inflation, high unemployment, and growing social unrest. Her only hope for a decent life was to gain Frederick’s financial support.

In Berlin, the consul took her application and explained
official
State Department policy; her claim about being married to an American would have to be investigated in Washington. When the answer arrived, it could not have been more disappointing: there was no record of the application that Valli had made to renew her passport in Moscow in 1916 (even though she had proof that she had filed one); it was also impossible to verify any passport
application
by Frederick or his birth in the United States; accordingly, Mrs.
Valentina Thomas’s request was denied. This not only was bad news for her but did not bode well for Frederick either.

Judging by the amount of trouble Valli was able to cause
Frederick
from afar during the next several years, it was his good luck that she did not receive papers allowing her to come to
Constantinople
. In early October, even before she got the rejection from Washington, she began to write in English and in German to the American consulate general in Constantinople, and later to the British embassy as well, presenting herself as Frederick’s only lawful wife, enclosing photographs of them together as proof of their
relationship
, besmirching Elvira, complaining of being ill and impoverished, pleading for financial support for herself and his daughter, insisting that he could afford to help them because he was well off, and asking for his precise address.

The task of dealing with Frederick fell to Allen, who forwarded a copy of Valli’s letter to Frederick and attached a surprisingly
presumptuous
demand: “I request you to indicate what attention you will give this matter.” The consulate general was now involved not only in his financial problems and his claim to American citizenship, but also in what Allen referred to as his “marital relationships.” Frederick was becoming an unbearable burden to the American authorities in Constantinople.

In the fall of 1920, Wrangel’s White Volunteer Army lost its war against the Bolsheviks, dashing the hopes of Russian refugees in Constantinople that they would be able to return home. Following a cease-fire with Poland in October 1920, the Red Army was able to concentrate its forces in the south and pushed the Whites down into the Crimean Peninsula, until their backs were to the Black Sea. The only escape was by water. In early November, Wrangel began to assemble a ragtag fleet of some 130 vessels—everything from former imperial Russian warships and transports to passenger boats and merchant ships, private yachts, and barges towed by other ships. By November 19, the motley flotilla had finished staggering across the Black Sea and dropped anchor off Constantinople, transforming the Bosporus into a floating archipelago of human misery.

There were nearly 150,000 people on board and the conditions were horrible. All of the ships were overcrowded, some so badly that they listed dangerously. Sanitary facilities had been overwhelmed and water and food supplies were exhausted. Passengers willingly traded their wedding bands and the gold crosses around their necks for jugs of water or loaves of bread that enterprising Turks offered
from small boats, which had flocked to the Russian ships. There were large numbers of sick and wounded on board. Many of the refugees had only the possessions on their backs.

The remnants of the White Volunteer Army numbered nearly 100,000 men, with the rest civilians, including 20,000 women and 7,000 children. During the days and weeks that followed, the French interned two-thirds of the troops in makeshift camps throughout the region, including the Gallipoli Peninsula, the site of the disastrous Allied landings during the war. But tens of thousands of others,
military
men and civilians alike, flooded into Constantinople, where they created a humanitarian catastrophe.

November was already cold; the winter winds were beginning to stream down across the Black Sea from the great Russian plain; and housing, food, clothing, and medical care were all in short supply. The Allied authorities, the American Red Cross, the Russian embassy, and other civic organizations did what they could to help. Some of the refugees were herded into hastily designated shelters—abandoned barracks and other partially ruined buildings—where they endured near-freezing temperatures and starvation rations. Some lucky ones got space in the stables of the Dolmabahçe Palace. But many had to manage as best they could on their own and to survive by their wits. There was no trade or job at which they did not try their hand. Those who knew languages tried to teach them or to work in Allied offices. Others hauled bags of coal and cement on the Galata docks; sold
shoelaces
and sweets from trays on Pera’s streets; spun handheld lottery wheels; hired themselves out as doormen, dishwashers, and maids; or simply begged. Army officers tried to sell their medals to passersby on the Galata Bridge. The writer John Dos Passos saw a one-legged Russian soldier standing in the street, covering his face with his hands and sobbing. Out of despair some officers shot themselves. So many Russian women peddled nosegays in an arcade on the Grande rue de Pera that it is known to this day as “Çiçek Pasaji,” “Flower Passage.” Anyone who had any money tried to start a business: small Russian
restaurants sprang up all over like mushrooms after a rain (as Russians liked to put it). Secondhand shops displayed the luxury detritus of a vanished empire—jewelry, watches, icons, furs—that the fortunate had managed to bring out with them. Classically trained musicians, singers, and dancers organized performances and inspired a taste for Western arts that forever changed the city’s cultural landscape. Speculators created an unofficial currency exchange on the steep steps from Pera to Galata. A few made fortunes overnight but lost them the following day.

From the start, there was one thought on everybody’s mind: how to get out of Constantinople—how to go somewhere, anywhere, that would be better. Wrangel at first tried to keep his army intact, hoping to return to fight in Russia. But the Allies were not interested in supporting his anti-Bolshevik movement any longer and soon began to disperse his troops and the other Russians in the city to any country that would take them—in the Balkans, Western Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Indochina.

The tragedy affecting his former countrymen played out
before
Frederick’s eyes. That fall, when Stella closed for the season, he had to find another place to rent because the Jockey Club was no longer available. His new winter location in the Alhambra Theater was on a busy stretch of the Grande rue de Pera just a few blocks north of the Russian embassy, a neighborhood that became one of the main gathering places for thousands of Russians who milled about day and night in search of work, food, a place to sleep, news, visas, hope. Most of Frederick’s kitchen staff and waitstaff, and many performers, were already Russians. Many more showed up at his door after the massive November evacuation, asking for jobs or help. He hired a few out of kindness but turned away most because his staff was complete. However, no one left empty-handed, even though he was hard up himself. For many years afterward, grateful émigrés across the Russian diaspora who had experienced exile in Constantinople still remembered “Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas”
as “the black man with a broad Russian nature” who never denied anyone a free meal.

The Russians’ plight had given Frederick a vivid reminder of how one’s place in the world could depend entirely on having the right piece of paper in hand. Although he had fallen ill with pneumonia again at the end of November, and was not yet fully recovered, in late December 1920 he went back to the consulate general to
inquire
about the passport for which he had applied more than a year earlier. We do not know what excuses Allen gave him to explain the extraordinary delay in submitting the paperwork, or if he even
admitted
that he had never forwarded it to the State Department. But on Friday, December 24, he finally sent the passport application and the “Affidavit to Explain Protracted Foreign Residence” to Washington. As Allen could not have failed to realize, the application was doomed even before he put it into the diplomatic pouch, because he had left it shockingly incomplete. Nevertheless, as if to be doubly sure that it would fail, Allen also appended a statement that was striking in its dishonesty and malevolence.

Referring to the application as an “abandoned” one (but without explaining how it came to be so), Allen identified Frederick as an “American negro”—a loaded characterization that none of the
American
officials ever omitted in their correspondence about him—and “a waiter by profession.” The latter was Allen’s attempt to demean Frederick; if the tables had been turned, it would be like Frederick saying that Consul Allen was a “railway clerk” because he had been one in the past. But not only did Allen obscure the fact that by 1920 Frederick had been a major entrepreneur for nearly a decade; he also tried to make Frederick sound like a parvenu when he claimed that “there is considerable doubt as to whether Thomas is a partner or an employee” in his current enterprise. This too was deeply dishonest. Over the past eight months, diplomats at the American consulate
had documented in detail Frederick’s relations with Arthur Reyser, Bertha Proctor, and Karp Chernov. In fact, Allen himself handled the money transfer between the two sets of partners and deposited a signed copy of the receipt in the consulate records. And just a month earlier, a subordinate whom Allen had charged with the task of
pinning
down the precise relationship between Frederick and Chernov reported that they were equal partners. Allen concluded with an especially damning complaint about Frederick that summed up all the diplomats’ irritation with him.

Two weeks later, Frederick’s paperwork landed on the desk of Joseph B. Quinlan, one of several dozen clerks in the Division of Passport Control in the State Department. Not surprisingly, he found the case “rather unusual,” and passed it on to a superior, G. Gilmer Easley. Whereas Quinlan came from the Midwest, Easley was a Virginian. This may have been why he had no doubts whatsoever about the case.

This answer is not only racist in the singular way it identifies Frederick; it is also either a lie or evidence of startling ineptitude. During his years abroad, Frederick had registered with American embassies and consulates, and applied for passport extensions eight times: on the first occasion in Paris in 1896, on the last in Moscow in 1914. All of these documents were duly forwarded to the State Department (and would resurface a decade later; but by then it would be too late). It is doubtful that Easley actually bothered to check these records, or that they would have made any difference to him if he did. He also did not seem to care that the application he was judging was scandalously incomplete.

Fortunately for Frederick, during this first round, Easley’s
recommendation
was reviewed at a higher level and overridden. Allen could not have been very happy with the official response that was sent over his head to his superior, Ravndal, by Wilbur J. Carr, the director of the entire consular service, who wrote on behalf of the secretary of state himself. The response, which arrived at the end of February, was a rebuke, in diplomatically measured bureaucratese, aimed at Allen for wasting everyone’s time by not following the
instructions
that were clearly printed on the forms: Frederick has to submit a complete application; he needs to provide evidence of his citizenship and “of his marriage to the woman represented to be his wife.” “He should also state definitely his intention with reference to returning to the United States for permanent residence and as to the future place of residence of his family.”

This was bad news for Frederick, although it could have been worse. At least his claim to American citizenship had not been rejected out of hand (as it would have been if anyone in the State Department had gotten wind of his Russian citizenship) and he was, in effect, invited to reapply.

In the meantime, he had to counter the considerable damage that Valli was continuing to inflict on his reputation. When she wrote to the consulate general in Constantinople she included copies of documents supporting her claims, including an official translation of her and Frederick’s marriage certificate from 1913. Frederick did not have a single document in support of what he said. As a result, the diplomats, who lived in a world made largely of paper and who had already found Frederick unreliable in other respects, believed her and not him. In a letter to Valli in May, Ravndal referred to Frederick as “your husband,” and in one to Frederick written on the same day he referred to Valli as “your wife in Germany.”

All this aggravated Frederick’s already poor relations with the American officials. He could do little except insist on his version of events. Shortly thereafter, he wrote, in his careful longhand, a detailed response to Ravndal, in which he politely and firmly explained “once more”: “I have no wife in Germany, because I have my wife with me here.” He continued, “As I wrote to you before, I divorced my former wife in Moscow, because she committed a break of marriage in having a Bolshevik Commissar for her lover for about 2 years.” Frederick then explained:

Frederick added the phrase about his birthplace as an afterthought (he used a different pen) to remind the diplomats of his claim to an American passport. However, none of this made any difference; the diplomats did not believe him. The next time one of them wrote to the State Department, he characterized Elvira as Frederick’s “
free-love
companion.”