The Black Russian

7: Reinvention in Constantinople

The American consulate general in Constantinople did not have the money or the inclination to provide much practical help to the refugees from Odessa after they finally disembarked on the Galata quay. Frederick initially took his family to the Pera Palace Hotel, which was one of the two best in the city. Staying there was an indulgence that he could ill afford, but it must have been an enormous relief to immerse oneself in the cleanliness and comforts of a good hotel after the filth and deprivations of Imperator Nikolay and the degrading quarantine at Kavaka.

The Pera Palace had opened in 1895 on the heights of the city’s European district as a modern residence for the passengers of the Orient Express, the fabled train that ran from London, Paris, and Venice (in reality as well as fiction and film), across all of Europe to the Sirkeci Terminal in Stambul. Other than the sultan’s Dolmabahçe Palace, the Pera Palace was the first building in Constantinople with electricity, an electric elevator, and hot running water. In its heyday before and after the Great War its famous guests included Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary; Edward VIII of the United Kingdom; Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), the founder of modern-day Turkey; Ernest Hemingway; Greta Garbo; and Agatha Christie, among many others. Lavishly decorated with stained glass, marble, and gilded plaster (recently refurbished to all its former glory), the hotel had wonderful views of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn and was the epitome of the Pera district—a cosmopolitan, Westernized island in an otherwise Turkish Muslim sea.

The Pera Palace Hotel was then one of the main centers of social and business life in Constantinople, and a crossroads for people who had either money or ideas about how to make it. Shortly after he arrived, Frederick ran into an old Moscow acquaintance, the Romanian musician Nitza Codolban, a large-nosed man with slicked-back hair, sad eyes, and a big smile. He was a virtuoso of the cimbalom, an instrument resembling a hammered dulcimer that was very popular in Gypsy music.

Codolban recalled how struck he was by Frederick’s passion and eagerness to confront the difficulties ahead: “I’m going to try something desperate,” the black man proclaimed, “and I’ve got a few ideas.”

Frederick went on to explain that he was going to start everything from zero. He described how he had overcome far bigger obstacles than the Black Sea to stop now. He also said that he liked this new city, which even reminded him a bit of Moscow.

Frederick then swore to Codolban, as he said he had already sworn to his wife, that he had had enough. No matter what happened in Constantinople, he would never leave. This is where he would die, he declared, after “conquering the Bosphorus nights,” in Codolban’s florid recollection. “And so, will you join me?” he concluded with his memorable smile.

Much impressed by Frederick’s energy, Codolban decided that he would put off leaving Constantinople and, in a reference to their shared past, agreed to work in what he assumed would be a “new Maxim,” a nightclub to be named after its famous Moscow predecessor. But Frederick was not ready to move so quickly: “Not a Maxim yet. You have to move slowly with luck,” he explained. “I’m going to start with a Stella.”

Despite the physical and cultural distance Frederick had traveled, he discovered that Pera suited him surprisingly well. All the Western embassies were located there, as were the most important businesses, banks, fashionable restaurants, bars, and shops. Many of the buildings on the main streets were half a dozen stories high, constructed of light-colored stone, and European in style. The population was mixed; in addition to Turks there were large numbers of Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and people known locally as “Levantines,” or natives of European descent. Even though spoken Turkish was unlike anything Frederick had heard before, and its written form in Arabic was unintelligible to him, the language of commerce and the second language of the city’s elites was French, which he spoke fluently. This would make life and work in Constantinople much easier.

Frederick also soon noticed some similarities between Constantinople and Moscow because of how both straddled East and West, the old and the new. Despite its European traits and cosmopolitan character, prerevolutionary Moscow often struck visitors as having an Oriental cast due to the unfamiliar architecture of its numerous churches and the traditional garb worn by peasants, priests, and other exotic types. Similarly, in Constantinople the shop signs in French on the Grande rue de Pera, the European district’s central thoroughfare, as well as the automobiles, the streetcars, and the men in business suits, all proclaimed “the West.” But like the fez (the signature tasseled red hat of the Ottoman Empire) that many of the men wore, reminders that Constantinople was on the border between continents and cultures were never far from sight.

Like Moscow, Constantinople had its own religious “soundscape” that showed visitors how far they had traveled. Instead of a chorus of church bells marking the daily round of services, here it was a single male voice from atop a minaret calling the faithful to prayer five times a day. The muezzin would begin with a mellifluous tenor chant—“Allahu Akbar,” “God is Great”—that would draw out into a long, oscillating slide, slowly soaring and descending, like a seagull riding a breeze over the Golden Horn. The muezzin’s final words— “La ilaha illa Allah,” “There is no god except the One God”—would then fade and dissolve in the crash of the city’s background noise: the clatter of cart wheels and hooves on cobblestones, trams banging and squealing, automobile klaxons blaring as drivers raced through narrow streets, vendors shrieking out the virtues of their wares.

Just walking up the steep streets from Galata to Pera was like passing through an ethnic kaleidoscope. Harold Armstrong, one of the many English officers who served in the Allied military administration of the city, captured this impression (even though he viewed it with an Occidental’s superciliousness).

A sight that especially astounded many visitors was the city’s “hamals,” traditional porters who carried enormous loads on their backs, be it hundreds of pounds of coal, a freshly killed beef carcass, or a new bureau measuring twelve by four feet and filling the entire narrow street so that pedestrians had to squeeze into doorways to let it pass.

The Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn that linked the European districts with Muslim Stambul on the other side showed most spectacularly the city’s mix of cultures. Visitors would go to the bridge just to observe the great parade of people wending their way across: Turks, Tatars, Kurds, Georgians, Arabs, Russians, Jews; sailors from American warships, Gypsies in tattered robes, Persians in high fur caps. On any given day, one could see a Circassian from the Caucasus in a tunic with rows of cartridge pockets and a sheathed dagger in his belt, a French Catholic Sister of Charity in her billowing black robes, or an old Turk with a bit of green on his turban to show that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. The transport on the bridge was as varied as the population: modern automobiles, wagons drawn by horses and oxen, mules hauling baskets, even occasional caravans of camels.

Once across the bridge, however, the crowds and racket melted away. In 1919, Stambul was still the home of old Muslim Turkish traditions, with narrow, quiet, shaded streets; the upper floors of the weathered two-and three-story wooden houses, shuttered and jutting out over passersby, dimmed the light even more. In Stambul life turned inward, and at night the quarter was silent and seemed deserted. But at its heart, concentrated in a space less than a mile long, are Constantinople’s grandest and most cherished monuments from the past, and what Frederick saw then, one can still see today. In the middle soars Hagia Sophia, built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century, once the patriarchal basilica of Eastern Christianity, and converted into a mosque by the Ottomans after their conquest in the fifteenth century. Facing it like an echo in stone is the vast, blue-tiled seventeenth-century Mosque of Sultan Ahmed, its rising cascade of domes guarded by six minarets. And on Seraglio Point, jutting into the Bosporus, sprawls Topkapi Palace—a maze of pavilions, galleries, and courtyards that was the residence of the sultans for four hundred years, before the Dolmabahçe Palace was built in the nineteenth century. The glories of the Ottoman past, and remnants of Byzantine architectural marvels, were everywhere in Stambul. Then as now, no visit to the quarter could end without a foray into its Grand Bazaar—a labyrinthine covered market encompassing scores of streets and thousands of shops, all piled high with a riot of goods.

Like the European quarter where Frederick settled, Constantinople’s postwar history also seemed fashioned to fit his needs. The Allies began their occupation only days after the armistice, with the British taking control of Pera. The French got Galata, as well as Stambul. The Italians were in Scutari, on the Asian side of the Bosporus. Because the Americans had not been at war with Turkey, they did not administer any territory, but their activities and interests were also concentrated in Pera; in fact, the American embassy and consulate general were only a few dozen steps from the Pera Palace Hotel, where Frederick stayed at first.

The Allies also arrived with plans to stay. They had agreed among themselves to carve up the vast Ottoman Empire, leaving only the core of Anatolia to the Turks, and to divide its mineral-and oil-rich territories by drawing lines across maps without regard to who lived where. The affected areas included present-day Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, and we live to this day with the consequences of those decisions. Constantinople itself would be transformed into an international city, resembling what Shanghai had been in China since the nineteenth century. To secure their position and to intimidate the defeated Turks, the Allies brought a fleet of several dozen warships to the Bosporus and anchored them off the Dolmabahçe Palace.

Thousands of British, French, Italian, and American officers, soldiers, sailors, diplomats, and businessmen poured into the city, and the nature of commerce in Pera changed accordingly. Many of the military arrivals were single men who brought with them an appetite for wine, women, and song. Such interests were inimical to conservative Turkish Muslim culture, but the liberal, Europeanized districts were happy to satisfy them. And it is doubtful that there was anyone in Constantinople in the spring of 1919 with more or better experience in this line of work than Frederick.

The historical and social forces swirling through the city had thus created another charmed circle, one within which Frederick could try to reproduce the world that had made him rich and famous in Moscow. He would have to deal with the American diplomats and their racism, but Jenkins’s acceptance of him in Odessa set a precedent that he could try to build on in the future.

Frederick also had the consolation that for the Turks and other natives of Constantinople, his race was of no concern. The Ottoman Empire had stretched from North Africa to Europe to the Near East and into Asia; it was racially heterogeneous and parsed the world very differently than white America did. A Turk who met Frederick would want to know first if he was a Muslim or not and after learning that he was a Christian would not care at all that he was married to a white Christian woman. In fact, black Africans had regularly risen to high positions at the Turkish sultan’s court. The Ottoman language, which was replaced by modern Turkish only in 1928, did not even have a special word for “Negro” in the American sense; it used “Arap,” or “Arab,” for anyone who was dark-skinned. (The African-American writer James Baldwin would discover that this tradition was still alive in Istanbul as late as the 1960s.) History had uprooted Frederick from Russia very painfully, but the place of exile that it had chosen for him was unique in the world at the time. He had been given a remarkable second chance.

In comparison with the vibrant world of popular Western entertainment that Frederick had known in Moscow and even in Odessa, Constantinople was a backwater. When he arrived, there were a few elegant European-style restaurants with music in Pera, one or two places with variety acts onstage, and quite a few bars and other drinking establishments that catered mostly to Levantines and to the growing numbers of foreigners, especially military officers. Down the hill near the Galata port, the narrow, foul-smelling streets, which turned to mud whenever it rained, were filled with beer joints and cheap bordellos patronized by sailors and enlisted men; drugs, especially cocaine, were also readily available. Some of these places were so vile that they were put off-limits by the military authorities. The city’s traditionally-minded Turkish men shunned Western entertainment and did not drink alcohol or consort with women outside their families; they frequented the ubiquitous coffeehouses instead. Traditional Turkish women did not participate in public entertainments at all and wore veils when they ventured out of the home; they also did not go out into the street after seven o’clock at night. What Constantinople lacked were precisely the kinds of places that Frederick had owned in Moscow—elegant, sophisticated whirls of Western music, entertainment, dancing, drink, and enticing cuisine.

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.

The first complaint arrived at the consulate general at the end of November. A Greek subject, George Matakias, reported that Frederick had bought a piano from him for the Anglo-American Villa; when he could not pay for it, he changed the sale to a rental, and still failed to pay what was due. Because the complaint had been addressed to Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, who was the highest-ranking military and civilian American in Turkey (he commanded the American squadron of warships sent to Turkey after the war and was also the American high commissioner in the country), the matter landed on the desk of the consul general himself, Gabriel Bie Ravndal. His dealings with Frederick would prove to be somewhat more humane than Allen’s, perhaps because of his very different background (he had been born in Norway and grew up in South Dakota, where he published a newspaper and served a term in the state house of representatives before becoming a career diplomat in 1898). Ravndal decided to speak with Frederick in person and got him to agree to return the piano and settle his debt.

However, the other cases that followed did not go as smoothly. In early December, an Italian shopkeeper, Ermano Mendelino, wrote to Ravndal that Frederick owed him 252 Ltqs (around $5,000 today) for wine and groceries and had failed to pay the bill after asking for and receiving an extension. In a direct reference to the Capitulations, Mendelino also accused Frederick of behaving this way because he believed that the Ottoman courts could not touch an American citizen. Ravndal again called Frederick in and tried to mediate between him and Mendelino, but over a year later the Italian had still not been paid. Next came a Bulgarian named Bochkarov who claimed he was owed 34.28 Ltqs for milk that he delivered to the Villa and to Frederick’s home. A baker wrote that Frederick owed him 47.93 Ltqs for daily bread deliveries. Another man complained that he had not received the 55 Ltqs he had been promised. A prominent French firm in the city—Huisman, suppliers of furnishings of various kinds—which started doing business with Frederick several days before the Villa opened and delivered goods to him worth 964.95 Ltqs (over $20,000 in today’s money), presented its bill to the consulate general. Frederick paid part of this debt, but not until nine months later and only after Ravndal had interceded once again. There were many other such cases to come.

All of this was annoying and humiliating for Frederick, especially in light of the financial security he had achieved in Moscow. It also put him in a false position; although he was quite willing to bend laws when it suited him, he was not the kind of man who would try to swindle tradesmen. But even worse than facing angry creditors who caused scenes at the Villa was enduring the sanctimonious lectures of the diplomats at the consulate. When dealing with them, Frederick found himself transformed from a businessman who commanded dozens of employees into a supplicant trying to placate unfriendly superiors. Shortly before Christmas of 1919, Ravndal admonished him “to arrange all these matters amicably in the very near future…. I should like to avoid the annoyance and expenses of court proceedings in these matters but I cannot refuse to take cognizance of suits if such are filed.” Frederick’s financial problems were becoming an embarrassment to American interests in Constantinople.

His problems were not restricted to the Villa during the difficult fall of 1919. In November he tried to find Olga, his oldest daughter, who had been separated from the family during their evacuation from Odessa in April. Contrary to the hopeful suggestion of the British consul, she had not turned up in Constantinople on any of the other refugee ships from South Russia. Frederick made additional inquiries through the British embassy in Constantinople, and to add weight to his request he deposited thirty pounds sterling with the embassy to cover Olga’s passage, should she be found. This was a substantial sum (worth around $4,000 today), and it would not have been easy for him to raise when he could not pay the milk and bread bills for his three sons. The British in Odessa made an effort to find Olga, but without success. It would be several more years before Frederick would learn anything about her fate.

With the onset of Constantinople’s cold, wet, and frequently snowy winter, Frederick’s business problems got even worse and the prospect of financial ruin began to loom before him. The Anglo-American Villa’s optimistically named “Winter Salon” became unusable after the fall season, and the only solution, despite the heavy new expenses this would entail, was to find a heated space. On January 20, 1920, he announced the opening of “The Royal Dancing Club” at 40 rue de Brousse in Pera, a central location in comparison with Chichli, and the site of a previous establishment called the “Jockey Club,” a name he also kept. To attract new clients and keep his old ones happy, Frederick tried several innovations. The place was organized as an actual club that people had to join—an arrangement that may have been necessitated by the gambling, specifically baccarat, which went on in an upstairs room. Frederick also stressed ballroom dancing and provided free lessons in the fox-trot, shimmy, and tango by American and Italian “professors.” Together with jazz, “dancings”—as such events and the places that fostered them came to be known in Constantinople—would become one of the main reasons for his later success. And like jazz, European-style dancing would also become culturally and politically loaded in Turkey in the 1920s because of the way it broke down the barriers that separated men and women in Ottoman society. Mustafa Kemal would personally encourage this during his aggressive campaign to secularize the country starting in 1923.

Frederick was fortunate that Bertha was still willing to continue their partnership that winter, despite the unpleasant discussions they were beginning to have about unpaid bills. Her bar remained an essential draw for military clients and helped to keep the entire enterprise afloat. A young American who visited one night with a friend, an English major, captured the seductive atmosphere of cosmopolitan wantonness that it fostered.

The Royal Dancing Club let Frederick limp through the winter. However, when spring came and he began to plan to reopen Villa Stella, Bertha and Reyser decided that its prospects were too dim and announced they were quitting. This was a serious blow for Frederick. He did not have the money to proceed alone, and the Villa had accumulated debts totaling 4,500 Ltqs, the equivalent of $75,000 today.

This case also landed in the consulate general. Allen and the others were becoming increasingly exasperated by Frederick’s financial problems, but they were still constrained in their dealings with him by their belief that he was an American and thus entitled to their assistance. They suggested that he submit to binding arbitration. The process was complex but when he emerged from it his hopes had been rekindled. He not only was free of his former partners but had found a new Russian partner with money, a certain Karp Chernov, who had faith in Stella’s long-term prospects. The debts had not disappeared, but as Frederick explained in a handwritten letter to Ravndal, he was doing everything in his power to pay them off in installments.

Frederick was so pressed financially that several days after writing he sent Elvira to the consulate general to speak with Ravndal personally. She was an attractive woman with a sweet disposition and, in the end, her efforts paid off. Ravndal agreed to intercede with the biggest and most insistent creditor and won Frederick some more time.

That spring, two dramatic historical events occurred that seemed to secure Frederick’s future no matter where it would play out, in Turkey or Russia. The first was the Allies’ decision to consolidate their occupation of Constantinople. On March 16, 1920, the British landed additional troops and established what was effectively martial law. The Allies assumed direct control over all aspects of social, economic, and judicial life in the city, and seized hundreds of private and public buildings to house military and civilian personnel. They also tried to suppress both of Turkey’s political wings by arresting scores of prominent representatives of the old Ottoman regime, as well as numerous leaders of the new Turkish Nationalist Movement that had formed around Mustafa Kemal in opposition to both the sultanate and the Allied occupation.

The overall British aim was to force the Turks to ratify the very harsh Treaty of Sèvres, which formally abolished the Ottoman Empire and apportioned much of its territory to the Allies and their protégés. These included the Greeks, who had already invaded Smyrna on the Aegean coast, thus initiating a three-year war with the Turkish Nationalists; the Armenians, who were victims of Ottoman genocide during and shortly after the Great War and now claimed their own state; and the Kurds, who were also clamoring for independence. For the Turks this “second occupation” was a devastating blow to sovereignty and national pride (and a powerful stimulus to throw off the Allied yoke). But for a foreigner like Frederick it was a boon because it moved Constantinople a big step closer toward becoming an internationalized city, one where Western interests—and entertainments—could thrive.

The other development that spring was, if anything, even more promising because it affected the future of Frederick’s adopted homeland. On April 4, 1920, the leaders of the White Army in the South of Russia elected General Baron Pyotr Wrangel as their commander in chief to replace General Anton Denikin, who had lost their confidence and retired. A more able and charismatic leader than his predecessor, Wrangel reorganized and enlarged his forces and created an effective Black Sea fleet. The invasion of Ukrainian territory by Poland that spring helped him defeat the Bolsheviks in several engagements and double the territory that the Whites controlled in the south of Russia. The achievement was quickly heralded in Constantinople’s newspapers. For a time, it began to look as if the setbacks suffered by the Whites during the past year could be reversed and the Bolshevik regime might fall or be defeated. Were this to happen, Frederick and other exiles could return home and reclaim their former lives and property.

But the influx of Allied troops was not the only change in the city’s population in the spring of 1920, and the arrival of other newcomers presented Frederick with an unexpected threat as well as an opportunity. Despite the apparent successes of the Whites in the civil war, waves of evacuees from southern Russia kept crossing the Black Sea, and as a result Constantinople was becoming increasingly Russified. Among the new arrivals were many popular performers, some with experience running their own shows and theaters, and all needing to make a living. Russian restaurants and nightspots began to pop up all over Pera. Many tried to play up the “broad Russian nature” that foreigners found highly seductive—unbridled revelry and passion, although now tinged with a delicious sadness over a lost, glorious past. Frederick discovered that he suddenly had competition.

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.