The Black Russian

9: Sultan of Jazz

In late summer of 1922, just when Maxim was emerging as the pre-eminent nightclub in Constantinople and Frederick was finally beginning to enjoy genuine financial success, the historical ground under his feet began to shift. Once again, his life and the life of the country he had adopted began to diverge, just as they had when he reached the pinnacle of his financial and social success in Russia on the eve of the October Revolution. The Turkish Nationalist movement had started to liberate the country from foreign invaders. And central to Mustafa Kemal’s aims was to put an end to the Allied occupation of Constantinople, which had created the artificial oasis where Maxim had thrived.

Following their victory at Sakarya, the Nationalists resumed their campaign against the invading Greek army in August 1922 and launched a major offensive in western Anatolia. The Greeks broke and fell back in disarray to Smyrna on the Aegean coast, where they had begun their invasion three years earlier, and which the Allies had promised Greece. On September 9, the Nationalists took Smyrna, thus completing their reconquest of Asian Turkey; several days later a vast fire, apparently started by the victorious Turks, burned much of the city, causing many deaths and much hardship among the Greek and Armenian populations. The only part of Turkey that remained in foreign hands now was on the European side of the Straits in the north, which included Constantinople. Kemal’s forces continued their advance and two weeks later entered what the Allies considered a “neutral zone” near Chanak on the Asian side of the Dardanelles, precipitating a crisis that almost led to war with Great Britain. A diplomatic solution averted conflict at the last minute, but the relations between the occupying powers and a renascent Turkey had irrevocably changed.

In Constantinople, the news of the Nationalists’ advance, two hundred miles away, greatly alarmed the Americans. On September 23, Admiral Bristol circulated a memorandum explaining that the United States would remain neutral should fighting break out between Turkish and Allied forces, but would still evacuate all American citizens living in and near the city. A detailed list of all 650 Americans (including a young journalist named Ernest Hemingway) was prepared but, needless to say, Frederick and his family were not on it.

The Nationalists now had the upper hand and nothing stood in the way of their goal to reclaim the rest of their country. On October 11, 1922, Britain, France, and Italy accepted Kemal’s demands and signed the Armistice of Mudanya. They also agreed to a new peace conference to renegotiate the onerous Treaty of Sèvres, which had provided for the partition of the Ottoman Empire and the internationalization of Constantinople.

Kemal next shifted his attention to his internal enemy—the sultan. Mehmet VI, a bespectacled, studious-looking man who inherited the throne from his brother, had opposed the Nationalists from the start and blamed them for the disaster that had befallen the Ottoman Empire after the war. For a time, his government in Constantinople, whose powers had already been severely limited by the Allies, continued to function independently from the Nationalist government that had formed in Angora. The Nationalists also initially attempted to remain loyal to the sultan personally, but the final rupture between them became inevitable. On November 1, 1922, Kemal and the Nationalists proclaimed the abolition of the sultanate. Two weeks later, Mehmet VI slipped out of the Dolmabahçe Palace, boarded a British warship, and fled to Malta and permanent exile on the Italian Riviera.

When the Lausanne peace treaty was signed on Tuesday, July 24, 1923, the news was as bad as the foreigners in Constantinople had feared. The Allies had been forced to give up all of their imperialistic plans for Turkey itself and would soon be evacuating the city. Frederick had been waiting for the news and understood its gravity. The very next day, Wednesday, July 25, he hurried to the American consulate general and, in effect, threw himself on the diplomats’ mercy. Despite the rejection he had received earlier, getting American recognition was now the only hope he had left.

It is surprising that this time the American diplomats were more receptive to Frederick’s appeal and agreed to try to help him. Why? As their later comments and actions suggest, their collective conscience was not entirely clear because of the role they had played in the State Department’s rejection. They were also not indifferent to the pleasures that could be had at Maxim, which a number of them patronized. And they now began to sympathize with Frederick on a purely human level—with his hard-won success, his unusual vulnerability because of the drastic change in Turkey’s political situation, and the urgency of his plight.

Immediately upon signing the Lausanne treaty, the Turkish authorities announced that all foreigners in Constantinople would have to register with the police by August 1. To comply, Frederick would need official identification as a foreign national; without it, he could be subject to deportation and the loss of his property. Because this deadline was only a week away, Ravndal agreed to expedite Frederick’s appeal and to send a telegram to Washington, albeit at Frederick’s expense and provided he brought the money in advance.

Ravndal telegraphed the State Department on Thursday, July 26, asking that Frederick’s case “be reopened.” As justification, he explained that creditors’ claims against Frederick “have been practically all disposed of,” and that Frederick promised to pay income tax for the past several years, if “he is recognized.” Showing more than a perfunctory interest in helping Frederick, Ravndal even searched for a precedent in a vast diplomatic compendium that dealt with such matters (Moore’s Digest) and invoked a case from 1880 that he thought was similar.

But Ravndal was also bound by State Department policies regarding repatriation, and the conditions he specified under which Frederick could be granted an “emergency certificate of registration” were heartless. The certificate would include Frederick’s children but not his “wife” (the skeptical quotation marks were Ravndal’s), and Frederick would have until May 1924 to return to the United States and place his children in school. In other words, Frederick’s price for American protection would be to give up Elvira; to dispose of Maxim; to accept a permanent, inferior status as a black man in the United States; and to doom his sons to the same fate. Nevertheless, Frederick went along, although it is possible that he had other ideas about what he might do if he got his hands on a passport that would allow him to travel, or at least to escape from Constantinople. (As he surely knew by now from newspapers as well as from traveling entertainers who worked for him, Paris had become a haven for many black American musicians and entrepreneurs.) The day after Ravndal sent the telegram, Frederick signed a typed note, certifying that he was “always ready to fulfill all the obligations that an American citizen is bound to,” and that he was “quite willing to pay my income tax for these past three years, amounting to about a thousand Dollars [equivalent to $40,000 today]; this, as soon as my new citizenship papers will be delivered to me.”

The response from Washington arrived in less than a week and was as disheartening as it was brief: “You are informed that the Department is unable to reverse its decision as indicated in its mail instruction of 20 January, 1922. Collect $2.70.”

But Frederick was still not prepared to give up. He had one very influential acquaintance left in the city—Admiral Mark Bristol. A stern-looking man with a firm gaze that fitted his high rank and position, Bristol was also very kind and, together with his wife, did much valuable charitable work in Constantinople, including helping Russian refugees and founding an American hospital. Bristol took a personal interest in Frederick’s plight and asked Larry Rue, the correspondent of the Chicago Daily Tribune who also knew Frederick, to investigate. Rue canvassed other Americans in the city as well as Frederick’s employees and wrote a strong letter to Bristol on August 24, 1923. He affirmed that Frederick was “obviously an American”; that after his initial stumbles he had achieved “enviable” success in his business; that he was widely admired for being a humane employer; and that the State Department had discriminated against Frederick when it denied him a passport on the basis of a “rule which is freely waived for others whose intentions, citizenship, business methods and Americanism are considerably more in doubt than his.” Rue also reported that neither Allen nor Ravndal had objections to Frederick any longer, and that they would both “really like to help him out of this dilemma.” Rue concluded that if the State Department did nothing to protect Frederick from the risk of having his property confiscated by the Turks, “There ain’t no justice.”

There are several inaccuracies in Rue’s letter, which are presumably due to the efforts by all concerned to put the best possible face on their dealings with Frederick. Allen’s claim that he would like to help Frederick is difficult to reconcile with his central role in sabotaging Frederick’s earlier passport applications, although it is possible that Allen’s attitude had evolved during the ensuing two years. Rue’s report that Ravndal did not have any objections to Frederick was belied by the way Ravndal referred to Elvira in his telegram to Washington on July 26. Despite all these reservations, it is still remarkable that so many of the influential white Americans in the city would have rallied around Frederick in this way.

Bristol did not forget Frederick’s case. In late December 1923, he asked Edgar Turlington, a solicitor in the State Department and his official legal adviser, to “have an extended conversation” with Frederick about his past in order to try to gather information that might persuade the State Department to reverse its decision. The resulting six-page autobiographical narrative that Turlington produced traces Frederick’s life from his birth to his arrival in Constantinople and contains many details that are still readily verifiable. He also gives the names of several people who could vouch for Frederick’s American origins. Turlington incorporated this narrative into a letter he addressed on February 8, 1924, to George L. Brist of the Division of Passport Control at the State Department. Turlington also added that although he himself was in no position to verify independently much of what Frederick said,

However, once again all the efforts came to nothing. Brist did ask a colleague to check the Passport Division’s records, but the clerks again failed to find or, if they found them, to produce any of Frederick’s applications. Even more egregious is that Turlington gave Brist the name of a naval officer who was living in Washington at the time, who had been to Maxim, and who knew the Cheairs family—the onetime owners of Frederick’s parents. But Brist and his colleagues either did not pursue this easy lead, were not persuaded by it, or chose to let it get lost in the great State Department paper shuffle. In the end, it proved impossible for Bristol, Rue, or anyone else to undo the damage that had been done to Frederick’s case earlier by the diplomats in Constantinople and the officials in Washington.

In the meantime, things in Constantinople were not going as badly as had been feared. The August 1 deadline had come and gone, but Frederick had not been deported and Maxim had not been seized. Because Turkey was an overwhelmingly Muslim country, there was much talk initially about prohibition, which would have been ruinous for Maxim and other establishments like it. In October 1923, for example, dire rumors had spread that all drinking establishments would be closed, and stores of liquor would be dramatically thrown into the sea. But although some closings did follow, pressure to reverse this policy began immediately. Many Turks were now accustomed to Western-style nightlife and wanted it to continue. Soon, a few private clubs were authorized to provide drinks to members. Maxim, which had become an important part of the city’s increasingly secularized popular culture, was prominent among them. By the spring of 1924, clubs, gardens, hotels, restaurants, and casinos were allowed to serve liquor, provided they had government permits (the Gazi, Mustafa Kemal, himself was reputedly a tippler).

Following the Treaty of Lausanne, the changes in the country’s government and in Constantinople’s administration were rapid, dramatic, and epochal in historical terms. But initially at least they did not affect Frederick’s life and affairs in any very striking ways. The Allied forces began the evacuation of the city on August 29, 1923, only five days after the treaty was signed. It was completed on Tuesday, October 2, at 11:30 in the morning, when the British, French, and Italian commanding generals and their remaining troops carried out a brief but impressive ceremony in the open square by the Dolmabahçe Palace. With Allied and Turkish units drawn up on the sides of the square, and under the eyes of dignitaries including foreign ambassadors and the high commissioners, the generals inspected the troops; then the Allied and Turkish colors were presented, and the Allied forces marched off. “In a twinkling of an eye,” a great, jubilant Turkish throng flooded the square, according to an American who was present. The Allied fleets left the same afternoon and, in contrast to their imperious arrival five years earlier, now seemed to be “slinking out of port.” “Had these vessels had tails,” the American commented, “I can imagine that they would surely have been securely curled behind their hind legs.” Three days later, on October 5, the Nationalist army reached the Asian side of Constantinople; the following day it crossed the Bosporus and landed in Stambul near Topkapi Palace. On October 13, the capital was officially moved to Angora. The final step in the country’s transformation came on October 29, 1923, with the proclamation of the Turkish Republic and Mustafa Kemal’s election as its first president. In 1935 the grateful nation that he created would give him the honorary name Atatürk, “Father of the Turks.”

After the Allies left, the first thing that changed in Constantinople was the appearance of the crowds on the city’s streets. The British, French, Italian, and American naval uniforms that had filled Pera and Galata were replaced by those of the Turkish army and navy. The number of prostitutes working the streets also dropped because the authorities closed many of the city’s “resorts of ill fame.” Shop signs and advertising banners in the European districts began to change in accordance with the new government’s decree that everything would now have to be in Turkish, with foreign lettering allowed only if it was smaller.

The fall of 1923 after the Allies’ departure is probably when Frederick sent his oldest son, Mikhail, to study in Prague. Because all hope of getting American recognition now seemed to be lost, it made sense to get him out of (potential) harm’s way by taking advantage of the Czech government’s very generous offer to provide young Russian émigrés with a free higher education. By 1922, some two thousand had arrived in Prague from all points in the Russian diaspora, including Constantinople. Because Mikhail had been born in Moscow and spoke Russian fluently, he was eligible. (It is also likely that he was motivated to leave because there were still unresolved tensions between him and Elvira.) Father and son would never see each other again.

Despite the tectonic political and cultural shifts in the city, Maxim remained popular with both residents and tourists and continued to do very good business for a number of years longer. This appears to have given Frederick a heady sense of liberation and achievement, and unleashed an extravagant streak in him. He liked to tell visiting Americans about his remarkable life in Russia; about how in Constantinople he surmounted “difficulties that would stagger the ordinary man”; and how he had “once more mounted the pinnacle of success as the owner and proprietor of the most noted and most popular amusement palace in the Near East.” Before long, he started boasting to visitors that he was “conservatively rated to be worth at least $250,000,” which would amount to $10 million today. Even if this was a two-, three-, or fourfold exaggeration, it still suggests the impressive scale of his success.

For many of Frederick’s clients, his appeal as a host was the infectious, personal pleasure he took in the gaiety that he orchestrated in his nightclub. Sergey Krotkov, a Russian émigré musician who worked for him for several years, recalled how Frederick would suddenly decide that it was time for an elaborate spree. He would put on the top hat that had become his signature and would lead a procession of all of Maxim’s employees—waiters, dishwashers, musicians, cooks, performers—from Taxim Square down one of Pera’s main streets, to the accompaniment of the band’s drums and the clash and clatter of its cymbals. They would stop at every bar they encountered and Frederick would buy everyone a round of drinks. Even when he was working in his office at Maxim, he kept a bottle of champagne chilling in an ice bucket on his desk so that he could offer a glass to anyone who came to see him. It was this kind of behavior that led émigrés to see in him the same “broad” Russian nature they valued in themselves.

The other side of Frederick’s expansive generosity was his continued insistence on personal loyalty from everyone he included in his circle. The bond this allowed him to forge with his employees was another reason for his success, and Krotkov experienced this as well. Krotkov was a master of the Hawaiian ukulele, an instrument that was sweeping the world in the early 1920s, and was very popular at Maxim. One evening he had been invited to a private event elsewhere before having to perform at Maxim for another boatload of American tourists. Krotkov arrived very late for his turn onstage, to find Frederick waiting for him in a rage at the entrance: “Tvoya svoloch!” (“Yours a bastard!”), he yelled in his expressive but grammatically flawed Russian. “My your mug will smash! The Americanas came, and yours not played—your run and play!” “Fyodor Fyodorovich,” Krotkov pleaded, “I know I’m late. Please forgive me, I took a taxi.” He then dashed to the stage. When Krotkov had completed his set, a waiter asked him to come to the bar. Frederick was standing there, his face beaming: “Yours played well. The Americanas listened and clapped.” There were two tumblers of vodka before him. “Yours drink good yet?” he asked.

Frederick’s penchant for spontaneous expressions of good feeling prompted him to host a Fourth of July celebration at Maxim in 1924. The nightclub was filled with American businessmen, merchant sailors, mining engineers, and, as an observer put it, other “American adventurers” from every corner of the Near East. Feelings ran especially high and “the jovial American Negro proprietor” was generously “setting up drinks on the house time and again.” Completing the festive setting were a jazz band playing “Last Night on the Back Porch (I Loved Her Best of All)” and a bevy of Greek and Levantine dancing girls.

With Maxim a success, and facing what seemed like a cloudless future despite the revolutionary transformation of Turkey that was under way, Frederick’s thoughts once again turned to growth.

During Constantinople’s summers, temperatures can climb to oppressive heights for weeks, driving many residents to seek cooler locations somewhere on the water. In early summer of 1924, Frederick decided to open a new place in Bebek, a quiet suburb overlooking a pretty cove on the European shore of the Bosporus, some five miles north of Galata. Together with a senior employee from Maxim, “Mr. Berthet,” he took over a Russian restaurant called “Le Moscovite” that had a terrace by the water. Frederick renamed the place “La Potinière” (“The Gossip”) and began to entice customers with what had been his foolproof formula—dinner and dancing under the open sky, a bar with special cocktails, and his own celebrated self as the host.

However, Constantinople’s weather can be erratic, and that summer, shortly after La Potinière opened, it turned disastrous. Torrential rains at the end of June flooded parts of the city, transforming the main streets into rivers, damaging houses, breaking windows, and knocking out electricity. There was serious destruction outside the city as well, with bridges in villages washed out and fruit and nut orchards badly damaged. On the heights of Pera, Maxim was not affected too much, and its open terrace remained popular. But the rainstorms apparently damaged La Potinière, and customers stayed away from the place, because after the summer season ended Frederick decided not to reopen it. He had lost some money on his investment, and such a stumble was unusual for him. It must have rankled him that two competitors in Bebek had succeeded where he had not. La Rose Noire, which changed hands several times after Vertinsky first opened it several years earlier, had also moved to Bebek that summer and appeared to be thriving. And the following year a resurrected Le Moscovite, which now advertised itself as the “ex-Potinière,” had a good season as well.

More—and far more serious—competition was to come. Tourism was still on the rise in Constantinople. A noticeable jump occurred in early spring of 1925, when hundreds of American and British tourists started arriving every week. During the first half of 1926, the number swelled to twenty-one thousand, which was nearly double the tally for the same period the previous year. Although most tourists spent only a day or two rushing past the famous sights before heading off to the Mediterranean, it did not take long for other entrepreneurs to see the potential that Constantinople had and to start dreaming up ways to capitalize on it.

The most audacious plan was to create a rival Monte Carlo on the banks of the Bosporus. In late summer and fall of 1925, word spread through Constantinople that a syndicate headed by Mario Serra, an aggressive young businessman from Milan, had rented for a period of thirty years the Yildiz Palace complex on the northeastern edge of the city as well as the Çiragan Palace on the shore of the Bosporus just below it. This arrangement had been approved at the highest levels of the Turkish government, by the Council of Ministers and President Kemal himself. The jewel of the Yildiz complex was the Şale Kiosk, a palace that had been the sultans’ residence in the late nineteenth century. Its appearance was highly incongruous for Constantinople because on the outside it resembled an enormous Swiss chalet (whence the first part of its Turkish name), whereas inside it was elaborately decorated with carved marble, mother-of-pearl inlaid wood, frescoes, and gilded plaster. Serra intended to transform the palace’s magnificent throne room into a gambling casino and to use the other halls for bars, restaurants, and dancing. In the huge park outside there would be sporting facilities, a roller coaster, and possibly a golf course, while other amusements would be set up by the large lake and in the smaller buildings on the grounds. Plans for the Çiragan Palace involved rebuilding the white marble structure, which had been badly damaged by fire (it had formerly been the sultan’s harem), and turning the entire place into a luxury hotel (which it is today). For all this Serra agreed to pay the Turkish government 30,000 Ltqs a year in rent—that would come to around $1 million now—plus an annual tax of 15 percent on his profits. Because the government of the Turkish Republic was hardly sentimental about the Ottoman past, it was also willing to let him buy some of the luxurious furnishings that remained in the palace, including massive pieces of furniture, handmade rugs hundreds of square yards in size, and mirrors covering double-height walls. The Yildiz project was on a scale that would eclipse not only every other attraction that the city might offer to a rich tourist, but also potentially any other comparable destination in Europe. Indeed, there was talk that it might lead to the birth of a new Turkish Riviera.

Frederick understood what this grandiose plan could mean for him and that he needed to do something about it. He reportedly initially discussed with representatives of the Standard Oil Company of America, which had major long-standing financial interests in the region, the possibility of transforming Hagia Sophia into a casino or a “temple of jazz.” As absurd and blasphemous as this idea may sound—this was, after all, one of the most famous ancient religious buildings in the world—it was picked up by American newspapers at the end of 1926 and the beginning of 1927. One newspaper reported that “a group of business men” in Constantinople had concluded that “the edifice is unsuitable for religious services.” Word spread, and companies eager to take part started to write to the American consulate general in Constantinople. The “American Association of Jazz Bands,” for example, asked “for full acoustic details” of the vast edifice (whose central cupola is taller than a fifteen-story building), and with a “can do” aplomb that was undaunted by any cultural or practical concerns promised “to provide the largest jazz band in the world with the largest number of most powerful saxophones.” However, the Turkish authorities never seriously considered this appalling project, and it came to nothing. Frederick decided that he would have to expand on his own, and on as big a scale as he could manage. This seemed not only possible but plausible because Maxim continued to pull in crowds with its time-tested entertainments, which now regularly included black jazz bands.

But history was not standing still in the Turkish Republic. In its ongoing process of secularization, it abolished the caliphate (formerly, Ottoman sultans had also been Muslim caliphs, but the republic’s experiment with separating the two ended in less than a year). The last representative of the Ottoman dynasty, Caliph Abdülmecid II, left Constantinople for Switzerland by train on March 3, 1924; a week later, he was followed by the few princes and princesses who had lingered behind. The fez was officially abandoned in favor of Western hats for men. On April 17, 1924, the Russian imperial embassy on the Grande rue de Pera was transferred to the Soviet government, marking Turkey’s friendly relations with the Soviet Union (and symbolically confirming Frederick’s now complete statelessness).

There were new laws as well that targeted establishments like Frederick’s and that reflected the Turkish Republic’s attempt to find a path between Muslim traditions and secular Western culture (and to raise revenues). Taxes were introduced on the consumption of alcoholic beverages and on dancing in public: a “First Class” place like Maxim had to pay the equivalent of around $1,500 a month for the latter. Restrictions were also placed on the hours when “dancings” could operate, on the events they could organize without special authorization, and on the age of young women who could be admitted. Shop signs that were in Turkish and a foreign language were taxed, with the amount depending on the size of the foreign lettering. During the period 1924–1926, operating an establishment like Maxim became progressively more expensive.

It was also becoming more difficult for foreigners to live and work in Constantinople. Xenophobia increased as the Turkish Republic dismantled the old privileges that had been granted to Europeans. In 1924 an unsuccessful attempt was made in Constantinople to force employers to replace their Christian employees with Muslims. Two years later a new law required that Turkish workers replace all foreigners, including dames serveuses, waiters, headwaiters, cooks—in short, the core group of Frederick’s employees at Maxim. He may have needed to hide behind Turkish partners himself. To verify compliance, officials began to check identification papers throughout the city. Early in 1926 a law was introduced mandating the use of Turkish in bars, in restaurants, and on bills; any establishment that persisted in using French would be punished.

All these changes caused great anxiety and hardship for Constantinople’s many foreigners, including the several thousand Russian refugees who had stayed behind after nearly two hundred thousand others left. Some of the remaining Russians sought Turkish citizenship, as did Frederick. After vacillating for a while, the new republic decided not to grant it to large numbers of stateless foreigners, and this decision forced many more to leave the country. Even though the Russians’ identity papers had lost their meaning when their homeland ceased to exist, they were able to travel on the strength of the “Nansen passports” that the League of Nations started to issue in 1921. Had Frederick not claimed all along that he was an American, he might have been able to get one of these too. Fridtjof Nansen and Frederick actually met on June 9, 1925, when Nansen, the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, went to Maxim during a visit to Constantinople. However, by then it was too late for Frederick to tell the truth, and Maxim was still doing too well for him to want to leave.

By early spring of 1926 Frederick had found the property that would be his answer to Serra’s Yildiz casino. About a dozen miles up the Bosporus from Constantinople on the European side is a picturesque cove with a town called Therapia (now Tarabya) that was popular with wealthy natives and foreigners as an escape from the city’s crowds and summer heat. The rich built luxurious villas; the foreign diplomats built “summer embassies.” There were several good hotels and restaurants right on the water that caught the cooling breezes.

Frederick opened his “Villa Tom” there in early June and continued to operate Maxim during that summer as well. He spent lavishly to create a new destination that would give the members of Constantinople’s fashionable set everything they could possibly want: sophisticated dinners, dancing on a terrace by the water under a moonlit sky, a “Negro Jazz” band, a magnificently illuminated garden filled with flowers, and constantly varying entertainments—a “Venetian evening,” a “Neapolitan program,” an “aristocratic Charleston competition,” a “Monster Matinee.” And when the night’s performance drew to a close, there were spectacular fireworks overhead.

At first, Villa Tom looked like a success—the city’s night owls came, enjoyed themselves, and lingered until dawn. But the place had cost a lot to open and was expensive to run. A problem also emerged regarding its location: Therapia was twice as far from the city as Bebek, where Frederick had tried opening La Potinière two years earlier, and the distance seems to have put many people off. Frederick realized that he would have to take on the additional expense of providing transportation from Constantinople if he was going to induce clients to make the trip. A few weeks after the opening, he hired and advertised a “luxury boat,” promising to return revelers to the city at 2 a.m. But this did not turn attendance around. Frederick’s income that spring and summer started to falter. He had to cut back on paying bills and other expenses, just as he had several years earlier.

This time, one of his first victims was his own daughter Olga. A year earlier, in July 1925, together with her Russian husband, she had managed to get from Romania to Paris, where she enrolled as a student. For the previous three years Frederick had been supporting her with a sizable monthly allowance, but when his expenses began to mount prior to opening Villa Tom he stopped sending money to her and, inexplicably, broke off all communication. Olga waited anxiously for several months, until July 1926, at which point she went to the American consul general in Paris, Robert Skinner, for help in finding out what had happened to her father. Skinner, in turn, contacted Allen in Constantinople, reporting that Olga was “very worried” and “absolutely penniless.” Allen’s response was as brief as protocol required: he confirmed Frederick’s address at Maxim and explained that because Frederick had been denied American protection, “this office is… not able to exert any influence on him or otherwise interest itself in him.” Following this exchange in late July 1926, nothing is known about any further communication between Olga and her father.

Although the government of the United States had washed its hands of Frederick, many of the people with whom he did business in Constantinople continued to think of him as an American. Consequently, when he stopped paying his bills on time, some of his smaller and less savvy creditors began once again to bring their complaints to the officials in the consulate general. A Russian waiter at Maxim, who had managed to circumvent employment regulations pertaining to foreigners, sent a pathetic complaint to Admiral Bristol about how Frederick had stopped paying him his full wages in June, around the time that Villa Tom had opened, and had not paid him for months despite repeated pleas. A merchant who supplied flowers to Villa Tom described how he had waited at Frederick’s office as late as “3 o’clock in the morning” in an attempt to collect the remaining half of the sum owed him, the equivalent of some $2,000 today. The Americans must have been dismayed to see such familiar complaints after their intercessions on Frederick’s behalf. They gave everyone the same response: “This office is unable to offer you any assistance towards collection of the sum which Mr. Thomas is alleged to owe you.”

However, there was a new, ominous development as well: Frederick’s bigger and better-connected creditors did not bother to contact the consulate general. Because foreigners like Frederick no longer had extraterritorial protection, there was no reason to involve the American diplomats; Turkish laws were now sufficient to cover any eventuality.

That fall and winter Frederick’s problems got worse. After closing Villa Tom for the season, he began to try to salvage his financial situation by refocusing exclusively on Maxim. But on September 26, 1926, the “Yildiz Municipal Casino,” as it was now officially called, opened for business. It did so not only with the fanfare befitting its size and splendor but also with official support from the city government, which made it into an even more significant event in the city’s nightlife. Invitations had gone out in the name of the prefect of Constantinople, and his assistant joined Serra in welcoming the six hundred guests at the palace doors and in cutting the ribbon to the gambling salon. Practically the entire diplomatic corps came, as did the city’s military and civilian authorities, the leading members of society, and representatives from the Grand National Assembly, the country’s parliament in Angora. Despite the large turnout, the palace was so vast that it did not feel crowded. The casino was an instant success: men and women flocked to the six baccarat tables and four roulette tables in what a journalist characterized as “probably the most luxurious gaming room in the world.”

Gambling made the Yildiz Municipal Casino a unique destination in the city, but the place also had everything else for which Maxim was famous, and more of it—fine restaurants, bars, tearooms, black jazz bands, dances in the afternoon, dinner dances in the evening, variety entertainment, and an enormous, beautifully illuminated park overlooking the Bosporus where one could stroll, ride, shoot, and play tennis. Yildiz also stayed open every day from 4:30 p.m. until 2 a.m., or later; it staged lavish special events regularly; and it provided fifteen automobiles to ferry guests back and forth from their homes and the city center.

The money poured in. During its first year of operation, the Casino is estimated to have paid the city government 130,000 Ltqs, which would be around $3 million today; this means that Serra’s syndicate grossed $20 million. Yildiz had completely eclipsed Maxim, and Frederick’s clients began to abandon him at the worst possible time. He tried to continue, but nothing he attempted worked, not even the special evenings that had been exceptionally profitable in the past and that now proved very difficult to organize. He announced a “first grand gala” of the season with a “ball of parasols” only on December 18, 1926; the next such event, featuring a masked ball, was not until two months later, on February 17.

Apart from the debts weighing him down, Frederick was also beset by new and continually shifting legal restrictions, taxes, and penalties. An Englishman who visited Constantinople in 1927 underscored this: “Obstacles are placed in the way of all foreigners now doing business in Turkey. Fines are imposed upon the flimsiest pretext and there is no redress without endless litigation in Turkish courts.” As for the legal system itself, “Laws and regulations are being passed at such a rate that none can keep pace with them.” In fact, early that year, a wave of stringent restrictions swept through Constantinople that were aimed at enterprises like Maxim. The governor of the province announced labyrinthine regulations about who could, and who could not, attend public dances, dance together, and receive dance instruction. A week later, several hundred cabarets were closed because they had all somehow transgressed aspects of the existing regulations.

The last glimpse of Frederick and Maxim that we have is a sad one, but it elucidates what went wrong. Carl Greer, a middle-aged businessman from Ohio on a grand tour of the eastern Mediterranean, visited three nightspots in Constantinople at the end of April 1927 and compared them. The first was a place near the consulate general called the “Garden Bar” that he described as “the only prosperous cabaret” in the city. Greer concluded that it was successful because it had “no such thing as a cover charge” and welcomed a range of clients, from big spenders prepared to pay several hundred dollars for a bottle of French champagne to penny-pinchers who nursed a glass of lemonade throughout an entire evening’s show. The second place was Maxim, which Greer characterized as “a much more ornate establishment than the successful Garden Bar.” But despite its swanky appearance he found it a “disheartening” sight because “the dance floor stood empty and the number of diners was never as great as the personnel of the orchestra that entertained them.” What had happened was obvious to Greer: after making “a great deal of money during the occupation,” Frederick could no longer attract his former clientele and was “now engaged in the painful process of losing all his profits.” The third place Greer visited was where Constantinople’s smart set had moved—the Yildiz Casino, and it elicited all his superlatives: “the show place among the resorts of the East, if not of the entire world… magnificence truly oriental… the gaming room causes any casino in the French Riviera to appear by comparison commonplace.” He also noted the crucial detail that there were “three hundred players” gathered around the Yildiz Casino’s tables. In short, the niche that Frederick had inhabited in the city’s nightlife was now gone, and he was trapped, unable to adapt. Maxim could not compete with Yildiz’s splendor and attractions, but neither could Frederick afford to make Maxim more broadly accessible, because of the size of his debt.

In the end, he tried to escape. Around the beginning of May 1927, just a few days after Greer had glimpsed Maxim’s last breaths, and with creditors on the verge of having him arrested, Frederick fled to Angora in the hope that he would be out of their reach. The distance from Constantinople was approximately three hundred miles, and the train crept along for the better part of an entire day, with long stops at stations. It was like a grotesque parody of his escape from Odessa eight years before. Frederick’s best hope was a long shot, as he surely realized. But he had escaped disaster before and was prepared to try once again. He was now fifty-four, and it could not have been easy.

The new Turkish capital was being created out of an ancient but obscure town in arid, hilly central Anatolia, with a population of only seventy-four thousand in 1927. However, it was growing rapidly as the republic expanded its bureaucratic institutions and offered a boom town’s opportunities for entrepreneurs. Frederick found a prominent resident, Mustafa Fehmi Bey, who owned property on the Yeni Çehir hills by the Çankaya Road with a splendid view of the entire city. Their plan was—predictably—to transform this site into a “marvelous summer garden,” a fully “modern establishment” with a “restaurant of great luxury” that would be called “Villa Djan.” The summer season was about to begin and they would have to hurry. Because of his renown and expertise, Frederick would naturally be in charge of the construction, organization, and future direction of the new garden.

Frederick and his new partner got only as far as hiring some of the staff before the money, or the promise of money, gave out. There was also stiff competition from existing establishments run by Russian émigrés. Soon the familiar problems began—debts, broken agreements, and angry diplomats. In June, the French consul general in Angora, who did not know that Frederick had been disowned by the United States, but was aware of his “deplorable” past in Constantinople, as he put it, complained to his American counterpart. A certain Mr. Galanga, a chef Frederick hired and then had to dismiss, was stuck in the city because he did not have the money to pay his hotel bill, something that Frederick was contractually obligated to do.

Meanwhile, the expected disaster struck in Constantinople and Frederick’s creditors seized Maxim. In late May, they allowed the editors of a magazine called Radio to put on a concert of classical music in the former nightclub, although they made a pointed announcement that no food or drinks would be served. A month later, Frederick’s former place in Therapia reopened under new ownership. It was now identified as “ex-Villa Tom” and, in what may have been a vindictive gesture by someone who knew of Frederick’s past in Moscow, had been renamed “Aquarium.”

Following the collapse of his plans for the Villa Djan, Frederick got a job for a short period as an assistant waiter in a restaurant in Angora. It was his bad luck that a former Constantinople customer happened to be in town and stopped by the restaurant. He saw Frederick in his new role and was surprised that the “likable negro” and “ex-proprietor of Maxim” was actually still alive. Frederick put on his bravest face and insisted that he was “flourishing,” but in fact he was earning only 30 Ltqs a month, comparable to $700 today. This was barely a living wage, especially if he was trying to send money to Elvira and his two sons. Frederick was also cocky, perhaps too much so for his own good: he asked the visitor to give word to his creditors in Constantinople that he was quite prepared to pay them, but “on the condition that they come to Angora.”

Whether the taunt provoked them, or they tracked him down on their own, Frederick’s creditors did catch up with him around mid-October of 1927. This time, there were no more discussions or negotiations: he was arrested and imprisoned in Angora. His total debt was a crushing 9,000 Ltqs, equivalent to about $250,000 today. Not only could he not pay any part of it, he did not even have the money to buy additional food to supplement the prison’s meager rations. Frederick’s friends and former employees in Constantinople took up a collection and sent him money so that he would not go hungry. Elvira and the boys survived largely on their charity as well. But life soon became so difficult for them that she made a desperate gamble and, leaving her sons behind in the care of friends, went to Europe to find some way to rectify their situation.

It is highly ironic that Frederick’s end coincided with the demise of the Yildiz Casino, whose success had sealed Maxim’s failure. In the spring of 1927, the Turkish government decided to impose new taxes on Serra, which he refused to pay, claiming that his annual levy already covered them. The disagreements continued until, on September 12, 1927, at 10:30 in the evening when Yildiz was in full swing, the general procurator of the Turkish Republic unexpectedly appeared with several assistants and ordered the casino closed. His official pretext was that Turkish citizens, including women, had been gambling there; Yildiz—like the casino in Monte Carlo, which Monegasques could not enter—was supposed to be open only to foreigners. The matter went to trial and rumors quickly proliferated, including that the Gazi himself wanted Yildiz shut down because it was earning too much money for foreigners. Whatever the backstage plots, the Yildiz Casino never reopened, and the palace eventually became a museum. One cannot help wondering whether Maxim might have survived if the Casino had been closed earlier in 1927. But perhaps it would have made no difference: the lesson an American diplomat drew from the Yildiz affair is that it illustrated once again “the difficulties which foreign concessionaires have in their dealings with the Turkish authorities.”

Details about Frederick’s last months are scanty. By Christmas of 1927 he was in prison in Constantinople, where he appears to have been transferred because that is where he had incurred his debts. It was a bitter coincidence that the new owners reopened his former nightclub as “Yeni Maxim”—“New Maxim”—on December 22. They enticed patrons with the same mix of ingredients that Frederick had perfected: dinner, dancing, jazz, an American bar. They would continue to do this for decades to come.

Conditions in Turkish prisons were harsh no matter where a prison was located. Most of the buildings were very old—the central prison in Stambul, which was directly opposite the famous Sultan Ahmed Mosque, had been built in the fourteenth century. Typically, many inmates were housed together in large cells and without regard to the nature of their crimes; someone sentenced to fifteen days for a misdemeanor could be locked up with a hardened criminal who had been given fifteen years. Prisoners were also left largely to their own devices. Bedding, sanitation, and health care were primitive. The quality and quantity of food varied. The ability to buy extra food was always essential.

In late May of 1928, Frederick fell ill with what was described in an official American consular report as “bronchitis”; it was more likely a recurrence of the pneumonia that had nearly killed him twice before. His condition was sufficiently serious for him to be taken to the French Hospital Pasteur in Pera, which was on the Grande rue de Pera, just off Taxim Square and a five-minute walk from Yeni Maxim. The nuns who ran the hospital accepted him as a charity case.

Frederick died there on Tuesday, June 12, 1928, at the age of fifty-five. Because Elvira was out of the country, all funeral arrangements were made by his friends. One of these was Isaiah Thorne, a black man from North Carolina who had worked for him at Maxim and who became his token executor. Another was Mr. Berthet, who had collaborated with Frederick during the ill-fated venture in Bebek and was also one of the boys’ guardians. Frederick left no possessions to speak of.

The following day at 2:30 p.m. Frederick’s body was taken to the St. Esprit Roman Catholic Cathedral in nearby Harbiye for a funeral service. Later that afternoon he was buried in the “Catholic Latin” Cemetery in the Feriköy district north of Taxim, not far from where he had first opened Stella. His sons and some sixty other people attended. There was no money for a permanent headstone, and the exact location of Frederick Bruce Thomas’s grave in the cemetery, which still exists, is unknown. In one of the few American newspaper articles to note his death, he was referred to as Constantinople’s late “Sultan of Jazz.”