The Black Russian

4: Early Fortune

In November 1911, Moscow’s devotees of nightlife got some exciting news: Aquarium was going to reopen the following spring under new management. After Aumont had absconded with his employees’ money four years earlier, the place had changed hands more than half a dozen times in a complex sequence of rentals and subleases. Some entrepreneurs had good runs initially, but even though the property was one of the biggest and most desirable green spaces in the city, their success never lasted long. To journalists who followed Moscow theatrical life, it seemed as if Aumont had laid a curse on anyone who tried to resurrect Aquarium after him.

An additional surprise was the self-confidence of the unlikely trio that took over the place, none of whom had been a player in the high-stakes game of Moscow nightlife. Two were Russians—Matvey Filippovich Martynov, a businessman, and Mikhail Prokofyevich Tsarev, a former barman who had risen to maître d’hôtel at Aquarium under a previous manager. The third was Frederick, who was very familiar to Yar’s habitués, and who was now calling himself “Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas.”

Launching into this business venture was another major step in Frederick’s process of reinventing himself. To become an entrepreneur, he had to give up the security of a very well paying job and to put his hard-earned money and family’s welfare at risk. But there was a deeper change as well. By adopting a Russian first name and patronymic, he was changing the very terms by which the world knew him. This also proved to be more than a gesture of accommodation for the benefit of Moscow’s business world; it became part of Frederick’s identity even in his own family. Two of his grandchildren, who now live in France, did not know his American first and middle names. They believed that “Fyodor” was the only name he ever had because this is how their father, Frederick’s first son, had always referred to him in his family oral history.

Running Aquarium was a large, ambitious, and expensive project. The property had been neglected in recent years and needed extensive repairs. At least initially, Frederick and his partners intended to cover the costs by pooling their own savings. Of all the tasks facing them, the most urgent was to book the kind of entertainment that would dazzle Muscovites on opening night and keep them coming back all summer long. Accordingly, in February 1912, when the city’s freezing weather and snowdrifts made spring seem very distant, Frederick left for Western Europe to recruit variety theater acts for the coming season. It was typical that he wanted to oversee the crucial process of selection himself rather than entrust it to his partners or to talent agencies. The trip also shows how he quickly emerged as the leading member of the partnership, especially regarding issues of artistic taste. It helped as well that he knew foreign languages, since the others did not.

For about six weeks, Frederick traveled by express trains with a secretary and an assistant to Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, and other major cities to see as many different programs as possible, in the best theaters. Because variety theaters were an international business, Russian entrepreneurs like him had to compete with their foreign counterparts for the most popular acts and stars. This required putting on a performance of one’s own—an ostentatious display of wealth, which implied that the theater director was not only rich but in a position to offer generous contracts to potential clients. An entrepreneur would therefore typically telegraph ahead to reserve large suites in famous hotels, such as the Grand on Vienna’s Kärntner Ring or the Ritz in Paris on the Place Vendôme. He would arrange to have the suites lavishly decorated with bouquets of flowers that would impress desirable stars at lunches and private meetings. Finally, he would have to dress and act the part of a rich, worldly sophisticate.

During his first recruiting trip to Europe, as well as the others he made in subsequent years, Frederick did not spare any expense and booked the best acts he could find for Aquarium’s variety stage. He went so far that a journalist in Moscow who got wind of what some of the performers were being paid began to complain that it was too much—presumably because it might lead to a price war among Moscow’s entrepreneurs. Two black American singer-musicians, George Duncan and Billy Brooks, who worked for Frederick while on their swing through Russia, remembered that he always tried to impress audiences with acts that were big, often involving five to twenty-five performers. Duncan and Brooks even joked that because there were no limits to what Frederick would be willing to put onstage, he would have gone along even if someone wanted to “work twenty or more elephants.” They acknowledged sadly that although they had always prided themselves on their own performances and stage settings, and that when the curtain went up their act looked “big all the way,” “Thomas’ acts with whole carloads of scenery, made us look dwarfed.”

Frederick and his partners launched Aquarium’s new season on April 28, 1912, when the daytime temperature in Moscow finally began to reach the upper fifties. The city’s cold, continental climate made people so eager to get out-of-doors that they were willing to start even when it was still chilly during the day and the temperature dropped nearly to freezing at night. It had been a feverishly busy, expensive, and exhausting five months of preparations, but now all was ready. The first groups of variety stage performers that Frederick had engaged in Western Europe, and others from various Russian cities, had arrived safely in Moscow. The garden had been redecorated with new construction, paint, and numerous flower beds; the restaurant was reorganized; a new staff had been hired. The well-known Saburov theatrical troupe, which had begun to perform in Aquarium years earlier under Aumont, was preparing to start its season of light comic plays and musicals in the enclosed theater. Posters announcing Aquarium’s opening and listing the performers had gone up throughout the city, and advertisements appeared in the big newspapers and magazines. All that remained was to open the gates and see who came.

From the first day, people began to stream into the garden. Within a month, it was clear that the season was going to be a success. By summer’s peak, the new managers could scarcely believe their eyes. The box office for the open theater, where the variety acts performed, had to put up a SOLD OUT sign most nights; Saburov’s farces played to packed houses; all the tables in the café chantant were still booked after midnight. Several journalists who covered Moscow theatrical life quickly pointed to “Mr. Thomas” as the member of the “triumvirate” most responsible for the garden’s sensational success; indeed, the partnership soon began to be referred to as “Thomas and Co.” A reporter who hid behind the pseudonym “Gamma” praised “Mr. Thomas’ good taste” for the acts he booked abroad, and characterized the program he put together on the open theater’s stage as nothing less than “brilliant” (even if he criticized some of the garden’s other entertainments). His summary conclusion is the one that mattered most: “Aquarium has become the favorite place of Muscovites and has left Hermitage”—which was the other big entertainment garden in the city and Aquarium’s only real competitor—“far behind.”

These two establishments would in fact continue to compete in future years, but although Hermitage was always very successful, Aquarium garnered more attention—and earned more money—because of Frederick’s skillful management and eye for novelty in entertainment. And although Muscovites had a rich array of fashionable restaurants, cafés, variety theaters, dramatic theaters, operas, concert halls, and cinemas vying for their attention, Aquarium’s celebrity never faded once “Thomas and Co.” took over.

From the first night that Aquarium opened, one of the keys to its success was Frederick’s ability to provide a range of entertainments that catered to various tastes and pocketbooks. Prominent among these was the pervasive atmosphere of sexual license. It was not that Frederick or his partners promoted prostitution on Aquarium’s grounds; there was plenty of this readily available elsewhere in Moscow, including streetwalkers on nearby boulevards. Suggestive performances were also far from the only thing that appeared on Aquarium’s different stages. Nevertheless, the garden quickly became a kind of eroticized zone where those who were so inclined could easily and cheerfully suspend proper morals. Conducive to this were the park-like setting and the feeling of being apart from the city, the spicy performances by attractive showgirls who were also available to mingle with patrons, a leisured clientele in search of dissipation, and the fact that journalists liked to play up the garden’s libertine atmosphere in their reporting.

A frequent visitor to Aquarium captured well the ambience of pleasure and permissiveness that characterized a typical warm summer evening. A refreshing light breeze greets you when you enter from the heat and noise of the street; many small lamps that look like fireflies sway on the trees; the moon—a large, light-filled sphere—floats above; flags cheerfully wave over the kiosks and the stages. The crowds promenading on the sand-strewn paths make a rustling noise like waves gently washing onto a beach. The beckoning sounds of an orchestra come from a stage across the way, its footlights surrounded with a rainbow display of flowers in crystal vases. You see the happy and excited smiles of women clad in light summer dresses, their flashing eyes, their thirst for love, for happiness, for wine, “or… maybe just for money,” the visitor concludes with practiced cynicism. The crowd greedily watches the acrobats on the open stage and guffaws at the vulgar jokes of the comedians. Nearby stands an obvious libertine. He is wearing an elegant tuxedo with a boutonniere in his lapel and a bright red handkerchief sticking out of his breast pocket. His eyes narrow as he watches a big-haired, big-bosomed blonde pounding out a march on a piano, something very bouncy “and Germanic.” A minute later, he is gazing lustfully at a svelte young woman onstage, a spear thrower barely out of her teens. Then he whispers a playful invitation to a woman who is standing next to him “to come and spend this short summer night with me.” A bald, wrinkled little old man passes by with a dazzling young woman on his arm; she throws her fiery gaze at all the men she encounters, inviting them to follow. Multiple attacks on the old man begin and half an hour later he is alone and on the watch for a new “victim” while the dazzling young woman, with a pink-faced student by her side, is causing a row at the entrance, where she is stridently demanding an automobile. Staid, faithful Muscovites and their wives stand for hours by the open stage on spots they claimed and will not abandon even during intermissions. For their “fifty kopek” entrance fee, they want to soak up as many sights as possible, and they will leave only when the fireworks are over.

Aquarium’s atmosphere naturally had an especially powerful attraction for young men, whether they were Russians or visiting foreigners. Several months after the garden’s opening, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, a boyish-looking twenty-five-year-old Scot who had recently arrived in Moscow to take up the post of vice-consul at the British consulate, and who would go on to an adventurous career and a knighthood, made a memorable visit there with an English friend, George Bowen. They had never been to Aquarium before, but they knew of the place because of how famous it had become that summer, and also because their consulate often had disagreements with “the negro Thomas” who “presided over” it, as Lockhart phrased it, regarding “the engagement of young English girls as cabaret performers.” Frederick may have been a novice at running Aquarium during its first season, but as his encounter with Lockhart shows, he was anything but inexperienced when it came to resolving a messy situation that involved passion, jealousy, suicide, and the police.

Lockhart and his friend understood very well the moral gradations of the entertainment venues that were available at Aquarium, which Lockhart summarized as “a perfectly respectable operette theatre, an equally respectable open-air music hall, a definitely less respectable verandah cafe-chantant, and the inevitable chain of private ‘kabinets’ for gipsy-singing and private carouses.” One night, already well primed by a boozy dinner elsewhere, they naturally chose the café chantant and took the best box. Despite their “exalted state,” they were initially bored by a string of unappealing acts. Then suddenly the lights were dimmed and everything changed.

However, Lockhart and Bowen were not able to continue their interesting conversation uninterrupted. A waiter walked in with a note for the young woman, who read it and asked to be excused for a minute. Shortly thereafter, the young men

But they were not allowed to forget for long, because an hour later the door was thrown open again.

Several days passed before Lockhart and his friend could relax and accept that Frederick had been right. In the end, they learned something that he had known at least since he worked at Yar (where romantic dramas also unfolded regularly)—Russian police and other officials showed deference to anyone who had rank or social standing, and such deference could always be “reinforced by the concrete of hard cash.” Frederick’s years of experience as a waiter, valet, and maître d’hôtel before he took over Aquarium had made him an expert on reading his clients’ desires and fears. By the summer of 1912, he had also become a master of all the written and unwritten rules of running a successful business in Moscow, a business that employed scores of people and entertained thousands every week.

The summer of 1912 was also when Frederick first became rich. In September, when the season was starting to wind down, a reporter managed to ferret out the final tally of how much Aquarium’s partners had earned. It was a remarkable 150,000 rubles net profit, or the equivalent of about $1 million each in today’s money. In less than a year, Frederick had launched himself on a trajectory that would scarcely have been imaginable to blacks, or to most whites for that matter, in Mississippi or anywhere else in the United States, and that put him into the first ranks of Russia’s theatrical entrepreneurs.

From an American perspective, it is also nothing less than amazing that Frederick’s race was never an issue as he rose to prominence in Moscow. Even the highly opinionated journalist “Gamma” made only a single, oblique reference to Frederick’s skin color (and the other commentators in the Moscow press did not mention it at all). Gamma tried to be witty, invoking ancient Roman history and identifying “Mr. Thomas” with no less a figure than “Julius Caesar,” adding that Frederick had “turned black” in Yar and “not in Gaul.” The journalist’s rather pretentious point was that Frederick’s experience at Yar, where he perfected the skills that allowed him to “rule” in Aquarium, was similar to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, which preceded his becoming dictator of Rome. Frederick’s “blackness” is thus neither an explicit racial category nor connected to his American past; it is, instead, a metaphor for superior experience and skill, as well as a simple identifying trait.

Around this time several Chicagoans visited Aquarium—which they characterized as “one of the institutions of Moscow”—and were so “astonished” by Frederick’s “prosperous” and “diamond bedecked” appearance, as well as by the fact that his mixed-race children were “now at school in one of the leading academies of Russia,” that they felt compelled to report their discovery to a local newspaper once they got home. Frederick also demonstrated to them one of the reasons for his success by charming them with his personal attention and reminiscences about their city, including the Auditorium Hotel, in which he had worked twenty years earlier. “Good evening, Mr. Blank,” he said addressing each by name. “I can give you better tables if you will do me the honor of moving. How were things when you left Chicago?”

The success and sheer size of Aquarium might have seemed enough to keep Frederick busy, even with his two partners sharing the load. Running the place was also a year-round job, so that as soon as the first season was over he had to start preparing for the next one. In September 1912, he went on the road again, this time to the major Russian cities St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Odessa, to recruit new variety acts for the 1913 summer season. Simultaneously, he was also making plans to open a “Skating-Palace” on the Aquarium grounds that would operate during the colder weather.

But Frederick’s ambitions reached farther than Aquarium. His first success had whetted his appetite for more. That fall, rumors began to circulate in Moscow’s theater world that he was in discussions regarding a new business, one he would run by himself. The failure of a theater with an attached garden right in the city’s center provided the target.

“Chanticleer” had just ended a disastrous season under the management of Stepan Osipovich Adel, an entrepreneur who was an old hand at running theaters into the ground and ruining his employees. When Frederick revealed that he was going to take it over, Muscovites in the entertainment business cheered the news. “This one plays for keeps,” a magazine editor proclaimed about Frederick. “He’ll know how to create a big, solid enterprise.” In a vivid sign of how thoroughly Frederick had become assimilated into the city’s life in personal and not just professional terms, a Moscow journalist declared that “F. F. Tomas” had become “our favorite.” Several of these encomiums were accompanied by a flattering photograph: Frederick gazes at the viewer with calm self-possession, one arm resting comfortably on the crook of a walking stick; he sports a dapper hat, an elegant suit with a boutonniere, and a big bushy mustache.

Frederick decided to rename Chanticleer “Maxim” after the famous belle epoque restaurant in Paris (the name was popular for cafés chantants in cities throughout Europe), and immediately began to plan renovations. When Muscovites went to the theater in those days, no matter if it was to see serious performances of music and drama or light genres such as operetta, comedy, and vaudeville, they expected to feel that they had arrived somewhere out of the ordinary. Unabashed luxury was the norm (except at some artistically avant-garde theaters), and this meant elaborate displays of rich fabrics, gilt, soaring ceilings, glittering chandeliers, and ornate plaster decorations. Frederick did not stray from this formula, and by mid-October 1912 the interior of Maxim was ready and the list of performers complete. When the black Americans Duncan and Brooks saw the place in all its refurbished glory, they were struck by how everything in it was “gold and plush. When you went inside the door you would sink so deep in carpets that you would think that you would be going through to the cellar.”

Anticipation among Moscow’s pleasure seekers was high when advertisements announced the October 20 opening. One magazine even tried its hand at a jingle to capture the mood: “To Maxim’s I will go/With friends to see the show.” But a snag suddenly developed and forced Frederick to put off the opening for several weeks.

A complication that affected Maxim was the property’s location at 17 Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, between Kozitsky Lane and Glineshchevsky Lane: three churches were located nearby. (None of these survived the Soviet antireligious campaigns of the 1930s.) The Russian Orthodox Church saw theatrical performances as inherently frivolous and impious and therefore considered it highly improper to have theaters of any kind close to places of worship. Church hierarchs also insisted that theatrical performances throughout the city be suspended during major religious holidays, even if the theaters were nowhere near churches. Moscow’s secular authorities generally sided with the church, although there was some flexibility in how and when religious policies were enforced. The previous entrepreneur, Adel, had faced difficulties and restrictions because of the surrounding churches during the few seasons he tried to run Chanticleer, and now it seemed that Frederick’s turn had come.

In a case like this, everything depended on personal connections, deep pockets, or both. The Moscow city governor, Major General Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Adrianov, who also had a prestigious appointment at court in St. Petersburg as a member of His Imperial Majesty’s Suite, was officially a pillar of the establishment. He supported the church zealously and at times ordered the Moscow police to prohibit theatrical performances during major Orthodox holidays. Frederick’s desire to open a café chantant in the neighborhood of three churches thus potentially put him at odds with one of the most powerful officials in the city. But the fact that Frederick succeeded after only a brief delay, and that Maxim subsequently became one of the city’s most successful and popular nightspots until the revolution, indicates that someone pulled strings on his behalf. In fact, rumors about this appeared in Moscow’s press less than a year after Maxim opened. The “someone” was not named but was characterized as “influential” and as spending his nights “rather often” in Maxim until seven in the morning. This person was also rumored to be important enough that his activities were of some interest in St. Petersburg itself, which was beginning to look askance at the matter. This is the kind of situation that would have been kept strictly secret in imperial Russia, and there is no public evidence that city governor Adrianov himself was the influential person in question. Nevertheless, his involvement remains a possibility, as does that of someone else of high rank in the city administration, or in the police (the person in question was also clearly big enough not to be easily touchable).

Be that as it may, Frederick’s problem was soon made to disappear, and when Maxim finally opened on November 8, 1912, it was a major event in Moscow nightlife. Crowds of people showed up—from well-known devotees of all such openings to regular folk looking for a new place to have fun—and marveled at how the interior was done up with “great luxury.” In contrast to the somewhat more democratic Aquarium (although the gatekeepers there were actually still quite strict about whom they would let enter), in Maxim Frederick had decided to aim squarely at Moscow’s moneyed classes. He stressed that it was a “first-class variety theater” with a “European program” and promised patrons “Light, Comfort, Air, Atmosphere, and a Bar”; the idea of being served fanciful mixed drinks at a counter was still a novelty in Russia in those days. After the variety show in the theater, patrons were invited to continue with a “cabaret”; there were also private rooms. The evenings began at 11 p.m.; the new establishment’s focus was clearly on what was considered to be entertainment for sophisticated adults.

Maxim’s location may have been problematic from the point of view of the church, but it was nothing if not brilliant in terms of visibility and public access. This was doubtless why Frederick went to the effort of working around the city’s zoning policies rather than looking for a property elsewhere. But he also had to show some ingenuity because of the kinds of shows he put on. Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street is one of the spokes of the Moscow “wheel” radiating from the Kremlin, and number 17 was, and is, only a fifteen-minute walk from Red Square. It lies in the same district as the city’s most celebrated theaters of high culture, including the Moscow Art Theater—forever associated with Chekhov’s plays—and the Bolshoy Theater, one of the great houses for classical ballet and grand opera in Europe. Given this prominent neighborhood, Frederick realized that he would have to find some way to tone down Maxim’s reputation for putting on risqué acts, but without abandoning them altogether.

The ruse he used was to throw a skimpy verbal veil over part of his enterprise while advertising the rest openly. Not long after the November debut, he began to place ads in which he announced that Maxim was, of all things, a “family variety theater.” But he also made clear that after the variety program was over, patrons could see the famous “Maxim cancan quartet” straight from the Moulin Rouge in Paris. This made it seem as if husbands could bring their wives to the earlier evening performances at Maxim without blushing (“family” certainly did not mean children in this case), while everything bawdy, such as the notorious Parisian kick line with its raised skirts, yelps, and flaunted pantaloons, would appear onstage only later.

There were even more risqué performances available, although these were still very tame in comparison to what “adult” entertainment means today. Frederick created a “theme” space in Maxim, an intimate and dimly lit “Salon Café Harem,” as he called it. It tended to attract mostly rich men, who reclined on low settees, smoking Egyptian cigarettes or Manila cigars while sipping Turkish coffee laced with Benedictine, and watched with sated eyes the bare midriffs of Oriental “belly dancers” writhing on the carpeted floor.

However, even if the ads proclaiming Maxim to be a “family variety theater” were sufficient to placate the authorities, who must have watched Frederick’s activities with eyes half shut, they did not fool everyone. One commentator with a professional interest in Moscow’s nightlife thundered that this new café chantant was “shameless” and had reached “the heights of outrageous debauchery” right after its opening. He also heaped sarcastic praise on it for being as successful in fostering a “family” atmosphere as were some of the city’s notorious public baths. And he concluded by wondering how a place such as Maxim could be allowed to exist when some smaller establishments, which were like “innocent infants” in comparison, were closed by the authorities.

This was an intentionally naive and provocative question; the only real mystery was whom exactly Frederick paid and what it cost him to be “allowed” to stay open. Was it enough to treat the “protector” in question to an occasional lavish evening on the house? Or did a fat envelope also have to change hands? As Frederick would demonstrate repeatedly in future years, he had no compunctions about circumventing laws and regulations to protect his interests, especially when it would have been naive, or out of step with the unwritten norms of the time, not to do so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In December 1912, the Russian and French Societies of Dramatic Writers and Composers signed an agreement about intellectual property rights that was scheduled to take effect on October 30, 1913, just around the time when Frederick was rushing to reopen Maxim for his second winter season after rebuilding the interior. Previously, theater directors in Russia and France had done whatever they wanted with music and works created abroad. The new agreement was supposed to end unauthorized use and plagiarism. Because Parisian styles and fashions ruled in Russia at this time, the French had much to gain and were especially eager to have the agreement enforced with regard to one of their most valuable exports—popular music.

In Moscow, the agent of the French society was an energetic, fussy, but not very intelligent or successful Russian lawyer by the name of Grigory Grigoryevich Konsky. This was potentially a very lucrative assignment for him because the city had a good number of venues that performed a lot of the latest French music and because he would get a percentage of any royalties he managed to recover for his patrons. Konsky doggedly pursued Frederick over a five-year period. However, the prey proved to be much wilier than the hunter.

In early April 1913, five months before the agreement was even officially supposed to take effect and just when the summer season was starting, Konsky began to make the rounds of the prominent theaters and restaurants in Moscow where popular French music was usually performed. His first, exploratory conversation with Frederick, whom he approached as the most important member of the Aquarium partnership, did not go well. Frederick began by feigning inexperience. He pleaded that he was a novice at directing a variety theater and could not risk angering his partners by setting a precedent and being the first to pay royalties openly. He did not deny the validity of the French claims but suggested a cunning solution: perhaps the best way to handle the payments would be if he made them secretly and without signing a contract.

Konsky could not accept this offer because it amounted to subverting the international agreement by substituting cash under the table for legally mandated fees. Frederick had obviously decided that he could “play” with Konsky rather than pay him. He tried to shift Konsky’s attention away from himself by suggesting that the lawyer should approach Aleksey Akimovich Sudakov (the well-known and respected owner of Yar and Frederick’s former employer) to set the example of cooperating with the new law.

This ploy worked initially in distracting Konsky, but in the end he got nowhere with Sudakov either. Veteran entrepreneurs like Sudakov were accustomed to making free use of French music, plays, and operettas and naturally balked at suddenly having to pay for the right. Undaunted, and still following Frederick’s advice to pursue someone prominent, Konsky next turned to Yakov Vasilyevich Shchukin, the owner of Hermitage Garden, Aquarium’s rival. Shchukin initially agreed to pay something, but then abruptly changed his mind and put off paying, ostensibly because the spring season was cold, his garden was empty, and no money was coming in. Nonetheless, Konsky was very encouraged by the initial promise, and believing that his plan was working he went back to Frederick to ask him if he and his partners would sign a contract now that Shchukin was leading the way. As Konsky reported to his superior in St. Petersburg, “Thomas replied that given the importance and authority of Shchukin, Aquarium would negotiate without a doubt.”

Frederick’s response excited Konsky greatly because he thought that all the dominoes were lining up just as he had hoped. “You can imagine the effect this would produce!!!” he exulted. Konsky expected that he could get Frederick alone to pay the French society around 2,500 rubles a year (several tens of thousands in today’s dollars), which would give him a commission of 200 to 300 rubles, the equivalent of several months of his regular income. He would receive more when the other owners paid up.

Konsky did not realize that he was still getting the runaround. The owners of the prominent Moscow establishments may have been competitors in some respects, but they also seem to have colluded with each other against the hapless lawyer. Despite the promises and assurances they gave him, they continued to play with him—changing their minds, setting new conditions, putting off meetings, making him run back and forth among them. Owners of some of the city’s other theaters signed contracts and paid, as did some of their brethren in St. Petersburg, but most of the biggest ones procrastinated, continued to bargain, or paid Konsky only a bit here and there.

By the end of the summer, the lawyer finally realized that it would “be impossible to come to an amicable agreement with Thomas.” He explained to his employer that he had “exhausted all means” available to him and that he intended to take the steps necessary “to start a scandal”; later he escalated this threat, saying he would “start a war.” Konsky’s rhetoric betrays a personal and vindictive edge: in addition to still wanting the fees, of course, he clearly hoped that a big, noisy trial would punish Frederick for all the trouble he was causing.

By this point, Konsky understood that he was not dealing with a novice and described Frederick to his superior as “one of the premier restaurateurs not only in Moscow but in all of Russia”; he also noted that Maxim was actually doing bigger business than the venerable Yar. But realizing who his opponent was also unnerved Konsky. He saw that Frederick was not “afraid of a lawsuit,” that it could take two or three years to mount the case against him, and that other owners in Moscow who were resisting making payments were probably taking their lead from Frederick. Nevertheless, Konsky continued to fuss and to scheme. He started gathering evidence for a lawsuit, sent Frederick notarized “cease and desist” orders, and even found a musician who had left Maxim on bad terms and who agreed to provide, for a fee, a list of all the French pieces that were being performed there.

All this also came to nothing and Frederick never paid Konsky a kopek. Then, in the summer of 1914, the Great War broke out and life in Russia and Europe began to change irrevocably. France and Russia were allies, but in the face of the vast historical storm that had begun, Konsky’s little case faded over the next few years and eventually disappeared, together with the entire world that it represented. All that it produced is a paper trail, now preserved in a French archive, that provides an intriguing portrait of the indomitable Frederick Bruce Thomas in action.

Frederick’s successful life in Moscow, and infrequent dealings with officials at the American consulate, made him immune to American racial politics. But he was not indifferent to the situation of blacks in the United States. In the fall of 1912, at the same time that he was making plans for Aquarium’s second season and launching Maxim, he decided to bring a black man to Moscow who has been characterized as “the most famous and the most notorious African-American on Earth” during the early years of the twentieth century. “Jack” Johnson, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, occupied the pinnacle of what was then one of the world’s most popular spectator sports. Frederick’s invitation to Johnson was not only a smart business move meant to attract customers to Aquarium during the slow winter season but also an extraordinary transcontinental attempt to extend a helping hand to a fellow black man who was in serious trouble, and whose career Frederick followed closely.

Born in 1878 to former slaves in Galveston, Texas, Johnson had won dozens of fights against black and white opponents by the early 1900s. He was clearly a contender for the world championship, but because of the color line in boxing, white champions initially refused to enter the ring against him. Johnson persevered and in 1908 demolished the white heavyweight champion Tommy Burns. American whites in particular were outraged by the result and began to howl for a “great white hope” to beat Johnson back down to the position that they believed his race was meant to occupy. This led to what came to be called the “fight of the century” on July 4, 1910, when Johnson destroyed James J. Jeffries, a racist white boxer who had retired as the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world six years earlier, and who reentered the ring “for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro,” as contemporary accounts put it. The victory Johnson won against Jeffries was enormous in all respects. The winner’s purse was $225,000, about $5 million in today’s currency. Critics who had disparaged Johnson’s previous wins were stunned into silence. When news of the victory reached blacks across the country, they poured into the streets in jubilation. The backlash from outraged and humiliated whites was swift: riots exploded in twenty-five states and fifty cities. The police intervened to stop several lynchings, but two dozen blacks and several whites died, and hundreds more were injured on both sides.

Johnson’s prowess in the ring was not all that infuriated many white Americans. The boxer was a flamboyant showman who loved fine clothes, fast cars, and—what was most incendiary at the time—fast white women. When Jeffries failed to show Johnson his “proper” place, racist whites turned to the “law,” which was their next best weapon during the Jim Crow era. On October 18, 1912, Johnson was arrested in Chicago because of his open affair with a nineteen-year-old white prostitute named Lucille Cameron. He was accused of violating the federal Mann Act of 1910, which banned the transportation of females across state lines “for immoral purposes.” Johnson managed to escape a trial by marrying Lucille—the marriage prevented her from testifying against him—although this also led to renewed fury across the country and more energetic attempts to ruin him financially and to jail him.

Frederick first approached Johnson just a few days after he had been arrested, and this was no coincidence. A year earlier, Richard Klegin, an American promoter of sporting events in Europe, had tried to start a boxing club in Moscow with Frederick’s help. At that time, the imperial government opposed the idea because Russia had never had Western-style prizefights before, and Klegin returned to the United States, but without giving up all hope. He left his proposal “in the hands of Mr. Thomas, owner of the Aquarium Gardens in Moscow,” as an American newspaper phrased it, just in case the government’s attitude changed. It did change around October 20, 1912, and the timing was perfect—so perfect, in fact, that it is tempting to speculate that Frederick may have had something to do with it. This was just two days after Johnson’s arrest, an event that had been reported immediately in scores of newspapers around the United States and quickly picked up by the foreign press in Europe and elsewhere. Frederick cabled Klegin to tell him about the government’s decision to allow boxing matches and to suggest that they organize “a great tournament” that would start in Moscow on January 1, 1913. It would last a week, and the final “battle” for the heavyweight championship would be between Johnson and Sam McVey, a black American heavyweight then popular in Europe. All the bouts would be held at Aquarium, which could make arrangements to seat ten thousand spectators. Klegin, in turn, immediately wired Johnson’s manager with a concrete offer from Aquarium: this included a certified check for $5,000, three round-trip tickets to Russia, a chance to win a $30,000 purse in a match against McVey, and one-third of the proceeds from the film that would be made of the fight. In today’s money, all this would be a very nice deal—an up-front fee of around $150,000; another $750,000 if Johnson won, as was expected; and even more from the film. The offer caused a sensation in the United States, and newspapers from coast to coast publicized it because of Johnson’s notoriety and celebrity, the large sums involved, and the remote and exotic locale. Newspapers also noted that the offer came from Aquarium’s black American proprietor, who was described not altogether accurately as a “negro named Thomas” from Chicago. Johnson quickly accepted and announced that he was anxious to go to Moscow. Thanks to Frederick, Russia was now beckoning to Johnson as a refuge from American racism.

However, despite repeated efforts, Johnson was unable to leave the United States until the summer of 1913, so Frederick was forced to postpone all his grand plans. Johnson then toured several other European cities for close to a year before finally arriving in Russia in mid-July 1914. When he did meet Frederick, they hit it off right away: “Thomas and myself became close friends and we made our headquarters in his park,” Johnson recalled. The two black men had similar origins and had triumphed in two very different white worlds. They shared another similarity as well. As Johnson illustrated vividly in his memoirs, both were fond of tall tales that enhanced their present or embroidered their past and that underscored the extent to which both were showmen.

This is mostly fiction with a sprinkling of fact, and it is difficult to disentangle Johnson’s inventions from Frederick’s. There is no doubt that army officers liked spending time in Aquarium, drinking champagne, and ogling the chorus girls, and that some would also have enjoyed meeting and dining with the black American champion. There is also no doubt that Frederick had acquaintances among influential Russian businessmen and, possibly, politicians. But although Frederick may have been known and liked by such men because he was a genial and broad-minded host, he was certainly not a confidential agent of the tsar or a player in the Russian political arena (also, there were no hotels in Aquarium, just living quarters for some of the staff).

Johnson’s career might have developed quite differently if Frederick’s plans for him in Russia had been realized. Johnson had run a successful saloon in Chicago, the Café de Champion, before he was run out of town. Nothing prevented him from doing the same in Moscow, perhaps with Frederick as a partner, and without any of the problems that continued to dog him when he was touring Western Europe, or that resurfaced after he returned to the United States. It is regrettable that he and Frederick were unable to spend more time together, but by the end of July 1914 the world around them was about to go mad.

When war was declared on August 1, 1914, Johnson realized that if he stayed in Moscow, he would be cut off from the rest of Europe by the fighting that was about to break out along Russia’s long border with the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Frederick helped him to leave in a hurry, although Johnson had to abandon much of his luggage on the way. But he did not forget Frederick and managed to keep track of his friend from a distance, through the maelstrom of Russia’s collapse in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and Frederick’s hairbreadth escape to Constantinople in 1919.