Constantinople was also in a state of tumultuous change as its centuries-old social fabric unraveled under the occupation. The emasculation of the sultanate’s civic institutions, the influx of hundreds of thousands of indigent foreign and Turkish refugees, the soaring living expenses, the thousands of bellicose young men on leave from their ships and barracks—all led to an upsurge in everyday crime and public violence. People who were out late at night, like Zia Bey and his wife, tried to rush through the streets of Pera and especially Galata because they were not safe. Pickpockets preyed on passersby during the day (even Ravndal lost a pocket watch this way) while “second story men” shinnied up and down rain gutters to plunder residences when their owners were out. Businesses had to hire armed watchmen who spent the night striking the pavement with sticks at regular intervals to scare off thieves. Greek, British, and other Allied soldiers got drunk and started fights in the streets, making some residents reluctant even to venture out after dark. In Maxim one night, an Italian count started “a fracas” with a Lieutenant “Bubbles” Fisher of the U.S. Navy and drew a pistol from under his coat, but the lieutenant deftly disarmed him. Prostitution was rife and many desperate Russian women became streetwalkers. Ten thousand cocaine addicts in the city were estimated to consume ten kilos of the drug a day.
However, of all the threats that hung over Frederick, the most serious was in distant Washington, D.C. The blow fell early in 1922. In January, the State Department completed its review of his passport application, and Ravndal received the response on February 21. His assistant, John Randolph, needed only one sentence to inform Frederick: “With reference to your application for a Department passport I have to advise that the Department of State has disapproved same, and this office accordingly is not disposed to accord you further protection as an American citizen.” Randolph also informed Berlin, which put an end to Valli’s hopes for a passport or for help against Frederick.
The letter to Ravndal was signed by Wilbur J. Carr, the number six man in the State Department. This was a fairly high position, and his response carried the weight and authority of the American government. What he said was hardly surprising, given Frederick’s comments on the application. Carr focused on Frederick’s admission that he did not intend to return to the United States because of his business interests abroad. He also made special mention of Frederick’s “living in a free-love relationship with the white woman whom he alleges to be his wife.” Carr’s final reason for “disapproving” Frederick’s application, however, was that “even should he be in a position to submit evidence of his alleged American birth, favorable consideration could not be given… because it is apparent from the foregoing statement of the circumstances in his case that he has abandoned whatever ties he may have had with the United States.”
For all of Frederick’s knowledge of the ways of the world, it is odd that he did not appear fully to grasp this “disapproval” and believed that something other than his skin color and long life abroad was the problem. He talked about the matter frankly with the young naval intelligence officer Robert Dunn, explaining that he had been denied a passport because he could not prove his American birth. When Dunn objected that providing a birth certificate would surely solve the problem, Frederick replied with a “resigned and wistful” expression on his face as he “bore with the ignorant Yankee”: “Say, Mista Dunn, you know jes’ as well as Ah does dat us niggers down in Mississipp’ ain’t never got no birth co-tificates.” Frederick was not above poking fun at himself with this kind of linguistic self-caricature (and Dunn was not above recording it), but the point remains that he believed all he needed was proof of his American birth.
In the meantime, the start of the summer season was approaching and there was an important new development in the life of the city that Frederick was eager to exploit—an influx of American tourists. In early spring of 1922, Constantinople began to reemerge as a popular destination for cruise ships plying the Mediterranean. In March alone nearly three thousand tourists came ashore for a day or two, the largest number since before the war. Their gaily illuminated ships enlivened the drab Galata quay and were a striking contrast to the hulking gray warships lining the Bosporus. As the prosperous-looking tourists trooped through the city, they were followed with a calculating gaze by restaurateurs, antiquarians, souvenir peddlers, and Russians who still had jewelry, furs, or other valuables to sell.
High on the list of tourist attractions—in addition to taking a quick look at the wonders of ancient Stambul and picking up some souvenirs—was having a drink at a stylish place with music and dancing, something that had been legally denied at home for two years, since the start of Prohibition. American tourists quickly spread the word that Maxim was the fanciest nightclub in town, and for the next few years many of Frederick’s former countrymen made it an obligatory stop during their visits.
Most of the time Frederick limited himself to regaling the Americans with his trademark mix of personal attention, seductive atmosphere, haute cuisine, good liquor, excellent jazz, flashy acts, and a smooth dance floor. But on occasion he and his staff also put on a show that revealed his extravagant side, and played to the tourists’ naïveté and their if-this-is-Constantinople-it-must-be-Tuesday itinerary. Negley Farson, an American businessman and writer who had known Frederick in Moscow during the war and ran into him again in Constantinople, describes what sometimes happened.
When a big White Star liner came into Constantinople with a shipload of suddenly-wealthy American tourists on a round-the-world trip, all of Thomas’s Russian girl waitresses jumped into Turkish bloomers, and Thomas put on a fez, got out his prayer rug and prayed towards Mecca….
We had watched the American tourists being rushed around Constantinople all day in charabancs. They entered Maxim’s like a chorus themselves, rushed to the tables around the dancing floor and stared at the bloomered dancing girls.
“Very Turkish!” explained their guide-interpreter. “Just like a harem—what?”
Half an hour later he stood up and looked at his watch.
“Ladies and Gentlemen—this concludes our trip to Turkey. Ship sails in twenty minutes. Transportation is waiting for you outside the door. All aboard! All aboard for Jerusalem and the Holy Land—we will now follow the footsteps of the Master!”…
Thomas salaamed them out, bowing with pressed hands—“Good-bye, Effendi. Good-bye, Effendi!”—then he took off his fez and became a nice Mississippi Negro again.
Farson’s concluding epithet may sound condescending, but he genuinely admired Frederick and saw him as “very sophisticated.”
However, many of the American tourists differed from Farson because they brought with them the same attitudes Frederick had encountered when dealing with the diplomats in Constantinople and bureaucrats in Washington; the difference was that none of the tourists had any doubts about Frederick’s origins and all were happy to buy his drinks. Southerners’ reactions were invariably the most flagrant. Mrs. Lila Edwards Harper, a fifty-year-old matron from Montgomery, Alabama, spent a month in Constantinople and talked with Frederick at some length. Once she returned home, she could not wait to tell others what she saw and heard. “Everyone in Constantinople knows Fred Thomas,” she gushed. “He is a good polite negro, rolling in wealth, and an admirable host. His career is an amazing story, worse than fiction.” Mrs. Harper was struck primarily by two things: Frederick’s rags-to-riches story, which he recounted to her in detail (including the fact that he encountered no “color line” in Russia); and that his waitresses were Russian noblewomen who had been his “most fashionable patrons” in Moscow. “Nobody avoids them on account of their misfortune,” she commented, with what is actually rather mean-spirited surprise: “I’ve seen the English consul dance with the waitress who served his dinner. She was a countess in the old days.”
Frederick treated Mrs. Harper the same way he did all his patrons. But because she viewed him through the lens of her white southern narcissism, she took his polish a
nd charm as personal tributes: “Thomas is from Mississippi and was as hugely pleased at meeting a Southern woman from America as he could be…. Nobody objects to the fact that the manager of the restaurant is a negro.” She added: “He’s one of the dozen or so negroes in Constantinople. They are never presumptuous. I saw Thomas sitting at a table with one of his Russian lady dancers, but that was the only unusual sight I saw. The diners find him a likable, obliging negro.” Mrs. Harper makes it sound as if dealing with people like her was what made Frederick know his natural place. In fact, knowing how to deal with her type is what helped him become rich again, and that was his best revenge.
Frederick was friendly by disposition and also charmed his customers for the simple reason that this was usually the easiest way to get what he wanted from them. But there were limits, and he was no Pollyanna. The numerous military men in Constantinople could be especially difficult to handle, owing to the way that alcohol and the proximity of attractive women fueled their aggressiveness. The English were the worst offenders—because of their numbers in Pera, because they were armed in contrast to the other Allies, and because of their arrogance. Captain Daniel Mannix, a seasoned American naval officer newly arrived in Constantinople, witnessed this unsavory concoction at Maxim one evening. He was curious about the place and its “American Negro” owner because he had heard that Frederick “had done a lot for other refugees and was generally liked and respected.” A short while after settling in at a table with friends, Mannix noticed that two drunken Englishmen were abusing a Russian waiter for some reason. Suddenly, one of them leaned forward and hit the Russian in the face, but the waiter only stepped away. Then the Englishman reached out and hit him again, and this time the waiter responded with a blow of his own.
Instantly both Englishmen went into a perfect spasm of fury, yelling and waving their fists in a frenzy of rage. By now Thomas had come up and he asked mildly what the trouble was. One of the men, shaking his fist in Thomas’ face, screamed, “He struck an ENGLISHMAN!” Thomas replied grimly, “You shake your fist in my face again and I’ll strike another.” The Englishman recoiled in open-mouthed astonishment while his friend turned to stare at Thomas unbelievingly. A few seconds later both left the cafe, still seemingly in a daze.
Mannix saw the Englishmen’s behavior as a shocking expression of their sense of national inviolability. But Frederick was neither impressed nor cowed, and in characteristic fashion came to his employee’s defense. He also knew that this would not damage his relations with the British authorities, because of Maxim’s popularity with the representatives of all the Allied powers.
Even Admiral Bristol, the most senior American in the city, patronized Maxim, especially for dancing. The music and entertainment there were always Western European and Russian. But on one memorable evening Bristol presided over a special party that included Turkish folk music and dancing that Frederick had arranged with the help of the young journalist Adil. The performer was known as “Champion Osman, the Tambura-Player”; he was a master of the “bağlama,” a long-necked, traditional stringed instrument, and the “Zeybek,” a martial folk dance peculiar to western Anatolia. When Adil brought him to Maxim, Frederick’s initial reaction to the big, slow-moving old man, with his handlebar mustache, thick fingers, and eyeglasses, was skeptical. But after Osman changed into his costume, Adil was relieved to see that Frederick’s face broke into a broad smile at the transformation that the diffident old man had undergone.
After a dramatic drumroll, Osman walked out onto Maxim’s dance floor. The impression he produced was extraordinary because of his costume—a colorful head wrap, short baggy pants, a yataghan thrust through the sash around the waist of his embroidered jacket—and the contrast between his enormous body and the tiny bağlama. This was the first time that a Turkish folk artist had ever appeared in a Pera nightclub. When Osman began to play a virtuoso improvisation called a “koşma,” the audience listened entranced, scarcely breathing. When he had finished, the silence at first was so complete that “one could’ve heard the humming of a mosquito,” as Adil recalled; then wild applause erupted. Osman replied with a calm and dignified bow, as if he had spent all his life performing for foreign dignitaries. Following a signal to the bandleader, who started up a Zeybek tune, Osman stretched out his arms and began the high-stepping dance, adding some remarkable moves that even Adil had never seen before. When it was over, the audience again exploded with applause. Admiral Bristol’s wife came up to Osman and invited him to their table. Showing worldliness that few expected from him, the old man offered his arm to the lady and escorted her back, to the delight of Maxim’s entire audience. When his hosts offered him champagne, he did not refuse it as a Muslim, but touched the glass to his lips and took two sips before putting it down. When offered a cigarette, he smoked it and, once he had finished, politely asked for permission to leave.
Elegant, pricey Maxim was at the upper end of popular tourist entertainments in Constantinople. But the city had many other levels, both native and foreign, and there was a lot to choose from if you had eclectic tastes or were not a prude. An American naval officer who went to a Russian restaurant where “the waitresses were all refugee Russian girls chosen obviously for their good looks” kept being urged, “You can be as wicked as you like” by the maître d’hôtel, a man “with a black beard who looked like Rasputin.” Vertinsky’s nightclub “La Rose Noire,” in which his singing was the prime official attraction, was reputedly shut down when a police raid “unearthed quantities of cocaine and 100 per cent syphilis among the lady servants and entertainers.” There were exotic “Oriental” entertainments that one could attend, like the “camel fights” between pairs of beasts that were held in the MacMahon Barracks Hippodrome in Taxim Square, not far from Maxim.
American tourists also treated as entertainments some Turkish cultural traditions and rituals of the Ottoman court that survived under the Allied occupation. The weekly ceremonial procession of the sultan to his mosque for worship attracted crowds of observers because of the magnificence of the scene: lined-up palace guards in bright scarlet; units of cavalrymen richly uniformed in red breeches, hussar jackets, and astrakhan hats, their lances tipped with red and green pennants; the sultans’ horses caparisoned with tiger skins and silver mountings. Especially popular with tourists were the dervishes, Sufi Muslim ascetics who resembled Western monks in some ways. Their religious practices, which varied by sect, included the famous dance-like “whirling,” as well as a form of collective prayer that supercilious foreigners called “howling.” There were also lurid forms of self-mortification, with individuals searing their bodies with red-hot irons, striking themselves with swords or spiked iron balls, and even thrusting daggers through both cheeks.
But probably the oddest entertainment in Constantinople was the “cockroach races” that the Russians invented. In an attempt to control the spread of gambling in the city, in April 1921 the Allied authorities forbade the “lotto” games of chance that Russian refugees had introduced all over Pera. After casting about for some other source of income, several enterprising souls dreamed up the idea of staging races using the ubiquitous insects. They sought permission from the head of the British police, who, being a “true sportsman,” enthusiastically granted it. A large, well-lit hall was found and a giant table was set up in the center, its surface covered with a series of tracks separated by low barriers. Announcements of a new “Cafarodrome”—after the French “cafard,” “cockroach”—were posted throughout the district. The public poured in. Men with feverishly glistening eyes and women with flushed faces crowded around the table, trans-fixed by the sight of the enormous black cockroaches. Each had a name—“Michel,” “Dream,” “Trotsky,” “Farewell,” “Lyulyu.” A ringing bell signaled the start of the race. Released from their cigar-box “stables,” the cockroaches dashed forward, pulling tiny, two-wheeled sulkies fashioned out of wire; some, dumbfounded by the bright lights, froze, waving their feelers around uncertainly to the de
spair of their fans. Those that reached the end of their runs found stale cake crumbs as their reward. Pari-mutuel winnings could reach 100 Ltqs—the equivalent of several thousand dollars today. The success of the first Cafarodrome was so great that competing “racetracks” began to pop up all over Pera and Galata, with word spreading to Stambul and even Scutari. Some of the organizers quickly became rich and started to make plans to leave for a new life in Paris. If you had the money, you could buy a forged passport, and if your assets were portable and the Interallied Police did not know you, you could board a ship and escape.
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.
The Black Russian Page 24
