The Black Russian

by Vladimir Alexandrov

  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.”

  Epilogue:

  Death and Life

  Life was very hard for Frederick’s family after his imprisonment. Elvira learned of his death in Czechoslovakia, where she had gone in a desperate attempt to regain her German citizenship. (Germany would not let her in without a passport, and the closest she could get was Czechoslovakia, which shared a long border with Germany and continued to be exceptionally hospitable to Russian émigrés.) Elvira could not have stayed in Constantinople any longer because of restrictions on employment for foreigners. Her plight was even worse because she was a semi-invalid, and her condition prevented her from doing manual labor. She believed that if she could get her German citizenship back, she would have a firmer legal standing in Turkey and would be able to help her sons.

  But to her shock, Elvira found that she had fallen into a new legal hell by leaving Turkey. “If you could have seen the tragedies that has been my life on account of all this difficulties,” she wrote in English to an American official, “you would shudder, at the thought, what a cruel thing law and its application is in cases like mine.” From the German government’s perspective, she had forfeited her citizenship by marrying a foreigner, and there was nothing she could do to get it back while he was alive. Elvira also discovered that she was trapped in Czechoslovakia because the Turkish authorities refused to let her return to Constantinople. Only the painful news of Frederick’s death freed her. In a remarkable act of courage and endurance, she crossed the border into Germany illegally, on foot and without any identification so that she would not be sent back if caught, and turned herself in to the authorities. Now that she was a widow, she could petition the German government to have her citizenship restored. It would take five years, and she would not be able to return to her sons in Turkey until 1933.

  In the meantime, Bruce and Frederick Jr., or “Fred” as he was called in English, had known real hardship. They had to drop out of school when their father’s financial difficulties began. Isaiah Thorne effectively adopted them when Elvira was away, and the only jobs they could find were marginal, with “very low” wages, as Fred described it. They worked mostly as waiters in restaurants in Angora and Constantinople, including Yeni Maxim. Both also occasionally found work as “jazz singers” in nightclubs.

  And then, suddenly, in a way no one could have predicted, the American government changed its mind. On November 25, 1930, at Thorne’s instigation, Fred and Bruce went to the American consulate general in Constantinople to apply for a passport. Thorne put them up to it because he wanted to help them escape the hardships of their lives in Turkey by taking them with him to North Carolina, where he had family.

  The consulate had become a different place. New people worked there, and some of those who had known Frederick in the past had had a change of heart. The recently arrived vice-consul Burton Y. Berry interviewed the brothers, filled out the necessary forms very carefully, and wrote a remarkably detailed statement in support of their application. He implied that Frederick’s request for a passport in 1921 had been denied because of racism; he defended Frederick for wanting to stay close to Russia because of the valuable property he had in Moscow; and he explained with great sympathy and historical understanding why a black man from the South should not have been expected to have documentary evidence of his birth. In very measured language, Berry then suggested the obvious—that a search of the State Department’s archives would undoubtedly yield Frederick’s previous passport applications, and that these would support his sons’ petition to be recognized as American citizens on the strength of their father’s origin.

  By now, people and attitudes had also changed in the State Department. This time the clerks in the Division of Passport Control found the numerous applications that Frederick had filed between 1896 and 1914, and that had been there all along. On January 17, 1931, they wrote back: “The Department has carefully considered the case of Mr. Thomas and from evidence in its files in the case of his father, Frederick Bruce Thomas, is satisfied of his American citizenship, and the application under acknowledgment is accordingly approved.” It no longer made any difference that Frederick had spent most of his life abroad, or that his sons had never set foot in the United States. The secret of his Russian citizenship also remained hidden in Russian archives. Charles Allen, who had effectively sabotaged Frederick’s applications a decade earlier, was now “consul in charge” in Istanbul and issued the boys their passport on March 17, 1931.

  But all of Thorne’s and Elvira’s plans still came to nothing. Thorne did not succeed in taking the boys to the United States because he could not raise the money, and Elvira was neither able to find work nor able to help her sons after she returned to Constantinople. In fact, because of her poor health, they had to take care of her.

  By 1935, Elvira and her sons were at their wits’ end. Her last resort was an appeal to the American consulate for money so that the young men could travel to the United States. But the diplomats did not have allocations for this purpose, and all they could suggest was that the brothers try to find jobs on an American ship that was returning home.

  Despite worsening xenophobia in Turkey, Fred and Bruce managed to scrape out an existence for themselves and their mother for several more years, somehow circumventing the laws that restricted most work to Turkish nationals. Fred finally found a way out in March 1938. The SS Excello, an American merchant ship, had docked in Istanbul and was short one crew member. A sailor had jumped ship in Greece and Fred signed on in his place as a “messman.” The ship sailed on March 18 and arrived in New York City on April 26, 1938, forty-four years after Frederick Bruce Thomas had left.

  Little is known of either brother’s subsequent fate. Shortly after arriving in New York, Fred found a job in Manhattan. Later, he may have continued to work in the American merchant marine. For Bruce, things had begun to look up briefly after Fred left Istanbul because he managed to get a contract to sing in Paris, where he hoped to earn enough money to travel to the United States. However, the beginning of World War II in September 1939 thwarted his plans and he remained in Turkey, continuing to lead a precarious existence performing in nightclubs and working in restaurants. In 1943 he came to the consulate in Istanbul, saying that he wanted to enlist in the American army, but his offer was refused.

  It was not until the war was over that Fred reestablished contact with Bruce and their mother in Turkey. In February 1948, a decade after he had left on the Excello, two African-American newspapers—one in New York City and one in Chicago—published a letter from a black American friend of Elvira’s in Istanbul asking anyone who knew the whereabouts of Frederick Thomas Jr. to pass on to him that his mother “is an invalid and needs his support, [and] is very anxious to hear from him.” The message apparently reached Fred, because the following year he tried to enlist the State Department’s help in finding out about Bruce’s “welfare,” and in 1950 he applied (unsuccessfully) to the department to help pay for Bruce’s passage to the United States from Turkey.

  Nevertheless, Bruce managed to get to the United States on his own the same year. He traveled via Western Europe, and during the summer of 1950 he stopped in Paris, where he had a brief and unhappy meeting with Mikhail, his half brother, that centered on money; they had not seen each other in a quarter of a century. Bruce then took a ship from Rotterdam that arrived in New York City on September 9, 1950, fifty-six years after his father had left.

  Nothing is known about the relations between the brothers in the United States. Bruce died on April 13, 1960, at the age of forty-five, in Los Angeles, where he worked as a cook and had lived for the previous two years. Fred outlived his brother by a decade and died in Rochester, New York, on February 12, 1970, at the age of fifty-five.

  Elvira’s fate is unknown but she probably died in Istanbul in the late 1940s or 1950s. Olga’s traces also disappear after she lost contact with Frederick in 1926, when she was living and studying in Paris.

  Irma’s fate was tragic. Af
ter initially living with Valli following their escape to Berlin in 1921, Irma came under the care of a local Lutheran pastor for several years. In 1925, when she was sixteen, she asked the American consulate in Berlin for help in locating her father because she had not heard from him “for some years.” Berlin contacted Ravndal, who responded promptly with Frederick’s address at Maxim. Whether or not Frederick ever helped Irma when she was in Berlin and he still had money is not known. Irma never entirely got over the unhappiness of her childhood or her troubled relations with her father, and some years later, after having married and moved to Luxembourg, she committed suicide.

  Frederick’s oldest son, Mikhail, was alone among the five children in escaping extreme hardship or tragedy. He studied agronomy in Prague, where he was also an enthusiastic boxer, becoming the city’s Russian student boxing champion. After graduating from the university, he lived in Belgium and then Colombia before settling in France. During the war he worked for the Resistance. Afterward, he made a living by playing numerous small roles in French television series and in French and international films, at times with major stars like Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, William Holden, and Yul Brynner. He also sang at the famous Russian émigré nightclub “Scheherazade” in Paris—popular old Russian and Gypsy songs and African-American spirituals. His cultural orientation, despite his cosmopolitan past, was largely Russian. He died in Paris in 1987.