In Constantinople, the news of the Nationalists’ advance, two hundred miles away, greatly alarmed the Americans. On September 23, Admiral Bristol circulated a memorandum explaining that the United States would remain neutral should fighting break out between Turkish and Allied forces, but would still evacuate all American citizens living in and near the city. A detailed list of all 650 Americans (including a young journalist named Ernest Hemingway) was prepared but, needless to say, Frederick and his family were not on it.
The Nationalists now had the upper hand and nothing stood in the way of their goal to reclaim the rest of their country. On October 11, 1922, Britain, France, and Italy accepted Kemal’s demands and signed the Armistice of Mudanya. They also agreed to a new peace conference to renegotiate the onerous Treaty of Sèvres, which had provided for the partition of the Ottoman Empire and the internationalization of Constantinople.
Kemal next shifted his attention to his internal enemy—the sultan. Mehmet VI, a bespectacled, studious-looking man who inherited the throne from his brother, had opposed the Nationalists from the start and blamed them for the disaster that had befallen the Ottoman Empire after the war. For a time, his government in Constantinople, whose powers had already been severely limited by the Allies, continued to function independently from the Nationalist government that had formed in Angora. The Nationalists also initially attempted to remain loyal to the sultan personally, but the final rupture between them became inevitable. On November 1, 1922, Kemal and the Nationalists proclaimed the abolition of the sultanate. Two weeks later, Mehmet VI slipped out of the Dolmabahçe Palace, boarded a British warship, and fled to Malta and permanent exile on the Italian Riviera.
When the Lausanne peace treaty was signed on Tuesday, July 24, 1923, the news was as bad as the foreigners in Constantinople had feared. The Allies had been forced to give up all of their imperialistic plans for Turkey itself and would soon be evacuating the city. Frederick had been waiting for the news and understood its gravity. The very next day, Wednesday, July 25, he hurried to the American consulate general and, in effect, threw himself on the diplomats’ mercy. Despite the rejection he had received earlier, getting American recognition was now the only hope he had left.
It is surprising that this time the American diplomats were more receptive to Frederick’s appeal and agreed to try to help him. Why? As their later comments and actions suggest, their collective conscience was not entirely clear because of the role they had played in the State Department’s rejection. They were also not indifferent to the pleasures that could be had at Maxim, which a number of them patronized. And they now began to sympathize with Frederick on a purely human level—with his hard-won success, his unusual vulnerability because of the drastic change in Turkey’s political situation, and the urgency of his plight.
Immediately upon signing the Lausanne treaty, the Turkish authorities announced that all foreigners in Constantinople would have to register with the police by August 1. To comply, Frederick would need official identification as a foreign national; without it, he could be subject to deportation and the loss of his property. Because this deadline was only a week away, Ravndal agreed to expedite Frederick’s appeal and to send a telegram to Washington, albeit at Frederick’s expense and provided he brought the money in advance.
Ravndal telegraphed the State Department on Thursday, July 26, asking that Frederick’s case “be reopened.” As justification, he explained that creditors’ claims against Frederick “have been practically all disposed of,” and that Frederick promised to pay income tax for the past several years, if “he is recognized.” Showing more than a perfunctory interest in helping Frederick, Ravndal even searched for a precedent in a vast diplomatic compendium that dealt with such matters (Moore’s Digest) and invoked a case from 1880 that he thought was similar.
But Ravndal was also bound by State Department policies regarding repatriation, and the conditions he specified under which Frederick could be granted an “emergency certificate of registration” were heartless. The certificate would include Frederick’s children but not his “wife” (the skeptical quotation marks were Ravndal’s), and Frederick would have until May 1924 to return to the United States and place his children in school. In other words, Frederick’s price for American protection would be to give up Elvira; to dispose of Maxim; to accept a permanent, inferior status as a black man in the United States; and to doom his sons to the same fate. Nevertheless, Frederick went along, although it is possible that he had other ideas about what he might do if he got his hands on a passport that would allow him to travel, or at least to escape from Constantinople. (As he surely knew by now from newspapers as well as from traveling entertainers who worked for him, Paris had become a haven for many black American musicians and entrepreneurs.) The day after Ravndal sent the telegram, Frederick signed a typed note, certifying that he was “always ready to fulfill all the obligations that an American citizen is bound to,” and that he was “quite willing to pay my income tax for these past three years, amounting to about a thousand Dollars [equivalent to $40,000 today]; this, as soon as my new citizenship papers will be delivered to me.”
The response from Washington arrived in less than a week and was as disheartening as it was brief: “You are informed that the Department is unable to reverse its decision as indicated in its mail instruction of 20 January, 1922. Collect $2.70.”
But Frederick was still not prepared to give up. He had one very influential acquaintance left in the city—Admiral Mark Bristol. A stern-looking man with a firm gaze that fitted his high rank and position, Bristol was also very kind and, together with his wife, did much valuable charitable work in Constantinople, including helping Russian refugees and founding an American hospital. Bristol took a personal interest in Frederick’s plight and asked Larry Rue, the correspondent of the Chicago Daily Tribune who also knew Frederick, to investigate. Rue canvassed other Americans in the city as well as Frederick’s employees and wrote a strong letter to Bristol on August 24, 1923. He affirmed that Frederick was “obviously an American”; that after his initial stumbles he had achieved “enviable” success in his business; that he was widely admired for being a humane employer; and that the State Department had discriminated against Frederick when it denied him a passport on the basis of a “rule which is freely waived for others whose intentions, citizenship, business methods and Americanism are considerably more in doubt than his.” Rue also reported that neither Allen nor Ravndal had objections to Frederick any longer, and that they would both “really like to help him out of this dilemma.” Rue concluded that if the State Department did nothing to protect Frederick from the risk of having his property confiscated by the Turks, “There ain’t no justice.”
There are several inaccuracies in Rue’s letter, which are presumably due to the efforts by all concerned to put the best possible face on their dealings with Frederick. Allen’s claim that he would like to help Frederick is difficult to reconcile with his central role in sabotaging Frederick’s earlier passport applications, although it is possible that Allen’s attitude had evolved during the ensuing two years. Rue’s report that Ravndal did not have any objections to Frederick was belied by the way Ravndal referred to Elvira in his telegram to Washington on July 26. Despite all these reservations, it is still remarkable that so many of the influential white Americans in the city would have rallied around Frederick in this way.
Bristol did not forget Frederick’s case. In late December 1923, he asked Edgar Turlington, a solicitor in the State Department and his official legal adviser, to “have an extended conversation” with Frederick about his past in order to try to gather information that might persuade the State Department to reverse its decision. The resulting six-page autobiographical narrative that Turlington produced traces Frederick’s life from his birth to his arrival in Constantinople and contains many details that are still readily verifiable. He also gives the names of several people who could vouch for Frederick’s American origins. Turlington
incorporated this narrative into a letter he addressed on February 8, 1924, to George L. Brist of the Division of Passport Control at the State Department. Turlington also added that although he himself was in no position to verify independently much of what Frederick said,
I have no doubt, from his manner and general appearance, that he was born and largely brought up in the southern part of the United States. Among the Americans in Constantinople there is, so far as I could discover, no doubt whatever of Thomas’ being an American, and the reasons for the denial of an American passport to Thomas are far from clear.
However, once again all the efforts came to nothing. Brist did ask a colleague to check the Passport Division’s records, but the clerks again failed to find or, if they found them, to produce any of Frederick’s applications. Even more egregious is that Turlington gave Brist the name of a naval officer who was living in Washington at the time, who had been to Maxim, and who knew the Cheairs family—the onetime owners of Frederick’s parents. But Brist and his colleagues either did not pursue this easy lead, were not persuaded by it, or chose to let it get lost in the great State Department paper shuffle. In the end, it proved impossible for Bristol, Rue, or anyone else to undo the damage that had been done to Frederick’s case earlier by the diplomats in Constantinople and the officials in Washington.
In the meantime, things in Constantinople were not going as badly as had been feared. The August 1 deadline had come and gone, but Frederick had not been deported and Maxim had not been seized. Because Turkey was an overwhelmingly Muslim country, there was much talk initially about prohibition, which would have been ruinous for Maxim and other establishments like it. In October 1923, for example, dire rumors had spread that all drinking establishments would be closed, and stores of liquor would be dramatically thrown into the sea. But although some closings did follow, pressure to reverse this policy began immediately. Many Turks were now accustomed to Western-style nightlife and wanted it to continue. Soon, a few private clubs were authorized to provide drinks to members. Maxim, which had become an important part of the city’s increasingly secularized popular culture, was prominent among them. By the spring of 1924, clubs, gardens, hotels, restaurants, and casinos were allowed to serve liquor, provided they had government permits (the Gazi, Mustafa Kemal, himself was reputedly a tippler).
Following the Treaty of Lausanne, the changes in the country’s government and in Constantinople’s administration were rapid, dramatic, and epochal in historical terms. But initially at least they did not affect Frederick’s life and affairs in any very striking ways. The Allied forces began the evacuation of the city on August 29, 1923, only five days after the treaty was signed. It was completed on Tuesday, October 2, at 11:30 in the morning, when the British, French, and Italian commanding generals and their remaining troops carried out a brief but impressive ceremony in the open square by the Dolmabahçe Palace. With Allied and Turkish units drawn up on the sides of the square, and under the eyes of dignitaries including foreign ambassadors and the high commissioners, the generals inspected the troops; then the Allied and Turkish colors were presented, and the Allied forces marched off. “In a twinkling of an eye,” a great, jubilant Turkish throng flooded the square, according to an American who was present. The Allied fleets left the same afternoon and, in contrast to their imperious arrival five years earlier, now seemed to be “slinking out of port.” “Had these vessels had tails,” the American commented, “I can imagine that they would surely have been securely curled behind their hind legs.” Three days later, on October 5, the Nationalist army reached the Asian side of Constantinople; the following day it crossed the Bosporus and landed in Stambul near Topkapi Palace. On October 13, the capital was officially moved to Angora. The final step in the country’s transformation came on October 29, 1923, with the proclamation of the Turkish Republic and Mustafa Kemal’s election as its first president. In 1935 the grateful nation that he created would give him the honorary name Atatürk, “Father of the Turks.”
After the Allies left, the first thing that changed in Constantinople was the appearance of the crowds on the city’s streets. The British, French, Italian, and American naval uniforms that had filled Pera and Galata were replaced by those of the Turkish army and navy. The number of prostitutes working the streets also dropped because the authorities closed many of the city’s “resorts of ill fame.” Shop signs and advertising banners in the European districts began to change in accordance with the new government’s decree that everything would now have to be in Turkish, with foreign lettering allowed only if it was smaller.
The fall of 1923 after the Allies’ departure is probably when Frederick sent his oldest son, Mikhail, to study in Prague. Because all hope of getting American recognition now seemed to be lost, it made sense to get him out of (potential) harm’s way by taking advantage of the Czech government’s very generous offer to provide young Russian émigrés with a free higher education. By 1922, some two thousand had arrived in Prague from all points in the Russian diaspora, including Constantinople. Because Mikhail had been born in Moscow and spoke Russian fluently, he was eligible. (It is also likely that he was motivated to leave because there were still unresolved tensions between him and Elvira.) Father and son would never see each other again.
Despite the tectonic political and cultural shifts in the city, Maxim remained popular with both residents and tourists and continued to do very good business for a number of years longer. This appears to have given Frederick a heady sense of liberation and achievement, and unleashed an extravagant streak in him. He liked to tell visiting Americans about his remarkable life in Russia; about how in Constantinople he surmounted “difficulties that would stagger the ordinary man”; and how he had “once more mounted the pinnacle of success as the owner and proprietor of the most noted and most popular amusement palace in the Near East.” Before long, he started boasting to visitors that he was “conservatively rated to be worth at least $250,000,” which would amount to $10 million today. Even if this was a two-, three-, or fourfold exaggeration, it still suggests the impressive scale of his success.
For many of Frederick’s clients, his appeal as a host was the infectious, personal pleasure he took in the gaiety that he orchestrated in his nightclub. Sergey Krotkov, a Russian émigré musician who worked for him for several years, recalled how Frederick would suddenly decide that it was time for an elaborate spree. He would put on the top hat that had become his signature and would lead a procession of all of Maxim’s employees—waiters, dishwashers, musicians, cooks, performers—from Taxim Square down one of Pera’s main streets, to the accompaniment of the band’s drums and the clash and clatter of its cymbals. They would stop at every bar they encountered and Frederick would buy everyone a round of drinks. Even when he was working in his office at Maxim, he kept a bottle of champagne chilling in an ice bucket on his desk so that he could offer a glass to anyone who came to see him. It was this kind of behavior that led émigrés to see in him the same “broad” Russian nature they valued in themselves.
The other side of Frederick’s expansive generosity was his continued insistence on personal loyalty from everyone he included in his circle. The bond this allowed him to forge with his employees was another reason for his success, and Krotkov experienced this as well. Krotkov was a master of the Hawaiian ukulele, an instrument that was sweeping the world in the early 1920s, and was very popular at Maxim. One evening he had been invited to a private event elsewhere before having to perform at Maxim for another boatload of American tourists. Krotkov arrived very late for his turn onstage, to find Frederick waiting for him in a rage at the entrance: “Tvoya svoloch!” (“Yours a bastard!”), he yelled in his expressive but grammatically flawed Russian. “My your mug will smash! The Americanas came, and yours not played—your run and play!” “Fyodor Fyodorovich,” Krotkov pleaded, “I know I’m late. Please forgive me, I took a taxi.” He then dashed to the stage. When Krotkov had completed his set, a waiter asked him to come to the ba
r. Frederick was standing there, his face beaming: “Yours played well. The Americanas listened and clapped.” There were two tumblers of vodka before him. “Yours drink good yet?” he asked.
Frederick’s penchant for spontaneous expressions of good feeling prompted him to host a Fourth of July celebration at Maxim in 1924. The nightclub was filled with American businessmen, merchant sailors, mining engineers, and, as an observer put it, other “American adventurers” from every corner of the Near East. Feelings ran especially high and “the jovial American Negro proprietor” was generously “setting up drinks on the house time and again.” Completing the festive setting were a jazz band playing “Last Night on the Back Porch (I Loved Her Best of All)” and a bevy of Greek and Levantine dancing girls.
With Maxim a success, and facing what seemed like a cloudless future despite the revolutionary transformation of Turkey that was under way, Frederick’s thoughts once again turned to growth.
During Constantinople’s summers, temperatures can climb to oppressive heights for weeks, driving many residents to seek cooler locations somewhere on the water. In early summer of 1924, Frederick decided to open a new place in Bebek, a quiet suburb overlooking a pretty cove on the European shore of the Bosporus, some five miles north of Galata. Together with a senior employee from Maxim, “Mr. Berthet,” he took over a Russian restaurant called “Le Moscovite” that had a terrace by the water. Frederick renamed the place “La Potinière” (“The Gossip”) and began to entice customers with what had been his foolproof formula—dinner and dancing under the open sky, a bar with special cocktails, and his own celebrated self as the host.
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