The Black Russian Page 11

  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.

  The band struck up an English tune. The curtain went up, and from the wings a young English girl—amazingly fresh and beautiful—tripped lightly to the centre of the stage and did a song and dance act. Her voice was shrill and harsh. Her accent was Wigan [i.e., from Lancashire] at its crudest. But she could dance, as Moscow had never seen an English girl dance. The audience rose to her. So did two young and suddenly refreshed Englishmen. The head-waiter was summoned. Pencil and paper were demanded, and then after bashful meditation—it was a new experience for both of us—we sent a combined note inviting her to join us in our box. She came. Off the stage she was not so beautiful as she had seemed ten minutes before. She was neither witty nor wicked. She had been on the stage since she was fourteen and took life philosophically. But she was English, and the story of her career thrilled us. I expect our shyness and our awkwardness amused her.

  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

  heard high words outside the door—a male Cockney voice predominating. Then there was a scuffle and a final “blast you.” The door opened and was hurriedly shut, and with flushed face our Lancashire lady returned to us. What was the matter? It was nothing. There was an English jockey—a mad fellow, always drunk, who was making her life a burden and a misery. We expressed our sympathy, ordered more champagne, and in five minutes had forgotten all about the incident.

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

  This time Thomas himself appeared, followed by a policeman. Outside the door was a mob of waiters and girls with scared faces. The negro scratched his head. There had been an accident. Would Missie go at once? The English jockey had shot himself.

  Suddenly sobered, we paid our bill and followed the girl to the shabby furnished rooms across the road where the tragedy had taken place. We were prepared for the worst—scandal, possibly disgrace, and our almost certain appearance as witnesses at the inquest. For both of us the matter seemed terribly serious. In the circumstances the best course seemed to be to take Thomas into our confidence. He laughed at our fears.

  “I will make that ol’ right, Mistah Lockhart,” he said. “Bless yo’ heart, the police won’t worry you—or the English Missie either. They’s sho’ used to tragedies like this, and this one has been comin’ fo’ a long time.”

  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.”