However, these threats flickering and rumbling in the distance did nothing to dampen Muscovites’ enthusiasm for revelry. Many observers noted that people in the city began to seek pleasure with increasing frenzy as the century’s second decade began. Frederick saw how others around him were making money and was ready to start doing so as well.
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.”