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.”
Anticipation among Moscow’s pleasure seekers was high when advertisements announced the October 20 opening. One magazine even tried its hand at a jingle to capture the mood: “To Maxim’s I will go/With friends to see the show.” But a snag suddenly developed and forced Frederick to put off the opening for several weeks.
A complication that affected Maxim was the property’s location at 17 Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, between Kozitsky Lane and Glineshchevsky Lane: three churches were located nearby. (None of these survived the Soviet antireligious campaigns of the 1930s.) The Russian Orthodox Church saw theatrical performances as inherently frivolous and impious and therefore considered it highly improper to have theaters of any kind close to places of worship. Church hierarchs also insisted that theatrical performances throughout the city be suspended during major religious holidays, even if the theaters were nowhere near churches. Moscow’s secular authorities generally sided with the church, although there was some flexibility in how and when religious policies were enforced. The previous entrepreneur, Adel, had faced difficulties and restrictions because of the surrounding churches during the few seasons he tried to run Chanticleer, and now it seemed that Frederick’s turn had come.