The style of dress that these Slavic sirens adopted varied from restaurant to restaurant. In one place they would flaunt their Russian boldness: “white Caucasian jackets, high black boots, thin scarves around their hair and heavy makeup.” In another, they cultivated a softer, decadent seductiveness, as the singer Vertinsky, who had also arrived in 1920, promised at his nightclub “La Rose Noire”: “The serving ladies will whisper to the clients the poems of Baudelaire between the courses. They are to be exquisite, select, delicate and to wear each a black rose in their golden hair.” Some wore dainty aprons that made them look like soubrettes in light comedy, an impression that they augmented with their shyness and apologetic manner.
The reactions to them in Constantinople were predictable. A group of thirty-two widows of Turkish noblemen and high officials sent a petition to the city governor demanding the immediate expulsion of “these agents of vice and debauchery who are more dangerous and destructive than syphilis and alcohol.” The British ambassador, Sir Horace Rumbold, explained wryly in a letter to Admiral de Robeck, the British high commissioner, that the “little Princess Olga Micheladze” plans to marry “one Sanford, a nice quiet fellow in the Inter-Allied Police…. He has money.” A tourist visiting from Duluth, Minnesota, gushed that the owner of a restaurant “is an escaped Russian grand duke, and all the waitresses are Russian princesses of the royal family.” The latter “were pretty and flirted terrifically. I asked one if she spoke any English and the answer, with a quaint accent, was, ‘Sure, I know lots American boys.’” A cartoon in the local British newspaper showed a Turk asking a Russian woman: “Parlez-vous français, mademoiselle?” She replies, “No, but I know how to say ‘love’ in every language.”
At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, more than one visiting foreigner was moved by the sight of an exiled Russian officer rising at his restaurant table with an expression of somber respect on his face to kiss the hand of the waitress approaching him because they had known each other under very different circumstances in their previous lives. Princess Lucien Murat, a French tourist in Constantinople, had a series of similar heart-wrenching encounters with a number of people she had known in prerevolutionary Petrograd—“Baron S,” whom she found working as a street bootblack; “Colonel X,” who now manned a cloakroom in a restaurant; and then, at Frederick’s bar, her old friend “Princess B,” whom she had last seen at a ball in Petrograd “in a silvery dress, with her marvelous emeralds in a diadem on her lovely forehead.” “The Princess tells me her lamentable tale, her escape from the Bolsheviks, her flight in a crowded cattle-car.” Meanwhile, her “Boss” hovers around—“an ebony black, who, in the old days, kept the most fashionable restaurant in Moscow where, many a time, the Princess dined and danced to the music of the tziganes.” Princess Lucien’s reaction to seeing her old friend in Frederick’s employ is revealing in that it provides a glimpse of a dame serveuse from a point of view other than that of an admiring or lascivious male.
Also revealing, but for reasons of Turkish national pride and what this foreshadowed about the future of the Allied enclave in Constantinople, is the reaction of a sharp-eyed young Turkish patriot during a visit to Stella one warm summer evening. Mufty-Zade K. Zia Bey knew the United States well, having lived there for a decade. Together with his wife and a friend, he decided to sample Pera’s nightlife and went to the “café chantant” that was the “best” in the city. When they arrived, Stella was crowded and Zia Bey, who was very proud of his conservative, traditional Turkish values, was immediately put off by its libertine atmosphere, although he was impressed by Frederick’s manner.
Every one seems to be intoxicated and the weird music of a regular jazz band composed of genuine American negroes fires the blood of the rollicking crowd to demonstrations unknown even to the Bowery in its most flourishing days before the Volstead Act. Much bejewelled and rouged “noble” waitresses sit, drink and smoke at the tables of their own clients. The proprietor of the place, an American coloured man who was established in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution… is watching the crowd in a rather aloof manner. Frankly he seems to me more human than his clients; at least he is sober and acts with consideration and politeness, which is not the case with most of the people who are here.
Zia Bey also bristled at the way everything about Stella reflected the foreign presence in the city and the secondary role that had been forced on the city’s Muslim natives: “Not one real Turk is in sight. Many foreigners, but mostly Greeks, Armenians and Levantines—with dissipated puffed-up faces, greedy of pleasure and materialism.” Before long, Zia Bey and his wife decided to leave. They relaxed only when they were safely out of Pera, across the Galata Bridge, and back home in “our Stamboul, the beautiful Turkish city, sleeping in the night the sleep of the just; poor Stamboul, ruined by fires and by wars, sad in her misery, but decent and noble; a dethroned queen dreaming of her past splendour and trusting in her future.” Zia Bey’s attitude represented the numerous threats to the foreign world of which Frederick was a part, although there was no reason for him to be aware of them just yet.
With the prominence of the “dames serveuses” in the minds of Constantinople’s male population, it was inevitable that racially tinged insinuations about Frederick’s relations with his Russian waitresses would have begun to spread among members of the city’s American colony. Some intimated that, like “all Negroes,” Frederick was prone to “the greatest sexual excesses” and had “a way of compelling various of his employees to accept his caresses.” But in fact, as Larry Rue, a reporter from Chicago who looked into the allegations, put it, Frederick’s waitresses considered him to be “the ‘whitest’ employer around” because he not only treated them with respect but allowed them to refuse advances from anyone, including “numerous British officers” who “protested against this high tone morality.”
Frederick did not stop at extending his protective circle around his waitresses and even arranged several galas for their financial benefit, which was very unusual in the world of Constantinople nightlife—such events were typically organized on behalf of star performers or the management. His action was a genuine kindness, although it was also shrewd because it put the young women on special display. This was similar to his decision to donate Stella for “A Great Festival of Charity” on July 24, 1920, on behalf of the “Waifs Rescued by the Suppression of Begging Society.” The event had been inspired by one of his star performers, the singer Isa Kremer, and sanctioned by the city’s highest authorities—the Interallied high commissioners. Both Kremer and Frederick were praised lavishly for their initiative. This participation recalls his donation of Aquarium as a staging area for patriotic manifestations in Moscow during the war.