Most of the time Frederick limited himself to regaling the Americans with his trademark mix of personal attention, seductive atmosphere, haute cuisine, good liquor, excellent jazz, flashy acts, and a smooth dance floor. But on occasion he and his staff also put on a show that revealed his extravagant side, and played to the tourists’ naïveté and their if-this-is-Constantinople-it-must-be-Tuesday itinerary. Negley Farson, an American businessman and writer who had known Frederick in Moscow during the war and ran into him again in Constantinople, describes what sometimes happened.
When a big White Star liner came into Constantinople with a shipload of suddenly-wealthy American tourists on a round-the-world trip, all of Thomas’s Russian girl waitresses jumped into Turkish bloomers, and Thomas put on a fez, got out his prayer rug and prayed towards Mecca….
We had watched the American tourists being rushed around Constantinople all day in charabancs. They entered Maxim’s like a chorus themselves, rushed to the tables around the dancing floor and stared at the bloomered dancing girls.
“Very Turkish!” explained their guide-interpreter. “Just like a harem—what?”
Half an hour later he stood up and looked at his watch.
“Ladies and Gentlemen—this concludes our trip to Turkey. Ship sails in twenty minutes. Transportation is waiting for you outside the door. All aboard! All aboard for Jerusalem and the Holy Land—we will now follow the footsteps of the Master!”…
Thomas salaamed them out, bowing with pressed hands—“Good-bye, Effendi. Good-bye, Effendi!”—then he took off his fez and became a nice Mississippi Negro again.
Farson’s concluding epithet may sound condescending, but he genuinely admired Frederick and saw him as “very sophisticated.”
However, many of the American tourists differed from Farson because they brought with them the same attitudes Frederick had encountered when dealing with the diplomats in Constantinople and bureaucrats in Washington; the difference was that none of the tourists had any doubts about Frederick’s origins and all were happy to buy his drinks. Southerners’ reactions were invariably the most flagrant. Mrs. Lila Edwards Harper, a fifty-year-old matron from Montgomery, Alabama, spent a month in Constantinople and talked with Frederick at some length. Once she returned home, she could not wait to tell others what she saw and heard. “Everyone in Constantinople knows Fred Thomas,” she gushed. “He is a good polite negro, rolling in wealth, and an admirable host. His career is an amazing story, worse than fiction.” Mrs. Harper was struck primarily by two things: Frederick’s rags-to-riches story, which he recounted to her in detail (including the fact that he encountered no “color line” in Russia); and that his waitresses were Russian noblewomen who had been his “most fashionable patrons” in Moscow. “Nobody avoids them on account of their misfortune,” she commented, with what is actually rather mean-spirited surprise: “I’ve seen the English consul dance with the waitress who served his dinner. She was a countess in the old days.”
Frederick treated Mrs. Harper the same way he did all his patrons. But because she viewed him through the lens of her white southern narcissism, she took his polish and charm as personal tributes: “Thomas is from Mississippi and was as hugely pleased at meeting a Southern woman from America as he could be…. Nobody objects to the fact that the manager of the restaurant is a negro.” She added: “He’s one of the dozen or so negroes in Constantinople. They are never presumptuous. I saw Thomas sitting at a table with one of his Russian lady dancers, but that was the only unusual sight I saw. The diners find him a likable, obliging negro.” Mrs. Harper makes it sound as if dealing with people like her was what made Frederick know his natural place. In fact, knowing how to deal with her type is what helped him become rich again, and that was his best revenge.
Frederick was friendly by disposition and also charmed his customers for the simple reason that this was usually the easiest way to get what he wanted from them. But there were limits, and he was no Pollyanna. The numerous military men in Constantinople could be especially difficult to handle, owing to the way that alcohol and the proximity of attractive women fueled their aggressiveness. The English were the worst offenders—because of their numbers in Pera, because they were armed in contrast to the other Allies, and because of their arrogance. Captain Daniel Mannix, a seasoned American naval officer newly arrived in Constantinople, witnessed this unsavory concoction at Maxim one evening. He was curious about the place and its “American Negro” owner because he had heard that Frederick “had done a lot for other refugees and was generally liked and respected.” A short while after settling in at a table with friends, Mannix noticed that two drunken Englishmen were abusing a Russian waiter for some reason. Suddenly, one of them leaned forward and hit the Russian in the face, but the waiter only stepped away. Then the Englishman reached out and hit him again, and this time the waiter responded with a blow of his own.
Instantly both Englishmen went into a perfect spasm of fury, yelling and waving their fists in a frenzy of rage. By now Thomas had come up and he asked mildly what the trouble was. One of the men, shaking his fist in Thomas’ face, screamed, “He struck an ENGLISHMAN!” Thomas replied grimly, “You shake your fist in my face again and I’ll strike another.” The Englishman recoiled in open-mouthed astonishment while his friend turned to stare at Thomas unbelievingly. A few seconds later both left the cafe, still seemingly in a daze.
Mannix saw the Englishmen’s behavior as a shocking expression of their sense of national inviolability. But Frederick was neither impressed nor cowed, and in characteristic fashion came to his employee’s defense. He also knew that this would not damage his relations with the British authorities, because of Maxim’s popularity with the representatives of all the Allied powers.
Even Admiral Bristol, the most senior American in the city, patronized Maxim, especially for dancing. The music and entertainment there were always Western European and Russian. But on one memorable evening Bristol presided over a special party that included Turkish folk music and dancing that Frederick had arranged with the help of the young journalist Adil. The performer was known as “Champion Osman, the Tambura-Player”; he was a master of the “bağlama,” a long-necked, traditional stringed instrument, and the “Zeybek,” a martial folk dance peculiar to western Anatolia. When Adil brought him to Maxim, Frederick’s initial reaction to the big, slow-moving old man, with his handlebar mustache, thick fingers, and eyeglasses, was skeptical. But after Osman changed into his costume, Adil was relieved to see that Frederick’s face broke into a broad smile at the transformation that the diffident old man had undergone.
After a dramatic drumroll, Osman walked out onto Maxim’s dance floor. The impression he produced was extraordinary because of his costume—a colorful head wrap, short baggy pants, a yataghan thrust through the sash around the waist of his embroidered jacket—and the contrast between his enormous body and the tiny bağlama. This was the first time that a Turkish folk artist had ever appeared in a Pera nightclub. When Osman began to play a virtuoso improvisation called a “koşma,” the audience listened entranced, scarcely breathing. When he had finished, the silence at first was so complete that “one could’ve heard the humming of a mosquito,” as Adil recalled; then wild applause erupted. Osman replied with a calm and dignified bow, as if he had spent all his life performing for foreign dignitaries. Following a signal to the bandleader, who started up a Zeybek tune, Osman stretched out his arms and began the high-stepping dance, adding some remarkable moves that even Adil had never seen before. When it was over, the audience again exploded with applause. Admiral Bristol’s wife came up to Osman and invited him to their table. Showing worldliness that few expected from him, the old man offered his arm to the lady and escorted her back, to the delight of Maxim’s entire audience. When his hosts offered him champagne, he did not refuse it as a Muslim, but touched the glass to his lips and took two sips before putting it down. When offered a cigarette, he smoked it and, once he had finished, politely asked for permission to leave.