It was also becoming more difficult for foreigners to live and work in Constantinople. Xenophobia increased as the Turkish Republic dismantled the old privileges that had been granted to Europeans. In 1924 an unsuccessful attempt was made in Constantinople to force employers to replace their Christian employees with Muslims. Two years later a new law required that Turkish workers replace all foreigners, including dames serveuses, waiters, headwaiters, cooks—in short, the core group of Frederick’s employees at Maxim. He may have needed to hide behind Turkish partners himself. To verify compliance, officials began to check identification papers throughout the city. Early in 1926 a law was introduced mandating the use of Turkish in bars, in restaurants, and on bills; any establishment that persisted in using French would be punished.
All these changes caused great anxiety and hardship for Constantinople’s many foreigners, including the several thousand Russian refugees who had stayed behind after nearly two hundred thousand others left. Some of the remaining Russians sought Turkish citizenship, as did Frederick. After vacillating for a while, the new republic decided not to grant it to large numbers of stateless foreigners, and this decision forced many more to leave the country. Even though the Russians’ identity papers had lost their meaning when their homeland ceased to exist, they were able to travel on the strength of the “Nansen passports” that the League of Nations started to issue in 1921. Had Frederick not claimed all along that he was an American, he might have been able to get one of these too. Fridtjof Nansen and Frederick actually met on June 9, 1925, when Nansen, the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, went to Maxim during a visit to Constantinople. However, by then it was too late for Frederick to tell the truth, and Maxim was still doing too well for him to want to leave.
By early spring of 1926 Frederick had found the property that would be his answer to Serra’s Yildiz casino. About a dozen miles up the Bosporus from Constantinople on the European side is a picturesque cove with a town called Therapia (now Tarabya) that was popular with wealthy natives and foreigners as an escape from the city’s crowds and summer heat. The rich built luxurious villas; the foreign diplomats built “summer embassies.” There were several good hotels and restaurants right on the water that caught the cooling breezes.
Frederick opened his “Villa Tom” there in early June and continued to operate Maxim during that summer as well. He spent lavishly to create a new destination that would give the members of Constantinople’s fashionable set everything they could possibly want: sophisticated dinners, dancing on a terrace by the water under a moonlit sky, a “Negro Jazz” band, a magnificently illuminated garden filled with flowers, and constantly varying entertainments—a “Venetian evening,” a “Neapolitan program,” an “aristocratic Charleston competition,” a “Monster Matinee.” And when the night’s performance drew to a close, there were spectacular fireworks overhead.
At first, Villa Tom looked like a success—the city’s night owls came, enjoyed themselves, and lingered until dawn. But the place had cost a lot to open and was expensive to run. A problem also emerged regarding its location: Therapia was twice as far from the city as Bebek, where Frederick had tried opening La Potinière two years earlier, and the distance seems to have put many people off. Frederick realized that he would have to take on the additional expense of providing transportation from Constantinople if he was going to induce clients to make the trip. A few weeks after the opening, he hired and advertised a “luxury boat,” promising to return revelers to the city at 2 a.m. But this did not turn attendance around. Frederick’s income that spring and summer started to falter. He had to cut back on paying bills and other expenses, just as he had several years earlier.
This time, one of his first victims was his own daughter Olga. A year earlier, in July 1925, together with her Russian husband, she had managed to get from Romania to Paris, where she enrolled as a student. For the previous three years Frederick had been supporting her with a sizable monthly allowance, but when his expenses began to mount prior to opening Villa Tom he stopped sending money to her and, inexplicably, broke off all communication. Olga waited anxiously for several months, until July 1926, at which point she went to the American consul general in Paris, Robert Skinner, for help in finding out what had happened to her father. Skinner, in turn, contacted Allen in Constantinople, reporting that Olga was “very worried” and “absolutely penniless.” Allen’s response was as brief as protocol required: he confirmed Frederick’s address at Maxim and explained that because Frederick had been denied American protection, “this office is… not able to exert any influence on him or otherwise interest itself in him.” Following this exchange in late July 1926, nothing is known about any further communication between Olga and her father.
Although the government of the United States had washed its hands of Frederick, many of the people with whom he did business in Constantinople continued to think of him as an American. Consequently, when he stopped paying his bills on time, some of his smaller and less savvy creditors began once again to bring their complaints to the officials in the consulate general. A Russian waiter at Maxim, who had managed to circumvent employment regulations pertaining to foreigners, sent a pathetic complaint to Admiral Bristol about how Frederick had stopped paying him his full wages in June, around the time that Villa Tom had opened, and had not paid him for months despite repeated pleas. A merchant who supplied flowers to Villa Tom described how he had waited at Frederick’s office as late as “3 o’clock in the morning” in an attempt to collect the remaining half of the sum owed him, the equivalent of some $2,000 today. The Americans must have been dismayed to see such familiar complaints after their intercessions on Frederick’s behalf. They gave everyone the same response: “This office is unable to offer you any assistance towards collection of the sum which Mr. Thomas is alleged to owe you.”
However, there was a new, ominous development as welclass="underline" Frederick’s bigger and better-connected creditors did not bother to contact the consulate general. Because foreigners like Frederick no longer had extraterritorial protection, there was no reason to involve the American diplomats; Turkish laws were now sufficient to cover any eventuality.
That fall and winter Frederick’s problems got worse. After closing Villa Tom for the season, he began to try to salvage his financial situation by refocusing exclusively on Maxim. But on September 26, 1926, the “Yildiz Municipal Casino,” as it was now officially called, opened for business. It did so not only with the fanfare befitting its size and splendor but also with official support from the city government, which made it into an even more significant event in the city’s nightlife. Invitations had gone out in the name of the prefect of Constantinople, and his assistant joined Serra in welcoming the six hundred guests at the palace doors and in cutting the ribbon to the gambling salon. Practically the entire diplomatic corps came, as did the city’s military and civilian authorities, the leading members of society, and representatives from the Grand National Assembly, the country’s parliament in Angora. Despite the large turnout, the palace was so vast that it did not feel crowded. The casino was an instant success: men and women flocked to the six baccarat tables and four roulette tables in what a journalist characterized as “probably the most luxurious gaming room in the world.”