Gambling made the Yildiz Municipal Casino a unique destination in the city, but the place also had everything else for which Maxim was famous, and more of it—fine restaurants, bars, tearooms, black jazz bands, dances in the afternoon, dinner dances in the evening, variety entertainment, and an enormous, beautifully illuminated park overlooking the Bosporus where one could stroll, ride, shoot, and play tennis. Yildiz also stayed open every day from 4:30 p.m. until 2 a.m., or later; it staged lavish special events regularly; and it provided fifteen automobiles to ferry guests back and forth from their homes and the city center.
The money poured in. During its first year of operation, the Casino is estimated to have paid the city government 130,000 Ltqs, which would be around $3 million today; this means that Serra’s syndicate grossed $20 million. Yildiz had completely eclipsed Maxim, and Frederick’s clients began to abandon him at the worst possible time. He tried to continue, but nothing he attempted worked, not even the special evenings that had been exceptionally profitable in the past and that now proved very difficult to organize. He announced a “first grand gala” of the season with a “ball of parasols” only on December 18, 1926; the next such event, featuring a masked ball, was not until two months later, on February 17.
Apart from the debts weighing him down, Frederick was also beset by new and continually shifting legal restrictions, taxes, and penalties. An Englishman who visited Constantinople in 1927 underscored this: “Obstacles are placed in the way of all foreigners now doing business in Turkey. Fines are imposed upon the flimsiest pretext and there is no redress without endless litigation in Turkish courts.” As for the legal system itself, “Laws and regulations are being passed at such a rate that none can keep pace with them.” In fact, early that year, a wave of stringent restrictions swept through Constantinople that were aimed at enterprises like Maxim. The governor of the province announced labyrinthine regulations about who could, and who could not, attend public dances, dance together, and receive dance instruction. A week later, several hundred cabarets were closed because they had all somehow transgressed aspects of the existing regulations.
The last glimpse of Frederick and Maxim that we have is a sad one, but it elucidates what went wrong. Carl Greer, a middle-aged businessman from Ohio on a grand tour of the eastern Mediterranean, visited three nightspots in Constantinople at the end of April 1927 and compared them. The first was a place near the consulate general called the “Garden Bar” that he described as “the only prosperous cabaret” in the city. Greer concluded that it was successful because it had “no such thing as a cover charge” and welcomed a range of clients, from big spenders prepared to pay several hundred dollars for a bottle of French champagne to penny-pinchers who nursed a glass of lemonade throughout an entire evening’s show. The second place was Maxim, which Greer characterized as “a much more ornate establishment than the successful Garden Bar.” But despite its swanky appearance he found it a “disheartening” sight because “the dance floor stood empty and the number of diners was never as great as the personnel of the orchestra that entertained them.” What had happened was obvious to Greer: after making “a great deal of money during the occupation,” Frederick could no longer attract his former clientele and was “now engaged in the painful process of losing all his profits.” The third place Greer visited was where Constantinople’s smart set had moved—the Yildiz Casino, and it elicited all his superlatives: “the show place among the resorts of the East, if not of the entire world… magnificence truly oriental… the gaming room causes any casino in the French Riviera to appear by comparison commonplace.” He also noted the crucial detail that there were “three hundred players” gathered around the Yildiz Casino’s tables. In short, the niche that Frederick had inhabited in the city’s nightlife was now gone, and he was trapped, unable to adapt. Maxim could not compete with Yildiz’s splendor and attractions, but neither could Frederick afford to make Maxim more broadly accessible, because of the size of his debt.
In the end, he tried to escape. Around the beginning of May 1927, just a few days after Greer had glimpsed Maxim’s last breaths, and with creditors on the verge of having him arrested, Frederick fled to Angora in the hope that he would be out of their reach. The distance from Constantinople was approximately three hundred miles, and the train crept along for the better part of an entire day, with long stops at stations. It was like a grotesque parody of his escape from Odessa eight years before. Frederick’s best hope was a long shot, as he surely realized. But he had escaped disaster before and was prepared to try once again. He was now fifty-four, and it could not have been easy.
The new Turkish capital was being created out of an ancient but obscure town in arid, hilly central Anatolia, with a population of only seventy-four thousand in 1927. However, it was growing rapidly as the republic expanded its bureaucratic institutions and offered a boom town’s opportunities for entrepreneurs. Frederick found a prominent resident, Mustafa Fehmi Bey, who owned property on the Yeni Çehir hills by the Çankaya Road with a splendid view of the entire city. Their plan was—predictably—to transform this site into a “marvelous summer garden,” a fully “modern establishment” with a “restaurant of great luxury” that would be called “Villa Djan.” The summer season was about to begin and they would have to hurry. Because of his renown and expertise, Frederick would naturally be in charge of the construction, organization, and future direction of the new garden.
Frederick and his new partner got only as far as hiring some of the staff before the money, or the promise of money, gave out. There was also stiff competition from existing establishments run by Russian émigrés. Soon the familiar problems began—debts, broken agreements, and angry diplomats. In June, the French consul general in Angora, who did not know that Frederick had been disowned by the United States, but was aware of his “deplorable” past in Constantinople, as he put it, complained to his American counterpart. A certain Mr. Galanga, a chef Frederick hired and then had to dismiss, was stuck in the city because he did not have the money to pay his hotel bill, something that Frederick was contractually obligated to do.
Meanwhile, the expected disaster struck in Constantinople and Frederick’s creditors seized Maxim. In late May, they allowed the editors of a magazine called Radio to put on a concert of classical music in the former nightclub, although they made a pointed announcement that no food or drinks would be served. A month later, Frederick’s former place in Therapia reopened under new ownership. It was now identified as “ex-Villa Tom” and, in what may have been a vindictive gesture by someone who knew of Frederick’s past in Moscow, had been renamed “Aquarium.”
Following the collapse of his plans for the Villa Djan, Frederick got a job for a short period as an assistant waiter in a restaurant in Angora. It was his bad luck that a former Constantinople customer happened to be in town and stopped by the restaurant. He saw Frederick in his new role and was surprised that the “likable negro” and “ex-proprietor of Maxim” was actually still alive. Frederick put on his bravest face and insisted that he was “flourishing,” but in fact he was earning only 30 Ltqs a month, comparable to $700 today. This was barely a living wage, especially if he was trying to send money to Elvira and his two sons. Frederick was also cocky, perhaps too much so for his own good: he asked the visitor to give word to his creditors in Constantinople that he was quite prepared to pay them, but “on the condition that they come to Angora.”