Oh! things are humming,
Night time coming
Drinking and eating,
Lying and cheating . . .
Sometimes a sailor just from sea
Imbibes his dusico too free,
Or an officer haughty
Gets a wee bit naughty
In Constantinople town.
—Capt. Lyman Cotten,
Admiral Bristol’s chief of staff
Leaders have always understood that those same people you have to send into battle or depend on during high seas have nonnautical interests that can greatly affect their performance of duty. Particularly on deployments involving enticing shore leave, a leader would be remiss not to recognize all the pressures by which a sailor might be affected. Similarly, it would seem shortsighted for the naval chronicler of a period to omit portraying in some detail sailors’ after-hours’ experiences, particularly in such an entrancing city as this one. Taking this view, I’ll proceed in my portrait of Constantinople by describing the nightlife, and then I’ll show several examples of how American Navy men were affected by it.
From 1919 to as late as 1923, one of the first things that American visitors noted about Constantinople’s nighttime atmosphere (particularly that of the European quarters of Pera and Galata) was the music. Some of it was played or sung by Europeans and Americans, but most of the performers were Russians. Among the Russian refugees who fled to Constantinople after the Revolution were many fine musicians, and it would appear that most of them ended up playing at the city’s restaurants and nightclubs.
Many Russian refugees first tried to earn their bread by offering lessons, to be sure, while others gave concerts. With the exception of full-scale grand opera, performances of almost every possible kind were given in Constantinople from 1920 to 1923.1 Outward appearances notwithstanding, benefit concerts could be of superb quality. The Nouveau Theatre, for example, was a “tawdry, tinsel theatre built out of an old skating rink,” but once a week you could hear an excellent symphony there.2 At the Petits Champs, two concerts per day were offered by Boutnikoff’s symphony orchestra,3 while pianist Paul Lounitch played almost a hundred recitals throughout the city between 1920 and 1921.4
Naval and civilian Americans alike embraced these artists. Robert College invited the pianist Serge Bortkiewicz to its chapel to perform, for example. Then the social secretary for the American Sailors’ Club arranged for the same pianist to play for Adm. A. P. Niblack, the visiting admiral in charge of all American naval forces in Europe. (The admiral was embarked in the battleship Utah, then visiting the city.) An official of the club (a former sailor) decided the admiral would not appreciate a classical pianist and told the secretary to uninvite the Russian; after all, he was only a refugee. The social secretary quietly ignored the man’s direction. The evening arrived, and the secretary brought the pianist in, introduced him to the admiral, and then placed him at an instrument. Bortkiewicz’s mazurka brought down the house. After seeing the audience clamor for encore after encore, the club official confessed himself enlightened about the musical tastes of American admirals and their guests.5
Several American men’s organizations also hosted the Russians. At one time or another all the YMCA clubs in the city featured Russian musicians,6 while the larger Navy ships sometimes invited artists aboard to sing or play. However, the American embassy led in sponsoring benefit performances. As just one example, Jeanette Edwards (visiting her brother in the city, who was an American naval officer) was especially taken with the singer Alexander Vertinsky, who had once performed before the czar: “He sang at a dinner at our Embassy the other night, and I could see the Cossacks marching—going away—away—faint in the distance, never, never to march again. Everybody cried.” Jeanette added that Vertinsky was a drug fiend and would no doubt soon die; but he could really sing.7
Russians also danced throughout the city. At least one full-scale ballet, Scheherazade, was put on, complete with scenery, costumes, and a very large troop. Some said the production was on a par with those of New York and Paris; others were not so impressed.8 In any case, it hardly made expenses, and usually smaller productions held the stage. The talent could be very good, whatever the scale. Vernon Duke created the ballet Tale of a Syrian Night for a premier at the Theatre des Petits-Champs in 1921. This production featured sets by Pavlik Tchelitchev, who would move on to design sets for the Berlin Opera House, while the dancers were the Russian Viktor Zimin and the Italian ballerina Bianca Fosca. Navy people were capable of admiring this kind of art, too. Late in 1922, Navy captain Rufus Zogbaum enjoyed sitting at small tables at that same garden, “sipping champagne and watching the excellent Ballet Russe.” Such nightclub ballets had to compete with the bustle of service and the popping of corks, of course, but many were quite charming, nevertheless.9
Probably more popular than the ballet among Navy people and other Americans was Cossack dancing. You could find it throughout Constantinople, and not only in places like Maxim’s, where the dancers “shouted and stamped and did particularly wonderful things with their swords.”10 In looking to buy some rugs at a Russian house somewhere in the city (he had heard about them from an Englishman), naval officer Charles Olsen came across Cossacks putting on dances for some American Red Cross girls. Sitting in a circle with a chair for a drum, the soldiers sang. After several drinks, they began to dance, and very gracefully too, Charles thought. Every so often they gulped a shot of vodka. These Russians could not understand why Charles himself would not drink. After all, the American women did, and somehow they “got away with it,” as Lieutenant Olsen wrote his young wife.11
Occasionally Americans tried out their own feet. Hearing some Cossack music deep in the Caucasus east of Batoum, the executive officer of an American destroyer (I’m not sure which one) jumped into a ring and danced well enough to be showered with money by appreciative bystanders. “Nothing like this had ever hit dear old Adzharistan. A U.S. officer in uniform, crossing gold armstripes, squatting and kicking out in rhythm!” The American officer had probably been taught by Russian officers back at Constan.12 Even very senior Russians could dance, by the way, and dance well. At a stag dinner to which the Russian commanding general was invited, General Wrangel performed a Cossack sword dance.13
A good deal of the Russians’ dancing and music was spontaneous. After the Muscovite’s large orchestra retired late in the evening, gypsy songs with guitar often enraptured both its late diners and its own Russian staff. “More than all else this Gypsy music brought back Russia to them, their lost Russia. What was happening in Russia? Millions were dying of starvation, so the relief agencies reported, and letters sometimes came through—it was quite true that human flesh was being eaten. What was the fate of the old mother, the little child, the sister, the friends left behind? Eyes swam with tears, but they were resolutely held back; lips smiled on.”14 After all, the Russians had to eat, too, and it was in the restaurants, the nightclubs, and the small cafés that the artists typically earned their living.
The music at the hotels and at the best restaurants was of high caliber. A chamber music orchestra was employed by the Pera Palace Hotel, for example, and the Tokatlian also had its orchestra.15 Groups performed outdoors, as well. Not only did an orchestra sometimes play at the Petit Champs, for example, but Taxim Garden employed an operatic group.16 Nightclubs more commonly had smaller groups or soloists, but they could be first rate as well. Ivan Ontchik, a former first violinist at several Russian symphony orchestras, played at the nightclub Rose-Noire, for instance.17 At that same club, Ens. Dan Gallery heard a violinist he called “Gurlesque” (probably Jan Gilesko) perform Etude, Humoresque, Minuette, and Ave Maria: “He made that fiddle weep & sing as if it were human.”18
American fox-trots and other pieces were part of the mix. A Russian pianist at the Muscovite got considerable attention by picking up any song that an American might whistle to him and quickly putting it in parts for the orchestra. “One is apt to hear anything from ‘Home, Sweet Home’ to the latest rag, which ends in the middle because the ensign who whistled it to the pianist couldn’t remember how the last half of it went,” wrote journalist Kenneth Roberts.19 Some Americans were themselves musicians. The larger Navy ships like St. Louis and Alameda had bands or orchestras, and even the destroyer McCormick had a jazz orchestra, which frequently did gigs ashore.20 As an enlisted radioman in the city, “in the days of my pious youth,” Arthur Godfrey had played banjo in his destroyer’s band.21 American blacks also performed. Right near Taxim Garden was the popular nightclub called Maxim’s, and an American jazz orchestra played there. Not only were the members of this orchestra often black,22 by the way, but so was the club’s proprietor. He was an imposing though polite American black named Thomas, or, as he is usually referred to by Istanbul’s historically knowledgeable, “Black Thomas.”
In the early 1890s, Thomas had apparently been living somewhere in Virginia (or Mississippi or Georgia—the accounts do not agree) and attracted the attention of a Russian prince traveling through the American South, who engaged him as his valet and took him back to Russia. Thomas, who somewhere along the line acquired the Russian name “Feodor Feodorovich Tomas,”23 became butler in his employer’s household. Then he worked as a waiter in a St. Petersburg restaurant, and eventually from there he is said to have become the owner of a jazz hall called Maxim’s in Moscow, or a Moscow amusement complex called the Aquarium.24 When the Revolution occurred, his first wife was killed, after which Thomas married his children’s nurse. But according to Lieutenant Dunn (who once interviewed Thomas at the American embassy), Thomas had trouble with this woman. One day he found her in bed in his own flat with a Bolshevik commissar. He divorced the woman, but she ran off with the children.25
Thomas himself fled south and ended up in Constantinople. He had some money, and so he started a cabaret called Stella’s, a sort of “improvised box under the trees,” as Captain Lyman Cotten’s wife, Elizabeth, would put it.26 It was said to be the first dancing establishment in Constantinople and seems to have introduced the Charleston and the fox-trot to the city. Before long, Thomas was running Maxim’s, near Constantinople’s Grande Rue, “a [wild] place, but everyone goes,” according to Jeanette Edwards.27 By this time, Thomas had married again to a “titled” Russian wife, a woman who was also a fairly good dancer.28 Like the Muscovite restaurant, which employed over a hundred Russians and fed two hundred more, Thomas’s place hired Russians as cooks and helpers of various kinds. Captain Mannix watched Thomas one day go to the help of a Russian busboy. This Russian had dared return the blow of a drunken British patron. On Thomas’ mild inquiry, the British man’s friend shook his fist in the proprietor’s face and screamed in outrage, “He struck an ENGLISHMAN.” Thomas replied, “You shake your fist in my face again and I’ll strike another.” Taken aback, the Englishmen both left the place.29
Maxim’s, like everybody else, also employed Russians as waitresses, a great attraction throughout Constantinople. The young Russian women who got jobs at premier restaurants like the Muscovite, the Hermitage, or Maxim’s were typically very beautiful. Some had aristocratic backgrounds; others had once been very rich. The Muscovite, Cleveland Edwards’ sister Jeannette wrote home, “was the famous Russian restaurant where a general checks your coat and helps you on with your rubbers; and a princess, very likely, brings your soup.”30 In a short story, French writer Paul Morand described the situation in this way: “Waitresses sat about at the tables. They fetched the food, gave orders, took them with a gentle distinction; here and there the ease, the fine word, the elegance of some gesture ordinarily servile betrayed their former condition.”31 At the Muscovite it was not uncommon to see a party of guests get up from their table and kiss the hand of the waitress who came to take their order.32
One night at this restaurant (the most popular and fashionable in the city), journalist Roberts found himself being waited on by a granddaughter of one of Russia’s former prime ministers. At an adjoining table, five American naval officers were being served by Madame Shmeman, whose husband had once been many times a millionaire. Roberts admired these handsome and cultivated women, for they seemed completely without air or haughtiness. They also proved excellent dinner companions, for at leisure moments they would sit at the tables, eat, and talk. After midnight, once the full orchestra had packed up, these waitresses would often waltz to the accompaniment of a pianist and a few strings and with American or British officers as partners.33
In his six months in the city while attached to the cruiser Pittsburgh (when he was not visiting Anthie Angelides, the Greek girl he dated regularly for several weeks), Ens. Dan Gallery would usually begin his evenings at the Muscovite, admiring both the waitresses (with whom he would sometimes dance), and the music, too, “not more than a month behind New York,” he noted. By midnight he and his friends would typically find themselves at Maxim’s. Before heading back to the ship (typically committing some kind of petty vandalism on the way), these high-spirited young officers would dance with all the girls at this place. In his diary, Gallery described the waitresses’ attractions: “Most of them sling a fragrant sock, speak English well, and would pass for respectable girls. As a matter of fact I think over half of them are but of course some of them would be except for one bad habit.”34 And indeed there was another side to the romantic portraiture of the Russian waitresses drawn by magazine writers, an aspect that journalists sometimes left out.
Red Cross worker Eugenia Bumgardner described the very difficult situation facing the young women who worked even at the very best restaurants. They were not well paid, but they still had to look very good every evening, and hair treatments, manicures, clothes, and shoes could be expensive, Bumgardner wrote. As meals were not a part of their wage, they might be hungry even as they served dinner. Given their precarious economic status, they could be quite vulnerable, especially when offered large tips or invitations to dine, which were the surest approaches to them. “There was nothing so crude in the management of the restaurants as an understanding that the waitresses were employed for any other purpose; but if one of them refused the proposals of a wealthy client, and he reported his disappointment, the management simply dispensed with her services. . . . The cards were stacked, and it was inevitable that she must sometimes play a losing game.”35 Some of the Russian women (like Madame Shmeman) supported relatives or families or husbands, and those husbands, often diseased or wounded or unable to find work, could be tortured with jealousy. Yet the women could not let any anxiety show. Hence the atmosphere of these restaurants was so charming that casual visitors often did not notice the dark underside of the business, the “tears behind the smile, the nightly traffic in souls and bodies.”36
Actually, most of the vice in Constantinople—again, it predominated in so-called Christian (actually, European) districts as it always had—was quite unabashed. In his 1922 book, Turkish writer Zia Bey described an evening when he and his young American wife were shown the sights of Pera by a friend, an ethnic Greek. They noted prostitutes strolling arm-in-arm everywhere on the Grande Rue of Pera, including some girls of fourteen and fifteen, and prostitutes of the male sex as well. Their host invited them to a show, “the rage of the moment,” so lurid that attendees were given masks to let them hide their identity. His wife was so shocked at the idea that they went to Scheherazade instead. It dragged a bit, so they adjourned to Stella’s, noted its black proprietor and the Negro jazz band, and also witnessed the surreptitious glances their Greek host exchanged with a Russian waitress beauty. The Greek obviously being bent on getting into the action, Zia Bey and his wife soon excused themselves and left the “sinister noises” of Galata for their home in Stamboul, which was, he wrote, sleeping “the sleep of the just.”37
Zia Bey was, of course, part propagandist. At one point Admiral Bristol felt he had to warn the Turkish writer to “avoid writing propaganda articles”; instead, he should write articles in such a way “that they would appear impartial.”38 Still, much of Zia Bey’s description here, at least, rings true. Not everyone was interested in the more lurid activities of Pera and Galata, of course, but other than the fellow who came to lecture the British military on the nobility of sex, almost nobody did much about the situation. Well, the French did inspect a few whorehouses and issue those specific addresses to their troops (separate addresses for officers and men, by the way), and they also attempted to standardize the prices.39 Some of the more shabby and disease-ridden houses were put out of bounds for the Allied militaries, and of course venereal disease was treated after the fact.
Western writers did sometimes comment upon the rampant immorality. Comparing Constantinople’s vice to that of other port cities he had visited, William T. Ellis argued that Constantinople’s vice was “far and away the most immoral on earth.” He not only cited an American naval officer’s dismayed reaction to the spectacle—“It makes you feel as if there is no God”—but also reported the instincts of a veteran American missionary. She confessed longing for the good old days of Sultan Abdul Hamid (known widely as “Abdul the Damned”), when the city had been so much less immoral a place!40
Anyway, contemporaneous descriptions of the prostitutes plying their trade ranged from naval officers’ comic verse to dry academic prose. After considerable observation of Constantinople, for instance, Bristol’s chief of staff, Capt. Lyman Cotten, composed rude lines like these for the amusement of the admiral and his staff:
In Constantinople Town,
Lovely ladies can be found. . . .
Tall and short and young and old,
Fat ones, thin ones, gay and bold. . . .
Oh! they are perfect ladies, quite,
Except they swear so when they’re tight.41
Contrasted to this doggerel was the matter-of-fact prose of a contemporaneous sociological survey of Constantinople that was conducted by the American colleges. It discussed prostitution under the heading of “Adult Delinquency”: “In the registered houses, the girls are usually paid one-half the fee received, and are given board and room. The fees run all the way from 15 piasters ($.12) a visit in some of the lower houses in Galata to 5 liras ($4) in what is called the Yankee House in Pera and one other. In one of the private houses at Shisli, patronized by rich Moslems, the price is from 5 to 10 liras ($4 to $8) a visit.”42 The survey also reported fourteen hundred beer halls throughout the metropolitan area: “Most of them are rather disreputable places, where there is low dancing and where prostitutes solicit trade.”43 Bumgardner, by the way, seems doubtful about the usefulness of this “queer American Survey” of employment, industry, wages, recreation, and education. Indeed, given the terrible suffering existing at the very time the survey was being conducted (mid-1920 to mid-1921), the great effort expended would probably have been more fruitfully dedicated to relief work, as Admiral Bristol argued.44
Still, in retrospect, the survey helps paint a picture. For example, although it was very difficult to find out what was going on in Turkish houses run by Muslim women in Scutari and KadiKeuy, the survey reported almost two hundred registered “houses of ill repute” in Pera, these owned primarily by Greeks, Jews, and Armenians. Over four thousand prostitutes were estimated to work in the city, some of them registered (that is, monitored and treated for venereal disease) but most of them not. Greek women predominated, but a quarter of the prostitutes in Galata were Russian, the survey stated, and their number was growing. Interestingly, one American woman was listed among the registered prostitutes.45
The young Vernon Duke was turned off by the “terrifying fat whores in Galata,”46 but such revulsion was atypical. Most young American men found Pera quite a place. Naval officer Robbie Dunn described the scene in this way:
At Petit Champs you could watch Cossack dancers, see clean, U.S. tincan sailors pile out of arabas [carriages] into the stew of tarts cadging for champagne, one on stage singing “Madelon.” There I met Blanche, a pallid-plump, clever Rumanian Jewess who had the junior staff [Royal Navy] paymaster in tow. Blanche was my first Pera friend.
Across at Bertha’s bar, the madam was out of a Lancashire music hall, blondined, loud, and handsome. The house girls she’d named ‘Frying Pan,’ ‘Square Arse,’ ‘Mother’s Ruin,’ ‘Fornicating Fannie’; she herself lived alone off over Tophani Landing and virginally locked the door on whoever took her home. She was, of course, a top limey spy.
Loving the atmosphere of intrigue as he did, Dunn avoided the embassy social circuit and made lots of prostitute friends. At one point he got sick with typhoid and spent six weeks in a British hospital. Although everybody from the American embassy came to see him, his Pera friend, Blanche, came by most often. Her visits scandalized the British nurses there.47
Not all Navy people liked the nightly entertainment. After helping with the Crimean evacuation in October of 1920, St. Louis mostly stayed anchored in the Bosporus for the next year or so. The young officer Charles Olsen, serving in this ship, frequently wrote his wife and often commented disparagingly on the drunkenness, the fights, and the vice. On Christmas Eve of 1920, for instance, he had the midwatch. His relief had come aboard drunk and would not get up even when Olsen dumped a pitcher of water over him, stuck him with his sword, then threw him out of his bunk to the deck. Olsen gave it up when two other drunken officers came aboard and engaged his relief in a fight.48 On this occasion virtually all the officers returned to the ship drunk, but more typical were problems with the enlisted men, especially after payday. Twice a month they “drank the town dry,” and sometimes as they came aboard, three men had to wrestle one to the deck till a doctor’s needle put him to sleep.
According to Olsen, the men were usually okay when they ran out of money49—unless they had brought liquor aboard. A couple of nights before New Year’s, at midnight, a chief petty officer came on the quarterdeck with a bulge in his pocket. Officer of the Deck Olsen had the man searched and found a bottle. The chief immediately sobered, but Olsen still put him on report.50 Four days later, at morning quarters, Olsen was embarrassed to find that overnight one of his own men had returned drunk from shore patrol with liquor in his possession. This sailor had also been drinking on duty. Olsen was totally exasperated, for now three men in his own division faced General Court Martials. Drinking on duty was a major offence: “It is a G.C.M. every time and they all know it,” Olsen lamented. The penalty was five to ten years in prison. At this time, by the way, St. Louis had eighteen G.C.M. prisoners aboard (from several Navy ships), all apparently having been awarded five to ten years’ sentence.51
In late January, even one of Olsen’s own Annapolis classmates (a young naval officer) was undergoing a G.C.M., this for climbing up and into the second-story window of a house in Constantinople and raising hell in somebody’s home.52
Of course, there were also frequent fights ashore, and many murders. In early January 9, 1921, a sailor from Scorpion shot an Italian; around January 15 another American sailor shot a Japanese man. That same night seven Greeks and three Frenchmen were killed, this during the celebration of the Greek New Year. A few nights after that, while Olsen was on shore patrol, several English and Italian nationals were killed while fighting: “The rumpus started near the dock yard gate at Tophany and ended up in the wops throwing hand grenades.” (Normally the Italians, as in Romeo and Juliet, just fought with knives, which was certainly bad enough). In the letter to Edna describing the latest incident, Charles concluded that Constantinople was at the same time interesting, dirty, and terrible.53
The wickedness was sometimes ridiculous. One night Charles found a Russian kid trying to pimp two streetwalkers for him and the sergeant of marines, even while Olsen and the marine were on shore patrol. Later he saw something else: “Just imagine darling, a man, painted and powdered up with rouge, penciled eye brows and painted lips, dressed to kill, with short trousers with cuff and cloth top shoes and silk socks. An overcoat with narrow waist and it all walking past so dainty and delicate, wiggling her sterns. Oh my. . . . They tell me that this is a common sight.”54 All this time, although Edna wanted to join him, Charles was writing her not to come to the place.
Of course, the great interest both officers and men took in the available women also bothered Olsen. When St. Louis’s executive officer (a commander) was not gambling, for instance, he was chasing women and coming back at five or so in the morning. One night the exec had a girl aboard ship to sing. Fine, but at the end of the evening the exec had given the girl eight of Olsen’s favorite piano pieces, his very latest and best. Olsen was furious: “He would give anything away to a pretty face. ‘Japanese Sandman,’ ‘Irene,’ ‘Just Like a Rose,’ etc., all gone. Damn his soul anyhow.” Because he was so junior, Olsen feared to confront the exec. On another occasion Olsen told Edna that a Russian girl had come aboard. She had demanded the captain marry her to a sailor who had lived with her for two months and gotten her pregnant. Of course the sailor called her a slut, and two other crewmen came forward to say they had also slept with the girl. The captain resisted forcing the marriage on the sailor lest it make a precedent for all the Russian women in Constantinople.55
Then there was the affair of one of Olsen’s friends with a Russian ballet dancer. A fellow officer named John began befriending this decent woman. (Though her looks were unremarkable, she had some artistic talent, Olsen thought.) John brought her aboard to dance and to teach the officers some basic ballet steps. He started spending all his spare time ashore with her. Not surprisingly, she fell for John, and John eventually also for her. John, however, was already married. Eventually, he told the Russian girl of his marital status, and she made plans to leave for Vienna. But then she put it off to stay with John, and at last report John was reading the Russian girl his wife’s letters. Charles was disgusted with the whole business.56 Meanwhile, in the junior officer staterooms the conversation was always turning to the cafés and to the women. That disgusted Charles too.57 (Well, he was in the Navy; what did he expect?)
After months and months, Charles caved in and invited his wife to come to Constantinople. (At some point he would transfer to become the commanding officer of a subchaser, apparently so as to stay longer in the city, while St. Louis returned home.) He made sure Edna knew what she was in for: “Constantinople has [neither] the luxuries of the States nor are the houses new or modern. They are old weather beaten shacks for the most part. . . . The localities of apartments are horrible, the places are on side alleys in the midst of the slum. There [are] no nice sections of the town. The streets are crooked and cobblestone, narrow and dirty, and hilly. The people, well dear, there are many nice people and also bad. They all live together in this town. Your next door neighbor might be a ———. Especially if she is a Russian girl, of which this town is full.” He also warned Edna that there wasn’t much to do: dinners at cafés, movies, sightseeing, dancing at the embassy, YMCA, and the Near East Relief. That was it. He wasn’t fond of any of it.58 When she arrived, Edna wrote home, exclaiming that American women dared not go out after sunset without a man, lest the girls find a group of men at their heels. All unaccompanied girls were assumed to be prostitutes. Once Navy wives went home, she later reported, their officer husbands seemed always to be chasing women, getting drunk, and worse.59
It could work the other way, too. In late 1922, when another dozen destroyers came and several officers brought their wives, complaints were heard about the wives’ regular flirtations with married officers other than their husbands. One explanation for the behavior of these married women might have been the competition they faced. As Bumgardner pointed out, “Wives were always a bit de trop [in the way] in restaurants of Constantinople. The Russian waitresses, quite unconsciously apparently, dimmed the charm of other women.”60 At any rate, the young naval officer Orin Haskell said it was typically the younger women who behaved like this: “This bunch of newlyweds try to outdo the Russians on their own soil while their husbands sit back and try to watch their smoke. I could stand such a life just about a week and then I should be tempted to try a little smoke myself.”61 Edna Olsen was not that kind of woman. To be sure, she did like the swimming and picnics, the dinners and teas and nightlife quite a bit more than her husband did. Although she had originally been shocked about the circumstances she encountered, her letters home indicate that before long she had gotten quite used to the place: “Well it’s a rather hard step to take to leave U.S.A. for wicked old Constantinople but after one lives here six months all the weird and awful sights pass by unnoticed.”62
In contrast, Jeannette Edwards was not just enthusiastic about the city—she was breathless: “It’s a delirious life for a British or American girl. Thousands of British officers (the most handsome creatures on earth—so slim and straight, and just poured into their uniforms); fiery Italians and French; the mad, impulsive, pathetic Russians; all lonely for women of their own class to talk to, all new and strange and exciting.” For Jeannette, every meal was a party; almost every evening a dance. There were lunches at famous restaurants, teas on the ships, tea dances at the embassy and at the restaurants, dinners (with dancing) at apartments. If Jeannette did occasionally hear screams or gunshots or see fires when coming home at night, it only added to the fascination of the place.63
Jeannette was not the only young American woman interested in men and marriage. Although, according to Edwards, American naval officers took only a brotherly interest in the American women (the American men were all entranced by the beautiful Russians), the Near East Relief girls were said to be marrying the British at an “alarming” rate. It was true. By June 1922, Admiral Bristol had given away six American girls to British officers.64 To be sure, some of the American women had a few special attractions of their own. A Russian author spoke of what typically happened, say, at the Hotel Splendid on Prinkipo Island. The American girls there danced in such close proximity to their partners, and wore “an expression of such ecstasy,” that an Englishman, after dancing an entire evening with one of them, asked his friends if it were not his duty, as an honorable man, to marry the girl.65
Marriage was an interest of both men and women in this astonishing city, and for a great variety of reasons. The women sometimes were quite forthright about it. An enlisted man on the St. Louis asked Olsen’s advice about marrying a Russian girl in Stamboul, and Olsen convinced him not to, as her only desire seemed to be to marry somebody who would take her to America. The man took Olsen’s advice.66 Naval officer Ash Pleasants later told his son that a Greek lady at a social function had once offered him 15,000 drachma to marry her beautiful daughter, but Ash had turned her down. “Dad often said, between chuckles, that the daughter wasn’t bad, but that he didn’t much care for the look of the mother.”67 Conversely, when Baroness Wrangel complained to Captain Bill Leahy that, in their association with men, many Russian women in Constantinople didn’t seem to care whose husbands they might be, the captain replied that the Russian women he had met “were not hard to look at, but that none of them had seemed to show any interest in me.” Yet a Turkish official’s wife did once offer to marry Leahy, in order, she said, that she might get to America. When Leahy politely informed her that this would not be possible because American men only married one woman at a time, she went on to offer herself in turn to each of the St. Louis’s officers. However, she had no success.68
Some Americans did marry foreign women in Constantinople during this period. One reporter talked to a sailor who was about to marry a French girl from the city and bring her back to New York before he entered flight training.69 Another writer told of an American sailor who asked his officer not only for authorization to marry a local girl, but also to have the use of a naval car to take his bride to the wedding. The officer gave his consent, but then happened to ask about the nationality of the girl. Grinning, the sailor replied, “She says she’s a Hellene, but confidentially I think she is a blooming Greek.”70 Robbie Dunn’s yeoman married a Russian “princess,” and officers married Russian girls too. A Navy chaplain married a young Russian woman named Elaine to Lt. Edgar Winckler while he was serving in Scorpion, for instance.71 And during the time that Gilmer saw duty in Russia, Lt. Edward Jones met a young Russian woman in Yalta named Thais Jarochev.
Thais and her mother had fled from the Bolsheviks, her father being a White Russian officer. Later, Edward and Thais met again in Trieste and got married there. They honeymooned in Venice. Some months after that, Edward shocked his staid, aristocratic family back in Virginia by sending home on a Greek steamer a beautiful and young but also quite Russian and newly pregnant wife.72
Despite the other enticements, and no matter what their age, many Americans would remain romantic rather than merely venereal even in this apparently godforsaken place. Alice Clark, Anna Mitchell, and Cdr. Harry Pence (the latter with the Russian waitress Tania from the Muscovite beside him) on different occasions all were moved by the wonderful sunsets or the beautiful moonlit nights, as they took Navy boats south through the Bosporus back to the city from a day of recreation further north.73 And in a half dozen American ships out in that harbor would be another hundred hearts with their minds on something other than their nightly duty. Some, like Charles Olsen in the months before Edna joined him, might be reminded of nights on the water back home in Waukegan by hearing a porpoise splash. Through the still, cool night he would hear the shouts or noise of the city, while all about the ship he could see the lights of the other vessels and the glow of the city beyond. The scene would remind him of the girl he had left behind. “Oh darling, my heart longs so for you.”74 Conversely, the beautiful nights and exotic location would make many other officers and sailors yearn for the restaurants and streets of Pera, and the Greek, Armenian, and especially the young Russian women who they planned to visit the very next night.
