At the 1918 Victory Ball held in London’s Albert Hall to celebrate the end of World War I, 22-year old revue star Billie Carleton was slipped a small gold box of cocaine. Next day, her maid found her dead of an overdose in her apartment next to the exclusive Savoy Hotel.
Carleton’s death exposed the high-society drug parties organised by Chinese restaurateur ‘Brilliant’ Chang. After the drabness and privation of war, socialites hungered for sensation. Chang supplied it with opium and cocaine. English women, traditionally prudish, found the suave, westernised Chang irresistible. Often in groups, they joined him for drugs and sex in his luxurious apartment in dockside Limehouse.
BRILLIANT lifts the curtain on this gaudy episode in London’s jazz age and reveals how Chang inspired Noël Coward, Evelyn Waugh and Sax Rohmer, creator of the diabolical Doctor Fu Manchu.
John Baxter was born in Australia but has lived for the last 25 years in Paris. His books include THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD and biographies of Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Robert De Niro. He has also translated, as My Lady Opium, Claude Farrère’s classic of drug literature Fumée d ’Opium.
Carleton’s death exposed the high-society drug parties organised by Chinese restaurateur ‘Brilliant’ Chang. After the drabness and privation of war, socialites hungered for sensation. Chang supplied it with opium and cocaine. English women, traditionally prudish, found the suave, westernised Chang irresistible. Often in groups, they joined him for drugs and sex in his luxurious apartment in dockside Limehouse.
BRILLIANT lifts the curtain on this gaudy episode in London’s jazz age and reveals how Chang inspired Noël Coward, Evelyn Waugh and Sax Rohmer, creator of the diabolical Doctor Fu Manchu.
John Baxter was born in Australia but has lived for the last 25 years in Paris. His books include THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WALK IN THE WORLD and biographies of Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and Robert De Niro. He has also translated, as My Lady Opium, Claude Farrère’s classic of drug literature Fumée d ’Opium.
