Billie Carleton had a certain frail beauty of that perishable, moth-like substance that does not last long in the wear and tear of this rough-and-ready world.
Evening News
A collection of Agatha Christie short stories, which originally appeared in magazines between 1923 to 1926, was published as The Underdog and Other Stories (1951) and included ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, in which Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings investigate a well-publicised society mystery where a young woman has been found dead of a cocaine overdose. With the addition of another death on the same night, where the drug victim’s aristocratic fiancé is found stabbed to death, the mystery is based on the first great sex and drugs scandal of the twentieth century, in which the promising show-business career of actress, dancer and singer Billie Carleton came to a tragic end. A member of a fast-living set, the beautiful actress died from an overdose of cocaine. She was found dead in bed after an all-night party following the Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the First World War in November 1918. Her Chinese drug suppliers became the target of hysterical press coverage about the growing threat of a ‘yellow peril’ in the Limehouse area of London. The case inspired several books, plays and films, notably Noël Coward’s The Vortex, D.W. Griffiths’s Broken Blossoms, based on a story by Thomas Burke, and Sax Rohmer’s incredibly successful novels, adapted into over thirty films, about an evil empire in Limehouse controlled by ‘Dr Fu Manchu – the yellow peril incarnate in one man’.
Billie Carleton (1886-1918) was given leading roles in musical plays and revues produced by the top impresarios of the day, André Charlot and Charles B. Cochran, before she developed a serious drug habit that impeded her progress to becoming a star. During the run of Watch Your Step in 1914, Cochran was told that Carleton was being ‘influenced by some undesirable people and was going to opium parties’.
The actress enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, backed by three men in her life: ‘Sugar daddy’ John Marsh, twenty years her senior, whose wealth provided a permanent flat in Saville Row, Knightsbridge; physician Frederick Stuart, who managed her finances; and Bond Street costumier Reggie de Veulle, the man responsible for introducing her to drugs.
Arriving at the Victory Ball escorted by Dr Stuart, Carleton wore a daringly provocative dress made of transparent black georgette commissioned from de Veulle, who had asked heroin addict and actor Lionel Belcher to pass a silver box containing cocaine to the actress. Next day, Carleton’s maid could not wake her mistress and called Dr Stuart, who administered an injection of strychnine and brandy in a vain attempt to revive the patient from the effects of ‘cocaine poisoning’.
Lurid details of the late actress’s lifestyle disclosed how Carleton and de Veulle held ‘opium parties’ and ‘disgusting orgies’ during which Ada Ping You, the Scottish wife of a Limehouse drug dealer, Lau Ping You, would arrive to cook the intoxicating concoction. The normally staid Times reported these activities in a headline article ‘An Opium Circle. Chinaman’s Wife Sent to Prison. High Priestess of Unholy Rites’:
After dinner the party… provided themselves with cushions and pillows, placed these on the floor, and sat themselves in a circle. The men divested themselves of their clothing and got into pyjamas, and the women into chiffon dresses… Miss Carleton arrived later at the flat from the theatre, and she, after disrobing, took her place in this circle of degenerates.
The trial of the drug dealers at the centre of the scandal resulted in Ada Ping You being sentenced to five months hard labour, although her husband escaped with just a £10 fine. In court it emerged that the married Reggie de Veulle had previously been involved in a homosexual blackmail case. However, contrary to the judge’s direction, the jury acquitted him of the manslaughter of Billie Carleton. He admitted, however, to supplying the victim with cocaine and was sentenced to eight months imprisonment.
In ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, Agatha Christie’s murderous drug peddlers are an English couple, a scenario that happily avoids the xenophobic approach to the true-life case employed by other authors; an unfortunate reflection of contemporary press coverage, typified by the Evening News. The fear of the evil influence of foreign men on the behaviour of innocent women drove them to issue a dire warning about the spectre of the opium den and the white slave trade, stating that it was the ‘duty of every Englishman and Englishwoman to know the truth about the degradation of young white girls’, published under the banner headline: ‘White Girls Hypnotised by Yellow Men’.
Following Agatha Christie’s death, her final novel Sleeping Murder (1976) was published featuring the last case of Miss Marple, written during the Second World War and then kept in a vault. In the book a woman returns to her childhood home, where events trigger long-suppressed memories of the time when he saw the murdered body of her mother.
Amazingly, in 1979 real-life similarities with Christie’s story occurred in North Carolina, where Annie Perry started having terrifying ‘visions’ of the time when she was aged ten and her father suddenly disappeared from the family farm in April 1944. Annie’s flashbacks recalled how on Easter Sunday, she had seen her mother in the kitchen with the sink full of pots and pans in bloody water, the naked body of her father in an unused room and the noise of butchering sounds in the night. The week after her father’s disappearance, when using the outside privy, she clearly remembered seeing his face floating in the water. After consulting a psychiatrist about these disturbing visions, she was advised to make a report to the police. They took the matter seriously and dug up the site of the old privy, where human remains were duly found.
Annie’s mother, Winnie Cameron, had reported her husband missing and in due course obtained a divorce on grounds of desertion. When the gruesome discovery was made thirty-five years later, she shot herself, leaving a note confessing to the murder.