The Billie Carleton Connection

They say, fact is stranger than fiction. I say, sometimes fact is more interesting than fiction! Take, for instance, the case of Billie Carleton.

Billie Carleton (4 September 1896 - 28 November 1918) was an English musical comedy actress during the First World War. She began her professional stage career at age 15 and was playing roles in the West End by age 18. She appeared in the hit musical The Boy (1917), which led to a starring role in The Freedom of the Seas in 1918. At the age of 22, she was found dead, apparently of a drug overdose.

Life and Career

Born Florence Leonora Stewart in Bloomsbury, London, daughter of a chorus singer named Margaret Stewart and an unknown father, Carleton was raised by her aunt, Catherine Joliffe. Carleton left home at 15 to work on the stage and received her first break when the impresario C.B. Cochran promoted her from the chorus to a role in his 1914 revue Watch Your Step. According to Cochran, despite having a weak voice, Carleton had a good stage presence, and her delicate beauty charmed the audience. When he was informed during the run of the show that Carleton was attending opium parties, Cochran fired her. He gave her another chance in 1917, when she took over the leading role from Gertie Millar in his show Houp La! She made little impression in the part, which she took on only a week before the show closed.

Carleton soon appeared for André Charlot in another revue Some More Samples! Although the critics again noted her weak voice, she had better success in this, and was engaged for the part of Joy Chatterton, a flapper in the hit musical farce The Boy when it opened at the Adelphi Theatre in August 1917. In May 1918, she appeared in Fair and Warmer, this time playing a maid to Fay Compton's flapper. Then in August, she took the starring role of Phyllis Harcourt in The Freedom of the Seas at the Haymarket Theatre, briefly becoming the youngest leading lady in the West End.

Death and Scandal

Early on that warm Saturday evening in September 1918, six guests arrived at a flat on Dover Street, one hundred yards or so north of Piccadilly. This was the home of, thirty-seven year old theatrical dress designer, Reggie De Veulle and his wife Pauline. Five years his senior, she too was a designer. They both worked at Hockley's in Bond Street. 

At about nine o'clock a Scottish woman, Ada Ping You, arrived at the apartment. Ada lived with her Chinese husband, Lo Ping You, in a dilapidated house on the eastern end of Limehouse Causeway. While everyone else continued eating supper, Ada was shown into the drawing room. She sat in the middle of the room and began the initial preparations for the smoking of opium.

An hour later, they had divested themselves of their clothing. The men now dressed in pyjamas and the women in chiffon and crepe de chine nightdresses. The De Veulles, with their guests, reclined on the many cushions and pillows placed around the room. 

In a circle around Ping You, they watched with excited anticipation as she took a pea-sized ball of the dark opium paste and, with the end of a long needle, held it over the faint blue flame of a peanut-oil lamp until it stsrted to swell and turn golden. The gooey mass was stretched into long strings several times before it was rolled back into a pea-shape and pushed into the bowl of an opium pipe. 

At about eleven, just as they started to pass the pipe around, another woman arrived at the flat. This time it was a well-known actress. Billie Carleton had been staying with the De Veulles and had come straight from the Haymarket Theatre, where she had been performing in a light comedy called The Freedom of the Seas. After disrobing, she joined the rest of the circle. It was later reported the guests remained, apparently in a comatose state, until about three o'clock on the following afternoon, Sunday.

On 27 November 1918, she left the theatre after performing and, wearing a daringly diaphanous outfit designed by her friend Reggie De Veulle, attended the Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall. It was one of many such events held to commemorate the end of the war earlier in the month, but being under the patronage of a large number of aristocratic ladies, it was a particularly long and splendid affair, lasting into the small hours. The next day, Carleton's maid found her dead, in bed, at her Savoy Court Mansions flat, an expensive serviced apartment block just behind the Savoy Hotel, apparently killed by an overdose of cocaine.

A coroner's inquest found Carleton had died of a cocaine overdose "supplied to her by Reginald De Veulle in a culpable and negligent manner". De Veulle was charged with manslaughter and conspiracy to supply a prohibited drug. Regulation 40b of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, which had been passed in 1916, made possession of both cocaine and opium illegal for the first time in Britain. The trial was held before Mr Justice Salter, with Sir Richard Muir for the prosecution. De Veulle was acquitted of the first charge but pleaded guilty to the second, and was sentenced to eight months in prison.

Reports of the trial exposed details of Carleton's private life and those of her friends, particularly De Veulle, who previously had been involved in a homosexual blackmail case and had dressed in women's clothes. Although the milieu in which she moved was stigmatised as immoral and sordid, and although she had been the kept mistress of a man twenty years her senior, Carleton was seen largely as an innocent victim.

After Carleton's death, Ada Ping You was sentenced to five months in jail with hard labour for supplying prepared opium for smoking to Miss Billie Carlton and others at the Mayfair flat of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald De Veulle. Lo Ping You pleaded guilty to a charge of possessing opium unlawfully and also to charges connected with the possession of various utensils connected with the preparation and smoking of opium. The author Marek Kohn, however, argues that Carleton did not die from cocaine but from legal depressants taken to deal with her cocaine hangover.

Art and Literature

Noël Coward, who had known both Carleton and De Veulle, acknowledged her story as a source for his first successful play, The Vortex. In Sax Rohmer's novel Dope, the character Rita Dresden is based on Carleton.

Source

Additional Resources
The Brilliant Chang Connection: A Real Life Fu Manchu
Chinatown, the Death of Billie Carleton, and the Brilliant Chang
Disgraceful Orgies, Unholy Rites, and the Death of Billie Carleton
The Actress and the Opium Den
What Happened at the Victory Ball