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.
Author
John Baxter (born 1939 in Randwick, New South Wales) is an Australian-born writer, journalist, and film-maker. Baxter has lived in Britain and the United States as well as in his native Sydney, but has made his home in Paris since 1989, where he is married to the film-maker Marie-Dominique Montel. They have one daughter, Louise. He began writing science fiction in the early 1960s for New Worlds, Science Fantasy and other British magazines. His first novel, though serialised in New Worlds as THE GOD KILLERS, was published as a book in the US by Ace as The Off-Worlders. He was Visiting Professor at Hollins College in Virginia in 1975-1976. He has written a number of short stories and novels in that genre and a book about SF in the movies, as well as editing collections of Australian science fiction. Baxter has also written a large number of other works dealing with the movies, including biographies of film personalities, including Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, George Lucas and Robert De Niro. He has written a number of documentaries, including a survey of the life and work of the painter Fernando Botero. He also co-produced, wrote and presented three television series for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Filmstruck, First Take and The Cutting Room, and was co-editor of the ABC book programme Books And Writing. In the 1960s, he was a member of the WEA Film Study Group with such notable people as Ian Klava, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Thornhill, John Flaus and Ken Quinnell. From July 1965 to December 1967 the WEA Film Study Group published the cinema journal FILM DIGEST. This journal was edited by John Baxter. For a number of years in the sixties, he was active in the Sydney Film Festival, and during the 1980s served in a consulting capacity on a number of film-funding bodies, as well as writing film criticism for The Australian and other periodicals. Some of his books have been translated into various languages, including Japanese and Chinese. Since moving to Paris, he has written four books of autobiography, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, Immoveable feast : a Paris Christmas, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World : a Pedestrian in Paris. Since 2007 he has been co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop.
