“I consider William Parker to be an unusually bright young man, endowed with mental energy and capabilities which, if properly directed, will enable him to carve out for himself a name of which all concerned may be justly proud,” the principal of Deadwood High School wrote on Parker’s final report card.
As an obviously intelligent young man born into a distinguished family, Bill might have been expected to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and continue on to college. Instead, he stayed in Deadwood, working a series of odd jobs, delivering newspapers and selling frocks and undergarments knit by his mother to various ladies in town—and not just the ladies. By one account, Parker blushingly sold garments to the town’s madams as well. The teenager’s first real job, however, was at Deadwood’s most prestigious hotel—the Franklin—where he got a job as a bellhop and the house detective.
In later years, Parker would occasionally allude to his work in Deadwood, suggesting that his job involved rousting guests who misbehaved and patrolling the premises for ladies of the night. In truth, he was probably more occupied with his work as a bellboy than with acts of sleuthing. The Franklin was known for its ongoing high-stakes poker game; it is unlikely that a teenage employee would have interfered much with it. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the idea of being a lawman spoke to Parker’s imagination. Imagination was all he had. Bill Parker seemed stuck in Deadwood.
Then, suddenly, he wasn’t.
In 1922, his mother announced that she was separating from Bill’s father and moving to Los Angeles and that she was taking Bill’s three younger siblings with her. Bill went with her to help with the move—and to see the City of Angels for himself.
LOS ANGELES was Deadwood writ large—a boomtown on a scale never seen before or since in this country. The city was growing so quickly that residents and visitors couldn’t even agree on how to pronounce its name. To some it was “Loss An-jy-lese;” to others, “Loss An-jy-lus” or even “Lows An-y-klyese”—a pronunciation the Los Angeles Times suspected was a deliberate eastern slur. (The paper of record insisted that the proper pronunciation was the distinctly Spanish “Loce Ahng-hail-ais,” a pronunciation it printed under its masthead for several years.) Not until the 1930s did today’s “Los An-ju-less” gain the clear upper hand.
Whatever its pronunciation, it was clear that people couldn’t wait to get there. Model Ts crammed the old Santa Fe Trail—today’s Route 66—full of Midwesterners who were California-bound. By 1922, the city’s population had risen to more than 600,000. Fifteen-story skyscrapers (heights had been capped after the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906) lined Spring Street, the so-called Wall Street of the West. Dazzling electric signs proclaimed its next goal—2,000,000 POPULATION BY 1930!(It made it to 1,200,000.) At the corner of Wilshire and La Brea, newcomers were transfixed by something they had never seen before, neon signs, the first in the United States. Everywhere there were automobiles. On a typical workday, some 260,000 cars jammed downtown Los Angeles, making the intersection of Adams and Figueroa on the edge of downtown the busiest in the world, with more than double the traffic of its nearest rival, Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. Los Angeles also had one of the most extensive streetcar networks in the country. Together, the intraurban Yellow and interurban Red lines provided service over more than a thousand miles of rail and transported an average of 520,000 people into the downtown area every day. Total number of passenger trips in 1924:
110,000,000.
“All of the talk was ‘boom,’ ‘dollars,’ ‘greatest in the world,’ ‘sure to double in price,’” marveled the author Hamlin Garland, who visited L.A. in 1923.
“I have never seen so many buildings going up all at one time.… There are thousands in process in every direction I looked.” The mingling of architectural styles was—to use a word coined in that same period—surreal. The city’s neighborhoods, reported Garland, consist of “hundreds of the gay little stucco bungalows in the Spanish-Mexican, Italian-Swiss, and many other styles, a conglomeration that cannot be equaled anywhere else on earth I am quite sure.” If others noticed this, they didn’t seem to mind.
“The whole Middle West,” Garland concluded, “wants to come here.”
And no wonder. The city (to say nothing of its underworld) was a carnival. In downtown Los Angeles, the theaters and movie palaces that lined Broadway attracted thronging crowds to motley performances that mixed vaudeville performers, singers, dancers, chorus girls, acrobats, even elephants with silent films by stars like Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. Then as now, starstruck tourists could sign up for “star tours” that took them past the homes of their favorite celebrities on the beach in Santa Monica and in Beverly Hills. Streetcars packed with bands and draped with advertisements crisscrossed the city, announcing new towns every month. Elephants, lions, and circus freaks lured people out to the newest developments (or, more commonly, to a free lunch under a tent on an empty lot followed by a pitch for a “marvelous investment opportunity”).
“If every conceivable trick in advertising was not resorted to, it was probably due to an oversight,” wrote one early philanthropist. Along Hollywood and Wilshire Boulevards, the city’s first apartment buildings were starting to rise. South of downtown was the beginning of a vast manufacturing district, home to tire fabrication and automotive assembly plants that would eventually transform bucolic Los Angeles into the country’s preeminent manufacturing center. High in the Hollywood Hills, a giant sign, each letter fifty feet tall and covered with four thousand lightbulbs, promoted one of Harry Chandler’s new developments, “Hollywoodland!” The “-land” later fell over, and the sign became the new city’s most distinctive symbol.
Then there was the oil. Beginning in 1920, a series of spectacular discoveries just south of the city suddenly made Los Angeles into one of the world’s great oil-production centers. At its acme, Southern California produced 5 percent of the world’s total oil supply. Shipping out of the port of San Pedro exploded. Ordinary Angelenos became obsessive investors in local oil syndicates such as the ones organized by oilman C. C. Julian from his office suite above the palatial Loews’s State Theater on Broadway. It wasn’t Sacramento in 1848; it wasn’t Deadwood in 1876 or the Klondike in 1897; it was bigger. For a child of Deadwood, it should have been familiar terrain. Instead, Los Angeles would prove to be a cruel instructor.
THE PARKERS settled first in Westlake (today’s MacArthur Park), west of downtown, then one of the most fashionable parts of Los Angeles. Despite having moved to a nice neighborhood, the family’s position was a tenuous one. Support from Deadwood was uncertain. (Mary Parker and Bill’s youngest brother, Joseph, would later move to the immigrant neighborhood of Pico Heights.) In Deadwood, the Parkers had been one of the most prominent families in town. In Los Angeles, Mary Parker was basically a single mother. Moreover, she and her family were Catholics in America’s most belligerently Protestant big city, a place where the Ku Klux Klan’s members at one point included the chief of the LAPD, the Los Angeles County sheriff, and the U.S. attorney for Southern California. Bill Parker did not look like one of the swarthy Mediterranean immigrants that caused Protestant Angelenos such concern. Yet at a time when anti-Catholic views circulated freely, he was in a very real sense a minority.
Parker probably didn’t dwell much on these difficulties. He didn’t have time. At the age of seventeen, Bill Parker was now the man in the family. Although Bill’s father continued to support his family from afar, finances were tight. Bill had to find a job. And so Parker turned to Los Angeles’s—and America’s—fastest growing industry: the movies.