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could be tapped and transformed from barren disappointments into verdant successes.
    Los Angeles was now a sprawling, bustling city, spreading over some sixty-two square miles and rapidly incorporating the surrounding communities, most noticeably Hollywood, which had already begun attracting film companies with its climate fit for year-round filming. Along with real estate, cars, and shipping, filmmaking would soon become one of the city’s largest industries. Los Angeles architecture was a patchwork of styles, combining elements of the Spanish mission designs of yore with the ranch house of the American Midwest. The garden bungalow became the preferred form of housing, and the automobile was swiftly becoming a key component of city life, as ubiquitous as the electric streetcars.
    The Parsons settled into a house at 2375 Scarf Street, just south of downtown Los Angeles. The munificence of their respective families had helped pay for the couple’s journey westwards, but now they had to fend for themselves. Marvel found himself a modest job at the P. A. English Motor Car Company on South Grand, selling auto accessories to the ever increasing number of car owners. The new metropolis entranced him. In the words of the Californian critic Carey McWilliams, Los Angeles was not so much an urban landscape as “a great circus without a tent.” Inhabitants came not only from across the United States but from China, Japan, the Philippines, India, and Mexico, providing the majority of the farm labor force and bringing with them many of their customs and religions.
    Attire on the streets of the city ranged from straw hats to fur coats. Electric signs blazed everywhere; “clairvoyants, palm readers, Hindu frauds, crazy cults, fake healers, Chinese doctors” all plied their trade. In 1906 over 50 percent of Los Angeles’ population may have been Protestant, reflecting the number of transplants from the midwestern states, but a whole new breed of radical metaphysical religions, such as Christian Science, New Thought, and Theosophy, had begun to take root alongside the mainstream beliefs. Confucianism, which had arrived via Chinese immigrants, began to seep its way into the sermons of some of the more liberal Protestant churches. Spiritualism found proponents of its creed of mystical development and’séances, especially in the Hollywood film community where it was now becoming something of a craze. Secular Utopian communes were also springing up outside the city, most notably the short-lived Socialist community of Llano del Rio which at its peak had over 1,000 self-sufficient men, women, and children farming 10,000 acres of land.
    Despite the vast number of religious groups and the fact that the Anti-Saloon League of California had suppressed virtually every drinking establishment in Los Angeles by 1910, organized vice was rife, and many of the police force were on the take, foreshadowing the corruption that would be another of the city’s defining features. Brothels could frequently be found on the same street as churches, and although evangelists did their best to paint a veneer of moral rectitude over the immoral proclivities of the city, they instead imbued it with a quality of schizophrenia.
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    The Parsons decided to celebrate their arrival in town by trying for another child, and this time there was to be no heartache. Almost ten months after his parents set foot in Los Angeles, Marvel Whiteside Parsons was born at the Good Samaritan Hospital on October 2, 1914. As his father had always gone by the nickname Tad or Teddy, so the new addition to the family was also helped out of his unusual moniker; his parents called him Jack.
    The new family moved into a bigger house at 2401 Romeo Street, just off the long stretch of Wilshire Boulevard that ran to the northwest of the city center. But rather than solidifying the marriage, the arrival of little Jack heralded its end. Los Angeles lacked many of the