L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

      IT’S HARD to imagine better preparation for 1920s Los Angeles than turn-of-the-century Deadwood, a town devoted, as one wag put it, “to gold, guns, and women.” Parker was born into a family that had played a large part in cleaning it up. His grandfather—the first William H. Parker—had arrived in the spring of 1877, less than a year after General Custer and the 210 men under his direct command were killed by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors at Little Big Horn, a hundred miles south of the mining camp. College educated, a former colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War who was later appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to be the first federal collector for tax revenue and the assistant U.S. attorney in the Colorado territory, Parker cut an imposing figure. Within days of arriving in the frontier settlement, he was made captain of a hastily assembled town militia, formed to protect the booming mining camp. In 1902, he became the district attorney, a position he occupied until 1906, when he was elected to Congress. His willingness to enforce closing hours on casinos and brothels earned him a reputation as a reformer. Prosperous, fierce (“a good hater,” said one acquaintance), aloof (“to many he may have appeared unapproachably chilly,” noted one friend in a memorial address to the Deadwood bar), Congressman Parker was one of Deadwood’s most imposing citizens—“dauntless, proud, imperious.”

Congressman Parker’s position should have ensured that his grandson would grow up as a member of one of Deadwood’s most respected families. Instead, as he was returning home by train from his first year in Washington, the new congressman was suddenly afflicted with terrible abdominal pain. He stopped in Chicago. There a surgeon cut into the freshman representative and discovered that Parker suffered from advanced cirrhosis of the liver—a condition often associated with heavy drinking. He died two months later at the age of sixty-one, leaving behind a family of five sons and two daughters. Bill Parker would not grow up with his grand father’s wealth or prestige. Instead, he would inherit his temperament and, in time, his fondness for whiskey.

As a child, Bill grew up in a house divided. His mother, Mary Kathryn Moore, was a spirited, independent woman who was both deeply religious and good humored. By all accounts, she was intensely proud of Bill, her oldest son, who was born on June 21, 1905. Bill’s father, William Henry Parker Jr., had a personality that can only be called dour. He also had a violent temper. At school, one of Parker’s sisters was once asked what her father did. She answered, “Oh, my father gets up in the morning to fix breakfast and throws pots and pans around in the kitchen.”

These troubles were not debilitating, at least not at first. As a young boy, Parker was diligent and bright, a dogged athlete and a gifted orator. (The Deadwood High School yearbook reported that Parker won the senior year first prize in rhetoric for his stirring recitation of William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech—an interesting selection for a gold-mining town.) His final report card in 1922 reveals an excellent student, with an aptitude for math and rhetoric, who enjoyed the high opinion of his teachers.

“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.