Read A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age for Free Online Page A

Box, the Vine Street Theater, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Plaza, the Roosevelt, and other big theaters and hotels, an old man stopped him, asking, “Are you saved, brother?” Outside a church an advertisement proclaimed an upcoming appearance by Rin-Tin-Tin, “the canine motion picture actor.” Red streetcars rattled by and traffic lights gonged. Men in straw boaters and women in cloche hats bustled along the sidewalk. Everybody seemed breathless, White observed. Boxy Model T Fords were jammed into slant-wise parking slots. A jazz orchestra moaned ragtime in a dance hall.
    Downtown, on Broadway, White paid thirty-five cents to watch Charlie Chaplin in The Circus in the United Artists Theater, which boasted a $200,000 refrigeration system and “Certified Cool Comfort.” In the afternoon cool of another movie palace, he saw Ladies of the Mob , the very latest picture starring the “It” girl, Clara Bow, whom he liked. He was scarcely alone as a fan: Bow was then the world’s most famous movie star, the first mass-market sex symbol, the object of obsessive curiosity and the recipient of 8,000 fan letters a week. In one of the small black notebooks he used as a diary, White wrote: “Saw new Clara Bow. She meets a bunch of crooks and gets sent to Folsom! Still feeling a little weak, but good to be on my feet.”
    The fever of the Jazz Age had spread from New York across America and was reflected back, magnified and amplified, by Hollywood. It was the era of daring short-skirted flappers, of wild parties and bathtub gin, of everybody needing at least one automobile. The country was in the midst of “the greatest, gaudiest spree in history,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Young women, for whom a star like Clara Bow was both symbol and role model, smoked and wore lipstick and freely had sex outside marriage. Radio and the tabloid newspaper, entirely new phenomena, chronicled the national obsessions—crime, sex, sports, and God. This revolution in manners, morals, and fashion played out against the extraordinary experiment of Prohibition—the attempt to turn America into a dry Utopia, which came into effect nationwide on January 16, 1920. Nobody drank less. Outlaw liquor—smuggled or illegally brewed—flooded the country by hundreds of millions of gallons each year, filling the land with crime and its adjunct, graft, creating a spirit of rebellion and a subculture of speakeasies and bootleggers like Albert Marco. Prohibition, though, failed to prohibit in ways that differed from place to place, from city to city. What happened in Los Angeles in the 1920s couldn’t be more typically American, yet this history is also unique and particular.
    Leslie White arrived in the city toward the end of July 1928, when the boom was soaring to giddy heights and Los Angeles was not merely expanding but exploding beyond recognition. “In L.A. tomorrow isn’t another day,” said Los Angeles Times columnist Lee Shippey. “It’s another town.” Modernity had arrived, in an awful hurry. At night the downtown neon billboards were so plentiful and incandescent that visiting Harper’s correspondent Sarah Comstock said she longed “to hush them, to be rid of their blinding clamor, their deafening glare.” This, from a woman who lived in Manhattan.
    White saw scores of health cults and religious cults, churches of “Divine Power, of Divine Fire, of the Open Door, of the Blue Flames, of the Higher Things of Life.” There were Temples of Light, Chapels of Numerology, Truth Centers, Truth Studios. The frustrated Midwesterners who’d come to L.A. in droves, thinking that the city really was (as advertised by the Chamber of Commerce) “the white-spot on America’s industrial map,” sought almost any form of spiritual anchorage. Religion was what they knew, what they wanted; and religion in L.A. was like show business. Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson had a radio station and was a star in her own right. With a husky voice hinting of