Strange Angel by George Pendle Read Free Book Online

millionaires populated the one-and-a-half-mile-long avenue. They included Lamon Vanderburg Harkness of New York City, one of the richest men in the world because of his Standard Oil Company, which had been recently dissolved by Supreme Court decree. Arthur Fleming, the Canadian-born logging magnate and philanthropist, lived in the first Craftsman-style house to be built in Pasadena. Chicago chewing gum millionaire William J. Wrigley lived in an Italianate mansion at the top of the avenue, while Dr. Adalbert Feynes, a famed entomologist, resided in an Algerian-style palace not far away. The St. Louis beer millionaire, Adolphus Busch, had created a giant stone mansion overlooking his wondrous gardens, and the black-clad widow of assassinated president James A. Garfield also lived on Orange Grove. Behind ivy-clad walls, manicured hedgerows, and twelve-foot-high pillared gates were vast estates with swimming pools and tennis courts, driveways encircled with roses and flowering vines of perpetual summer. Footmen and even carriages were sometimes seen on the road. And where did these great and good meet? At the northernmost end of the avenue, where the Valley Hunt Club acted as the exclusive preserve of Pasadena’s high society.
    If any one street was responsible for the civilizing of California in the minds of the New England Brahmins, then Orange Grove Avenue was it, for it would have taken a stubbornness even greater than that displayed in the Episcopalian East not to have been impressed by the sheer mellifluous quality of Orange Grove. Languor and energy, rusticity and sophistication, American nature and European art mingled sweetly throughout. The avenue made even the palm trees look dignified. The year that the Parsons arrived on Orange Grove was the year the
Los Angeles Times
named it “the most beautiful residence street in the world.”
    Not one to shy away from ostentation, Walter Whiteside purchased a giant Italian-style villa at 537 Orange Grove Avenue so that his small, multi-generational family could rival any of the more conventional dynasties of Pasadena. Set back from the road amidst an acre and a half of cosseted foliage, the house met the visitor with a facade of pristine stucco, shaded windows, and sculpted arches. Within the cool walls the family of four shared some twenty rooms with their two English servants. What’s more, this mansion sat right next door to the Valley Hunt Club.
    Jack Parsons spent almost all of his childhood surrounded by this prodigious wealth. His earliest memories would have been of an exotic palace that seemed his alone, with attentive servants compliant to his every need. As the sole child in the house, he was given strict lessons in manners and treated as the heir apparent to the Whiteside family by his doting grandfather. As for Ruth, blue-blooded Pasadena suited her much better than downtown Los Angeles, and she swiftly entered into the social whirl that occupied Pasadena’s elite—chamber concerts with the Pasadena Music and Art Association, lectures at the Twilight Club, theater at the Pasadena Playhouse, golf and tennis tournaments at the Valley Hunt Club, and maybe the odd trip to the polo fields a few miles away. On one occasion the world renowned Austrian opera singer, Madame Schumann-Heink—better known in the popular press as “The Heink”—sang a private recital for the family, with young Jack sitting on her ample knee.
    Parsons’ neighborhood was no less fantastical than his home. Crenelated French chateaux with faux-arrow slits stood side by side with the domes and crescent moons of Moorish palaces, while the vast Craftsman-style bungalows conjured up pictures of the Orient with their sloping beams and precise lines. To the south of Parsons’ house lay the Busch Gardens, consisting of thirty acres of manicured lawns and exquisite floral pageantry. Plants from all over the world bordered the rolling lawns, and over fourteen