Bonnie and Clyde premiered at a film festival in Montreal on August 4, 1967. The order of the names in the title was the first departure from the Barrow Gang legend. Until Beatty’s movie, Clyde’s name always came before Bonnie’s. But the film’s immense, ongoing popularity changed that. Bonnie now had top billing.
The surviving Barrows resented that and much more. Blanche said later that the final version of Bonnie and Clyde was much different from the script she’d originally been shown by Beatty. In the movie, Clyde suffers from a low libido and erectile dysfunction. W. D. Jones and Henry Methvin are melded into a single character. Blanche Barrow is saddled with the scheming personality of Mary O’Dare, and shrieks more often than she speaks. After viewing the film Blanche said truthfully, “That movie made me look like a screaming horse’s ass.” She had signed an agreement with Beatty, so she didn’t sue Warner Brothers, the studio that produced the movie. But Clyde’s sisters Artie and Nell and brother L.C. did, claiming that because the film contained so many untruths it “maliciously and deliberately vilified [Clyde and Bonnie] and those connected with them.” Billie Jean Parker Moon and W. D. Jones filed similar suits. All their claims were dismissed. The judges ruled that Clyde and Bonnie were public figures, and that neither Nell, Artie, L.C., Billie Jean, or W.D. had been specifically referred to or identified in the movie.
But one lawsuit hit paydirt. Bonnie and Clyde depicted Frank Hamer as a bumbling lawman who’d been kidnapped by the Barrow Gang and pursued them for revenge. That clearly was false—Ted Hinton was still around to swear that Hamer had never seen, let alone met, Clyde and Bonnie until the morning of the Gibsland ambush. Hamer’s widow settled for an undisclosed amount from Warner studios—enough, great-nephew Harrison Hamer said forty years later, to see her through “the rest of her days.”
Audiences loved the film just as much as the Barrows, Parkers, and Hamers hated it. Thanks to taut storytelling and memorable performances by the featured cast, Bonnie and Clyde rekindled fascination with the real-life couple. The public now imagined Clyde and Bonnie to be as tall and physically attractive as the stars who portrayed them in the movie. Beatty got their undying love for each other right, as well as Clyde’s cocky attitude and Bonnie’s poetic bent. But there was nothing of West Dallas in the film—Clyde and Bonnie’s impoverished childhoods and social frustrations were never established. Bonnie and Clyde emphasized fancy clothes and gory gunplay, but didn’t touch on the mundane, routine Barrow Gang misery of camping in cars and dining on cans of cold beans. In the movie, Clyde didn’t limp from the self-amputation of two toes, and Bonnie wasn’t crippled in a car crash. Thanks to Bonnie and Clyde, they were once again glamorous without too many distractingly gritty details.
The interest in Clyde and Bonnie renewed by Beatty and his film never abated. Gibsland, a dying town after the interstate replaced the railroad, has experienced a limited renaissance with two Bonnie and Clyde museums and a Bonnie and Clyde Festival each May on the anniversary of the ambush. A Bonnie and Clyde symposium in Kansas City based on the shootout in Platte City has become an annual event. A fortieth anniversary DVD edition of Bonnie and Clyde was a bestseller.
In Dallas, both the city historical society and entrepreneur Ken Holmes offer “Bonnie and Clyde” tours that last several hours. The Barrow family service station still stands on old Eagle Ford Road, which has been renamed Singleton Boulevard. West Dallas has been incorporated into the main city, but it is still full of shacks, pothole-pocked roads, and suspicious-looking characters loitering on corners. Few people would live there if they had other options. The tours take in the service station, the house a few blocks away where Clyde shot down Fort Worth deputy Malcolm Davis on January 6, 1933, one of Bonnie’s old schools, and a few places where she and Clyde worked. They also include visits to Clyde’s and Bonnie’s graves.
Bonnie rests beside her mother, Emma, nephew Buddy, and niece Jackie in upscale Crown Hill Memorial Park. All four were moved there in the 1940s when visitors overran the smaller Fish Trap Cemetery where they were initially interred. A receptionist in the Crown Hill office says cheerfully, “Oh, we have lots of people coming to see Bonnie.”
Bonnie’s grave is easy to find. It’s about a hundred yards to the left of the main Crown Hill entrance. On any given day, tokens are left there by fans—plastic flowers, small cheap crosses, business cards, and scraps of paper with scribbled poems or lines from the Bible (“Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death” seems to be a favorite). Bonnie’s headstone is larger than many in the cemetery, and necessarily so because of its lengthy inscription:
As the flowers are all made sweeter by the sunshine and the dew, so this old world is made brighter by the lives of folks like you.
About three miles away, Clyde is buried in Western Heights Cemetery with his brother Buck. Cumie, Henry, and Jack Barrow lie in adjacent plots. It’s much harder to get to Clyde’s grave than Bonnie’s. Western Heights is cramped and surrounded by a chain-link fence whose gates are usually padlocked. That doesn’t keep Clyde seekers away. Part of the fence by the gates is perpetually yanked down to provide a convenient foothold. The grave they want to see is tucked in a far back corner of the property. Emma Parker had taken out a small life insurance policy on Bonnie, so she could pay for a large headstone. Henry and Cumie Barrow had no extra money, so after Buck died they told Clyde they would wait until his death, then bury him with his brother and buy one headstone for both.
Clyde understood. He even told Henry and Cumie the message he wanted carved on the headstone. Seventy-five years after he and Bonnie died outside Gibsland, the four-word motto Clyde asked his parents to inscribe remains true in ways he could never have imagined:
Gone but not forgotten.
Note on Sources
There is a great deal of disagreement about many dates and events in the lives of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, including the year in which Clyde was born and whether Bonnie really smoked cigars (1910, probably; and she didn’t, definitely). Some of this stems from the lack of public records kept in the small towns where they were born and in the slum where they grew up. Media accounts of their crime spree include all sorts of exaggerated or downright false claims about what they did and when. The problem is exacerbated by many books about them that rely too heavily on these inaccurate news reports, or else on interviews with people who claimed far more intimate relationships with the Barrow Gang than they actually possessed.
Fugitives: The Inside Story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker was published just months after their deaths in 1934. “Editor” Jan Fortune interviewed Nell Barrow, Clyde’s sister, and Emma Parker, Bonnie’s mother, for the book, and presented them as addressing readers in the first person. Both the Barrow and Parker families were appalled by the result; they claimed Fortune made up much of the text, mostly in the sections devoted to Clyde’s and Bonnie’s criminal careers. But because it was the first, and because it claimed to come right from the lips of family members, Fugitives was accepted as gospel by much of the general public.
In 1979, former Dallas County deputy Ted Hinton’s memoir Ambush was published some time after his death. He had been the last surviving member of the six-man posse that ambushed Clyde and Bonnie on a back highway outside Gibsland, Louisiana, in 1934, and swore his book told the only true, complete story. That does not seem to be the case; one friend of Hinton’s said Ted never told the story the same way twice. Few Barrow-storians—except Hinton’s loyal son Boots—accept Ted’s version of the ambush, which has the posse squatting on a mosquito-infested hill for two nights rather than part of one.
The only other “relatives” book ever published came in 2003, when Clyde’s youngest sister, Marie Barrow Scoma, coauthored The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde with Arkansas historian Phillip Steele. Marie died soon after the pair began work on the book, and afterward Steele relied heavily on information from Shawn Scoma, Marie’s adopted son, who was subsequently caught trying to sell forged Bonnie and
Clyde memorabilia and is currently in prison for second-degree murder. A new generation of professional and amateur Bonnie and Clyde scholars found the book to be rife with errors, mostly caused by Marie completely overlooking or drastically altering instances in Clyde’s life that might make her beloved older brother look bad.
Since then, there have been a few works of solid Barrow Gang scholarship published, all of which are helpful in putting together an objective, plausible delineation of what really happened during the short, violent lives of Clyde and Bonnie. These include James R. Knight and Jonathan Davis’s Bonnie and Clyde: A Twenty-first Century Update, published in 2000 by Eakin Press; On the Trail of Bonnie and Clyde Then and Now, Winston G. Ramsey’s exhaustive travelogue along every back road the outlaw couple traveled, published by After the Battle Press in 2003; John Neal Phillips’s well-researched Running with Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1996 and offering readers for the first time a glimpse of Clyde and Bonnie through the eyes of one of their criminal cohorts; and in 2004 the posthumous My Life with Bonnie and Clyde by Blanche Caldwell Barrow (also from the University of Oklahoma Press), a diary discovered and edited by John Neal Phillips after Buck Barrow’s widow died in 1988. Blanche’s apparent purpose was to present herself as a martyr, but she was present during crucial events and her eyewitness accounts are invaluable. In working on these books, Phillips and Davis variously had the inestimable advantage of friendships with Marie Barrow Scoma, Buddy Barrow Williams (L. C. Barrow’s stepson), Rhea Leen Linder (Bonnie Parker’s niece), and Blanche Caldwell Barrow, as well as Ralph Fults and several other Barrow Gang intimates. (Buddy and Rhea Leen are still living, and have cooperated completely on this book.) In all my own lengthy research, I never found any of these four books to have exaggerated or misrepresented the smallest detail, though in some cases those interviewed and the authors themselves honestly disagree about where, how, and when some things happened. I have particularly relied on those books—and on interviews with Davis, Phillips, Linder, and Buddy Barrow Williams—in compiling Go Down Together.
But throughout my own book, particularly in early chapters dealing with the Barrow family’s unsuccessful struggle to survive on country farms and subsequent move to West Dallas, I had the additional advantage of working from two other revealing, unpublished manuscripts. After the publication of Fugitives, which she had declined to work on with Jan Fortune, Cumie Barrow, Clyde’s mother, attempted to write her own memoir. She never finished after making several false starts, and the resulting pages jump erratically from one time frame to the next. There are, essentially, three versions, one in which Cumie names names, a second in which she protects some identities, and another written in the third rather than first person. There are few even remotely sequential page numbers, making it impossible in my prologue and chapter notes to cite specific pages. I could number them myself, but there is no way of knowing what Cumie wrote first, or in what order she intended her memoir sections to be read. But throughout, hers is unmistakably the voice of a mother who loved her children, regretted their mistakes and deaths, and endured her sorrow through a profound, fundamentalist Christian faith. The manuscript was furnished to me for use in this project by Buddy Barrow Williams.
Then Jonathan Davis offered an additional prize. Before he coauthored his book with historian James Knight, and before Marie Barrow Scoma had her brief collaboration with Phillip Steele, Jonathan and Marie had spent two years working on a memoir by Marie that, when completed, she angrily rejected as having too many negative stories about her family. Jonathan painstakingly researched everything Marie claimed, and felt the two had produced an accurate portrait of a family that made more than its share of mistakes but never stopped being loyal to one another. Compared to the later Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde, the unpublished manuscript is 100 proof whiskey rather than watered-down beer. Here we have Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker describing in detail to their families some of the most notorious incidents in their careers—the Easter Sunday murders of two Texas highway patrolmen; the Dexfield Park shootout where Buck and Blanche Barrow had to be left behind; the Eastham Prison Farm raid that was reportedly masterminded by Clyde, but wasn’t. It’s simply amazing material, and some of it has never been made public before. Jonathan later supplied the leads—Barrow Gang enthusiast-historian Terry Whitehead of Blackwell, Oklahoma, also made invaluable contributions—to information that may untangle the most persistent mystery remaining in the saga of Bonnie and Clyde: How, exactly, could Texas Ranger Frank Hamer be so certain they would drive by the ambush spot at or around 9 A.M. on Wednesday, May 23, in 1934?
For this book, besides extensive interviews with expert historians, reliable authors, most of the few surviving men and women who had actual contact with the Barrow Gang, and Buddy Barrow Williams and Rhea Leen Linder, the two surviving members of the Barrow and Parker families still willing to talk to authors, I’ve based many of my conclusions on the four books cited here, plus the two unpublished manuscripts. In most other cases, including but far from limited to Fugitives, Ambush, and The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde, I’ve tried to sift through the inaccuracies and utilize some specific passages that appear to reflect honest memory and not self-aggrandizing or ghostwritten exaggeration. And in virtually every instance, I give precedence to testimony from those who were there when something happened.
The hit 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway is inaccurate in any number of ways. It’s wisest to consider it entertainment, not actual history.
Notes
Prologue
If it had been raining twenty miles west of Dallas: Cissy Stewart Lale interview. She noted specifically that “motorcycle patrols could not occur during inclement weather because so many roads were still dirt, and the motorcycles would become stuck in the mud.”
Bonnie also spent some time sitting on the grass: Jan I. Fortune ed., with Nell Barrow and Emma Parker, Fugitives (Ranger Press, 1934), pp. 160–61.
Thanks to newsreels at movie theaters: Jim Wright interview.
But Henry, an escaped con who’d joined the gang ten weeks earlier: Marie Barrow Scoma with Jonathan Davis unpublished manuscript, pp. 176–80.
Clyde and Bonnie came to epitomize the edgy daydreams: Orville Hancock interview.
Chapter 1: Henry and Cumie
Much of the information in this chapter is taken from the unpublished memoir of Cumie Barrow, and from the unpublished collaborative manuscript of Marie Barrow Scoma and Jonathan Davis that Marie rejected as making her family look bad. Specific pages in the Marie-Davis manuscript can be cited, but most of Cumie’s pages aren’t numbered.
All quotes by Cumie Barrow are taken directly from her manuscript.
A great deal of weight is also given to material from interviews with Davis, Charles Heard, John Neal Phillips, and Sandy Jones, all of whom spent many hours with Marie Barrow Scoma; Buddy Williams Barrow, who was told of the early Barrow family farming years by his stepfather, L.C. Barrow, and stepgrandfather, Henry Barrow; Cissy Stewart Lale, former president of the Texas State Historical Association; and Archie McDonald, professor of history and also a former president of the Texas State Historical Association, as well as the East Texas Historical Association.
Worth Wren Jr. provided background for my general descriptions of tenant farming in general and cotton farming in particular.
Henry Barrow’s background: Cumie Barrow unpublished manuscript; Marie Barrow Scoma with Davis unpublished manuscript, pp. 2–4. A census of Nacogdoches County residents taken in 1900 indicates Henry was born in Alabama, perhaps in 1876 rather than 1873.
Tenant farming, in those years, had several attractions: Cissy Stewart Lale interview.
Jim apparently remarried in Texas: James R. Knight with Jonathan Davis, Bonnie and Clyde: A Twenty-first Century Update (Eakin, 2005), p. 4.
Horse racing was a popular recreation: Cumie Barrow unpublished manuscript
.
Henry would say later: Ibid.
he moved to nearby Nacogdoches: Ibid.
Cumie Barrow’s background: Ibid.
She had a knack for playing instruments: Ibid.; Jonathan Davis interview.
The bride was sixteen: Cumie Barrow unpublished manuscript. Cumie claimed she was ten months younger than her husband, which would make 1873 the year of Henry’s birth. Some census records indicate he was born in 1876. But that would make him fifteen at the time of his wedding, very young for a groom even in that era of early marriage. Cumie would have had no reason to misrepresent Henry’s age in her memoir. Of course, it’s possible he lied about it, either to his wife or to county officials conducting the census.
Forty percent of all Americans lived on farms: U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, pp. 457, 465.
During good years, even a smallish tenant farm: Richard D. White, Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (Random House, 2006), pp. 126–27; Worth Wren Jr. interview.
the first half-decade of her marriage: Cumie Barrow unpublished manuscript.
The fortunes of Nacogdoches farmers: Marie Barrow Scoma with Davis unpublished manuscript, pp. 6–8.
Jeff Guinn Page 42
