On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde

by John Gilmore

  Also by John Gilmore:

  Hollywood Boulevard

  Inside Marilyn Monroe

  Crazy Streak

  L.A. Despair

  Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia

  The Garbage People

  Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives &

  the Hollywood Death Trip

  Fetish Blonde

  Live Fast - Die Young: Remembering the Short Life of James Dean

  The Tucson Murders

  The Real James Dean

  Cold-Blooded: The Saga of Charles Schmid

  Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie & the Family

  Copyright ©2013 by John Gilmore

  Amok Books edition, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover design by Ross Goza

  Book design by Carson Gilmore

  Copy editing by Nikki Bazar

  Published by Amok Books

  Los Angeles, California

  First Edition

  Bibliographic Information for Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gilmore, John, 1935-

  On the run with Bonnie & Clyde

  by John Gilmore

  ISBN-10: 1878923226

  ISBN-13: 978-187892226

  1. Parker, Bonnie, 1910-1934. 2. Barrow, Clyde, 1909-1934.

  2. True Crime-American History-Americana. 3. Criminals-Texas-Dallas-

  Biography/Creative Nonfiction.

  4. Depressions-1929-1934-United States. I. Title.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  Foreword by Marshall Terrill

  Introduction

  Author’s Note

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  About The Author

  Also by John Gilmore

  A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even.

  —Nelson Algren

  In Memoriam:

  Bonnie Elizabeth Parker

  1910 - 1934

  “If a policeman is killed in Dallas,

  and they have no clue or guide

  if they can’t find a fiend,

  they just wipe their slate clean

  and hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.”

  —Bonnie Parker

  Foreword

  by Marshall Terrill

  The bogeyman really does exist and his name is John Gilmore. How many writers today can you really say are badasses? John Gilmore doesn’t know this, but he’s my favorite writer. He has been ever since I cracked open his book Laid Bare, which is the best Hollywood memoir I’ve ever read. It’s not one of those “warts and all” type books—John splays open his soul and puts it out there for all to see. He writes about the carnality of Tinseltown, the Boulevard of Broken dreams; those trampled underfoot.

  Gilmore specializes in imploding Hollywood myths, and that, in my estimation, makes him dangerous. How many writers can you think of who are dangerous? So when John’s publisher asked me to write a foreword, naturally I was thrilled. John is, in my humble opinion, the most talented noir/true crime writer on the scene today. His writing stuns. No one even comes close.

  Did I say badass? The man is scary and I’ll tell you why: he has witnessed evil up close. He knows where the bodies are buried; has seen the skeletons in the closet; understands everyone’s strange peccadilloes. Gilmore is a literary surgeon whose pen is like a scalpel. He peers into souls, reads minds, and isn’t afraid to crack open the cadaver to find out what’s inside. He divulges the secrets of the rich and famous and cold-blooded killers alike.

  What separates Gilmore from the rest of the great noir/true crime writers is that he was there. He befriended them all—the stars, starlets, has-beens, gangsters, pimps, hustlers, murderers—and strips away the glitz and glamour with the stroke of his cynical and merciless pen. He is comfortable in the darkness and writes from a very shadowy place. He is the sum total of his incredible life experiences: the son of an L.A. cop and a star-struck mom. He’s been an actor, writer, director, teacher, painter, observer, confidant of legends, mythmaker as well as mythbuster. He has an angel on his shoulder and a devil in his prose. He has looked evil in the eye many times and never flinched.

  He’s from the Mad Men era where adults lived, loved and played hard; his literary voice comes from a life of gut-wrenching hardship, which, he’ll admit, sometimes bordered on madness. He has lived an unrepentant life, that included plenty of beautiful women, booze, and dope. Most writers, including yours truly, secretly want to be loved by the public. Gilmore tells them, “Go fuck yourself.” I kind of like that.

  Gilmore gives a whole new meaning to the word “embeddedness.” Off and on, he spent four decades gum-shoeing the story of the Black Dahlia, facing off with the likes of Charles Manson and his Family, and was the one scribe to whom murderer Charles Schmid chose to confess his hideous crimes. Gilmore spent several years in the Deep South, and the “heart of Texas” researching the now-mythic outlaws, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Don’t expect to read a tale of folk heroes who robbed banks to get back at the establishment during the crushing economic times of the Great Depression. Gilmore’s version of the co-dependent, fast-running duo is raw, gritty and authentically American. He gives the readers perhaps the truest and best account of their lives on the run. But that is no surprise. No one does Babylon, noir, and true crime better than John Gilmore.

  Marshall Te
rrill is the author of a dozen successful books, most notably Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel.

  Introduction

  Probing the Perverse

  by Kurt Hemmer, Ph.D.

  On the Run with Bonnie & Clyde is an astonishing undertaking by an author already renowned for true crime classics like Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia (1994) and probing exposés like Inside Marilyn Monroe (2007). John Gilmore presents Bonnie and Clyde from inside their stolen cars, and the result is the antidote to Arthur Penn’s misrepresentative and exploitive film Bonnie and Clyde, a movie which has done tremendous disservice to those personages on whom it was based.

  Gilmore attempts to rectify our image of Bonnie and Clyde and their associates through his mastery of the true crime genre. As with all of Gilmore’s works, there is an element of the autobiographical. Having become fascinated with the story of Bonnie and Clyde as a child in 1943, he makes his depiction of their story a personal experience. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” Jack Kerouac would tell Gilmore over beers in New York’s Kettle of Fish, “as long as you do it with every inch of what you’ve got individually.” On the Run with Bonnie & Clyde is a passionate portrayal that hints at Gilmore’s skills as a memoirist, fascinatingly displayed in The Real James Dean (1975), and later, in Live Fast-Die Young: Remembering the Short Life of James Dean (1997). Then Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip (1997), which Gary Indiana called “[Gilmore’s] most astonishing work,” and which Genesis P’Orridge described lovingly as “compelling, Baudelaireian repugnance.” Gilmore also brings to the table the craftsmanship of a novelist, honed by his work on Fetish Blonde (1999), praised by William S. Burroughs as “[a] psychosexual crash”; Crazy Streak (2005), a twenty-first-century Lolita of Southern Californian depravity; and Hollywood Boulevard (2007), which crawls into the subterranean murk of Tinseltown. His skills as a true crime researcher are marvelously on display in The Tucson Murders (1970), revised as Cold-Blooded: The Saga of Charles Schmid, the Notorious “Pied Piper of Tucson” (1996); The Garbage People (1971), revised as Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family (2000); the gut-wrenching collection of enthralling putrefaction called L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times (2005); and the unforgettable Severed— “satisfying and disturbing,” said David Lynch; “[t]he best book on the Black Dahlia—in fact the only reliable book,” echoed Colin Wilson, while Marilyn Manson fantasized about morphing it into his unrealized directorial debut.

  None of Gilmore’s previous works could be characterized as “love stories.” On the Run is an outlaw love story, but not a Hollywood romance. The 1967 movie’s director and the star got it terribly wrong, portraying Clyde—bafflingly—as impotent, and presenting the couple as naïve, adorable scamps. Gilmore will show you that there is nothing adorable about Bonnie and Clyde. Their certain death would be imminent and violent—and they knew it. Clyde Barrow was not fucking around. Whether friend or foe, if you made Clyde’s acquaintance for any significant amount of time, chances were something bad was going to happen to you eventually. Bonnie and Clyde were dangerous people to know, though for decades since the film the outlaw paramours have been icons of romantic love. Listen to Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s duet “Bonnie and Clyde” (1968)—“La seule solution / C’etait mourir”— (“The only solution / Was dying”)—musically the most interesting of the Bonnie and Clyde songs. In Gainsbourg’s video you can see Bardot do her best Faye Dunaway impersonation. She is quite stunning and demure, but she is not Bonnie Parker—not Gilmore’s Bonnie Parker.

  On the Run is dark love, not adolescent bedroom fantasy, though it has become irresistible to view the lawless lovers as the quintessential icons of tragic love. There are dozens of songs that reference Bonnie and Clyde. In songs performed by country stars Merle Haggard, David Allan Coe, and Travis Tritt, to hip-hop idols Tupac Shakur, Eminem, and Jay-Z, Bonnie and Clyde have become empty signifiers waiting to be filled with the romantic musings of songsmiths and their devotees. When Desmond Dekker sings, “I don’t want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde” in 1967’s “Israelites,” used with great effect in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), the understanding is that we may want to be like Bonnie and Clyde while they were alive; we just do not want to die like them. PJ Harvey expresses the romantic yearning to identify with the doomed outlaws when she sings on “Good Fortune,” from Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000), “Like some modern-day / Bonnie and Clyde / On the run again.” This sentiment is echoed by Mike Ness of Social Distortion on “Reach for the Sky,” from Sex, Love and Rock ’n’ Roll (2004): “You can run, you can hide, just like Bonnie and Clyde / . . . And I thank the Lord for the love I have found / and hold you tight ’cause tomorrow may never come.” The bond between the tattooed lovers, Bonnie and Clyde, is all the more appealing because it is tied to imminent, violent death.

  Death in an automobile, John Gilmore will tell you, is a particularly American death: James Dean, Jackson Pollock, Jayne Mansfield. When you add guns, like JFK, Tupac Shakur, or the Notorious B.I.G., it is even more romantically American. In the perverse American psyche, sex, guns, and cars swirl around in one intoxicating cocktail.

  The stimulating saga of Bonnie and Clyde, like most crime stories, is an incomplete puzzle, but even more so. For this reason Gilmore’s talent as a researcher was put to the test. The historical facts have as many holes as the Cordoba gray Ford V-8 after the final ambush.

  As a matter of fact, when examining the various published accounts of the Barrow Gang, one finds that even basic details are disputed. Accounts vary from the self-serving to the downright ridiculous. Though some writers will state otherwise, there is no evidence that Clyde was a child molester, homosexual, bisexual, impotent, or a drug addict. Authors making such claims probably have their own issues to work out.

  With his skill as a researcher and novelist, Gilmore gives his reader the sensation of being in the car beside Bonnie and Clyde. His years of expertise in the writing of true crime offer the best creative nonfiction account we could hope for. As a lifelong denizen of the shadows of notoriety, Gilmore may have an advantage when trying to capture the essence of characters like Bonnie and Clyde.

  Just read Gilmore’s other books and you will see that he feels as alienated from society as the troubled souls he writes about, and after reading this book a first time the emotional impact will compel you to read it again. Gilmore’s Bonnie and Clyde revel in their perverse boil of passion. It is not perverse because it is foreign to us but because we so rarely allow the purity of our feral propensities to surface. The word “perverse” comes from the Latin pervertere, “to turn.” To be perverse is to turn away from society’s mores—and maybe inward to our own desires. It is this perverse relationship with the world—simultaneously attracting us and repelling us from the people who exude it—that we see in Gilmore’s Hollywood icons. The outlaws are not like the movie stars as much as the movie stars are like the outlaws. They are living dangerously emotionally. Gilmore probes the perverse personalities of celebrities and criminals—the famous and the infamous. We recognize them. We want to get closer to their incandescence even as we turn our heads from the burning light. They show us what we do not see in the mirror smoldering beneath the surface.

  In the hands of another writer, Bonnie and Clyde’s story may have been used as a moralizing tale warning us against the pitfalls of intemperate behavior. But John Gilmore is not a moralist, and On the Run with Bonnie & Clyde is bereft of words of wisdom. It is brutal.

  Author’s Note

  On the Run with Bonnie & Clyde is by necessity part documentary, part memoir, part narrative and reportage, plus a personal account that arrives ipso facto as a portrait of the American outlaw. The long haul of tracking the serpentine trail of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, as a means to understand them, to walk in their shoes, so to speak, fixed my focus to those two individuals, proving to me the only true way to share their tale was to she
d my own shoes and ride with them.

  Consequently, this offering rarely strays from Clyde and Bonnie in reconstructing a saga that narrowly includes situations in which they were not present, or events that lay beyond the windshield of their lives. In offsetting the obsession with their deaths, I have attempted to illuminate their lives, how they birthed emotionally, bonding in their youth to the inevitable, violent outcome of their union. The only way to offer what I’ve learned is to reconstruct what was lived.

  My sincere thanks to William Daniel Jones, in memoriam, for talks shared in Houston in the early 1970’s. A rare, close associate of Clyde and Bonnie, “W.D.”, as he was called, held valuable memories of the two this book specifically focuses on.

  Apart from Texas, I journeyed through Missouri, New Mexico and Arizona, spent time in Oklahoma and other states, and lived four years in Louisiana. It’s now seventy-nine years since Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed and murdered on that lonely road in northern Louisiana, neither having left personal records or diaries. Apart from Bonnie’s long poems, Suicide Sal and End of the Line (published before her death, a remarkable prediction), plus the many personal “on the run” snapshots and the scraps of bullet-riddled clothing snipped from their bodies, there is almost nothing. Whatever dreams they possessed went up in gun smoke.

  To many others whose names appear throughout this text, I remain indebted for their sharing with me often objected-to or overlooked points of view. I confess that years ago I lacked the confidence to set down an account from my obsessive note-taking, kicked off in 1949 by my interest in 1930’s Depression crime. Yet fueled by that same boyhood passion, the idea festered until I knew I’d eventually do it—rob a bank or write a book. I chose the latter, as my father was a member of the Los Angeles Police Department.

  If one finds this tale a jerky, nonlinear narrative, or a string of scattered episodes with no discernible arc as that is the truth of Clyde and Bonnie’s story—a disjointed, interrupted subject about a shapeless, chaotic existence broken into non-matching, unrelated facts few agree upon—they may be right. I never bothered to argue because I’ve embraced this history as the closest to an accurate picture of who these individuals really were.