On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde

by John Gilmore

  The sporadic hunt has been like opening a Chinese puzzle box or filling a jigsaw with missing pieces, always seeking something other than a quasi-documentary guess at what might’ve been. So much of the “history” one finds in books, archives, old newspapers or past offerings by so-called authorities or scarce survivors, even relatives and dubious one-time associates, has piled error upon error, camouflaging gaps with moralizing rhetoric or confusing issues with make-believe, self-serving conviction. Each new presentation tends to opinionate the previous—many even borrowing from the 1967 Hollywood melodrama manufactured solely for exploitation and thus burying any genuine grab at truth beneath an avalanche of slapstick misinformation.

  Answers to real-life questions about Clyde and Bonnie are lost to the past. The deeper one digs, the more discrepancies are found. This has created an alternate reality which most have and will subscribe to.

  Two other books have pieced together an approximation of what might’ve occurred, and I salute the efforts of James R. Knight and Jonathan Davis for their 21st Century Update. I also thank Winston G. Ramsey for his On the Trail of Bonnie & Clyde Then and Now, both works offering detailed explorations of that time and what remains—graves and broken headstones, highway pavements widened over once dangerously narrow dirt roads which Clyde would maneuver at near top speed. One sees the rotting bridges, empty washes, and weathered shacks collapsing in desolate fields. The authors present detailed portraits of what might have been, and what’s largely forgotten or gone.

  In offering this personal narrative of Bonnie & Clyde’s run across a now-disappeared American landscape, I have sought to bridge a gap of irresolute time and distance by bringing them to life through their language; without it they are but silhouettes. I’ve attempted to reflect the essence of these beings—bad, good, wildly in-between, without grace or blessing. My goal has been to grasp a hoped-for truth in portraying them as their desperate lives revealed, hopefully breaking the stereotypical shadows stemming from the excuseless errors in previously published or filmed accounts.

  My thanks to my publisher, Stuart Swezey, for taking on this unconventional book and showing again the faith he has demonstrated for years in creating a remarkable history in alternative publishing, enabling such an author as myself to explore two fringe lives beyond the status quo.

  John Gilmore

  One

  With a tight grip on the steering wheel, the pretty girl in red slowed the four-door Ford V-8 to a stop before the small Louisiana bank. Behind the rimless sunglasses her bright eyes turned to the man alongside as he leaned to kiss her. He buttoned his jacket to hide the butt of the pistol, tucked an empty canvas deposit bag against his left side, and got out of the car.

  Keeping the clutch pressed to the floor, Bonnie Parker jerked the shifter into neutral, waiting, the engine idling as she watched Clyde Barrow walk casually into the bank.

  Looking dapper as a door-to-door salesman, his tan suit pressed and white shirt starched, his silk tie knotted precisely and shoes shined to a glossy finish, Clyde walked directly to the teller window. Adjusting his brown felt hat, he glanced around the practically empty bank, then presented a ten-dollar bill to the young man behind the bars. Clyde said, “I need change, please.”

  Smiling and reaching for the bill, the teller said, “Good morning—” but fell silent as he looked at the muzzle of the half-hidden .38 pistol aimed at his stomach. He froze, his eyes locked on the gun.

  “This is a stickup,” Clyde said calmly. “Don’t raise your hands or do any talkin’. Put the paper money in this bag and nobody’s gonna get hurt.”

  Stunned and shaking, the teller stuffed currency from the cash drawer into the canvas bag. He pushed the bag across the counter to Clyde, who said, “Stand right there and keep your mouth shut till you don’t see me no more. You open your trap, I gotta come back and shoot your ass full of holes.” Concealing the gun against the bag, Clyde turned and casually walked out of the bank.

  Her foot floored on the clutch, Bonnie shifted into low gear as Clyde came briskly across the sidewalk. He climbed into the car, tucking the revolver into the waist of his trousers as Bonnie let out the clutch, the car pulling quickly from the curb. Shifting fast into second, she steered sharply around a corner, then jammed down on the gas.

  Clyde tipped back, the momentum pulling him into the seat as the Ford jumped ahead. “Take it easy,” he said, reaching for the shotgun at the foot of the seat. He placed the weapon between the edge of the seat and the door, and sat back as Bonnie wheeled into an alley behind a grocery store. Another two blocks, then slower, angling north onto a narrow dirt road sloping into a creek of black, dirty water. The air was wet, thick with mosquitoes, and Clyde rolled up the window. Seconds later he opened the canvas bag.

  “How’d you do?” Bonnie asked.

  Digging into the bills, Clyde said, “Not too bad.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  He smiled. “I love you too, sugar.”

  The road forked west, running beneath an overpass where a southbound train rumbled overhead, blowing its whistle. Pressing the fingers of one hand against her left ear, Bonnie raced beneath the bridge. Clyde said, “Loud noises still hurtin’ your head, aren’t they?” She nodded. He reached across her skirt and tucked his hand between her legs.

  “Now I don’t hear any sounds,” she said. “Just my heart beatin’ with your hand parked where it’s at.”

  Like a narrow path of dirt through a field of weeds, the road bordered a stretch of woods where Clyde had concealed a new Ford roadster he’d stolen that same morning. He’d already switched the roadster’s Louisiana license to an Oklahoma plate.

  Bonnie maneuvered between tree trunks, stopped, killed the engine and climbed out of the car. She opened the trunk and Clyde removed two rifles. Together they gathered from the still-creaking car three handguns, a second shotgun, two cardboard cartons of ammunition, a stack of out-of-state license plates and a pile of Hollywood movie magazines. Except for the shotgun and one rifle, the rest of the load was placed into the trunk of the roadster, along with two suitcases Clyde pulled from the rear seat of the sedan.

  “Wait!” Bonnie said, opened one of the suitcases and dug through a cache of clothes. She brought out her camera.

  “Hold on till we get across the border,” Clyde said, climbing behind the wheel. He adjusted the shotgun against the armrest and the edge of his seat for a fast reach. Leaning forward, he fumbled beneath the dash and the engine kicked over. Grinning at Bonnie getting into the car, he said, “Sweetest picture God ever made.” She pulled the car door shut and set the opened bank bag between her blue, size-three shoes. Closing her eyes, she took a few deep breaths and braced herself as Clyde maneuvered the car out of the woods and onto the dirt road.

  Bonnie opened her eyes and said, “Guess what I’m gonna do, honey.”

  Clyde said, “What’re you gonna do, angel?”

  With a bright smile, she said, “I’m goin’ to buy a pair of pretty red shoes to match my dress and I’m goin’ to get my hair curled like Joan Bennett’s.”

  Clyde grinned, pushing for speed, a whipping funnel of dust blowing behind the car as he left the dirt road. The speedometer needle climbed fast into the danger zone as he raced onto the highway heading west for the Texas border.

  Forty-eight years later, I was driving to St. Louis to marry my son’s mother, though the boy, Carson (as in Kit), wouldn’t arrive for another four years. It was 1981, and instead of heading towards the Mississippi River, my fiancée and I got a motel room in Joplin. We lounged around the city I hadn’t seen in two and a half decades, since 1957, when I was an actor on my way to New York. That first time, I hung around Joplin for a spell and met a pretty girl named Edith. She worked at a drugstore where I was getting coffee, and because of an old “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster on the wall, we got to talking about Missouri history. Edith said her mother had a bunch of “real” newspaper clippings about the “Barrow Gang” and a gunfight
at a Joplin apartment building.

  “The people who own that building,” Edith said, “are acquainted with my mother. They go to the same church and are vegetarians.”

  A day later, I was picking through a pile of old newspaper clippings and photos that hadn’t been rubber-cemented into a five-and-dime scrapbook, but just cut out of the papers to clutter an old pie safe.

  Later, with a bag of bananas and a wax paper ball of walnuts, Edith’s mother drove us to a building by Thirty-Fourth Street and Oak Ridge Drive.

  Two garages occupied the lower half of the structure, with an apartment overhead, the windows facing the street where twenty-four years earlier hell had erupted, bad as a quake that could’ve shook a devil out of the ground. She showed us what she said were scars in the stones from bullets that had struck the walls that spring day in 1933.

  Clyde Barrow, twenty-four at the time, and Bonnie Parker, twenty-two, had holed up above the garages for almost two weeks, Bonnie nervous, complaining, “We’re here too long with people looking for us everywhere…” She meant even in a town like Joplin, back then known in certain circles as giving a Good Housekeeping seal to characters on a breather from the law.

  Clyde’s older brother, Buck, and his wife, Blanche, shared the quarters with Bonnie and Clyde, along with a pimple-faced, determined sixteen-year-old named William Daniel Jones—called W.D. for short.

  Edith’s mother arranged for us to see the apartment Bonnie and Clyde had occupied for that brief time. The kitchen, living room, two bedrooms and even the floors and walls seemed permeated by a presence other than the current occupants. Edith whispered, “Ghosts.”

  “It’s what you know that makes it so,” said her mother. “You ever hear of silent echoes? You listen carefully and maybe you’ll hear Bonnie washing dishes and humming a tune. She could sing, you know. She had a good voice.…” Edith’s mother said she could imagine the smell of chicken roasting, red beans cooking and even butter melting on salted corn. If you tried hard enough, she said, getting your ear against the floor, you could maybe hear footsteps coming up the stairs. “Or in the bedroom,” she said. “I’ve smelled the aroma of Bonnie’s perfume… Someday,” she said, “if you listen hard enough, you might hear the bedsprings creaking, ’cause they got to creaking when the two of them were in the same bed—no matter what these know-it-alls say. Maybe you can even sense Bonnie standing beside you, looking at you with those haunting, blue eyes.”

  At that same time, I was introduced to Miss Johnson, an elderly, gentle lady who walked with a crooked bamboo cane and claimed to have witnessed the 1933 shoot-out. “The air,” she said, “was full of smoke from gunshots, and I only saw silhouettes runnin’ and shootin’. I hid on the ground beside an automobile. Thought I’d never be able to get up with those bullets whistlin’ in the air, or ricochetin’ every which way, makin’ sparks and terrible plunkin’ noises when they struck the automobile. More police were on the way,” she said, “but the gang escaped, leavin’ two of the officers shot down. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen.”

  Miss Johnson told me she had spoken to Bonnie Parker. “It was only days before that awful event, I was at the grocery store, and Bonnie was hidden in a big hat and sunglasses. She had a chicken she was wantin’ to roast, a load of corn, and red beans. I didn’t know who she was at that time, only a wee tiny girl I hadn’t met before, except for knowin’ they’d rented. I introduced myself because I enjoyed meetin’ new neighbors, and she said her name was Elizabeth. She didn’t volunteer much to say, and she seemed eager to be on her way with the chicken and groceries. She was polite and pleasant, and fashionably dressed, wearin’ a pair of red shoes I admired, though she said one was pinchin’ and she was walkin’ on a blister.

  “I lived but a short ways and invited her for tea and macaroon cookies. Some time when it would be convenient for her, I said. She replied she’d be delighted. Such a pretty smile when she said she would enjoy that, but a little sad, too, a sadness about her that I’d recall but had no understandin’ of. She said she didn’t know anyone in Missouri, though they were due in St. Louis at some time. Somethin’ about travelin’ on business. She hinted at being homesick and missin’ her mother who was not with them. I didn’t know who she meant by ‘them.’ The girl didn’t say where she was from, only that she’d be honored to visit as it would warm her heart. Those were her words—warm her heart.”

  Only briefly had Miss Johnson seen the others occupying the stone house with “Elizabeth.” “There was a couple,” Miss Johnson told me. “A man and another woman, and I did see Clyde Barrow drivin’ one of the cars. A boy was with him, and as they drove past, the man who I’d find out was Clyde smiled at me and touched the brim of his hat. I didn’t know his name, and had no way of knowin’ he was a wanted criminal. I believed that Elizabeth, who I’d be told was Bonnie Parker, must have mentioned to him about us speakin’ at the market, and must have pointed me out. Also I had no way of knowin’ he was not her husband, or who any of them were.”

  Miss Johnson claimed she baked macaroons for the occasion, but Elizabeth never came for tea and cookies. “It was so soon,” she says, “that the awful shootin’ happened, and afterwards I prayed for the two policemen who had been shot that day, and I also said a prayer for the girl, wherever she might’ve gone—wherever she was… After knowin’ what I was to learn, I knew there would be no end to my rememberin’ her.”

  Fast forward to 1981, when I was about to marry the mother of my son to come. Back in Joplin, I learned that Edith, the girl I’d known, had married a soldier and moved to Wyoming. Then I learned she’d died from ovarian cancer not long after her mother had been shipped from a Missouri nursing home to the care of relatives in South Dakota. The Joplin house Edith had lived in with her mother was gone, replaced by a fast-food drive-thru.

  The stone house the three of us had visited years before stood practically unchanged. Then, on a second visit to that building, I seemed to experience what Edith’s mother had suggested: an odd but not uncomfortable sense of the long-gone Bonnie Parker. It was as though at any moment I might turn to see her standing behind me, those blue eyes focused upon the back of my head.

  From that last encounter with the bullet-scarred stones, I left Joplin not only to get married in St. Louis, but eager to explore the lives of the by-then dubbed “star-crossed lovers,” catapulted to icon status by the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde. Disregarding fact, the motion picture nonetheless gained success as “shoot-’em-up” entertainment, while many critics described it as being nothing more than “a soapy melodrama.” New York Times critic Bosley Crowther labeled the movie “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy.”

  Much of the so-called historical data on Bonnie and Clyde—abstract dribbles of half-truths and manufactured information jumbled together over decades—left me cold. I wanted to know Bonnie and Clyde. I wanted to reach into the past and touch what it was propelling the violent rush of their lives.

  Four years later I was sitting in a greasy diner in Big Spring, Texas, eating macaroni with a handicapped old man. His name was Henry Edwards, an ex-bank robber who’d changed his surname to erase a past he couldn’t escape. The town of Big Spring looked almost empty of inhabitants. Half the main drag struck me as literally a ghost town, and the same kind of emptiness seemed reflected in the sad face of the man with eyes as blue as Bonnie Parker’s.

  Henry told me he’d been convicted once, and had done time. “Convicted only once,” he said, though he didn’t have enough fingers to count every joint he’d hit. I understood and asked what it was like robbing a bank. “Boils your piss first time around,” he said, “but you get the hang and a charge like a shot of moon.” He shrugged, saying, “Nothin’ to it.”

  My now-pregnant wife and I had been offered an empty, multi-storied department store for $750 a month. We’d stayed up half the night laughing over how to furnish a gutted department store.

  “You could rob the bank,” Henry said, showing a crooked s
mile. Later in the diner, with strips of yellow flypaper waving overhead, Henry said, “Clyde sat across from me same as you’re sittin’, and said his father’s name was Henry—same as my name. He said he didn’t know if it was good luck like a four-leaf clover, or bad like a black cat walkin’ behind you, but either way, he said it worried him.”

  Clyde didn’t talk like I was talking, Henry told me. “He wasn’t a sociable guy, but he was smooth and had beady eyes like an Indian. Maybe wonderin’ how your scalp’d look hangin’ on his belt. He could’ve had some injun blood mixed in,” Henry said. “Always packin’ a load of guns and his squaw, and watchin’ every door or window…

  “But, hell,” he said, “it isn’t fair my callin’ Bonnie a squaw. I mean she wasn’t like that, other than Clyde bein’ the apple of her eye. He was her religion, you could say, and there wasn’t even a way somebody’d get a tin shim between the two of them.

  “I gotta say I couldn’t see any charm in Barrow. He was a smart-lookin’ kid, but he was sure as hell hard-nosed to the business, even as he was so unduly worried about mistakes. He was nervous about makin’ any, and didn’t want to get in that position since he had murder warrants on him, and more warrants the further he went. Whatta they call it—a paper trail?

  “Not that mistakes don’t happen—they’re always a hazard of the business. I can’t in truth say Barrow got a kick outta pluggin’ someone for its own sake, like idiots do today. Contrary to what’s portrayed supposedly about Clyde, that sort of shit never happened with him, though he showed cold when we talked about a job in Louisiana, and then another one in Jasper—in Texas. He had more interest in the Louisiana job than in Jasper, which I was entertainin’.

  “Clyde knew dealin’s in the parish,” Henry said. “I’ve always figured that’s where they were headed, up in the upper Louisiana. I wasn’t partial to gettin’ back in Louisiana ’cause Texas was bad enough if they nailed you. Half the country was lookin’ for Barrow—and Bonnie too, though havin’ nothin’ on her except bein’ with Clyde. All that accessory hog-shit. They had to give the devil his dues ’cause they couldn’t get Clyde. He was a rattlesnake in high grass and in high gear, and didn’t give no howdy to see you comin’. So the law didn’t know how to stop him, didn’t know where he was or where he’d pop up next. Maybe right under their noses and they wouldn’t even know it until he’d already been there and gone. That’s where the ambush ideas came from—shotgun him when he wasn’t lookin’.”