Uncategorized marktaran 5:34 am

1934. The year the FBI and law enforcement struck back at the great lawbreakers of the 30’s. John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and in early 1935, Ma Baker and her gang were shot down. This ended a period like the old Wild West where gang activity had marked the early years of the Depression. The public had reveled in the exploits of these gangsters and had made them the subject of many romantic legends. They were risen up to the status of the Old West villains, such as Billy the Kid and Jesse James. Like the Golden Age of Pirates, this time had come to an end.

Of this group one couple does stand out, the West Dallas couple, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who were dramatized in song and film culminating to the classic 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. The nation was for about three years enthralled with these lovebirds as they cut a lawless streak across the nation. Publishing Bonnie Parker’s poems newspapers, magazines, and films painted a picture of two romantic people looking for adventure in the gray days of the Depression.

In this time of hardship, with nearly 25% unemployed and banks foreclosing on farms and houses people were desperate and a cloud of gloom overtook the nation. Escape was found in musicals and Shirley Temple movies, Micky Mouse became an icon at this time too. The novels of John Steinbeck dramatize this era and the films by James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson gave the people a chance to see the institutions they blamed for much of thier troubles be on the receiving end of trouble for a change. But justice would win in the end, for as Bonnie said in her famous poem, The Trials End:

but they do not ignore

that death is the wages of sin

While the couple provided entertainment for a while, the shootings of Texas Highway patrolmen H. D. Murphy and E. B. Wheeler on April 1, 1934 would end this romance and start the chain of events that led to the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde in Louisiana on May 23, 1934. Gunned down by a group of lawmen who had been hired by the Texas state prison system, in response to Clyde’s raid on Eastham Prison freeing several imates andkilling one guard. The killing of the patrolmen, like the St Valentine’s Massacre by Al Capone, set inot the motion the events that ended the crime spree of a pair of lovers that many had seen as a couple of romantic kids gone bad.

Myth is a strong force in history, what people think happens is many times more important than what actually did happen. Myth and legend elevated Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn and transformed it into a major battle, the the second most written about battle in US history (Gettysburg is the first). So it was with Bonnie and Clyde, myths would transform them from second rate crooks into the romantic couple of crime.

Songs would star this transformation, beginning with Dwight Boltcher’s Clyde and Bonnie Parker (RCA) released on May 28, 1934. Country stars like Merl Haggard (The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde: Capital ST 2912), New Vaudeville Band ( The Bonnie and Clyde Fontana F1612), Stone Country ( Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde RCA Victor LPM/LSP 3958), Jimmie Skinner (The Story of Bonnie and Clyde BP poem), and Flatt &Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers ( Songs & Sounds from the Bonnie & Clyde Era Starday SLP423) elevated this criminal duo into a romantic legend. (see ” Hillbilly and Older Styles of Country Music” by Norman Cohen The Journal of American Folklore: Jan-March 1970 #327).

Several films also portrayed this dynamic duo culminating in the classic 1967 film. Thus it was with Bonnie Parker, who looked nothing like Faye Dunaway, nor did she lead the romantic life of a highway woman, became the sultry idea of the gun moll. Described by Barbara Holland in her book, They Went Whistling- Women Wayfarers, Warrior, Runaways, and Renegades (Pantheon Books, NY 2001), as:

She was a pretty little thing, just five foot tall and ninety pounds, with strawberry blond curls, dimples, and a lightly freckled nose. (page 77)

Bonnie had been a good student in school and winning several essay, poetry, and spelling contest as well as being in the chorus. Confident and outgoing Bonnie complained in her diary that she wished something would happen. With limited opportunities in West Dallas, she felt trapped in a life that she hated. To escape it she tried marriage, to Ray Thornton when she was sixteen. Soon the marriage ended, Thornton was convicted of murder and sent off to prison, Bonnie never divorced him, she thought that would be bad form, but never spoke much of him again.

Bonnie was in Holland’s words (page 77) “a moody little girl, a poetry-reader, a romantic, a type of child unfamiliar now but common enough in the early years of the twentieth century; a child for whom adulthood loomed hideous with boredom and respectability.” She saw herself more like a doomed heroine in a Sir Walter Scott novel or the doomed princess in The Idylls of the King, Bonnie saw herself not as a waitress, factory worker or maid grinding out life with a drunk or absent husband and several children. She saw herself as one who willing would die for love like Barby Allen or Hethcliff’s Cathy. She saw herself being the heroine in “Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,” where she saved her love by muffing the bell that tolled the curfew.

What was Bonnie’s allure, what made her the object of so much attention. She was a woman in what was basically a man’s world. Without Bonnie, Clyde is nothing but a petty crook who knocked off gas stations and small stores. Wildly incompetent they were often ridiculed by the bigger gangsters of the time. Two things help keep these two from obscurity, ( the one thing Napoleon said was forever). First were the pictures found after their escape from Joplin Missouri, the most famous shows a gun toting Bonnie leaning against a car with a cigar in her mouth. A picture Parker hated and many times told hostages upon release to tell the people she did not smoke cigars. Teh second was her poetry, where gave an insight into the mind of this Depression era girl.

Bonnie’s poetry may provide one with a glimpse into the mind of this young villain, whose showmanship and love of publicity may have made her a good villain on the old Batman show. The poems show a certain fatalism and cynical outlook on life. this may have been the result of the grinding poverty of West Dallas. Girls from what was known as Cement City were regulated to jobs and futures of the lower classes along with all the horrors and degradations that come with that. For example, in 1933 her sister Billie Jean lost both of her children, daughter Jackie and son Buddy, to illness. Typhoid and pneumonia was rampant in West Dallas and many children lost their lives to these scourges. Like many famlies in this area, the grief from this caused Bonnie to drink heavily. She may never gotten over the deaths of her nice and nephew.

A bright girl with dreams may have been crushed by the realities of lower class Dallas. She may have turned to crime to escape this and find the adventure she so craved. One thing is sure, she loved Clyde and stayed with him even when her family and Clyde himself tried to get her to turn herself in. A future as a low class waitress or line worker held no promise to Bonnie Parker. She may have become an actress or poet had she lived in New York or Hollywood, but she was stuck in West Dallas with no money or prospects. A scenario that made life n the road and an early death appealing.

In his book, Go Down Together, The True Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, (Simon & Shuster NY 2009) Jeff Guinn hints (pages 51 and 116) that Bonnie may have engaged in prostitution. This is disputed , but in West Dallas a girl who loved make up and fine clothes might be tempted to earn some extra money through sex, it a a scenario that still exist today. If Bonnie had done this, it is not anything against her, it may have been a common practice and one had to do what one could to get by.

The hard side of life was seen in her poems, with mentions of drugs, prostitution, crime, and death floating throughout all her poems. They are fatalistic and seldom show any kind of hope. Reading like a John Steinbeck novel, the poems detail life for those whom the Depression had started long before 1929.

In the “Prostitutes Convention” (which some dispute that she wrote) Bonnie details names and street corners of Dallas hookers. It begins echiong her more famous poem about her and Clyde:

You heard of big “conventions”,

And theres some you can’t forget,

But get this straight, there’s none so great,

As when the “prostitutes” met.

This poem tells about the prostitutes of Dallas and thier drug of choice, sweet morphine. Not only does she name names but identifies street corners that they worked. How did Bonnie know of this, one way is they could have been patrons at the restaurant she worked at. She was always described a a very friendly and open person who may have befriended many of the working girls. These girls had “all done time” and “took a “pop” of “Sweet Morphine,” and may have found the petit Bonnie a good friend. Whether she had personal knowledge of this lifestyle or had only heard about it is a mystery, but it is not out of charater that she would have dabbled in the world’s oldest profession. In reading her poems one also sees that along with a love of adventure, Bonnie love quotation marks and used them often in her poems.

You don’t what to marry me,Honey,

Though just to hear you ask me is sweet;

If you did you’d regret it tomorrow

For I’m only a girl of the street.

Time was when I’d gladly have listened,

Before I was tainted with shame,

But it wouldn’t be fair to you, Honey,

Men laugh when they mention my name.

This is the beginning of her poem, “The Street Girl,” and might have been written to the unnamed boyfriend she had while Clyde was at Eastham, the one she left as soon as Clyde returned. Or maybe she just wanted to explain why some girls do not go with boys who are normal. The poem goes on to describe how a good girl from a Nebraska farm, came to wrong in the city. Falling into the bad crowd she is lead down a path that disqualifies her for any relationship with a decent man.

She goes on to lament the fact that while men are able to reform, women are branded for life. In a haunting verse Bonnie laments:

Don’t spring that old gag of reforming,

A girl hardly ever comes back,

Too many are eager and waiting

To guide her feet off the track.

A man can break every commandment,

And the world will still lend him a hand,

Yet, a girl that has loved, but un-wisely

Is an outcast all over the land.

In the last verse the unnamed woman thanks her suitor for the proposal and describes herself as a “poor branded woman” who cannot escape her past. The last line is almost a motto for Bonnie in her relationship with Clyde as the poem concludes:

But I’ll stick it out now till the last.

Bonnie may have seen herself as one who has cast her lot and now must play out the deal till the end, and she would do that.

Along these same lines Bonnie’s more famous poem “Suicide Sal” also tells a story of a good girl gone bad. It is the longest of Bonnie’s poems and one of her first. Written while she was in jail and maybe feeling that Clyde had abandoned her it tells a story of a farm girl from Wyoming who fell in love with a gangster from Chicago. After reading the poem her mother Emma Parker was disturbed and fearful for her daughter. She later wrote in Fugitives: “It was clear from the numerous quotations used in the poem that Bonnie was learning the jargon of gangdom, and striving desperately to fit into it and become part of it. I realized that I am not learned in such matters, but to my inner consciousness there seemed to be a strange and terrifying change taking place in the mind of my child.” (Guinn, page 110) While Emma Parker always blamed Clyde for corrupting Bonnie, Guinn suggest that these poems are proof that maybe these thoughts had already entered girl’s mind.

Claire Bond Potter asserts in an article in Feminist Studies (“I’ll go the Limit and Then Some: Gun Molls, Desire and Danger in the 1930s” 1995 58-59) that this poem shows how the bandit code of honor had ingrained itself into Bonnie’s psyche and she now viewed honesty and virtue as nothing more than meaningless qualities assigned by those in power. Bonnie also laments that money and lawyers are of no use “When Uncle Sam starts “shaking you down.” She wrote this and about ten others during her time in jail for participating in a jailbreak that got Clyde out of jail in Cedar Creek. The rest of the poems also convey the fatalistic life of one who may not have much hope in the future. She like fellow Texan, Janice Joplin, may have seen freedom as “just another word for nothing left to lose.”

The poem ends with Sal getting out of prison and killing her wayward boyfriend and his new gal pal and later she herself was gunned down by members of his gang. There were few happy endings in West Dallas.

Bonnie’s most famous poem is her last one, The Trail’s End, in which she writes of her life with Clyde. It begins relating their little gang to Clyde’s hero Jesse James:

You’ve read the story of Jesse James

of how he lived and died.

If you’re still in need;

of something to read,

here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

The next few verses tell how they are not as mean as they are portrayed and protest that many crimes attributed to them are false. Bonnie proclaims that she “knew Clyde when he was honest and upright ands clean.” Then in reference to his treatment by Dallas police and his rape at the Eastham prison (which many said turned Clyde “from a school boy to a rattlesnake” and made him vicious killer) she blames the “law” for making him bad. She goes on to describe her trackers as men who “wouldn’t give up till they died.” As for her and Clyde, “they know they can never be free.”

She tells of the people in West Dallas who feel:

From heart-break some people have suffered

from weariness some people have died.

But take it all in all;

our troubles are small,

till we get like Bonnie and Clyde.

She goes on to assert that except for the Lindbergh kidnapping and a jailbreak by Pretty boy Floyd in Kansas City all crimes are attributed to them, because the law cannot, or will not find, the real criminals. She goes on to describe the media mentality as :

A newsboy once said to his buddy;

“I wish old Clyde would get jumped.

In these awfull hard times;

we’d make a few dimes,

if five or six cops would get bumped.”

Bonnie shows a sense of humor as she says that her and Clyde are “joining the NRA” and giving up crime. She then laments the lives of the people in West Dallas, of whom she feels that they will not turn her in. She also speaks of the West Dallas viaduct, that later becomes the site of the Kennedy assassination.

The peom concludes with her fatalistic prophesey that the law will win in the end. She told her family at many meetings not to think of tomarrow, just be happy for today. She concludes:

They don’t think they’re to smart or desperate

they know the law always wins.

They’ve been shot at before;

but they do not ignore,

that death is the wadges of sin.

Some day they will go down together

they’ll bury them side by side.

To few it’ll be grief,

to the law a relief

but it’s death to Bonnie and Clyde.

On May 22 1934, 15 year old Robert Brunson stumbled into a campsite looking for his dog. There he ran into Bonnie and Clyde, after a short conversation he had his picture taken with Bonnie. He later related that he thought Bonnie was sweet, as many people did, but he was afraid of Clyde, whom many described as sullen. He asked Bonnie to drop him a card as they left, but that would never happen. Around nine AM Bonnie and Clyde were driving on a back road in Louisiana where they ran into a six man posse who ended the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie’s autopsy recorded that she had been hit with 52 bullets, mistakenly called pistol shots. On her possession was 2 diamond rings, a gold wedding ring (all on her left hand), a 3 acorn broach and a Catholic cross around her neck. She was wearing a red dress, which was usual for her, and matching shoes. On her upper right thigh she had a tattoo (two hearts pierced by an arrow, Roy on the right and Bonnie on the left) 6″ above her right knee. She had a gunshot wound near her hairline 1 1/2″ above her eye, one to the left side of her face that exited out of the top of the skull, another just below the left jaw. Bullets had pincered her left clavicle, shoulder arm (braking the bone) in the joint, in left Brest 4″ below armpit. These wounds had broken her ribs. More were in her left shoulder and 5 in her left thigh. Glass cuts were running down her left leg and ankle. The scar from her burn, occurring in an earlier accident that had left her crippled, 6″ length and 3 1/2″ width outer center of the right thigh and another, 6″ x 4,” from her outer right knee to the inner thigh. Bullet wounds on the right knee and mid thigh. her first and middle finger on her right had was shot off. (Carroll Rich, “The Atropsy of Bonnie and Clyde” Western Folklore vol 29 no 1 Jan 1970 page 27-33)

Crowds gathered round the dead couple, trying collect souvenirs, much like people would dip handkerchiefs in the blood of the beheaded in earlier times. They tore at Bonnie’s dress and hair and one tried to cut off Clyde’s ear. Crowds followed them to the coroners and later thousands attend their funeral in Dallas. They were not buried together, Bonnie’s mom would not allow that. A reporter had overheard Frank Hamer say, Well they died with their hands on their guns.” ( Actuaslly this was not true, the couple were surprised and killed before they had a chance to respond. Bonnie did scream when the first shots were fired, so she did know what was happening, but she died within minutes of the first volley.) Barbara Holland said that Bonnie would have loved that. She would have worked into a poem. (Holland page 89).

In the end Bonnie Parker may have been the victim of her time, but she had ample opportunities to walk away from Clyde, he had even promised to write a letter claiming that she had no active part in any of the crimes. Texas and Southern juries were notoriously lenient with women and she may have gotten off with a jail term. Records indicate that Clyde was killed with the first shot, and maybe if the lawmen had tried, they could have taken Bonnie alive. But there was a problem, Henry Methvin had been promised a pardon to give up the criminals and he had pulled the trigger at the murder of the two Texas Highway Patrolman. That could have been embarrassing for all concerned, and may have been behind Frank Hamer’s shooting Bonnie after the ambush was over. Whatever the motive on that day, one of America’s legends was killed and created.