My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (2 page)

Shortly after Blanche and I got together again, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. A longtime smoker, Blanche had finally quit, but it was too late. I had always felt that God must have had something special in mind when Blanche and I chanced to meet way back in 1952. Suddenly I knew what it was. My children were grown. I was on my own. Therefore, it was possible for me to help care for Blanche during her last illness.

During that period, I came to know Bonnie’s sister Billie; Billie’s husband A. B. Moon; and Rhea Leen, who was the daughter of Buster Parker but who had been raised by Billie Jean. These people cared for Blanche. They were a group of people possessed of a tremendous sense of family love and loyalty. Billie’s husband, in particular, must occupy a special place in heaven. He was so good to those two old ladies, Blanche and Billie, both of whom could be very cantankerous and demanding, and yet at other times so much fun to be around. All of this helped me to understand a different side of the Bonnie and Clyde saga.

Much time has passed. Blanche, Billie, and A. B. are all gone now. I think of them often. I am grateful to have been included in their family circle.

When Blanche died in 1988, I was named executor of her estate, such as it was. Blanche really had very few material possessions. My task was largely to make sure that debts were paid, papers were filed, and the other assorted loose ends of her life were attended to.

On the advice of my lawyer, I held on to a number of Blanche’s records, just in case something ever came up. Nothing ever did, and twelve years later, I still had all of those documents boxed up and stored in my garage. I asked my lawyer if it would be all right to discard some of those items. I was told that enough time had passed and that some housecleaning would be appropriate.

I started going through all the boxes, making sure I was not about to toss something important. That is when I discovered Blanche’s handwritten account of the time she and Buck Barrow had spent in the company of Bonnie and Clyde. It was almost thrown into the trash.

The account was written on an Empire Writing Tablet No. F-1024 on lined paper 8½ by 11 inches. Blanche had placed this tablet inside a large (8½-by-11) colorful Christmas card. It shows two ice-skaters on a moonlit night with a lovely home and church in the background. All is lit by a full moon, smoke is coming out of the chimney, and a horse-drawn sleigh is seen by the shore. Inside, the card reads:

Christmas Greetings to the One I Love:
I’m sending you at Christmas time my love across the sea,
and I hope that you shall hold a place in your dear heart for me.
Though time and distance part us, our love shall always be secure
in all its blessings which it holds for you and me.
”

On the back, written in ink in Blanche’s hand are the words “written in 1933 or 34 & 35 Part of my story with the Barrow gang. Blanche Barrow.”

I wonder if she was thinking of Buck when she wrote those words and put them in that particular card.

Because I knew that Blanche would have wanted this story told to a wider audience and because I knew of his earlier work with the Bonnie and Clyde saga, I turned Blanche’s handwritten “memoir” over to John Neal Phillips, asking him to prepare it for publication. I am glad I did.

The Blanche I knew was the antithesis of the young girl blinded by love and caught up in the tragedy of Bonnie and Clyde. She was a gardener, a lover of all creatures (whether animal or human), a builder of churches, and yes, even a Sunday school teacher. Indeed, she made certain all her Sunday school pupils left her class with their own Bible. She told me that the only thing she ever stole was a Gideon Bible from a tourist court and she wanted to be sure that none of her “kids” would have to steal a Bible. Blanche gave each of them one as they were promoted to the next class.

Blanche also had a wonderful sense of humor, Billie Jean too, something they both kept right up to the end. They were a regular comedy team. I am certain they are keeping St. Peter busy. Moreover, he had better watch out! If he ever turns his back on those two, they just might open up heaven’s pearly gates and let everybody in!

E
STHER
L. W
EISER

Editor’s Preface

T
HE FIRST TIME
I ever heard the names Bonnie and Clyde was from my father. Sometime around the age of ten, as a result of watching the television series
The Untouchables
, I became interested in the outlaws of the 1920s and 1930s. My father had lived in Chicago during the period of Al Capone and Elliot Ness and used to regale me with his memories of those days. (He lived around the corner from the location of the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.) Interspersed with tales of Chicago would be the names of other outlaws and lawmen of the day, Bonnie and Clyde among them. In my adolescent reality, I found myself mildly interested in a couple who would die together as outlaws rather than live apart.

This initial, admittedly superficial contact with America in the early part of the twentieth century nevertheless left me with something I have found eminently useful throughout my life, the knowledge that the record of a given event may not necessarily be an accurate account of that event. Because my father’s memory of Chicago often differed greatly from what was being portrayed on the small screen—and it was
his
take on things that he announced loudly and clearly—I suddenly became acutely aware of the possibility of misinterpreted facts, or in some cases a complete lack of facts, especially in the hands of the entertainment industry. Since then, I have tried never to take for granted any record of fact. I know that accounts can vary and that secondary sources sometimes misinterpret details from their primary sources, and that even primary sources can leave one’s head spinning because of the differences, sometimes significant, that arise from multiple accounts of the very same incident. Any historian attempting to reconstruct the past will encounter this, but the problems of sifting through the lives of a pair of intensely hunted outlaws such as Bonnie and Clyde are enormous. Not only were the fugitives and their inner circle secretive by the very nature of their existence, but the legions of law enforcement officials tracking them were secretive as well. Such a trait opens the door to the substitution of speculation, folklore, and misinformation for sound fact, some of which has been accepted for decades. Almost everyone dealing with this subject, myself included, has fallen victim to this very common phenomenon, common at least when dealing with Bonnie and Clyde. Therefore, I consider the publication of the memoir of Blanche Caldwell Barrow a major moment for students of the subject.

One may ask why we should care about the brief, tragic lives of a pair of Texans who wrought so much pain and suffering on so many innocent people. Some even complain that to discuss them or other criminals does nothing more than glorify them. However, when placed in the larger context of the socioeconomic times of the Great Depression, coupled with other factors like the culture of the Texas prison system, named the worst such institution in the nation in 1935, and the seductive nature of crime in general, there is much to be learned. If we view history as the collective memory of society, enabling us to progress into the future without encountering the same foibles that plagued our forebears, then we realize that every aspect of the past holds lessons. If we wish to eradicate crime, or at least gain control of it, then we should make a serious study of all criminals, especially Bonnie and Clyde, a couple who were not motivated in the least by money or greed, but by revenge. In his great work,
Life of Reason
, philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I do not think anyone would deny that society stands to benefit from examining its collective memory, its history, regarding crime and criminal behavior.

My boyhood fascination with underworld events, as filtered through my father, subsided as I came of age, but my interest in history did not. In college I lived overseas on a scholarship and studied firsthand the very places where society was born thousands of years ago. However, in 1980, I came back to outlaws. In that year, Andre L. Gorzell and I co-authored an essay about Bonnie Parker for the book
Legendary Ladies of Texas
(E-Heart Press, 1980). The essay was really rather inauspicious, but it led to my being introduced to former Barrow gang member Ralph Fults, who in turn introduced me to a host of others who knew Bonnie and Clyde, including Clyde’s sister Marie and his sister-in-law Blanche Caldwell Barrow. The result was my book,
Running with Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults
(University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).

Because I was privileged enough to have interviewed Blanche Barrow while conducting research for
Running with Bonnie and Clyde
, it was with particular pleasure that I accepted Esther Weiser’s invitation to edit and annotate her memoir. Apart from Blanche Barrow, only Esther ever knew of the memoir’s existence, and even she forgot about it until twelve years after the author’s death. Perhaps the manuscript’s rather caustic observations about some of the people toward whom Blanche later became very close kept her from pursuing its publication, or even revealing its existence. We may never know about that. However, concerning the value of history and the lessons to be learned from every story, even that of Bonnie and Clyde, we find a tangible thread throughout the memoir—the wholly unromantic, tension-filled life of a fugitive on the run.

Blanche Caldwell Barrow is not objective at all in her record. Hers is a most subjective viewpoint. Nevertheless, therein lies the value of her story. Her observations of those around her during her time on the run are often unflattering, usually poignant, and always from the gut. There’s a sense of gritty reality throughout, with very little joy sprinkled here and there amidst long periods of grueling travels punctuated by brief periods of life-threatening activity—certainly not the stuff of romance and folklore. If ever there was a statement of the seductions and ultimate futility of crime, this is it!

Helping young girls understand the circumstances that drew the daughter of an Oklahoma farmer and part-time preacher into the netherworld of Clyde and Buck Barrow was the apparent driving force behind this document. There is also an aspect of self-examination coupled with an overall tone of explanation, perhaps directed to her father, Matt Caldwell. However, Blanche states that the intent of her memoir was to illustrate the ease with which one can become mired and very nearly consumed by some social aberration such as a life of crime, or in her case a few months of crime, a very intense few months of crime.

This was exactly what happened to Ralph Fults, who characterized his descent into juvenile delinquency and his later adult criminal behavior with the likes of Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton as initially a game. Nevertheless, it did not take long for that game to become serious business. Before he knew it he was in way over his head, and although he eventually straightened himself out, the residue of that youthful “game,” as he called it, stayed with him all of his life. Certainly, such was the same for Blanche. Those few months on the run followed her wherever she went for the remainder of her nearly seventy-eight years.

In some ways one can see that Blanche Caldwell Barrow was a victim, blinded to reality by her deep, intense love for Buck Barrow, Clyde Barrow’s older brother. Of Blanche’s abiding loyalty to her husband, a loyalty that would lead to her involvement in robbery, murder, and a life on the run during the spring and summer of 1933, W. D. Jones, a friend and accomplice, would later observe, “I never knew love could be so strong.”

On the other hand, Blanche later admitted to her own complicity in the events leading to her husband’s death and her own imprisonment. “Clyde never held a gun to my head,” she said in a 1984 interview. “I was there because I wanted to be.” Moreover, she was quite aware of Buck’s background before she married him. She even spoke of accompanying Buck on robberies before his voluntary return to prison on December 27, 1931.

Having heard these things from Blanche herself, I was somewhat surprised by the overall tone of her memoir. Throughout she maintains initial ignorance of Buck’s criminal activity and paints her dead husband as an unwilling participant in nearly everything that happened between April 13 and July 29, 1933. Even as she is relating how Buck told her of killing an Arkansas town marshal, she follows by stating that Buck “loved life and hated to take it.”

Blanche also casts herself as a vehemently unwilling participant in the violence and robberies. However, while it may be true that she never handled a weapon, witnesses still saw her on at least two occasions helping Buck and Clyde flee from the scene of bank robberies, perhaps even firing a weapon during one of those escapades. She also said later that she was not exactly the picture of wide-eyed innocence she was supposed to be. In addition, of the hysterical portrayal of her in the 1967 Warren Beatty-Faye Dunaway film,
Bonnie and Clyde
, Blanche said, “That movie made me out like a screaming horse’s ass!” Yet, that is exactly how she portrays herself in her own memoir. Such is also the case in Jan Fortune’s book
Fugitives
and in the unpublished memoir of Clyde’s mother, Cumie Barrow. However, all three manuscripts were written at a time when Blanche could have easily been charged with murder, among other crimes. Indeed, the threat of a murder charge hung over Blanche all her life. No doubt this was on her mind as she began composing her memoir in her room at Camp 1 of the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1933 and may account for the discrepancy in its overall tone when compared with her later statements. Nevertheless, in many ways the Blanche of this memoir is not the same Blanche I interviewed in 1984.

The memoir appears to be a first draft, evidently never progressing to more polished stages. It is very raw. The author was not unintelligent by any means—I found her sharp-witted, thoughtful, and articulate—but she was not very well educated. The original manuscript, written in longhand on a school tablet, contains little punctuation, nearly all of which is very irregular. Throughout the text, there are numerous dots, which at first may be taken as an overuse of periods. However, because of the injuries she sustained in the Platte City, Missouri, battle of July 19, 1933, it is likely the author was placing her pencil on the line she was working on whenever she paused or looked away from the page so she would not lose her place. One can imagine her hunched over her tablet, inches from the page, focusing her one “good” eye on her work, no doubt with limited success. Still, there are other difficulties with the memoir.