My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (28 page)

Clarence Coffey, wounded in the Red Crown shoot-out and one of Blanche’s many visitors in prison. (Photograph by Blanche Barrow, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

Apparently, the night of her arrival at the state prison Blanche Barrow underwent the first of a long series of procedures designed to save her injured eye. Warden J. M. Sanders had arranged for Dr. Stanley Howard, described as a Jefferson City specialist, to treat the eye. According to Blanche, Howard removed some glass from her eye, adding that it hurt for some time afterward. She also stated that the doctor and prison officials had been very nice to her.
7

Indeed, Blanche told a number of people that her time in prison was not at all unpleasant, certainly not the type of experience her brother-in-law Clyde Barrow had endured in Texas. However, less than a year later Blanche Barrow did make a cryptic reference to the contrary in one letter, apparently following a change of prison personnel. “Things are better here now than they were before,” she wrote her mother, “these people see that we have plenty
to eat.”
8
The people to whom Blanche refers were a retired couple from Nodaway County, Missouri, a former state representative named William Job and his wife. Because of what appeared to be a genuine concern for the women under their watch, they were referred to by Blanche Barrow and her fellow inmates as “Uncle Billy” and “Aunt Clara.” Blanche kept greeting cards from them in one of her scrapbooks all her life.

The Missouri State Penitentiary for Women, Camp 1. (Photograph by Blanche Barrow, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

Nevertheless, despite better leadership, there were other concerns at the Missouri State Women’s Prison. The facility was quarantined at least two times because of confirmed cases of smallpox and flu, the former being serious enough but the latter had killed hundreds of thousands worldwide just fifteen years earlier. Weather could be a concern as well. The summer of 1934 was the hottest on record in Missouri, with temperatures reaching triple digits day after day. “The heat came up from the highways in shimmering waves,” wrote one historian, “like a mirage on a desert.” In addition, the winters could be equally extreme. In one of her letters to her mother, Blanche mentions condensation freezing to the walls of her room at night, and occasionally she had stop writing to sweep melted droplets from the ceiling.
9

Blanche Barrow was assigned to Camp 1, the “women’s prison.” The camp was located in Jefferson City, Missouri, on a high bluff overlooking the
Missouri River. A two-story stucco building with a prairie-style wooden front porch housed the eighty or so inmates. There Blanche Barrow found both the matrons in charge and the other convicts around her friendly and easygoing.
10
She was certainly one of the most notorious residents at the camp, but a few others were equally well known and most were a good deal more dangerous. One woman had murdered her abusive husband in a high-profile case. Another, convicted killer Irene McCann, was known for her spectacular jailbreaks. Edna Murray, whom Blanche befriended early on, was the infamous “Kissing Bandit.” Most of the other women, like Blanche, were serving time largely because of their love for the wrong man. Still others were drug dealers or addicts.

Blanche Barrow and her prison buddy Edna Murray, “the Kissing Bandit.” (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

Indeed, contraband drugs were a major commodity in the women’s prison. While Blanche was incarcerated there, a well-marked, foot-worn path was found leading from the river to a hole beneath the fence around the compound. Prison officials promptly constructed a second perimeter fence between the river and the first fence in an attempt to stop the flow of drugs and other items.
11

Blanche, still interested in photography, had her mother send her a camera, which she used throughout her prison term to record the images of those
around her, the keepers as well as the kept. Some of the snapshots were mailed to friends; others wound up in her scrapbooks.

In October, the eye bandage was removed. Initially Blanche could barely see. However, by the end of the month her vision was improving, and she had had her “front teeth fixed.” By December, though, she was bedridden for a week with severe eye pain. The eye was bandaged again. Blanche could only work sporadically as a kitchen helper because of recurring problems with her eye. Her condition did not improve and in January 1934, she was moved to the main prison hospital where she remained at least through March. The following month she was prescribed a topical medicine that she described as feeling like “liquid fire.” Moreover, more than once in her letters she mentioned having to stop writing because of eye fatigue and pain. The following December, Blanche described her eye as being as bad as before the first operation. A year later, she was experiencing enough pain to cause her to be confined to bed once again. On January 29, 1936, she reported that her eye had swollen shut and that the specialist had informed her there was not a doctor in the country who could save it.
12

Early in 1936, some members of the State of Missouri Board of Probation and Parole expressed interest in taking Blanche Barrow to another specialist in St. Louis, but apparently it came to nothing. She would eventually suffer complete loss of vision in the injured eye. Years later Blanche would lay blame for being denied access to the second specialist squarely on Harry S. Truman, then the junior U.S. Senator from Missouri. The reason for Truman’s alleged action—or inaction—is not known, nor is there any hard evidence to support the claim, but Blanche remained convinced throughout her life that he had something to do with the inevitable loss of her eye. Blanche also stated that Truman was frequently the topic of conversation among prison officials, all of whom thought at the time he was being groomed for the White House.
13

Throughout this period, Blanche Barrow spent an unknown number of hours hunched over a school tablet cathartically recording her memories of the brief but intense time she spent on the run with Bonnie and Clyde, W. D. Jones, and her dead husband.

When she was well enough she canned vegetables in the prison kitchen. In her spare time, apart from writing, she began reading as best she could, mostly movie magazines and self-help books at first, but then her interests broadened to subjects ranging from etiquette to reincarnation.
14
She also started keeping scrapbooks in prison. Eventually her collections filled six
known notebooks, the first of which bore a hand-lettered inscription on the inside cover: “News of the Dead—News of the Living Dead”.

Blanche Barrow in prison. Note injured eye. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

These books, which Blanche apparently continued to add to well into the 1960s, are filled with a variety of items. There are stamps, some from as far away as New Zealand, photographs, cartoons, poems clipped from the newspapers and magazines, self-help affirmations and beauty tips, an article titled “How to Be a Charming Companion,” and holiday greeting cards from a number of different people ranging from friends, strangers, and relatives to people like Katherine Stark, Missouri’s first lady, the family of the commissioner of the Missouri state penitentiary system, and even Sheriff Holt Coffey and his wife. The latter, a Christmas card, begins, “Darling little girl,” and is signed, “Ma and Pa, Mr. and Mrs. Holt Coffey.”

Blanche’s father sent her a packet of postcards from Chicago. He also sent her several humorous cards, including a Christmas card collaboration with his ex-wife, Blanche’s mother, which depicts part of someone’s rear end poking out from behind a flap on the card. When the flap is opened, it reveals a naked Santa Claus standing in a tub fumbling with a towel. The caption reads: “Who’s Behind—All This Merry Christmas Business Anyway?”

Lyrics to
“Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,”
written in Blanche Barrow’s hand. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

In letters, she mentioned listening to a lot of “good new music” on the radio as well as a number of old songs that reminded her of Buck, although she was not specific.
15
Her scrapbooks, however, contain a substantial number of song lyrics, mostly clipped from newspapers. Among the selections she liked well enough to save were “Vote for Roosevelt Again,” “Mexicali Rose,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “The Prisoner’s Song,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Flirtation Walk,” and “Ain’t We Crazy?” just to name a few. She also copied in her own hand the lyrics to one of the most popular big-band tunes of the day,
“Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen,”
an old Yiddish folk song reworked for Benny Goodman’s orchestra by trumpeter Ziggy Elman and sung by the Andrews Sisters.

There were occasional dances at the main prison compound with live bands as well as holiday dinners, activities that Blanche greatly enjoyed. In her scrapbooks, she placed an autographed promotional photograph of one visiting band, The Rural Ramblers. They were a five-piece group that specialized in western swing and featured a vocalist, fiddle, guitar, banjo, and bass.

Blanche loved to dance and by all accounts she was very good at it. She applied to a correspondence course in dancing that came complete with
diagrams of select dance steps to place on the floor and practice. She also cut similar dance instructions and diagrams from newspapers and magazines and put them in her scrapbooks. By 1937, she had mastered popular dances like the jitterbug, rumba, samba, and tango.
16

The men’s prison, or “the big prison” as the women called it, hosted movies on Friday nights. Features like
Roll Along Cowboy
with Smith Ballew, Cecilia Parker, and Stamford Fields were standard, usually accompanied by some short musical feature such as
Who’s Who
and a newsreel. The admission was five cents. Blanche attended many of these movies. She loved movies all of her life. Her scrapbooks are full of pictures and articles about movie stars like Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, William Powell, Jean Harlow, Betty Davis, and Shirley Temple.

Blanche Barrow’s periodic visits to the main prison allowed her to fraternize with males. She apparently had a brief encounter of some kind with “the boy in the warden’s office” in the fall of 1934. There are few details, but their relationship was evidently ended abruptly by prison officials in December.
17