JOHN S DOYLEpreviews Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and ClydeBy Jeff Guinn Simon Schuster 467pp, £14.99
THE HISTORY of Bonnie and Clyde is a short one: it covers just over two years, from March 1932, when Bonnie Parker joined Clyde Barrow’s gang, to May 1934, when they died together in a storm of gunfire that lasted 16 seconds. They had first met in January 1930, both aged 19.
She was from Cement City, where, as we are told, “the stink of industrial fumes clung to skin and hair”; he was from neighbouring West Dallas, “the worst slum in Texas”, known on the east side of the river as the Devil’s Back Porch.
This was a time when 40 per cent of all Americans lived on farms, and a quarter of the farms were worked by tenants.
Clyde’s father Henry’s livelihood as a tenant farmer in East Texas collapsed with the price of cotton after the first World War, and the family moved to campgrounds on the outskirts of Dallas, sleeping under the wagon which Henry used during the day to collect scrap.
Bonnie’s mother was a few rungs up the social ladder, having married a brick mason, but when he died she went to work in an overalls factory to support her three young children.
Emma Parker and Clyde’s “hard shell” Baptist mother, Cumie, are almost as important in Jeff Guinn’s telling of this remarkable story as are their gangster offspring. And a constant theme is the fugitive pair’s frequent return to see their families.
We know the Bonnie and Clyde outline from Arthur Penn’s fine film of that name, made in 1967, a time when anti-establishment values coincided with wild west nostalgia and a fondness for soft-focus photography. But the real story, as skilfully untangled by Guinn from a great variety of sources, including his own numerous interviews (there’s a good index and copious notes), is more complicated, and more interesting.
These were not beautiful people, though they insisted on dressing well and Bonnie was “pretty when she fixed herself up”, according to Clyde’s sister; besides she had a way of charming people, from little boys to old detectives.
Both were on the short side, and as gangsters they were inept, apart from Clyde’s skill in stealing cars and driving them at high speed over great distances, and his cool head for getting out of ambushes. Certainly their fellow criminal Pretty Boy Floyd wanted nothing to do with them, and John Dillinger dismissed them as “a couple of kids stealing grocery money”.
The public’s fascination with the pair owes as much to the shock of certain ruthless encounters and the titillating presence of a woman in the gang as to the embellishments of reporters and of “the laws”, local officials who frequently were not paid except for results. The author sets the context well. It is not that the Depression and the dust bowl made these two people what they were – Guinn is clear that it was their choice, and that of course not everyone who suffered the same deprivation ended up a gangster.
But with the details – such as the early harassment of Clyde by police over minor matters, his sentence to a prison-farm hellhole for 14 years on robbery charges, his murder of a prisoner who had repeatedly raped him, and the sense that because of the electric chair there was no chance of redeeming a serious crime – comes an understanding of how this tragic story started. Guinn’s book brings to vivid life a couple whose only end was death.
John S Doyle is a freelance journalist
