Pretty Boy Floyd told his wife not to help them when they were
on the run and desperate. “Master criminal John Dillinger
dismissed Clyde and Bonnie as ‘a couple of kids stealing
grocery money.’” Within a couple of years, four
notorious outlaws would be dead. But only one, Bonnie Parker, had
written a poem predicting her death and correctly foreseeing that
she and Clyde Barrow would “go down together” --- a
foreboding they had shared for most of their brief life
together.
Bonnie was a cute, sassy teen who longed for fame and attention.
Clyde, like Bonnie, came from the poorest of “white
trash” families in the hopeless desolation of West Dallas in
the early Depression years. When they met, they both knew that fate
had flung them together and their lives would be linked until death
did them part. In the meantime, they chose to cling together as
well-dressed high-profile thieves and occasional murderers (though
no killing was ever linked to Bonnie) --- a life on the run, often
sleeping in fields and eating takeout dinners in their stolen cars.
Both had a way with words. Bonnie wrote numerous poems, and Clyde
at the height of his notoriety sent an elegantly phrased missive to
Henry Ford, praising his V-8 sedan as the criminal’s choice,
with a hint of literary irony --- “I have drove Fords
exclusively when I could get away with one.” One senses,
after reading this exhaustively researched and dramatic biography,
that either of these young people --- smart, energetic, burning
with ambition --- could have achieved much if they had not been
dragged early into the shadowy lowlife.
For Clyde it started with petty theft of chickens, but he soon
graduated to cars, and that was perhaps his best skill.
Limelight-hungry Bonnie may have resorted to occasional
prostitution in her zeal for money, makeup and men, but once she
joined up with Clyde she took on all the trappings of a
cold-hearted moll, faithful to her man to the bitter end. Clyde
killed his first man as a teenager, bludgeoning a sadistic rapist
who had made Clyde his victim for many months in prison. That
con-to-con crime was ignored and seemed justified, but it probably
gave the young man a notion that dealing death wasn’t such a
terrible sin after all.
Yet Clyde, it was said, prayed every day and took good care of
his family. Both Bonnie and Clyde gravitated again and again to
West Dallas and set up meetings with their parents and siblings
seemingly right under the noses of the authorities, even as they
were among “America’s Most Wanted” for their many
bank robberies and petty hold-ups. There was only one brief period
when they truly enjoyed life on the lam, hanging out in Oklahoma
for a while with one accomplice and stealing only what they needed
for a few days at a time, enjoying sojourns in neat little tourist
courts where they experienced the only luxury of their impoverished
lives.