It began on this date: May 23, 1934. Oh, there’s a backstory all right, as sung by Merle Haggard in his 1968 hit:
Bonnie was a waitress in a small café
Clyde Barrow was the rounder that took her away
They both robbed and killed until both of them died
So goes the legend of Bonnie and Clyde. . .
Clyde Barrow was a small time Texas hooligan when he met nineteen-year-old Bonnie Parker in January of 1930; she was an unemployed waitress, caring for a temporarily disabled friend between jobs, married to a man doing a ninety-nine year sentence for murder (whom she never divorced) and, as she put it, “bored crapless.” Some say she took up with Clyde because she believed he was “going places.” He was: the first night they were together, he was rousted out by the police and taken off to jail. He didn’t become the killer of the legend until after a stint in Eastham, arguably the worst of all Texas’s prisons.
Bonnie was something of a poet herself, and in one called “The Trail’s End” she wrote of Clyde:
. . .I say this with pride
that I once knew Clyde
when he was honest and upright and clean.
But the law fooled around;
kept taking him down,
and locking him up in a cell.
Till he said to me,
“I’ll never be free,
so I’ll meet a few of them in hell.”
As the crime historian Jay Robert Nash put it, she was writing from bitter nostalgia; when she wrote those words she had figured out that Clyde wasn’t going places, he was just going—and she was along for the ride, with a string of penny ante robberies and a dozen dead men trailing along in their wake. Shortly after penning those words, on a visit home, she begged her mother, “When they kill us, Mama, don’t let them take me to a funeral parlor. Bring me home.”
And so it happened, on May 23, 1934, near Gibbsland, Louisiana, they stopped to help a motorist named Melvin Methvin , the father of an associate of theirs, not knowing that he had, in exchange for a lesser sentence for his son on a murder charge, helped a posse led by one-time Texas Ranger Frank Hamer organize an ambush. In the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, the pair, played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, had been sensuously sharing a pear just before the posse fired some two hundred shots into their car. In real life, Bonnie died with a half-eaten sandwich in her mouth, and Clyde in sock feet.
Bonnie had put it in bleakly accurate terms in her poem:
Some day they’ll go down together
and they’ll bury them side by side.
To a few it’ll be grief,
to the law a relief
but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.
And we remember them as they were in the film, not as the bloodthirsty inept pair they were in life (although there is no evidence to suggest that Bonnie actually ever killed anybody), but as the daring lovers whose exploits were big news during the early years of the Great Depression.
Haggard put it this way:
Two years of runnin’ was ended that day
For robbin’ and killin’ they both had to pay
But we’ll always remember how they lived and died,
So goes the legend of Bonnie and Clyde. . .
They aren’t buried together; they rest in cemeteries several miles apart. But, in the popular imagination, they will forever be side by side, guns in hand, mugging for the cameras they carried with them.
For some reason I identify with this. Must be the part about the pear. Only I would have made it a pomegranate. 😉
LOL I cannot imagine why–I dunno though. The way I remember it, that was one seriously juicy pear– (^_^) 😉 😀
I’ve heard boredom can kill you but these two were absolutely crazy. I remember this movie, I watched it when I was a kid and it bothered me very much.I never want to see it again.
I think they actually had something the French call “folie a deux” going on–literally, a “folly (or madness) of two”–in other words, he would never have become more than a smalltime punk if he hadn’t met Bonnie, and she wouldn’t have died in a hail of bullets if she’d never met him–Difference in people, but that movie actually is one of my favorites–but then I have strange taste in movies– 😀 ~~Fair
It was the shooting scene at the end. I love mystery and suspense but don’t do well with violence and I shouldn’t have watched it as a kid.
That was very extreme for its time–you’re right about that– ~~Fair
I hear you, Lily. Just like when they killed Sonny in THE GODFATHER. Some things stick. I loved that movie, too, until that point, although I must admit it was artfully done.
I mean, I loved BONNIE AND CLYDE. THE GODFATHER, not so much. 😉
I have never been able to watch THE GODFATHER. I read the book when I was in my teens and was so totally grossed out by the episode early in the book where the guy wakes up and finds his prize racehorse’s head staring at him at the foot of his bed. That put a quick halt to any desire I might have had to see the film.