Jeff Guinn Read online

  Roy finally came back a year later, in January 1929. Bonnie told him they were through, and meant it. She had her own income now, and Emma Parker believed “she was seeing Roy through new eyes.” A few months later, Roy was picked up for robbery and sentenced to five years in prison. He hadn’t just been courting Reba Griffin during his long absences. Bonnie never saw Roy again, and didn’t try to communicate with him in prison. But she didn’t divorce him, either. That, she said, “just wouldn’t be right,” kicking a man while he was down. She continued wearing Roy’s wedding ring.

  Early in 1929, Bonnie changed jobs. She began working at Marco’s, a restaurant in downtown Dallas near the courthouse and post office. The tips were undoubtedly better, since Marco’s customers included lawyers, judges, and bankers. One of Bonnie’s regulars was Ted Hinton, a postal worker who later became a Dallas County deputy. Hinton enjoyed bantering with her. She told Hinton she wanted to be “a singer, or maybe a poet.” Many of Bonnie’s male customers flirted with her, and Hinton noticed she “could turn off the advances or lead a customer on with her easy conversation.” If she was still turning occasional tricks, the move from Hargrave’s to Marco’s meant a more well-to-do clientele.

  Emma, ever alert for evidence her family was morally superior, was proud rather than dismayed when the manager at Marco’s told her that Bonnie’s job was in jeopardy. Bonnie, he complained, had such a soft heart that she gave food away to indigents who couldn’t afford to pay for their meals. Despite several warnings, she continued to do it, and if she didn’t stop he was going to “can her.” Emma agreed to speak to her daughter, and as she recalled later Bonnie “promised to do better but she didn’t…as long as she worked at Marco’s, she fed people, and she never got fired for it, either.”

  In November 1929, the effects of the previous month’s stock market crash hit downtown Dallas. Many small businesses closed, and Marco’s was among them. Bonnie was out of work, and suddenly there were no jobs to be found. Working-class girls in cities all over Texas were left without income and no prospects of employment. Things were so desperate that convents throughout the state faced a sudden deluge of applicants, most of whom weren’t even Catholic. Emma didn’t lose her job, but money in the Parker household was scarce. Frank Krause had died in 1919. Buster was grown and self-supporting, but Billie Jean had married Fred Mace, and the young couple lived with Emma. Bonnie had to find some way to contribute income. Unable to find anything permanent, she began hiring out as a temporary housekeeper or babysitter.

  Bonnie was miserable. She still believed in the fairy-tale lives of the characters she saw in movies, with their gorgeous clothes and grand love affairs and exciting adventures. Daily reality was the exact opposite: she was broke, unemployed, and didn’t have a husband anymore. The farm crisis had already crippled the Texas economy for almost a decade. The Depression was taken as just one more sign the bad times were permanent. Hanging on to dreams of fame and hopes for true love got tougher every day, yet Bonnie still wondered, as she’d written twice in her diary, “Why don’t something happen?”

  When it finally did, she knew right away. Bonnie’s brother, Buster, married Clarence Clay’s sister, and in early January 1930, Bonnie went over to their house for a party. There were enough people living in Cement City and West Dallas that they didn’t all know each other, and Clarence brought along a stranger who caught Bonnie’s eye. At the moment they met, Clyde Chestnut Barrow and Bonnie Elizabeth Parker exactly filled the needs in each other’s lives. He wasn’t as tall or as good-looking as Roy, but he liked making all the decisions. Bonnie always responded to a man who acted like he was in charge, just like Ronald Colman in The Night of Love or Milton Stills in Framed, two movies she had recently seen and enjoyed. Clyde had nice clothes and drove a fancy car. She might have suspected he stole it, but so what? Being with him promised some fun, of which there had recently been precious little in her life. So she fell instantly in love.

  For Clyde, the attraction was mutual. Bonnie was tiny as well as cute, a plus for a short man so sensitive about his height that he had stood on curbs to appear taller when posing for photos with previous girlfriends. Well-dressed Bonnie was clingy, always hanging adoringly on his arm. This bolstered Clyde’s self-image, which was probably still shaken from his narrow escape in Denton. Best of all, Bonnie’s fanatic determination to rise up out of poverty, to not meekly accept second-class status, matched his own.

  They were immediately inseparable. Clyde didn’t take Bonnie over to the campground right away to be introduced to his family—Cumie was unlikely to be impressed by a girl so fond of cosmetics—but Bonnie was eager for him to meet her mother. Emma’s first impression was that Clyde “was a likable boy…with his dark wavy hair, dancing brown eyes and a dimple that popped out every now and then when he smiled.” As crazy as Bonnie had once been about Roy, Emma thought, “she never worshipped him as she did Clyde.”

  Clyde found it very pleasant to be worshipped. It helped get his mind off Buck being in prison and his own ongoing risk of arrest. It’s not clear whether he told Bonnie about his problems with “the laws.” If not, she found out soon enough.

  In early February, Clyde made an evening visit to Bonnie’s home to tell her he’d be leaving town the next day. He’d undoubtedly planned a car theft or robbery. Squiring his new lady friend in style required cash. Bonnie made it obvious how much she would miss him until he returned, and their parting dragged on and on until Emma finally suggested he just go ahead and spend the night. It wasn’t an invitation to share Bonnie’s bed. Emma was much too starchy for that. Because the Parkers’ house was crowded—besides Emma, Bonnie, and Grandma Mary, Billie Jean and her husband still lived there, along with their newborn baby—Clyde had to sleep on the living room couch. That made it convenient for him to answer the front door the next morning when the Dallas police came to arrest him.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dumbbells

  Clyde went quietly. He hoped this arrest wasn’t any different from all the previous ones—that he was being picked up on the generic charge of “suspicion,” and that after routine questioning, he’d be out of the Dallas County jail in a matter of hours. There was, of course, the embarrassment of being hauled off by the police in front of his new girlfriend and her family, but that could be smoothed over once he was released and things calmed down.

  There was nothing calm about Bonnie’s reaction as her boyfriend was taken into custody. She flew into hysterics, pounding her hands on the walls and begging the officers not to arrest him. Clyde tried to soothe her. As he did, Emma asked the cops why Clyde was being arrested. They told her he was wanted in other cities; they were just making the initial arrest, and he’d be held in the county jail until the outside jurisdictions arranged for his transfer. If Clyde had heard this he might have attempted an escape, but Bonnie was making a considerable racket.

  As the police drove off with Clyde in custody, Bonnie collapsed in a sobbing heap. Emma tried to console her while suggesting to her older daughter that it might be a good idea to stop falling in love with felons. But Bonnie found the potential for drama, even glamour, in her new heartbreak. True, Roy was in prison and she was done with him, but Roy had shut her out of his life entirely. Clyde was different. He was a good man who’d perhaps made a few piddling mistakes and needed her now as no one had ever needed her before. She would support him in his time of trouble and save him with her love. She told Emma as much, then immersed herself in what promised to be the most satisfying role of her life.

  Bonnie began with visits to Clyde in the Dallas County jail. He would have been informed that police in Denton and Waco wanted him transferred to their jurisdictions, so seeing Bonnie was a welcome distraction. When she wasn’t visiting Clyde, she wrote him long, rambling letters pledging eternal love and predicting a long, happy future together. One, dated February 14, 1930, and snarkily addressed to “Mr. Clyde Barrow Care The Bar Hotel,” was full of inconsequential chat about feeling blue and s
praining her wrist. Some hopeful boy had brought her a box of Valentine’s candy, and “I didn’t appreciate the old candy at all, and I thought about my darling in that mean old jail, and started to bring the candy to you. Then I knew that you wouldn’t want the candy that that old fool brought to me.”

  Bonnie mentioned Clyde’s former partner Frank Clause—Clause was up to his old criminal tricks, and in a Dallas County cell on some charge or other—and finished with a plea: “I’m so lonesome for you, dearest. Don’t you wish we could be together? Sugar, I never knew I really cared for you until you got in jail. And honey, if you get out o.k. please don’t ever do anything to get locked up again.”

  The mention of a prospective, candy-bearing suitor couldn’t have pleased Clyde, and he certainly must have wondered why it took his arrest to convince Bonnie she really cared for him. But there was one more line in the letter that probably made his blood run cold: “I went out to your mother’s today.”

  Clyde had deliberately kept Cumie and his new girlfriend apart, but Bonnie felt that in such a terrible time she should bond with the rest of the Barrows. She liked them immediately—Nell especially, she wrote Clyde, was “so sweet”—but the feeling wasn’t entirely mutual. Cumie took in Bonnie’s heavily mascaraed eyes and fashionable clothes and sized her up as a pleasure-obsessed vixen. “Bonnie,” Cumie declared in her unpublished memoir, “just cared for a good time and believed in spending money as [she] went.”

  Eleven-year-old Marie, grown enough to be tantalized by makeup herself, had a more generous first impression. “She was just a cute little old girl,” Marie recalled decades later, adding that “Bonnie could have been characterized as cute, even pretty when she fixed herself up.” Cumie, Marie thought, couldn’t help comparing Bonnie to Buck’s girlfriend, Blanche, who was a preacher’s daughter. That meant Bonnie would always pale in comparison.

  Ever the opportunist, Marie saw an immediate advantage in Bonnie’s determination to become a quasi-member of Clyde’s family. The Parker home was considerably more comfortable than the campground, so Marie requested frequent sleepovers at her new pal Bonnie’s.

  About a week later, Bonnie borrowed a car and drove to downtown Dallas to visit Clyde. She was told he’d just been transferred to the Denton jail, where he would face charges on the attempted robbery of the previous November 29. Bonnie’s letter to him there described her reaction on hearing the news: “I was so blue and mad and discouraged, I just had to cry. I had maybelline on my eyes and it began to stream down my face and I had to stop on Lamar street. I laid my head down on the steering wheel and sure did boohoo. A couple of city policemen came up and wanted to know my trouble. I imagine I sure looked funny with maybelline streaming down my face.”

  Then she returned to her familiar theme—after this, Clyde was going to go straight, and she was going to inspire him to do it.

  “They only think you are mean,” Bonnie wrote. “I know you are not, and I’m going to be the very one to show you that this outside world is a swell place, and we are young and should be happy like other boys and girls instead of being like we are.”

  Clyde got lucky in Denton. The grand jury ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to indict him for the attempted November robbery. That was the extent of the good news. McLennan County lawmen were waiting to take him to Waco, where he was wanted on seven different charges ranging from car theft to possession of stolen goods.

  Bonnie followed Clyde south. She and Cumie made the trip together on the “interurban” train. Any conversation during the journey was undoubtedly one-sided. Cumie would have to leave as soon as the McLennan County grand jury finished its deliberations, but Bonnie had a married female cousin in town. She could stay indefinitely.

  Unlike Denton, the Waco jurists had a substantial amount of testimony to consider. Clyde had previously been picked up there on suspicion, giving his name as Elvin Williams. It was revealed during testimony that Clyde hadn’t been quite as reformed after Buck’s capture as the rest of the Barrow family hoped. Prosecutors offered evidence that in January alone, Clyde stole two different cars in Waco. On March 3, 1930, the grand jury returned seven counts against Clyde Barrow, aka Elvin Williams, Eldin Williams, Jack Hale, and Roy Bailey. Clyde had given the additional pseudonyms to authorities when picked up on suspicion in other cities.

  Clyde was held in the county jail with William Turner of Waco, who may have been Clyde’s partner in some of the robberies there. On the same day Clyde was indicted on seven counts, the grand jury charged Turner with twenty-five. It was clear that prison sentences were inevitable for both. Perhaps encouraged by a note from Bonnie swearing “if you do have to go down I’ll be good while you’re gone and be waiting—waiting—waiting for you,” Clyde joined Turner before Judge Richard Munroe on March 5 to plead guilty on all counts. It was a smart move. Clyde was technically a first-time offender, and Turner’s family was from Waco. Since they made statements declaring they’d learned their lessons, their sentences were relatively light. Turner got twenty-five four-year terms to be served concurrently, which meant just four years in prison. Clyde was assessed seven concurrent two-year terms. Saddened by the sentence but relieved by its relative leniency, Cumie returned to West Dallas. Bonnie stayed on, determined to stand by her man right up to the moment he was transferred ninety miles southeast from Waco to Huntsville in the state’s infamous “One Way Wagon.”

  Cumie left Waco thinking she now had two sons in jail. She’d scarcely arrived home when the number was reduced by half. On March 8, Buck escaped from Huntsville. It wasn’t hard. He’d been working as a trusty in the main prison’s kitchen, where supervision was minimal. Buck and another prisoner jumped into a car belonging to a guard and drove back to Dallas. Cumie recalled that he came to the campground, walked up to the shack, “stuck his head in and laughed.” He was still wearing his white prison overalls. He changed clothes, tracked down Blanche, and headed to Oklahoma to hide out with her. Cumie was appalled—Buck’s last letter from Huntsville, dated February 24, had assured her “the guards and the Captain down here treat me awfully good…so I see no reason why I should not get along.” As she’d promised Buck, Cumie had been pleading with the governor’s office for a pardon. But he’d gotten impatient and decided not to wait. Henry shook his head at his son’s impulsiveness and declared, “That’s Buck.”

  Back in Waco, Clyde had no idea of his brother’s escape. He was preoccupied with his own situation. A two-year sentence sounded easy to endure, but in practice it would be the opposite. Clyde hated relinquishing control under any circumstances, and now he faced twenty-four months of obeying orders nonstop. He’d eat, sleep, work, and even relieve himself only after someone else gave permission. As a first-time convict, he could hope for an easy assignment. In the main prison at Huntsville, known as “the Walls,” prisoners usually worked indoors with little direct supervision. But surrounding the central facility were a series of work farms, where convicts who were judged to be escape risks or potentially violent provided slave labor cultivating crops, mostly cotton, in all kinds of weather. They labored under the direction of guards who could discipline their charges as frequently—and, often, as sadistically—as they liked. He might end up on one of those farms. The more Clyde thought about it, the more determined he became not to serve his time after all. Because of overcrowding, the state prison board had recently forbidden additional prisoners to be sent to Huntsville. Individual counties had been instructed to hold newly sentenced convicts in their own jails until room opened up. That might happen any day. Clyde had to break out of the McLennan County jail before the One Way Wagon arrived to cart him off. To make that escape, he’d need an accomplice on the outside. There was an obvious candidate.

  On Tuesday, March 11, Bonnie made her usual morning visit to Clyde on the second floor of the county jail. She’d become a familiar figure there and thought the Waco jailors were nicer than the ones in Dallas and Denton. When she met with Clyde, he whispered details of a getaway pla
n. William Turner had lived with his parents in a house in East Waco. The parents were gone during the day. In the house, Turner had hidden a revolver. Clyde wanted Bonnie to go to the house, get the gun, and smuggle it back to him later in the evening. It had to be done that day—who knew when the One Way Wagon would begin making pickups again? Once Clyde had the gun and Bonnie was safely away, he’d break out, get clear, and come back for her as soon as he could.

  It was a watershed moment for Bonnie. She’d been reveling in her new real-life role as a convicted criminal’s supportive lover, but there was nothing illegal about that. She could walk away from Clyde Barrow anytime she liked, innocent of the slightest wrongdoing. Maybe times were tough back in Cement City and West Dallas, but there were still lots of other boys who wanted to be with her. If she did what Clyde wanted and was caught in the act, she might go to prison, too, a horrifying possibility. He was asking Bonnie to risk everything for him.

  And that was so romantic. No movie heroine would turn down such a perfect opportunity to prove her love. If she wasn’t caught, if Clyde got away, they would live an exciting life on the run where every day would be a new adventure. They might even assume false identities and settle down together somewhere far away from the Dallas slums. Without Clyde, Bonnie’s future involved slinging hash and perhaps turning tricks until her looks were gone, something that happened to poor girls relatively early. Life on the run had to be better than that.

  So Bonnie said she’d do it. For Clyde, it was proof she was completely loyal. He was the boss. She would do whatever he told her to do, and that was what he always wanted in any relationship. For Bonnie, it was the ultimate commitment she could make to Clyde. She was putting her life in his hands.