NONFICTION
Exploring the exploits of Bonnie and Clyde
“Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend” by Paul Schneider is the best thing I’ve read this year — it puts truer faces on the duo than Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s, and while taking nothing away from the immortal, classic film, adds layer upon layer of intrigue. “Ecoutez l’histoire,” sang the gloriously seedy Serge Gainsbourg in 1968’s song “Bonnie and Clyde,” and the world did — at least, in a semi-fictionalized version.
Thanks mainly to Arthur Penn’s film, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker became, and remained, the poster children for lovers on the lam, birthing a mythic genre that has spawned films (“Badlands,” “True Romance,” “The Getaway,” “Natural Born Killers,” “Wild at Heart”), music (even Jay-Z and Beyonce paid tribute), and, thanks mainly to Dunaway’s cheekbones, fashion. But Paul Schneider, 75 years after the couple was ripped to shreds by the bullets of the law, has stripped away the iconography, offering up a stunningly researched, immaculately constructed story of love, sex and sin, all in the words of Bonnie and Clyde and those who knew them, feared them, and had the misfortune of being caught in the cross-fire.
As Schneider explains in his intro to the text, “The following is a work of nonfiction in which nothing has been created out of whole cloth by the author and everything has a reasonably acceptable pedigree as a ‘fact.’ ” Then, he adds, with a touch of humor, “That said, some sources are better than others, a situation that is true for every work of nonfiction and is even more unavoidable in stories as rife with rumor and lacquered with legend as that of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow — all the reader needs to know is that no dialogue has been made up.”
“Lacquered with legend” — what a wonderfully appropriate description. Yet how can the tale not be? As they hurtled toward their inevitably blood-drenched conclusion, Schneider tells us that Bonnie, especially knew the end was near. She loved writing poetry, and finished one prescient piece during one of her last days on the planet:
Some day they’ll go down together
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.
There is much to take from that little bit of poetry, but to me, most fascinating is her use of the third person—“they’ll go down together.” As much as the media made Bonnie and Clyde national superstars, so, too, did Bonnie and Clyde help construct their own myth. They got off on the concept of themselves as (anti)heroes, and it turned them on.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the couple’s early days together involved arrests, jail breaks, and gunshots, there were somewhat calm times. “For a few weeks in Wichita Falls,” writes Schneider, “it’s the life Bonnie always thought she’d have. ‘Well, they wanted what anyone else — any other two people that were in love — wanted,’ says her little sister, Billie Jean. ’They wanted to live right. They wanted to be married. Live right.’”
Even then, however, Clyde was already involved in robberies, mainly little out-of-the-way gas station hold-ups. An incident at an open-air dance seems to be the catalyst, though, for what was to come. A sheriff ended up dead, and, as a witness explains, “For about five minutes there was a heavy gun battle between the law and desperadoes. People were running in every direction.”
Bonnie knew that Clyde faced the electric chair. And soon, it all begins. Others join their motley crew, bullets fly, and the bodies pile up. Schneider brings these wild days to life in as strong a fashion as Penn’s film. “It’s all a blur, really,” he writes. So it is.
As in the film, there are little cinematic moments that chill the reader, none more so than the gang’s experience in Okabena, Minn. “Rata rata rata rata you pretty much shoot up the
whole town. When you’re gone, they pick bullets out of the farm implement store, the hardware store, several upstairs rooms of the hotel, the barbershop, the blacksmith shop, the gas station, a car or two, the grain elevators, and, of course, the bank — All you can do is laugh. Or what about the time that maniac comes running out of a hardware store with a shotgun after you and Buck and starts firing and you have to just jump on the hood of the car and hang on while Bonnie pulls out of town? Ha! That was hilarious. You on the hood of there hanging on for dear life and Buck on the back bumper firing his pistol and the guy running down the sidewalk blasting away.”
Watching the film “Bonnie and Clyde” again, I was struck by the realization that even now, 40 years after its release, the violence still packs a punch. The best of Kubrick and Peckinpah, time has not dulled its impact, its force, and its sense of winking nihilism. Paul Schneider captures this feeling. As one witness to the couple’s death says, “I guess I will never forget the sight of that car. It looked like where hogs had been slaughtered.”
Schneider takes the “cool” away, and shows Bonnie and Clyde for what they were: lovers, laughers, and cold-blooded murderers. His “Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend” is a riveting triumph, and as eye-opening as the sight of Barrow’s corpse. They changed American culture, and died in the act, and for that, we’ll never forget them — whether we’d like to or not.
Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend By Paul Schneider
JR Books 320 pages, $27.50
Christopher Schobert is a Buffalo freelance writer.
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