My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (33 page)

A local Dallas, Texas, advertisement for the 1967 motion picture
Bonnie and Clyde
. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

When the production was filming in Dallas in Vickery Park, LC Barrow paid a visit to the set. At one point between shots he walked up to Warren Beatty and Gene Hackman, extended his hand, and with a wide, toothy grin said, “Howdy there, brothers!”
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Blanche said that Beatty visited her home during off-hours in the production. He would sit at her piano playing a number of tunes, telling her that if she ever needed anything, anything at all to contact him. She liked Beatty a lot.
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Nevertheless, she despised the movie he produced.

She indicated that by the time the script she read in her lawyer’s office made its way to the screen it had undergone an enormous transformation. She did not recognize much of anything in the story, least of all herself. Of Estelle Parsons’s portrayal of her character, Blanche said, “That movie made me look like a screaming horse’s ass!”
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There were also instances where Blanche’s character was freely mixed with the events and personalities of other people—such as Mary O’Dare, also known as Mary Pitts and Mary
Chambless. O’Dare was actually associated with Raymond Hamilton. She was married to a bank-robbing buddy of Hamilton’s named Gene O’Dare. While O’Dare was serving a ninety-nine-year sentence in Texas, his wife became Hamilton’s girlfriend. This was early 1934, after the raid on Eastham and well after Buck had been killed and Blanche imprisoned. Bonnie and Clyde and nearly everyone else then associated with the gang despised Mary O’Dare. Clyde and a cohort named Henry Methvin referred to her as “the washerwoman.”
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And Bonnie said O’Dare tried to convince her to slip knockout drops to Clyde so she and O’Dare could crack his head open, turn him in, and collect the reward. But to Clyde Barrow’s thinking, the worst was when O’Dare began complaining that she should get a share of the February 27, 1934, robbery of the R. P. Henry and Sons Bank in Lancaster, Texas. That incident was folded into the movie version of Blanche’s character, making it appear that she was driving a wedge between Buck and Clyde. In fact, it was Mary O’Dare, months after the death of Buck, who drove a wedge between Clyde and Raymond Hamilton. Barrow told Hamilton to dump his girlfriend or leave. Hamilton left.
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Mary O’Dare. (Phillips Collection)

According to Blanche, the overall impact of the movie
Bonnie and Clyde
was that “it nearly caused my husband to divorce me. Of course, my in-laws never liked me anyway.”
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Although the movie
Bonnie and Clyde
is certainly an exciting, fast-paced juxtaposition of violence and humor, masterfully crafted and directed by Arthur Penn, it is anything but the story of Bonnie and Clyde, much less of Buck and Blanche. Indeed, one of the initial criticisms of the movie was that it was so very inaccurate historically. Nevertheless, some may argue that such is the nature of entertainment, that if one is interested in history one shouldn’t try to find it in the entertainment industry. Still, that is of little consolation to those whose lives were being represented as something purportedly approaching fact.

Such was certainly the case with the characterization of the former Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer, as portrayed by Denver Pyle. In the movie, Bonnie and Clyde capture Hamer and humiliate him and even beat him up. In reality, nothing even remotely like that ever happened. Indeed, the very first time Frank Hamer saw Bonnie and Clyde was the day he and five other lawmen killed them in Louisiana. Hamer did not even know what they looked like. Only one officer in the group had ever seen them before that day. Consequently, Hamer’s family sued Warner brothers. The litigation was settled after a court case that included testimony from another one of the officers who killed Bonnie and Clyde, former Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Ted Hinton. When asked in court if Frank Hamer had ever been abducted by Bonnie and Clyde, Hinton responded wryly that only one entity had ever taken Frank Hamer anywhere, “and that was God! And I’m not so sure He knew what to do with him after He got him!”
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After the movie’s release Blanche hid away as best she could and hoped the fallout from her resurrected notoriety would be minimal. Besides, she had other things on her mind. Eddie had contracted cancer and died on May 11, 1969, at age fifty-seven.

After the death of Eddie Frasure, Blanche slowly renewed friendships with her former in-laws, beginning with her old friend Artie, Buck’s older sister. She started frequenting Barrow family gatherings, usually in the company of Artie. Nevertheless, it was Marie Barrow who told Blanche where to find Bonnie’s sister, Billie Jean. By then, Billie Jean had dropped “Billie” from her name and was married to a man from Mesquite, Texas, named Arthur Borland Moon. Jean and her husband, whom everyone referred to simply as “Moon,” also lived on Beltline Road, within a few miles of
Blanche. They began socializing together, eventually so much so that she rarely saw the Barrows thereafter. Marie once quipped, “Yeah, Blanche used to come by here and drink beer with us. Now she’s always over at Moon’s drinking beer.” The last time some of the Barrows remember seeing Blanche was at LC’s funeral.
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Like Eddie Frasure, LC contracted cancer. He was sixty-six when he died.

Artie and Blanche in front of the Cinderella Beauty Shoppe, Denison, Texas, 1932. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

By the early 1980s, Blanche’s house and property were becoming too much for her to handle. A few years earlier for example a severe ice storm pummeled the north Texas area and a thick sheet of ice sealed Blanche in her house for two days. She finally had to telephone a neighbor to come and free her. Afterward she decided to simplify her life. She sold all her property and most of her belongings, bought a house trailer, and moved it next to Jean and Moon at a trailer park called Country Village.

In April 1984, Jean, Moon, and Blanche all decided to move to Cedar Creek Lake in nearby Kaufman County. It began with Jean’s niece, Rhea Leen, suggesting that she and Moon move closer to her to make it easier to keep in touch. “Well, you better find a place for Blanche too,” Jean said. And Rhea Leen did.

Blanche riding her favorite horse on her property near Seagoville, Texas. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

The location was very near Kemp, Texas, where Clyde Barrow, Ralph Fults, and Bonnie Parker shot it out with a posse on April 19, 1932. That was the incident mentioned by Blanche early in her memoir, when Fults was wounded and captured along with Parker. However, the chief reason for the move to Cedar Creek was not to conjure memories, but to fish.

“Jean and Blanche would fish in a bucket of water,” Rhea Leen once said. “But you took your life in your own hands when you fished with Blanche.” The image of a 4-foot 11-inch tall, 100-pound woman with impaired vision swinging a rod that was bigger than she was and heaving a fishing line all over the 4-by-15-foot pier was the one most readily remembered. Apparently, no one would fish on the same pier with her for fear of being slapped with a rod or snagged by a baited hook. “We couldn’t fish for dodging Blanche’s line!” Rhea Leen remembered.
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The only time anyone would venture within range of her was when she would knock her stool off the pier into the shallow water and someone, invariably Moon, had to retrieve it for her. This happened a lot.

One thing Moon refused to be a part of was grocery shopping with Jean and Blanche. The two women would arrive together, each take a grocery
cart, and disappear down the aisles in opposite directions. But they would keep in contact by calling out to one another.

“Blanche, where are you?”

“I’m over here.”

“Did you see the sale over here?”

“The bananas?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get some?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

“I’m about through.”

“Me too.”

When they met at the checkout counter, they often had many of the same things in their carts, especially Oreos.
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Both were faithful collectors of S&H Green Stamps, the old bonus program very popular between the 1950s and 1980s that was based on how much one bought at the grocery store. Stamps issued with each purchase were redeemable at Green Stamp stores for a wide variety of products ranging from small appliances, clothes, and toys to tools, camping equipment, and larger items. One day Jean and Blanche were in the checkout line at the Green Stamp store. The line was rather long and as they waited a woman in front of them kept asking Jean and Blanche to hold her place while she either exchanged an item or added to her purchases. This kept happening all the way up to the counter. Then at the cash register, the woman suddenly thought of something else she wanted. She hoisted her open purse onto the counter and turned to Jean and Blanche one last time. “Would you watch my purse while I run and grab something else?” she asked. Before she could get an answer one way or another, the woman darted off, leaving her purse in the custody of the two grandmotherly-looking strangers who happened to be convicted felons, all her cash and credit cards in plain view. Blanche turned to Jean and smiled. “If she only knew who we are!” she said. Then she and Jean burst out laughing. The woman returned and offered a brief chuckle, not really sure what was so funny.
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Nevertheless, it was not all fun and laughter. The plight of the ex-convict trying to reenter society, though tough enough for Blanche, especially in the early days of her freedom, was more pronounced in the lives of certain members of the Barrow family, as well as in Jean’s life.
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Even before the death
of her sister, Jean was charged with two murders actually committed by Clyde Barrow and Henry Methvin, the heinous Easter Sunday shootings of two unsuspecting motorcycle officers of the Texas State Highway Patrol who had made the fatal mistake of approaching the wrong car at the wrong time. The story of how Jean, who was nowhere near the location at the time of the shootings, came to be charged with these crimes is strange and convoluted. Largely ignoring the testimony of two eyewitnesses who saw “the taller of two men” firing at the two lawmen on a dirt lane called East Dove Road northwest of Grapevine, Texas, Tarrant County officials (and nearly everyone else since) focused on the constantly changing story of a farmer named William Schieffer. Initially Schieffer said that although he saw the car and some people walking around it on occasion, and indeed heard the shots, he had been too far away to get a good look at the killers. Later, he was entirely unsuccessful in identifying anyone in a mug book that included pictures of Bonnie and Clyde.