Bonnie and Clyde's Untold Story
A New Look at Two Small-time Robbers Who Went Down Together
Oct 20, 2009
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde dispels most of the romantic myths in an embracing biography of the Barrow gang. Author Jeff Guinn relates the heyday of robbery and killing, their flight from justice and their grisly ending. Using thorough research and recently found unpublished manuscripts written by Clyde's mother and sister, letters, diaries, memories, police and FBI reports and interviews, the author has created a nonfiction book that reads like fiction.
Bonnie and Clyde's Romantic Myth Revealed
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were romanticized and made out to be a glamorous criminal couple in previous books and a 1967 movie "Bonnie and Clyde" starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Jeff Guinn combined exhaustive research and newly discovered material to tell the real story of two kids from a filthy Dallas slum who fell in love and then traded their lives for a brief interlude of excitement and fame. In the minds of the public, they were cool, calculating bandits who robbed banks and killed cops with equal impunity. It was an illusion created by the rise of the Hollywood antihero.
The setting for Go Down Together is during the Great Depression when in 1932 Bonnie and Clyde pulled off their first heist. The publicity that appeared in newsreels, true crime magazines, the new wire services showed the brazen Bonnie smoking a cigar and was published in every newspaper in the country. The Barrow gang quickly became household names on par with Charles Lindbergh, Jack Dempsey, and Babe Ruth.
During the years of the crime spree, Bonnie and Clyde held up a few banks, knocked over numerous grocery stores, killed several police officers while casting themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods struggling against an unjust social order.
The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde
Clyde had started out in the late 1920's stealing chickens and then cars as did his older brother, Buck. In the 1930's, he met 19-year-old Bonnie and during the next four years and with the ever revolving members of the Barrow Gang, robbed and killed at least seven people. Bonnie thought of herself as a poet and wrote that someday the two of them would go down together. They did, in a Louisiana ambush led by famed ex-Texas Ranger Frank Hamer.
Guinn writes that instead of the Robin Hood image, Bonnie and Clyde were perhaps the most inept crooks ever and their crime spree was as much a reign of error as it was of terror. Unsophisticated as they were, they weren't capable of plotting robberies of big-city banks- they mostly preyed on small mom-and-pop groceries and service stations. They often ended up empty handed and were reduced to breaking into gum machines for meal money.
Both Bonnie and Clyde were physically crippled-she as a result of a serious car crash caused by Clyde's reckless driving, he from cutting off two of his toes while in prison. They were always on the run from the law, they lived like animals, camping out in their latest stolen car.
Conclusions in Go Down Together
There was a genuine love story in Bonnie and Clyde's relationship. Their devotion to each other was as real as the overblown reputation as criminal masterminds was not. Guinn has succeeded in incorporating it all and bringing it up to date, from the true romance, rebellion against authority, bullets flying, cars crashing, and in the end the dramatic death of the two after being hunted down like animals.
Based partly on the surviving Barrow and Parker families and collectors of criminal memorabilia who provided Guinn with access to never-before published material, the real story of Bonnie and Clyde is now available.
Jeff Guinn's treatment of Go Down Together: The True Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde provides a model for writing crime fact or fiction books or magazine stories. His avoidance of using terms usually associated with the descriptions of Bonnie and Clyde bring realism to the story.
About the author
Jeff Guinn was book editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He is the author of several books, including The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame and Our Land Before We Die: The Proud Story of the Seminole Negro, which received the Texas Book Award. He is also the author of The Autobiography of Santa Claus and How Mrs Claus Saved Christmas.
Guinn, Jeff. Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde. NY,NY: Simon and Schuster, 2009
 |
 |
