“It’s just that I’ve got everything that makes a girl forget her better judgment,” Edward G. Robinson tells Alice White in the 1930 gangster picture, “The Widow from Chicago.” That seems to be exactly the kind of man that Bonnie Parker wanted, and if she hadn’t quite found him in Clyde Barrow, she was prepared to make him over from scratch.
Well, not entirely from scratch. She had pulp fiction to draw on, westerns featuring Jesse James and hardboiled crime stories, not to mention the gangster movies that flourished in Prohibition-era America before the Hays Code.
James Cagney plays a tough guy in “The Public Enemy”
If the reality of Bonnie and Clyde’s life on the lam was less than glamorous—the two spent more time hiding from the law than robbing, and much of their shooting seems to have been done by mistake—Bonnie’s fantasies turned them into outlaw heroes. She liked to pretend that she was a cigar-smoking gun moll, but deep down, she was the kind of gal who’d stand by her man, no matter how he treated her, and even take the rap for him.
Romance, not crime, may have been Bonnie’s true calling. I imagine her humming the lyrics to “My Man” as she waited for Clyde to be released from a two-year prison sentence he began serving a few months after they met. Fanny Brice popularized the song in the 1920s. I swear it could have been Bonnie Parker's anthem.
Oh, my man, I love him so
He'll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don't care
When he takes me in his arms
The world is bright all right
What's the difference if I say
I'll go away
When I know I'll come back on my knees someday
For whatever my man is
I am his
forever more
Steven Biel's book, Bonnie Parker Writes a Poem, can be purchased for $2.99 through Amazon, Barnes and Noble Nook Books, iTunes, and Kobo Books.
Lisa Lieberman's translation of Simone de Beauvoir's 1946 essay, "An Eye for an Eye" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Singles, Barnes and Noble Nook Books, iTunes, and Kobo Books. She blogs about old movies at Deathless Prose.
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