Bonnie and Clyde (and Blanche and Buck) with Jamie Loftus

“Why don’t something happen?” Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow died in 1934, but their legend gets bigger every year. This week, Jamie Loftus brings us back to reality with a tale of prison breaks, FBI malfeasance, love, guitars, and hot dog breakfasts.

You can find Jamie online here. 

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Transcript

Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. It's the summer, and we are learning about crime. Every so often, we are a true crime show, we are also a history show, and the times when those things overlap are the best times. And in this case, we're talking today about Bonnie and Clyde with Jamie Loftus. 

She has a book called, Raw Dog. She was a huge part of our spring tour, and the magic that she and Carolyn brought to these shows really defies words. But you know what doesn't defy words? Hot dogs, because she wrote a book about them. It's called Raw Dog. It's a New York Times bestseller. If you haven't read it yet, it is such a fun romp through America that actually shows you what America is made out of. And it is made out of hot dogs, for the most part, as well as labor issues. So we recorded this in true hot dog adventurer fashion, right after seeing the Nathan's Famous 4th of July hot dog eating competition in Coney Island, New York and riding the Cyclone. And I think you can really hear it. 

This is a story of depression era America, and so it is violent, it is bloody, and there is a very significant amount of domestic abuse and violence against women. Speaking of trigger warnings, we have a bonus episode coming out soon with Carmen Maria Machado talking about Flowers in the Attic, the topic I believe she was born for. And you can find that soon on patreon.com/yourewrongabout or Apple+ subscriptions. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you're having the best summer. Here are some hot dogs. We made them for you. 

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we are talking to you from a Comfort Inn in Sheepshead Bay right after the 4th of July Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition. Or is it Nathan's Famous 4th of July? It's very tough. 

Jamie: Nathan's Famous. No, you nailed it. Perfect. 

Sarah: If you don't know who Jamie is already or where to find her work, what are you doing with your life? But for people who don't know, where do we find you?

Jamie: You can find me at your local bookstore. I wrote a book about hot dogs called Raw Dog. I would love it if you read it. I had a really good time writing it, or you can find me online on Instagram or Twitter. I'm on Instagram at @JamieChristSuperstar, Twitter at @JamieLoftus help. I co-host the Bechdel Cast with Caitlin Durante, and I've done a bunch of limited series as well about Mensa, and Lolita, and Cathy comics, and spiritualism. So if any of those things sound interesting to you, you should check it out.

Sarah: If they don't, then…

Jamie: Get a life, babe. 

Sarah: I would love to just start by telling everybody about our day.

Jamie: Oh my gosh, our day's been really special. Truly, I think it's so fun that we were recording this today because I feel completely out of my mind.

Sarah: We got scared we weren't going to be able to make it back to see Joey Chestnut eat so many hot dogs, because it was a whole day, it rained really hard, they were like, we're canceling the men's competition. 

Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. It was raining really hard. I'm afraid of lightning. And there was a lot of lightning and close. I think George Shea was like, nothing will cancel the contest.

Sarah: And then the police were like, something could cancel the contest. 

Jamie: And so they told everyone to leave, which we did, happily. It was really scary out. So yeah, we thought the contest was rained out. And then due to a tip from living legend, professional wrestler, professional eater, veteran, megabyte Ronnie said, “No, they are doing the contest. You've got to get back here.” So we hauled ass back to the contest. I ran faster than I've run since I was on the track team in eighth grade, and we both got there just as it was starting. It was so awesome. 

Sarah: And it was so special to be there with you because I only know any of the things I know about professional eating or the Fourth of July hot dog eating competition because of your book. I was going into it just feeling like this is going to be this incredibly overwhelming thing, I'm going to be in a crowd, it's going to be hot, it's going to be stressful. There's obviously a ton going on, but it felt like this actually very familiar place and like I knew who the main characters were and the drama! 

Jamie: They were bringing it this year. I didn't think they could top last year when Joey put a protester into a chokehold mid contest while he had a broken leg and that we don't have time to get into what was going on there, but it was really special to me that you were there because we've been traveling together so much and it feels like comfortable and nice and also to do a big weird thing, I don't know. It just feels right to do it with you.

Sarah: I love to do a big, weird thing with you. And to be fair, we've never done a small, normal thing. 

Jamie: We've never tried. 

Sarah: But we're not here to talk about hot dogs today. Correction, we are here to talk about hot dogs today, but only in the context of Bonnie and Clyde. 

Jamie: That's exactly right. 

Sarah: And that's what you call a pivot.

Jamie: She's a pro, folks. It's been said and it's true. I like that you tease the hot dog inclusion because I feel like there's just enough story to totally forget that there's hot dogs coming and then when they come. And it’s at a pivotal moment in the story, you're going to be screaming, cheering, throwing up, getting a nosebleed. You'll just be gushing. You'll be gushing something. 

Sarah: It’s the Loftus effect, I wanted to start by asking you how Bonnie and Clyde grabbed you, because I feel like there are figures in history and in American life who everyone knows, we all know the name of even if you don't have a clear association, it exists as part of the culture. And I feel like those things can almost be harder to cultivate a personal interest in because they can feel distant and historic and hard to access personally. And I wonder about when they caught hold of you in that way. 

Jamie: I think it was during my intense hot dog history research. Because much like the hot dog, they're icons of the Great Depression, and very recognizable, commonly misunderstood Great Depression figures. What was your initial impression of Bonnie and Clyde, cultural osmosis wise?

Sarah: 100% Faye Dunaway in a cool hat. 

Jamie: Totally. Totally. I liked the movie, but I didn't ever really go back to it. Characters that are just like, so cool that I get bored of. And not to say that those, the characters as they are presented in the movie are not flawed and don't have problems and all this stuff, but they were just like, so unbelievably cool. And I think presented as masterminds that it was like, it's the same reason I don't like watching Iron Man movies where you're like, yeah, he's going to figure it out. He's going to look really handsome doing it. Why would I watch that? But then when I kept bumping up against them, I just did some light reading about them and I was like, oh. And I say this with a lot of affection, they were like unbelievable fuck ups. The Bonnie and Clyde movie for the most part is the best press they could have possibly gotten because they fucked up constantly. But there's a ton of songs about them.

Sarah: Bonnie and Clyde by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot. Which if you don't know French, like I don't know French, then you just know it as Bonnie and Clyde. 

Jamie: Bonnie and Clyde. Mine was the Jay Z and Beyonce Bonnie and Clyde ‘03. 

Sarah: For people who didn't grow up with the myth, I would say that the kind of Bonnie and Clyde legend is that they were this hot couple, they met somehow, they started on a crime spree, the details don't matter in this legend, and robbing banks, this is I think the iconic line from the Arthur Penn movie is they're stopping getting gas or something, right? And, they're like, “What do y'all do?” And Bonnie's like, “We rob banks”.

Jamie: “We rob banks.” 

Sarah: And she's got her hat on and you're like, ah. And that they were these hot, not to say that they weren't hot in real life, but that there were these glamorous bank robbers who were on a crime spree that captivated America. And it couldn't last, and they were gunned down by the FBI, I think?

Jamie: So the two perspectives that I've generally seen on how Bonnie and Clyde are presented is the first one is just pretty much straight up the movie one where they are sexy and they're like a little bit troubled, but they're very in love and they're really good at crime and outrunning the law. 

Sarah: They somehow we're born good at it. Didn't have a learning curve. 

Jamie: Exactly. And then the alternative, which I think is a response to the movie's inaccuracies, not that it needs to be a documentary, is oh they were actually incompetent criminals who weren't actually that conventionally hot as movie stars and they actually weren't even that smart at all. And just totally make them out to be like people just needed stuff to talk about during the depression. And that's the only reason that they were of note. 

But I think that that second perspective really lacks context of why they were committing crimes in the first place. The sort of basic sketch of who they were is they were two poor kids from Texas. They were in their early twenties when they died. I think they were 23 and 24. They had grown up with essentially nothing. They went on a two-year crime spree after meeting at a party, and were ultimately responsible for the death of nine cops and a number of civilians. Which is more of what I think is the sad part. And were ultimately super turbo killed by the, I believe, it was the sheriff's department that ultimately killed him. But it was a collaborative effort between the FBI and the local authorities in Dallas, which is also where they are from. 

But I think what made them appealing to the general public, because they were folk heroes for the majority of their crime spree, it's very late in their criminal tenure that the public turns on them. But what made them different was it was presented as this love story and it was also, at this point of peak American gangster killings, it's presented as different because Bonnie's there and she's a woman and it's really unusual for a woman to be in a gang at all, much less appearing to be very influential. Obviously, you can't talk about Bonnie and Clyde without talking about Clyde. But I want to prioritize Bonnie in this. Especially because I think most of what I read about them, even though the books were pretty comprehensive, were extremely Clyde forward. 

Sarah: Women don't have thoughts. We just have the Sex and the City theme playing in our heads continually. 

Jamie: And Bonnie actually wrote that. But Bonnie, obviously, she's treated as an important character, but always a secondary character, when the reason that they're called Bonnie and Clyde is of Bonnie's making. Everyone in their lives called them “Clyde and Bonnie”, but it's because of her writings and the fact that it just fucking sounds better. This poem she wrote towards the end of their lives called, “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” is a huge reason that they are known in that order. She is very important in the story. 

And my other favorite in this torrid tale is a woman named Blanche Barrow. I love Blanche Barrow. I love Mason Blanche. Blanche, I think of everyone in Clyde's extended circle, was the most misrepresented in the Bonnie and Clyde movie. She was Clyde's sister-in-law. She was married to his older brother, Buck. And she and Buck traveled with Bonnie and Clyde for a good portion of their criminal career. Blanche famously did not want to be a criminal, essentially got tricked into joining this crime spree, did not want to be there. This is presented as very unreasonable in the movie, which is wild. 

In the movie, Bonnie and Clyde, Bonnie is played by Faye Dunaway, glamorous, very young. And in the movie Blanche is played by Estelle Parsons, who is a Massachusetts legend. She's still with us. She's an icon, she's a legend, but she is older than Faye Dunaway and is really made to seem older, less conventionally attractive, and a shrill asshole. She's constantly in the way, she's crying, she's whining. Everyone's like, “Shut the fuck up.” That's how Blanche is treated the entire movie. It is so unfair. I will die on this hill. So I'm excited to talk about Blanche in particular too, because - spoiler alert - she's the only one in this fucking car who lives to tell the tale. So what now? 

Sarah: But I don't know. I remember when I was first, really into Tonya Harding research, one of the things that I felt I wanted to emphasize was like the extreme youth of everybody involved. Tonya Harding was 23, Nancy Kerrigan was 24. At the end of this great saga of them competing against each other for years, Tonya getting married, Taoya getting divorced. You just look at that. And I was about that age when I was doing that research, but I was like, I'm a baby, so clearly these girls are also babies. And it really makes you think about the amount of pressure that they were under. 

Jamie: Just because you had to live so much very young does not mean that you need to be portrayed by someone much older. I actually don't know how old… I guess Warren Beatty was 30, but they were college age students, they were so young, and they lived so hard, and I have a lot of love for them. They did some pretty fucked up stuff. 

Sarah: No one I love has ever done anything wrong. 

Jamie: I just think that like a lot of people that you've talked about on the show over the years, it's people who just never had a chance. But first I want to tell you about Bonnie, my girl, Bonnie Parker. She's born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas, born very poor. She has one younger sister whose name is Billie Jean. Her father dies when she's young and so her mom takes them, they moved to the outskirts of Dallas to this place called Cement City.

Sarah: It's like a lack of fear of naming the thing you're doing that I think is very charming. It's look, why try and hide that we make cement here or there's nothing shameful about it.

Jamie: Bonnie is raised by a single mom. She has a really close relationship with her mom. That's something that comes up later when they're on the road. Bonnie is always trying to convince Clyde to come back to Dallas, even when it's really dangerous for them because she's so close with her mom. Her mom supports her and her sister as a seamstress, and she raises them in a way that I've read presented as arrogant. I don't agree with that at all. Bonnie's mom, Emma, raises them with a really high sense of self-esteem, even though they're very poor.

Sarah: How dare.

Jamie: Kind of tells them that they're better than people, which is not great, but like she basically raises her kids to believe that they can achieve more, and they can get out of Cement City. She really overworked herself to try to do this. She learned piano so she can teach the kids piano. She encourages Bonnie to join the local theater troupe, which she does. 

And Bonnie grows up a bit of an art girly. She loves writing, she loves photography, and she loves acting. And she had these, I don't know, vague teenage girl aspirations of maybe I'll be an actor, maybe I'll be a writer, maybe I'll be a photographer, but whatever I do, I'm not going to be in Cement City. And I really love it. There's this glamor shot that she has taken of her when she's a teenager. It's very sweet. She wants to move to New York. She wants to write poetry and act on Broadway. But this is just such an absurdly disenfranchised part of Texas and at a time where only 8% of women would go to college at all. So her options are very limited. 

When she's 15, she gets married to a guy named Roy, who is around her age but is just a spectacularly abusive person. He also is in and out of jail for the duration of their relationship, is physically abusive to her, lies to her, and her mom is basically begging Bonnie to get out of this relationship. Something she and Clyde have in common that I think is just very sweet, is that Roy is a horrible person. She does get his name tattooed on her. Clyde also has the names of two past girlfriends tattooed on him. And they just love hard. 

And I feel very seen in that where they're like, I would not just have a boyfriend. All that to say, her first relationship was extremely abusive. She's very traumatized by this. Her mom says, “dump him”. Eventually, Bonnie does. She never formally divorces him. This is why a lot of people think Bonnie and Clyde were married. They weren't. But Bonnie was always wearing a wedding ring. She wore her wedding ring with Roy. She was going to divorce him, but then he gets arrested before she can file the papers. And she's like, fuck it. 

Sarah: This reminds me of how the whole, I haven't watched Twister in a few years and I watched it a couple weeks ago, and how like the whole premise of Twister is that Bill Paxton just needs Helen Hunt to sign these divorce papers. Which is a nice role reversal from how women normally are in 90s movies.

Jamie: God, it's amazing that the plot of Twister could be solved by DocuSign.

Sarah: Like in the Blair Witch Project. I was watching that this week and I was like, boy, if they if we were making this today, this I guess then though the witch could destroy their phones. That's the thing, I guess.

Jamie: I believe in her. 

Sarah: But yeah, I admire her. I'm not saying Bonnie Parker only made good choices, however, neither do I and I admire the fact that she went forward and loved again.

Jamie: I really love that too. And I feel like that is a testament to her and also her mom. There's a lot of my son that I see in Bonnie in the way that she is like she loves really hard. And sometimes she will overextend herself for a relationship such as committing crimes and dying. But who among us? There's just a number of Bonnie moments where I was like, yeah, I would have done that too, especially if I was 19. 

But I think that there is this other side of her that has a really strong sense of self. And to the very end, she has a lot of hope that things are going to change and that things are going to turn around. And obviously, they don't, but I think that is part of what Helped sustain them for so long was that like she and Clyde both had hope for the future for a really long time, which they should have, they were in their early 20s. It's wild.

Sarah: It’s kind of your birthright, you know unless you live in a society that takes it away from you. I feel like taking away the Faye Dunaway archetype, to me, what changes everything. And the story, the way you tell it is like starting off imagining Bonnie as a kind of dreamy already frustrated teenager. 

Jamie: Which I would imagine was at one point the majority of this listenership. It’s definitely us.

Sarah: Yeah. If you were some other kind of teenager, then you're presumably listening to the show, because Someone you love has put it on and you're in a car with them. 

Jamie: After the marriage falls apart, I don't believe she finishes high school. She's working as a waitress. She gets in trouble for giving away food to people who can't afford it because we're heading into the depression years. And she was known for just being very beloved and giving away food. 

She also keeps these incredible diaries. I love Bonnie's diaries so much. I have a lot of it written down, but the one that I really like to share always is she's just living in the middle of nowhere with no money, and she's fucking bored, and there's two entries in a diary that she also keeps very sporadically. She writes, “Why don't something happen?” And she writes this two days in a row. 

Sarah: I love her. 

Jamie: I love her, too. I just think she's the best, because, like, why don't something happen?

Sarah: You're like, but what if something never happened? Nothing has happened yet!

Jamie: And she's surrounded, and there's people in her life that nothing happened. And she really wants something to happen. And in 1930, something happened. She meets Clyde Barrow at a party in West Dallas. Most people do describe this as a very instant connection, a very love at first sight-y kind of thing. She doesn't know a lot about him. Bonnie didn't have any history of even petty crime prior to meeting Clyde. 

Clyde had done some petty crime, which we'll talk about in a second. They are very enamored with each other. Instantly, they start dating. So Clyde at this point was a year older than her and had a sort of string of petty crimes that were mostly survival. He stole chickens. He stole a couple of bikes.

Sarah: It was all very Portland 2023.

Jamie: Yeah for the most part, he was stealing food, and then he also started stealing cars. The point is, he wasn't hurting anybody, and I think that's what really frustrates me about the sort of born killer narrative that surrounds Clyde is that all of his crimes were petty crimes, that were majority intended for his survival, at worst, stupid. 

He is arrested from Bonnie's house early in their relationship for stealing a car. He asks if she'll wait for him. And she's like, “yeah”, but she's back and forth on it. She really cares about him, but also she's already been in a really horrific marriage with a husband who was in and out of jail. She's not sure if she wants to do it. And so she starts dating someone while Clyde is in jail. Who by all description, I feel bad for this guy. RIP to him, I'm assuming. It was a long time ago, but everyone describes this guy as a flop. They're like, Bonnie started dating this flop because he seemed safe, while she continued to write Clyde letters while he was in jail.

Sarah: Well, Bonnie has needs, I guess.

Jamie: I get it. Sometimes you’ve got to date to flop for a while. Her letters to Clyde are very sweet. They rock. She says, “Honey, I sure wish I was with you tonight. Sugar, I never knew I really cared for you until you got put in jail.” And, “Honey, if you get out, okay, please don't ever do anything to get locked up again.”

Sarah: Oh, boy. 

Jamie: And “Listen, honey boy, you started this, and someone is sure going to finish it.” But basically, she visits him. She is hedging her bets by being in this other relationship. But it seemed like the longer he's away, the more she realizes that she really does want to be with him. So on one visit to Clyde in prison, and this is a county jail, he's soon going to go to essentially a work camp, but she goes to visit him at the county jail, and he asks her to smuggle a gun into the jail so he can bust out. 

So this is a big turning point for Bonnie as she is an art teen who's working waitressing jobs, and this is like the first quote unquote bad thing that she's ever done. Clyde asks her to do this. She's not sure. And he passes her a note that says, “You are the sweetest baby in the world to me. I love you.” And she's like, “I'll do it.” Which, I would also do for the right person. Whew. So she smuggles him the gun the same day. She keeps that note for the rest of her life. 

Sarah: Oh, Bonnie.

Jamie: I know. Clyde busts out of jail. So the deal with Clyde, it gets hot dog adjacent, because his name is Clyde Chestnut Barrow. Kind of scary. 

Sarah: And we don't know how the rest of Joey's life is going to pan out. So anything could happen. 

Jamie: Joey passes me that note. Are you kidding?  Clyde Chestnut Barrow was from an even poorer family in West Dallas. He's one of seven kids. He and Bonnie are both very petite, which everyone seems to love to point out. Clyde's a short king. I love that for him. He's a real control freak, which I love less for him. But even within the gang, he has this cult-like presence where Bonnie and his brother and many of their associates think Clyde knows best, we're going to do what Clyde says. The only person who's, “Fuck Clyde”, is my girl Blanche, who's like, “Why are we listening to Clyde? We keep getting shot.” 

Clyde is also a very arty teenager. He loves music. He wants to be a musician. He played saxophone, he played ukulele, he sang. He left school when he's a teenager with the hopes of becoming a musician, which was not possible. Again, I just think it's so sad and frustrating that it's like Bonnie wanted to be a writer, Clyde wanted to be a musician. And they had these very pure aspirations. And another thing they had in common was they were both Clyde, I think to a greater degree, it was like they were very ashamed to be poor. And I think this is tied into their legend. 

In spite of the fact that they were living in horrible conditions or living in a car or living in the woods, they have to be totally off the grid, but they always were for the most part, until the end, they were always wearing really nice clothes and they would always go out of their way to steal clothes because they didn't want to die in the class they were born in. And so failing that they wanted to at least look like they weren't going to die in the class they were born in. So you have these very 20s, 30s fashions. Bonnie's very flapper coded in her wardrobe choices. 

Sarah: Not to jump ahead too much, but comes into the question of why do stories fascinate people when they do? And seeing it not as it was the depression, people were bored and so that was why they were big, even though they sucked as criminals. No, there's something more. It's like they're compelling, but there's something maybe about the time that makes them mesh with the public imagination. And I feel like being a criminal on the road, having a crime spree in the thirties and the depression. One of the things about it, it seems is that this is one of the only ways to transcend class.

Jamie: Hugely. Part of what makes them appealing is that they're also like saying fuck you to a lot of systems that are oppressing people across the country. The most obvious culprit is the police, but also they're robbing banks. Because, fuck banks. And they're killing cops, because, fuck cops. I think that there was a very cathartic element to following their crimes, and that's part of why people liked them so much. 

Sure, everyone's bored, but I already feel like we're hearing people characterize COVID like that, where you're like, yeah, people are bored, but they're way more mad. And especially because of the way that they were presented in the press as these enemies of the police and enemies of the state at a time where like most poor people felt that the state was against them. And so it's like, yeah, I'm rooting for these guys because they're much more like me than the police are and the government are. 

Sarah: And especially the banks that just lost everybody's money. You're like, I'd like my money, please. And they're like, we don't have it!

Jamie: Sorry. The time when it gets harder for the public to embrace them is a combination of when the media narrative changed and how would you know anything except what the ‘papes were telling you at the time. Borrowing a Newsies’ term. It was when they killed civilians that the public turned on them, and that I understand. But, anyways. 

Clyde wants to be a musician. He drops out of school to be a musician and he's supporting himself by working a string of low paid jobs. He works at Western Union. He works at, I think, a candy factory. And to supplement this, he starts stealing chickens and a string of petty crime across West Dallas. This obviously gets the attention of the Dallas police. And there's a wife of a Dallas sheriff that later says, in regard to Clyde, “If the Dallas police had left that boy alone, we wouldn't be talking about him today.” Which I think is really true and is obviously still a policing pattern now. 

Clyde was caught doing a few petty crimes, and then the police would never leave him alone ever. There's a number of times in his late teens/early twenties, before he's arrested, that Clyde tries to have a job and have a life and maybe steal a chicken or two here or fucking whatever. But the police would go to his place of employment and be like, hey, you really don't want this guy working for you, he's going to steal from you. And then he would lose his job. And he reached a point where he felt there was no alternative, because the police would never leave him alone. 

And in Dallas, from what I can tell, it was particularly bad. These guys had nothing fucking better to do than just harass a teenager who was trying to hold down a job at Western Union. It's ridiculous. This is where Clyde's at when he meets Bonnie. He's arrested. He says, “You are the sweetest baby in the world to me. I love you.” And now they're both crime-ing, baby, because she smuggles him a gun. He busts out. He is out for one week and then he is caught again and sent to a far worse prison. Really, it's this place called East Texas Penitentiary. 

There's been a lot written about it because there were many prisons, but this was notorious in Texas. It was a work camp whose goal was to exploit labor and completely break your spirit. There are long descriptions about it that I will not subject you to, but it was basically a torture camp. Its nickname was the burning hell. And this was very well known in the community. If your loved one was sent to Eastham of Texas, there was a very low chance that they would come out alive. 

Prior to going there, Clyde was a petty thief. Once he gets there, he is worked nearly to death along with all of the men at this prison. He is routinely sexually abused by a fellow prisoner. This goes on for a long time. And eventually the first person Clyde kills is his assaulter. He kills this man who's been sexually abusing him for months, and basically makes this deal with someone who is serving a 50-year sentence that this other guy is going to take the fall for killing this guy in exchange for Clyde, who's theoretically in for 14 years. So he basically barters with this guy to say, hey, I've busted out of prison once before. If you take the fall for me right now, I will attempt to bust out again, and I'll try to come back and help you basically. And this guy is like, yeah, I'm here for 50 years. What's a few more? Takes the fall for Clyde. 

Clyde starts planning on ways that he can get out, or at least transferred, And a common way to not have to work in the fields all day in Texas was you would cut off your own hand, you would cut off your own foot, you would physically make yourself unable to work. In the meantime, Clyde's mom, who is the sweetest, she's this lady named Kimi. And she has another son who's in and out of jail, Buck, who's eventually Blanche's husband. But she is appealing to the state like crazy, trying to get Clyde out. But Clyde doesn't feel optimistic about it. So he cuts off two of his toes so he doesn't have to work anymore. 

Sarah: The little ones. 

Jamie: I think it was like the middle, two of the middle guys.

Sarah: That's smart. I stubbed one of my pinky toes really badly recently and it is amazing how much work it's doing once it's not able to, and you realize how much you need it. Middle seems smart. 

Jamie: Yeah. Clyde walks with a slight limp for the rest of his life because of these missing toes. And then in an example of brutal irony, less than a week later, his mom's appeal to the state succeeds and he is released from prison. Which is great, but he's down two toes. So he does get out, but he gets out and everyone in his life is like, he was a completely different person when he came out.

Sarah: Wow. I can't imagine why. 

Jamie: Can you imagine? Once he's out, he moves to Boston briefly, because a friend of a friend is like, I can get you a job. I can get you back on your feet. But Clyde wants to be near his family. He bails. And once he's back, he essentially tells his mom, It's never going to be possible for me to have a normal life. I can't hold down a regular job. The Dallas Police won't let me and I don't want to leave Dallas. I shouldn't have to and so I'm going to do something else. 

Of course, once he is out, the question is ‘are he and Bonnie going to get back together?’ Because Bonnie is still just working waitressing jobs and doing the same thing, maybe dating a flop or two, who knows. But Clyde gets out with as close as you could describe to his missions in his life after he gets out of Eastham, is that he never wants to go to jail again ever. And he wants to bust people out of Eastham because of how poorly he was treated there. So those are sort of his two missions. And also to be with Bonnie, if she'll have him, which she does. There you go. Do you remember in the movie Clyde is presented as impotent. 

Sarah: Yes. I've never seen the whole movie, I've seen bits of it. And I started watching it in high school because I had gotten a tape of it. And I got as far as that issue coming up, and I was like if these two were not boning the whole time, I'm out, I'm going away, I'm going to go watch True Romance. And probably I did. 

Jamie: Completely reasonable. Because why else would you watch something as a horny teenager and that was like a Warren Beatty creative choice. This was not a thing. 

Sarah: I’m amazed that if you're making a movie in 1967 you're like, let's have less sex in it than the historical record supports.

Jamie: I think it was like, I don't know, the compulsion of a hot guy to play against type.

Sarah:  We get it, Warren Beatty, you have a mind as well. 

Jamie: But what about the truth? Part of that I think was Warren Beatty wanting to make a choice. But I also think there were a lot of persistent rumors surrounding Clyde's sexuality in general. I haven't found that there's much chew in it. I think that it speaks to at the time, a lot of the books I was reading, they were written in the 90s and early 2000s, and just speaks to people's literacy on consent. Because there's a lot of people that are like, Clyde was bisexual because he was sexually abused by a man. And you're like, that’s not… what? 

Sarah: I know. Sometimes I really feel like, ah, the 90s were great. It was like a time of economic prosperity, and we weren't obsessed with terrorism yet and Jerry Seinfeld was on TV wearing giant sneakers and a slim waist. And then you think about that, and you're like, oh, yeah, we didn't know anything.

Jamie: Yeah, Jerry Seinfeld was dating a teenager. 

Sarah: Yeah, and nobody was bothered by that. And then they were like, sexual abuse sounds like bi-sexuality. Dating a teenager seems good. It was just like, wow. 

Jamie: I think it's so bizarre that there's a hyper fixation around was impotent when the reality appears to be that he was straight and fucked a lot, which is okay, 

Sarah: And why complicate that? And do you feel like he was as in love with Bonnie that it was like an even love match there? 

Jamie: Yes, I do think that they had a very toxic relationship in a lot of ways.

Sarah: It's hard to kill civilians during a totally healthy relationship, I think. 

Jamie: Other than that, they were perfectly fine. No, I think that is something that resonates with people about this story that does actually appear to be true. They really loved each other. And we learn, yeah they did love each other there. I know at times that he was controlling and there, but there are just all these examples of things that they would do for each other where, when Bonnie is injured later in the story, he carries her from place to place for the rest of her life. They would never abandon each other, except in this example I'm about to get to. 

A lot of people present Bonnie as she had no idea what she was getting into, blah, blah, blah. It appears she actually does fully know what she's getting into. She tells Clyde that she does want to come with him on this- they're not saying crime spree, but she knows that they're going to be sticking up small businesses. That's another thing that I think I had a wrong idea about was like, they're robbing huge banks.

Sarah:  Right? That's just the mental image of a bank robbery. 

Jamie: Yeah, they were not robbing huge banks. They were robbing small banks, gas stations, and small businesses for very small amounts of money. So they weren't doing whatever, pretty boy Floyd numbers. They were almost universally robbing small businesses for small amounts of money. That was part of why they robbed so much. Yeah.

Sarah: Because they just had to. 

Jamie: They just had to. They're like, oh no, we only got $14 from that. And so I think it also speaks to like, where they were traveling at the time they were like, they were robbing during the Great Depression, they were not often getting big sums of money. 

Sarah: Who is going to have all these great sums of money for them to get?

Jamie: There's no strategy, is the thing. I feel like it would be dishonest to qualify Bonnie and Clyde as organized crime because there's no organization about it. Their gang was never larger than two cars full of people. And that would even be unusual. There's a rotating cast of people involved, and one is imagined as a catch all character in the Bonnie and Clyde movie. I think his character is called C. W. Moss.

Sarah: Is that Gene Wilder?

Jamie: No, that's Michael Pollard, who's basically their teen ward. They did have a teen ward. His name was WD. But there's this sort of rotating cast of people that they travel with, but it's all small-time stuff. They didn't have the resources, or the strategy, or the experience, or the infrastructure, to be able to pull off a huge bank heist because they have a ward.

Sarah: Like I said before, it changes everything starting by framing it this way as disenfranchised kids who basically don't know what to do with their lives, and have run out of other options.

Jamie: Bonnie starts helping out with these crimes. In one situation, they're running from the cops. It's Bonnie's kind of real first time encountering the cops. And because of the shoes she's wearing, she gets stuck in a ditch. It's a real Jurassic World situation. She gets stuck in a ditch and Clyde bales. He leaves her, And I'm like, “Clyde!” 

They did have a contingency plan. That's how most of these books justify this happening. I'm like, he's still wrong for that, though. And I think that this is interesting because Bonnie is often presented, she's either presented in the media once they become famous as an evil criminal mastermind or this bimbo that Clyde Barrow travels with and nothing in between, and she is neither of those things.

Sarah: That's the thing. I would love for women to be able to commit crimes and get a normal amount of credit. 

Jamie: But they have a plan basically, if you get caught alone, just play dumb. 

Sarah: That does work well for women.

Jamie: Unfortunately not for Bonnie. Not on this day. But she's arrested and she's in jail for a while.

Sarah: Oh, Bonnie.

Jamie: She's in jail for less than a year. 

Sarah: Way to go, Clyde. Get it together. 

Jamie: Seriously. And meanwhile, someone's free and it's Clyde. And while she's in jail, she starts writing. She starts writing a semi-autobiographical novel about a romance. I love it. It's about a romance between a con man and his girl who takes the fall for him, which is beautifully passive aggressive. She starts writing this story called The Story of Suicide Sal. 

Sarah: It’s so wonderfully teenage. 

Jamie: Just a quick passage from Suicide Sal. 

Sarah: Yes, please. 

Jamie: “If he had returned to me some time, though he hadn't a cent to give, I'd forget all the hell that he's caused me, and love him as long as I lived. But there's no chance of his ever coming, for he and his maul have no fears, but that I will die in this prison, or flatten these long fifty years.” And you're like, ooh, I love Bonnie. 

While Bonnie is in prison, Clyde kills his first person outside of Eastham. This is, I think, one of the ones that doesn't sit very well with people because it's a small business owner who he knew. It's positioned as an accident. Unclear what actually happens, but he's back at it. Bonnie gets out of jail in the summer of 1932, says that she's through with Clyde and 20 minutes later, she gets back with Clyde and they're back on the road. They're doing crimes. Several more murders, most of them cops. 

Bonnie is often so painfully lonely for her mom that even though Dallas is the most dangerous place on the planet they could be. That's another thing that I was like, Clyde really must have loved her because he does bring her back to Dallas all the time, even when it's dangerous. And he loves his family too. And the Parker and Barrow families develop this code where the moms will call each other. Their code is ‘I've got a big pot of beans and some corn bread’. And that means our children are back from being on the lam. Let's have lunch. 

Sarah: Oh God.  I don't know, I love that so much. It just pulls them out of Jen and you're like these are two kids with families and they're doing their best. And to be clear, I don't advocate killing anyone. But I also really sympathize or empathize, one of the “pathizes” is maybe both with Clyde and just being someone who like had a chance to be someone who would have found it much harder to kill people and I think after his time in prison, came out as someone for whom that was a lot more thinkable.

Jamie: I think that's another thing. Bonnie, as far as everyone knows, never killed anybody, but she's the Thanos of accomplices. Living in a place like Eastham for two consecutive years and seeing people around you murdered constantly and being in a constant state of hypervigilance, that very obviously changed him.

Sarah: If we had the choice, we would all choose to not harm each other and to be able to live in the world in a way that we felt able to offer and receive safety from other people. And that when we lose that ability, that's not something that feels good, that nobody wants to be that way, that's what this whole show is about, trying to say they weren't these super competent criminals. They weren't evil losers who got more press than they deserve. They were just people whose stories resonate so deeply with other Americans, I think. Partly because maybe in ways they couldn't verbalize, people saw themselves in that partly, too, and in the feeling of life is so impossible for a normal person, how many people looked at Clyde and thought that could have been me and kind of longing for that freedom. And then that could have been me in terms of being pursued to the point where you can't stop running and where you become someone else than the way you started. 

Jamie: Yeah, I think that's totally true. And these meetings, usually their mothers, just their mothers are always trying to say please stop. Please stop this. Clyde's purpose, I think once you know a little bit about him is very clear. And for Bonnie, I think she finds purpose for herself within this relationship in a way that is not the way she wanted to, but is successful. And I guess you can feel any which way about it, but I don't think that they were doing this for no reason. And it's sometimes presented as for no reason. Say what you will about murder, but once Bonnie's associated with murder, Suicide Sal is published in the paper, so hard to get published.

Sarah: Oh, Bonnie, that's so great. Many of us have spent many years trying to crack into publishing. And if you have to take shortcuts, then, you know.

Jamie: She got her poem published on the front page of a newspaper. You got to kill someone to do that. Doesn't just happen. So by the end of ‘32, they're well on their crime spree. In ‘33, that's where my girly Blanche becomes relevant to the story. Blanche Barrow, unlike the movie, which presents her as at least a decade older than Bonnie, Blanche and Bonnie are the exact same age. She's three months younger than Bonnie, born in Oklahoma, raised mainly by her father, who was a farmer and a pastor, very bad relationship with her mom. But there's a lot of similarities, too. 

I think it's really frustrating that in the most popular piece of media about Bonnie and Clyde is that Bonnie and Blanche are presented in opposition to each other. They hate each other. Bonnie thinks Blanche sucks, she's annoying. And there's no mention of how many similarities, they're very different women, but they have a lot of similarities in their early lives. Blanche was also married off to a man when she was a teenager when she was 16. And this husband was also extremely abusive. It's said that she was so physically abused by her first husband that she was unable to have children by the end of the marriage. 

Her aspirations were not as lofty or art oriented as Bonnie or Clyde. I would describe Blanche's aspirations as not to be on the run with a group of disorganized criminals being hunted by the FBI. She just wanted to have a stable normal life. So she runs away from her husband in 1929 and relocates to West Dallas after getting her divorce. And she meets a man named Buck Barrow on the street. Another Barrow, another short king, Clyde's older brother, and the one who first got him into stealing chickens and the like. They're very close. They fall in love very quickly as well. Three weeks after they meet, Buck is arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. They fall in love through letters. She calls him ‘daddy’. He calls her ‘baby’. 

Buck escapes from prison. Three months later, the Barrow boys are great at busting out of jail and they get married in 1931 after her first divorce goes through. But they're having the early days of their relationship tacitly on the run from the Dallas police and Blanche does not like this. But in every piece of media she's presented as, what a bitch. You're like, she doesn't want to be on the run for her entire life. She's not a bitch. She's regular. She writes a memoir much later towards the end of her life - spoiler alert - in the ‘80s. She lives forever. But she says, “I love this man who was hunted by officers of the law. He said, “he loved me as I did him.” He said he wasn't a criminal at heart. He said he was tired of that kind of life. Talk, talk, talk.” She's sassy. I love her. 

After they get married, and they've been moving around a lot, Blanche is like, “Look, I want you to go back to prison and finish your sentence. And when you get out, we will have a normal life together.” And Buck agrees to this. And so Buck goes back to prison and Blanche works while Buck is in prison. She works at this place called Cinderella Beauty Shop. She becomes a licensed beautician. I would watch a whole movie about this period of her life. And she does, she waits for Buck so that they can have a normal life. 

He gets out in the spring of 1933. while Bonnie and Clyde are already on the run. And my girl boss Blanche was a big part of making that happen. She's also constantly appealing to the state. It was rumored that Blanche would petition and manipulate Governor Ma Ferguson, played by Kathy Bates in that horrible movie, by bringing three children that were not hers and would pretend to be pregnant to try to convince her that she had all these kids and Buck had to get out because she needed support. Just random children.

Sarah:  So good. I do want to watch this movie. 

Jamie: Right? She is a crafty lady. So Buck gets out. He's 30. She is younger than that. So she's like 21. Blanche is like, great, let's go stay with my parents for a while. Let's get reacquainted. Let's go have sex for six weeks or whatever. But once Clyde hears that Buck's out of jail, he wants to go see him and talk to him. And so in the middle of the night very soon after Buck gets out of jail, they wake up and Bonnie and Clyde are at Blanche's house. And she's like, Oh, fuck. No, she actually isn't like that. She thinks, Buck has made me a promise and I've been waiting for actual years, surely this will be fine. 

Sarah: Surely he's not going to blow this whole thing.

Jamie: I can't with Buck. He's, “I lived a difficult life.” But I'm like, Buck. She worked at a beauty shop for two years. She kidnapped children to delude the governor. And then day one, it's just, it pisses me off. 

Sarah: She tricks Kathy Bates for you. 

Jamie: Oh my God. So they're woken up in the middle of the night by Bonnie and Clyde. There's a very sweet scene. I think this proves to me that Bonnie and Blanche were not at odds very often at least. Bonnie, at this point, once she's been on the road for a couple of months, begins to develop an issue with alcohol abuse that is another thing that I think de-glamorizes the whole situation. Bonnie is very rarely sober because of the stress that she's constantly under. 

Sarah: Yeah, I feel like if you're getting chased around and shot at, you know. 

Jamie: I'm never in a chase and I still drink too much. But Bonnie comes in, gets into bed with Blanche, she's drunk. Blanche says, “I asked Bonnie to get in bed with me and try to get a little sleep, but Bonnie seemed to want to talk instead of sleeping. She said it was so good to have a woman she knew to talk to, adding that it was so lonesome for her just being in the company of men, all the time and never any women friends to talk to. I knew this was true because I had experienced a few months of that myself. She had often told me that she was happier when she had something to drink, so I did not blame her for staying drunk most of the time if it made her feel better.” 

They weren't besties, but I don't know. I just hate the way that the movie frames them as there's only two women in the movie, so they better fucking hate each other.

Sarah: I think the patriarchal myth that women hate each other is a smoke screen they've created, so they can ignore the fact that we're all coming to get them or something. 

Jamie: Exactly. Any day now. 

Sarah: We're using this power with great discretion. 

Jamie: Huge L for Blanche on this night because downstairs Clyde, through whatever magic cult of personality Clyde is in possession of, convinces his brother instantly that just join us for a little bit.

Sarah: Oh, Clyde.

Jamie: You'll get a little bit of money and then you and Blanche can really start over.

Sarah: Actually, it seems a little bit like gambling actually, right? Because if you're knocking over convenience stores and stuff, they don't have much money in them, then it can cultivate the sense of okay, the next one.

Jamie: Now Blanche is convinced by Buck, we're just going on the road with him for a couple of days. We'll be back in a couple of days. If you want insurance, bring the dog. Which she does. She brings Snowball. Oh my god. Snowball lives, but it's not great. They are driving to Missouri. They get a two-bedroom apartment. They're hanging out. Clyde and Buck are knocking off convenience stores during the day. The problem is, at this point Clyde's operation is responsible for killing six people. 

Sarah: Oh boy. So Clyde's escalating?

Jamie: Oh yes. And it doesn't seem like he really has an interest in him stopping. He's very single minded, I will do what is going to keep me out of jail. And if that means killing someone. I don't care, and I don't care who it is. 

Sarah: Which again, it's wrong to kill people. It's insane that I have to say that this much but if you create an institution that someone comes out of so desperate to not return to that they will do anything to not have to, then I don't blame the individual there.

Jamie: Just speaking to the abusive parts of Bonnie and Clyde's relationship. Blanche notes that while they're in Joplin, they would get into arguments very often about how frequently Bonnie wanted to go back to Dallas and how much she missed her mom. Sometimes Clyde would bring her back. But if he felt that the police were too hot on them, he would say no. They would get into physical fights that he was the perpetrator of. And then there were two examples of her holding him at gunpoint being like, I am seeing mommy. So that is an element of their relationship. I don't see it brought up very much, but it would feel weird not to mention. 

So while they're in Missouri, Blanche isn't nervous because she has no information. She's being actively lied to by her husband about how serious the situation has gotten. So Blanche is like, we're on vacation. We're going to go home in a couple days. I've got Snowball. They take these goofy pictures. Bonnie and Clyde had stolen this camera, and they take these very important, culturally significant pictures where basically on the side of the road, they're like, oh, let's fuck around with this camera. And so they take this jokey picture of Bonnie fake smoking this big cigar and hiking her skirt up a little bit. They take pictures of Bonnie and Clyde kissing. They take pictures of Blanche and Buck hugging. There's a jokey picture of Bonnie pointing a gun at Clyde, and he has his hands up and it's all very kid-like, it's goofy kid vacation pictures. 

While they're at this apartment in Missouri, Clyde and Buck have stolen one too many cars and the police are onto them. A neighbor tips them off and they're surrounded. Clyde kills a cop and Blanche's worst nightmare has begun, because now they're all on the run days after Buck got out of jail. It is so frustrating. Snowball, the legend, books it. He's like, fuck you guys. This family's a mess. I'm out of here. Snowball is never seen again but could be alive to this day. 

Sarah: That's what I choose to think.

Jamie: So this is the moment where Bonnie and Clyde become famous in newspapers. Mostly Clyde is mentioned because he's mostly doing the murdering. At this house that they've just booked it out of, they find these jokey vacation pictures, and this is hugely what makes them famous. Media climate of the depression. People are more desperate to sell papers, very willing to sensationalize, what, if they're jokey pictures, seems ridiculous to publish as fact, but it doesn't matter at this time and probably still wouldn't matter now. 

They become less personally safe because now people can know what they look like. They become famous, which they seem to like, they kind of collected some clippings and they first catch the notice of J. Edgar Hoover, which is bad for them. Because at this point in his career, the FBI has recently been rebranded as the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover's in charge, and he's looking for some early successes to legitimize the operation. I tried to watch that DiCaprio movie, J. Edgar, and I just couldn't do it. It was so bad. He's doing this voice. It was a flop. 

Sarah: I also believed for years for whatever reason that J. Edgar was a Scorsese movie, and like, it's not. Right?

Jamie: It’s a Clint Eastwood movie. 

Sarah: It's such a relief to know that he didn't make it. I have projected too many feelings onto Marty, as is my right. And why does the FBI need to do this? What's their deal? 

Jamie: They don't need to do this. Their reasoning that I've seen given is that J. Edgar Hoover had a huge interest in taking down gangsters and criminals that were becoming famous at this time. It seems that his primary interest in them was a combination of ‘women have gone too’ far and they're famous and it will legitimize his operation that he's still trying to legitimize because of its relative newness to the public. They're like, this FBI organization must be great. They're killing people we've heard of. 

Sarah: Which remains true for them. I'm really fascinated by how in the 70s, the FBI made serial killers their business and something that was very associated with them publicly, which, of course, somebody needs to be catching serial killers. I'm not against that. But the timing was excellent because going into the 70s, a lot of Americans are not looking at the FBI as the good guys because they weren't. And if you're fighting serial killers, then you must be a good guy. If you're taking down the crime spree kids, then you must be good and powerful. 

Jamie: Throughout the spring and summer of 1933, things just get worse and worse. Clyde takes a wrong turn off a bridge.

Sarah: Don't do that. 

Jamie: His bad. But the car catches on fire. Bonnie is not able to get out of the car and she loses the use of one of her legs. It's really badly burned. It doesn't heal well. This is one of the most brutal parts for me. Not only is Bonnie's leg injured because of this genuine accident. She is not able to go to the hospital or she'll get arrested. And even when she's in this like searing pain, she understands that. And so when some local people come over to them and try to help and call an ambulance, Clyde is like, no, we can't afford it. Sorry. But can you help us? Do you have anything you can help us with? 

The family catches on anyways, calls the cops, and they kidnap the cops and take the car. They were also known to take hostages on the road for stretches. That's the Gene Wilder sequence in the movie. Sometimes they would corner and kidnap the cops that were trying to arrest them or shoot them. 

Sarah: It’s kind of brilliant. I feel like they don't see that coming. 

Jamie: It's great. And Bonnie is said to also hold the cops at gunpoint in spite of the fact she's just lost the use of one of her legs and is in extreme pain. Anyways, things continue to get worse. Later that summer, there's a face off in Platte City, Iowa where they're living in the woods. They're trying to keep things on the low at this point. It's barely possible. But Bonnie is not able to walk for the rest of her life, basically Clyde has to carry her everywhere for most of her life. And if she can walk, it's not for long. It's 5 a. m, they sleep in shifts to watch for the cops and their teenage ward W. D. is cooking them up a five in the morning hot dog breakfast.

Sarah: Bet you forgot there were hot dogs coming! 

Jamie: Inception sting. But during hot dog breakfast the police attack them, they're not prepared for it and Buck gets shot in the head, part of his head is no longer on his head, Blanche runs after him, everyone thinks that Buck is going to die she tries to bring him into a car to try to protect him and it's so frustrating to me that Blanche gets erased from this story all the time because Blanche is heroic. 

She gets her husband into this car. The police shoot the windshield of the car, her eyes are filled with glass, and she thinks that she will not be able to ever see again and is terrified, understandably, again, she's made out to seem hysterical in the movie. They do manage to get away. And they bring Buck to an abandoned amusement park, and they think that this is where he's going to die. And Clyde, I think sweetly is like, I want my brother to be somewhere fun when he dies. Let's go to this abandoned amusement park. 

Sarah: Again, they’re kids! 

Jamie: They’re kids. They're like, let's go to the roller coaster, he loves that. That seems to be the logic. They just wanted him to look at something nice when he died. Everyone keeps thinking Buck's about to die because he's missing a lot of his head, but then he just keeps not dying. He lives for so long. It's wild how long he lives. They're hanging out at this amusement park forever. And Clyde's like, WD, go get some chicken, Buck loves chicken. And WD's like, alright. He goes to buy some chicken, comes back. Buck eats all the chicken. I guess Buck's not dying today. We have to keep moving. 

Sarah: It's kind of awkward because you're like, okay Buck, we planned a nice moment, but the clock's ticking.

Jamie: Yeah, exactly. And Buck's like, no, bitch, I lived. Blanche washes the glass out of her eyes. She's lost the use of one of her eyes entirely and she can see partially out of one other eye, and that's true for the rest of her life. When they're captured a few days later, Buck is still alive, Bonnie can't walk, Buck is almost dead, Blanche can't see. So when the cops surround them again, there are also photographers, because they're so famous at this point. And a photographer takes out his camera and Blanche thinks that he's trying to shoot her at point blank range and screams. And there's this horrible picture of her screaming in these dark glasses because she thinks she's about to be killed. 

So when they're cornered this time, Bonnie and Clyde get away. But Buck and Blanche are captured. Buck dies after another week. He lives so long with 1% of his head. It's wild. But Blanche is sentenced to 10 years in prison. Which at this point she's glad for, better than being on the road. She's obviously miserable about what happened to Buck. They get to say goodbye to each other, which is very sweet. She cans vegetables and learns how to dance in prison and reads a lot of books. So she's happy with that outcome. However, she is questioned by J. Edgar Hoover himself and she does not crack.

Sarah: By Leonardo DiCaprio in a stupid little accent.

Jamie: But J. Edgar Hoover threatens to gouge out her other eye if she doesn't give him information about these kids he's trying to kill. At this point, WD bails. It's basically down to Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie writes that she blames the Texas police for, “Making Clyde what he is today. He used to be a nice boy. Folks like us haven't got a chance”. Once Buck dies, I think both of them accept that they will either be captured or killed, and they decide they would rather be killed than captured. And I think just based on, especially Clyde, but both of their experiences in prison. 

And so when Bonnie asks to go back to the Dallas area, Clyde's like, fuck it. We're approaching the end of the road anyways. Let's see our moms. Clyde's mom has just lost her son Buck as well. Their moms begged them to turn themselves in, but they're like, we're not going to do that. So Clyde's mom, this breaks my heart, holds off on buying a headstone for Buck because she's waiting for Clyde to die, and she can't afford two. It's so horrible. One of the last things Clyde wants to try to do is his other mission, bust some guys out of Eastham. And he does that. He busts four guys out of Eastham. He really rallies towards the end. 

Sarah: I did not think that was going to happen. Good work.

Jamie: He does. He organizes a couple of guys, Bonnie helps. Bonnie kind of cases the joint by pretending to visit a prisoner and communicating information about the plan. So she's the accomplice. And together, along with a few other guys from Dallas, they get four guys out of Eastham. And unfortunately, this new setup doesn't last long. Once the guys are out of prison, they don't want to continue lives of crime and they don't want to draw attention to themselves after recently escaping prison.

Sarah: Pretty smart. 

Jamie: Yeah. So they get out and they're like, thank you. Bye. So they're back to square one. I just think it is nice that Clyde, at least partially accomplished it. He didn't burn the prison down. Would've been great if he did. 

Sarah: But he got four people. 

Jamie: He got four people out. 

Sarah: That's really impressive. I haven't broken anyone out of prison. 

Jamie: Yet. But the media tide turns on them after they shoot a rookie cop on their first day. So okay, now we're in May 1934. The closest thing they have to an ally right now is an old friend of Clyde's named Henry Methvin. They've been hanging out with Henry and his family. Henry will help them do heists. Henry's parents are very sweet and welcoming to them. The police, I think the FBI picks up on this. And Henry is wanted as well. He has a rap sheet and could be taken to prison for a long time. The FBI basically goes to Henry's parents and are like, if you set Bonnie and Clyde up, your son will never get arrested ever.

Sarah: They offered that to them in writing?

Jamie: Good question. But they're basically desperate enough to improve their son's life that they agree to do this. And eventually Henry is made aware of it, and also agrees to sell Bonnie and Clyde out. And so this brings us to the death scene, which is actually presented pretty faithfully in the movie. There's a huge sting operation, I believe it's a combination of sheriffs and FBI. The setup is that Henry's dad is on the side of the road pretending that he needs help with his tire, knowing that Bonnie and Clyde will stop because they're his friends. 

So it happens. They pull up, he runs away, they don't have time to figure out what's going on. And there's 130 rounds shot into their car in 16 seconds. 130 rounds. It's just horrible. And that is basically what's shown in the movie. I believe Clyde dies almost instantly. Bonnie lives for longer. They die together. I think this is one of the most romanticized parts of their story. 

I think another bizarre thing about this is that the car still travels the museum circuit as an FBI success. It was in the Reagan Museum recently. Unfortunate crossover as an example of a huge FBI success. 

Sarah: Yeah, which is ghoulish. It's like a slightly more sophisticated version of a head on a spike. 

Jamie: Totally. And then charging admission. It's horrific what happens. And Frank Hamer, aka. Kevin Costner, is said to have walked up to the car after they’re obviously dead and shoots Bonnie in the head one more time. Just as a fuck you. 

Once people find out that Bonnie and Clyde have been killed, the press obviously descends. There's a huge mob of press, but there's also a huge mob of just people who felt any way about them. It didn't matter if you were pro, if you were con. There's a description of souvenir hunters that kind of descend upon this car, 16,000 people. To the point where people start selling beer and cigarettes at this site of a recent murder. 

And also Frank Hamer takes some guns that Bonnie and Clyde had in the car as souvenirs of his own. There's someone who tries to cut off Clyde's ear, they steal parts of Bonnie's hair. It's just vulture-y, nasty behavior. They try to take her typewriter and they try to take his guitar. I don't know. That to me is so disturbing. 

When their bodies are removed from the car, camera people take pictures of their bodies naked and publish them in the paper. When they're taken to the funeral home, people mob the funeral home to see what the bodies look like to the point where the funeral director has to spray embalming fluid into the crowd to get them to back away. 

Sarah: That was resourceful. 

Jamie: Everyone is just absolutely fucking feral. But I think it really speaks to like how impactful they were, they were so famous. And in that crowd of 16,000 people it's hard to know who was on their side at that point but everyone was there.

Sarah: But everyone is on their own side as a memorabilia hunter. We talk a lot lately and justifiably about how the internet affects our behavior and our culture. And I think there are plenty of things that people do online that they would not do in person, in public. But there are also plenty of terrible things that people are fully willing to do in public. And they used to do a lot more of them in the 1930s.

Jamie: It's hard because it's like I don't want to say like everyone fucking sucked in that crowd because the way that Bonnie and Clyde had been presented to them was so free of context and sometimes just straight up dishonest that any opinion someone had, it would be really hard to have an informed opinion about them. But also, their moms have to bury them. Clyde's mom buys the headstone. It was one of Bonnie's last wishes with her mom that she'd be buried with Clyde. Her mom was like, nope, which is maybe a little disrespectful, but I get it. She said he had her for two years. Look where it got her. He's not going to have her anymore. She's mine now.

Sarah: Oh, it’s so hard to be a mom.

Jamie: I know. And they have separate funerals as well, which thousands and thousands of people come to and is really and is heavily covered in the media. That is the story of Bonnie and Clyde. But it's not the end of Blanche's life. She's paroled in 1939. She moves to Oklahoma to be with her dad and gets remarried. She's only 28 when this happens. 

Sarah: Her soul is weary, but her skin is so good.

Jamie: Oh my God. So she marries this new guy in Oklahoma, does not tell him anything about her past at all. She's been through it. 

Sarah: Your 20s. Who among us?

Jamie: And her mom at one point brings up this really famous period of her life up in front of her new husband, and Blanche scolds her mom for bringing up those, “sour onions and dirty shirts.”

Sarah: Imagine referring to your time with the most notorious criminal element in the country as “sour onions and dirty shirts.” I love her.

Sarah:  Don't tell everyone about that gross apartment I used to live in.

Jamie:  Let me live, mom. I just, I love Blanche. And she eventually does achieve her goal of living a normal life. It takes a long time, and she almost doesn't make it out, but she does make it out. 

They live happily for a long time. He dies in the late sixties, and Blanche is feeling lonely. She's feeling reflective and she reconnects with Bonnie's younger sister, Billie Jean. They had met when Bonnie's leg got injured, and they hadn't gotten along then. Because, I don't know, who would get along? I don't know. But as older women they meet, they talk, I think that this friendship allows Blanche to access this part of her life that she was suppressing for a long time and they become best friends. They move to be close together and they're besties for the rest of their lives. And she died on Christmas Eve in 1998. Shoutout to Blanche. And, yeah, that was Bonnie and Clyde. 

Sarah: Bonnie and Clyde and Blanks and Buck. 

Jamie: Yeah, I would put Buck last. He's my least favorite.  

Sarah: I mean, I feel like it tells me so much about what the story is that one person of these four got to survive and live her dream and it wasn't wealth or fame. It was just a normal life. Like everyone is allegedly supposed to be able to have in America, but of course not in practice. 

Jamie: Which is, I think, what all of them wanted. They wanted different versions of that.

Sarah: That was our episode. Thank you for joining us. Stay cool out there. And if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, stay toasty. 

Thank you so much to Jamie Loftus for bringing us this story for everything that you do, Jamie. You're the best. Thank you to Carolyn for editing this episode and for making this show possible. Carolyn Kendrick, thank you so much. 

And thank you to you out there listening, doing whatever you're doing. It's the summer now. If you're listening in the present and the future, we hope it's a good one. Take care of yourself. We'll see you in two weeks.