Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde

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LYDEN: So they kind of topped into that seething of Depression-era rage. I mean, they were creatures of their context as Depression heroes because they took control of their lives in a certain way when other people couldn't. That, unfortunately, was before Clyde had been repeatedly raped in prison. That's the sort of reality that most people, perhaps fortunately, don't have to think about. Just like they don't have to think about the lives of people like Clyde Barrow's parents & their family: Yet W/ D. Jones in his 1968 interview with Playboy was also definite: "During the five big gun battles I was with them [which included Joplin], she never fired a gun." Bonnie's mother, Emma, and sister, Billie Jean, were adamant that Bonnie didn't fire even one bullet from the time she met Clyde until her death." - p 398

The coroner’s report detailed 17 holes in Clyde’s body and 26 holes in Bonnie’s body. Unofficially, there may have been many more. C.B. Bailey, the undertaker assigned to preserve the bodies for the funerals, found that the bodies had so many holes in them in so many different places that it was difficult to keep embalming fluid in them.Decades later, asked about long-standing rumors suggesting that her infamous former beau was either gay or impotent, she assured the interviewer that Clyde "didn't have any problems at all," and left no doubt that she spoke as an authority on the subject." - p 36 And the roles Bud inevitably chose for himself were outlaws. He was Jesse James or Billy the Kid." - p 16

I, like many people, might've 1st heard tell of Bonnie & Clyde when the Arthur Penn movie about them came out in 1967. It's unlikely that I witnessed this movie in a theater at the time because I was 13 most of that yr & had very limited access to theaters. There were none w/in walking distance of where I lived. Stll, I'm sure I saw it in a theater w/in a few yrs of its release. The Penn movie, starring Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow & Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker, is mostly sympathetic to its title's characters & paints a romantic picture.

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The lyrics of "Goodnight Saigon" are about Marines in battle bonding together, fighting their fears and trying to figure out how to survive. [1] The singer, a Marine, sings of "we" rather than "I", emphasizing that the Marines are all in the situation together. [1] In the bridge Joel sings of the darkness and the fear it induced in the Marines. [1] This leads into the refrain, which has multiple voices coming together to sing that the Marines will "all go down together", emphasizing their camaraderie. [1] [2] I suppose director Arthur Penn's 1967 cinematic critical and commercial success Bonnie and Clyde - starring then-relative newcomers Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway - sort of established the idea of the romantic outlaw duo and their ragtag cohorts for the public at large. (However - and not unusual for a Hollywood production - the screenplay was really only 'inspired by' actual people and events, and took a number of extreme liberties in the presented story.) Author Guinn's work - the kind of book I refer to as exhaustively detailed but sometimes just exhausting - aims to give a much more accurate telling of their life story. However, while the author notes how the gang became folk heroes to some of the downtrodden U.S. population during the agonizing throes of the Great Depression, he also seems to fall a little too often into the same admiration or 'hear no evil' opinion of their activities, in effect glamorizing a group of unrepentant criminals that have few redeeming values. Go Down Together is revisionist history. It is what we might call a deconstruction, an excavation of the Bonnie and Clyde legend that scours away romance, hyperbole, and false motivations. From a reader’s standpoint, the trouble with such a deconstruction is that it can leave you wondering why you bothered in the first place. In other words, there are times when you scrape away so many layers that you are left without anything at all. It is also a miracle of compression. It captures perfectly the emotional dilapidations of a dying relationship. If there is anyone who recognises nothing of themselves, a partner or a partnership in their bitter exchanges, especially during the final row (cathartic though it proves), I wish to live inside your head and life for ever. Along with peanut butter & jelly and Batman & Robin, Bonnie & Clyde have to rank among the most recognizable pairings in American cultural history. It has been almost ninety years since they died in a hailstorm of bullets, and fifty-four years since Arthur Penn’s classic film turned them into icons of something they never represented. Though many people would be hard-pressed to provide details about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, I’d venture that most at least recognize their names, recall that they were outlaws, and know that they went out of this world with a bang.

After years of predicting she'd be a famous star on Broadway, or perhaps a renowned poet, she was still a nobody in the Dallas slums." - p 44 Mr. JEFF GUINN (Author, "Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde"): Just across the river from here, in fact. As the train rolled across the wooded Wisconsin countryside en route to the state mental hospital, he was asked whether he liked to hunt. 'Only Bull Moose,' he replied wryly.""This is from a poem written by Bonnie Parker, shortly before the fatal ambush on her and Clyde Barrow in May of 1934. Bonnie wrote many poems during her time spent with Clyde. Most of them weren't very good but this one kind of gave me chills when I read it. Bonnie was well aware by then that there was no other way their story would end. She didn't get her wish that they would be buried together. When they died, Bonnie's mother would no longer even halfway pretend she liked Clyde and she refused, instead having Bonnie buried in a cemetery across town. We all know how it ends. Guinn writes that final scene in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, the best I’ve ever seen it described. It is gruesome and heartless, born out of a real fear of these outlaws who had proven themselves to be as dangerous and unpredictable as trapped animals. 130 rounds were poured into that 1934 Cordoba Gray, 8 cylinder, deluxe sedan Ford with the greyhound radiator cap, which had been stolen in Topeka, Kansas, and forever now known as THE DEATH CAR. When the legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer walks up to the car and puts one final blast into Bonnie, a few expletives escaped my lips. I felt a flare of anger that attests to the difference between knowing people and just knowing they existed. Last night, I heard Bonnie’s screams in one of my nightmares, and the men who were there that day heard them for the rest of their lives.