Blumenthal - Bonnie and clyde: the Making of a Legend

Bonnie poses with a gun and a cigar, March 1933. This is the photograph that made her famous.

IN TRUTH, Bonnie Parker was just messing around the day her most famous photo was taken.

But once a picture runs over and over again in newspapers all across the country, people draw their own conclusions.

By 1930s standards, this shot was a doozy. Bonnie, twenty-two years old and maybe a nick under five feet tall, propped her heel on the bumper of a car in a most unladylike position. She held a revolver stolen from a police officer on her hip. Most outrageous, she clenched a cigar between her teeth, something a decent woman would never do. Her expression was defiant.

In reality, she had borrowed the cigar from her friend W. D. Jones and was playing around for the camera. She knew how to shoot, sure, but she rarely fired a gun in public. She would never actually smoke a cigar; she wasnt that type of woman. She did smoke cigarettes, thoughlots of people did in those dreary days of the Great Depression.

When the photo was snapped, Bonnie and her boyfriend, Clyde Barrow, had been running from police for about a year. Clyde was already wanted for robbery and at least four murders in Texas and Oklahoma, where he was considered an elusive and extremely dangerous criminal with a quick trigger finger. But beyond the region, he wasnt well known. To law enforcement and reporters, Bonnie was only a female companion along for the ride as they raced through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas.

Then they decided to take a break in Joplin, Missouri.

On April 1, 1933, Bonnie, Clyde, and W. D., a teenager who had been a family friend of the Barrows, moved to a two-bedroom garage apartment. They were looking forward to a reunion with Clydes older brother Buck, who had just gotten out of a Texas prison, and Bucks wife, Blanche.

A neighbor, noticing that the curtains were always drawn, grew suspicious. Thinking they were thieves or bootleggers, he contacted the police, who began to watch the apartment.

In the late afternoon of April 13the day before the group planned to leaveClyde and W. D. were in the garage when five officers pulled up in two cars. When the county constable emerged with a gun, the two outlaws quickly responded with a hail of bullets. The constable was hit in the neck and shoulder. Another barrage of buckshot hit a Joplin detective.

In the intense gunfight, W. D. took a bullet in his side and Clyde was struck in the chest, which left him bleeding but not badly injured. Somehow, the gang managed to pile into a stolen car and escape the bloody scene.

The county constable was dead. The other lawman was dying.

Inside the apartment, amid partially packed clothes and dishes dirty from lunch, police found Buck and Blanches marriage license, Clydes guitar, and a poem that Bonnie was refining and recopying, the ink still wet. In Blanches bag, there was something else: a camera and undeveloped film.

Soon after, Bonnie Parkers photos appeared for the first time in the newspapers. There was the outrageous one with the cigar, and another one, where she teasingly poked a rifle into Clydes midsection, pretending to lift his gun. There were plenty of pictures of Clyde and W. D., too. But Bonnies photos were the attention grabbers.

Once the photographs were public, Bonnie was no longer merely a criminals girlfriendor, to use the derogatory term, mollalong for the ride. She was a partner, a gang member, a rare female fugitive with a known name and a really bad reputation. It was almost too scandalous to believe.