'My LIfe with Bonnie and Clyde' (Blanche's memoirs)

If anyone hasn't read it and has an interest in Bonnie and Clyde beyond the movie, I really recommend it. She puts you in the seat of the stolen/getaway car, so to speak. Also, she puts to rest some misconceptions about herself and the gang, particularly the recent rendering that Bonnie was just a ride-along girlfriend.

Bonnie never shot anyone or fired a gun
Blanche puts a gun in Bonnie's hand a couple times. She writes that Bonnie fired from an upstairs window during the first gun battle in Joplin (, and at another time while driving away from a robbery. In the latter, Clyde handed her a rifle which she shot out of the window of the getaway car. They learned later that two women passersby were injured. Blanche also mentions that Bonnie was not domestic or interested in "women's work" (i.e. she never cooked and hated to clean), and after Clyde and Buck robbed a National Guard armory, Buck brought back a pair of sunglasses for Blanche but that Bonnie got a gun from Clyde, instead. Blanche also writes that Bonnie made fun of her because she was "afraid to shoot coppers," but Buck came to Blanche's defense telling Bonnie, "She didn't grow up to be a criminal and a no-good crook like you... even if she wanted to shoot coppers and rob people, I wouldn't let her... Blanche and I aren't practically crazy like you and Clyde!"

Bonnie was a wonderful personality
This was Billie Jean's (Bonnie's sister) comment in her 1968 recorded interview with Jud Collins. While Bonnie may have been a sunny, amiable person before she met Clyde, Blanche paints a different picture. At times, she writes, Bonnie could be cruel. For example, when they kidnapped the undertaker and his lady friend, Clyde pistol-whipped the guy, and Bonnie ("wanting to prove how tough she could be") slapped the woman around. According to Blanche, Bonnie also threatened to beat her up a couple times. And she was a bit of a drunkard.

Bonnie never took part in the robberies
While Bonnie's role in the gang's activities has always been source of debate, Blanche has her participate at least one time in a robbery. Usually, Blanche and Bonnie waited in a second getaway car in a distant area, and when Clyde, Buck, and/or W.D. Jones met up with them after a heist, they'd ditch the first car and join the women in theirs. However, one instance Blanche claims that Bonnie insisted on joining Clyde and Buck, while Blanche waited by herself.

Blanche's portrayal in the movie was inaccurate
After the film came out, Blanche complained that it made her look "like a screaming horse's ass." However, in Blanche's own memoirs, she acts similar during the first raid in Joplin, running and screaming outside, with her small, white dog barking at her heels. Later, during the tourist camp shootout in Platte City (where she and Buck were wounded) she describes herself as "jumping up and down, screaming, and holding my hands over my ears like a person gone mad." She also mentions several times how much she hated guns and was deathly afraid during the gun battles. In contrast, she describes Bonnie as being cool-headed during the battles. This puzzled Blanche because Bonnie would cry and call out for her mother during a thunderstorm. "I couldn't understand why Bonnie would be so afraid of storms," she wrote. "She didn't act that bad when she was in a gun battle, but she feared God's work more than machine gun fire." In the movie, Blanche only reacts hysterical during the Joplin raid, but at other gunfights she is portrayed as being more composed albeit still scared, so it's not really an unfair or inaccurate portrayal. If I were Blanche, I would've been more offended that they cast 40-year-old, homely Estelle Parsons. The real Blanche was 22 and quite pretty.

Furthermore, it has been stated that the movie's Blanche is based on Mary O'Dare, Raymond Hamilton's girlfriend, who rode with them for a couple days after Bonnie and Clyde helped to break out Hamilton and others (including Henry Methvin) from Eastham prison in early 1934. O'Dare was disliked greatly by Bonnie and Clyde because of her constant meddling and complaining, which resulted in Hamilton and Clyde almost coming to blows and Hamilton deserting the gang. However, Blanche writes that there was indeed friction between her and Bonnie. In fact, Bonnie seems to have resented Buck and Blanche's constant presence, threatening Blanche and arguing with Buck and often cussing them both out.

Bonnie and Clyde were always agreeable with each other
According to Blanche, they fought often, even hitting each other, and a couple times Bonnie pulled a gun on Clyde during their heated arguments. Nevertheless, Blanche insisted that they truly loved each other and was glad to learn that they were killed together, because it would have been painful for one if he or she lived and the other died.

Though historians dispute the cinematic depiction of Bonnie leading Clyde astray in this film and especially in the recent TV miniseries -- for the record, I agree that Clyde called the shots (literally!) and Bonnie merely went along -- Blanche, however, mentions that the Barrow family blamed Bonnie for Clyde's downfall. She doesn't elaborate, but my guess is that, unlike Blanche, who'd convinced Buck to turn himself in and was planning a quite, respectable family life with him, Bonnie instead joined Clyde rather than try to rehabilitate him. Granted, in her letters to him while he was in prison, she'd begged him to "be a man and not a thug" and not to do anything illegal again, but once he was released, she seemed to do an about-face.

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