Bonnie and Clyde - in The Contemporary Media

In The Contemporary Media

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were among the first celebrity criminals of the modern era. They had little choice in the matter: after they fled the Joplin hideout in April 1933 with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, the police discovered several rolls of undeveloped film and some scrawled doggerel poetry left behind. It was instant legend: the photos showed the couple and W. D. Jones in playful, snapshot-type poses, except they were wielding pistols, rifles and BARs. In one gag shot, Parker had plucked a cigar from Barrow and popped it in her mouth, branding her as "Clyde's cigar-smoking moll." The poem "Suicide Sal," peppered with quotation marks and colorful underworld vernacular, mirrored the tone of the popular detective magazines of the time. Two days after the raid, the photos and poem went out on the wire and were running in newspapers all over the country. Before Joplin, the Barrows' notoriety had been confined strictly to the Dallas area; afterwards, they became notorious across America.

The high public profile was a mixed blessing. It certainly made life on the run more dangerous and therefore more difficult. There were more nights sleeping in the car and fewer sleeping in motor courts; picking up laundry at cleaning stores was particularly harrowing. As the noose tightened, Parker composed the fatalistic poem she titled "The Trail's End," known since as "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde." She gave the handwritten ode to her mother upon their final meeting two weeks before her death and Emma Parker gave it to the press thereafter.

Six weeks before the couple was ambushed, a letter purportedly written by Barrow arrived at the office of Henry Ford praising his "dandy car." Although the handwriting does not match known samples of Clyde's penmanship, and despite the fact the letter was signed by "Clyde Champion Barrow" while Barrow's middle name was Chestnut, the unauthenticated letter is on display in the Ford Museum. It was never used in any form in Ford advertising, nor was a similar letter Ford received around the same time that was presumed to have come from Dillinger, himself ambushed just two months after Barrow. One of the featured items of the auction was Bonnie Parker's personal Colt .38 snub-nosed revolver, which sold for $264,000. Clyde Barrow's Colt .45 sold for $240,000. Parker's revolver was found taped to her inner thigh and Barrow's on his waistband the day they were ambushed and fatally shot by a police posse in Louisiana in 1934. (cnn news)