My Life with Bonnie and Clyde (32 page)

Matt Caldwell logging near Idabel, Oklahoma, 1906. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

One day late in 1951, Blanche received a long-distance call from Grand Rapids, Michigan. A friend of hers who worked at the Federal Square Grill there had been talking to one of her customers, a young single mother named Esther who was in search of a solution to her small son’s health problem. The boy suffered from severe asthma and the damp, cold Michigan climate only made matters worse. Blanche’s friend overheard Esther’s lament and suggested she and her son move to Dallas.

“Dallas!” Esther had said. “But I don’t know anybody there.” The waitress said she knew someone. Before long Esther found herself on the phone in a corner of the cafe, speaking to a strange Texan named Blanche who insisted she drop everything, move with her son to Pleasant Grove, and stay with her and her husband for as long as necessary. Esther had heard of southern hospitality, but even this seemed unusual.

Blanche told Esther to catch the first train south. Once in Dallas she was to hail a cab and have it take her from Union Station, downtown, all
the way to her house in Pleasant Grove, a trip of some forty-five to sixty minutes at the time. The first thing Esther saw when she arrived in front of Blanche’s modest frame house at 222 Bridges in “the Grove” was a quaint white picket fence and a garden thick with brilliantly colored flowers. “Blanche didn’t have a green thumb,” Esther said. “She had a green arm! What a warm, welcomed sight for a couple of strangers like us.”
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Esther and her son moved in with Blanche and Eddie. A friend of Blanche’s who lived nearby was giving up her job in downtown Dallas and suggested that Esther apply for the position. She did so and got the job. Every day thereafter she walked from the Frasures’ house, across a barnyard, to the neighbor’s house where her son spent the day while she caught the bus at its southernmost stop and rode all the way into downtown Dallas and her new job. Blanche had seriously considered babysitting the boy. She really loved children and literally grieved because she could never bear her own. But neither she nor Eddie felt comfortable with the child’s asthma, his medications, and periodic seizures. Her neighbor had some experience with such, and the deal was struck.

For several months the arrangement continued. Esther and Blanche and Eddie and all of their friends got along very well. During the entire time, the name of Barrow never came up and Esther never had any idea of her hostess’s past, none whatsoever. She never dreamed this Sunday school teacher could have ever been anything but that—a Sunday school teacher, albeit one who still enjoyed “honky-tonking” every so often with her handsome, choir-singer husband.

Eventually, however, Blanche began to feel cramped in the house in “the Grove.” As Esther remembered, it had more than just a little to do with Eddie. “He and I were getting along a little too well,” she recalled. “And Blanche could be very jealous and possessive.” One day Blanche asked Esther if she might consider moving to her own place, adding, “Eddie and me are still a bit like newlyweds. Sometimes we just like to chase each other around the house naked. And we can’t do that with guests.”
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Esther got the hint and soon she and her son found there own place nearby. There were no hard feelings and everyone remained very close. It was after Esther moved out of the Frasures’ house that she discovered the nature of Blanche’s otherworldly past.

One day Esther received a frantic phone call at work from the neighbor who was taking care of her son. Esther’s former husband, the father of her son, Jon, was at the door demanding to see the child. This sent waves of panic through Esther as it had taken a court order to take the boy out of
Michigan. She was afraid her former husband might now take their son and not return him.

“What should I do?” the neighbor asked.

“You’ll have to let him see his son.”

“What if he doesn’t bring him back?”

“We’ll deal with that when it happens,” Esther responded.

After work she went to Blanche’s house to hide out until the coast was clear.

Blanche noted that Esther was extremely nervous, so to take her mind off of things she began regaling her with wild tales of some woman who had got herself mixed up with a group of outlaws and killers, one of whom was the woman’s husband. Initially Esther did not pay much attention to the stories, thinking to herself, “This lady sure has some imagination!” After a while, however, she began to realize Blanche was more than implying that she was the woman in the stories.

“Why are you making this up?” Esther asked.

“I’m not making it up!” Blanche answered, puzzled by Esther’s reaction. With that she got up from the kitchen table and disappeared into a closet. A few minutes later, she emerged with a box of yellowing photographs, official-looking papers, and a number of old detective magazines and
Police Gazettes
. Everything was related to Bonnie and Clyde, of whom Esther knew little, apart from the fact they were once dangerous outlaws. She had never heard of Buck Barrow. But in all the pictures and in every magazine there were images of a much younger, emaciated Blanche along with Bonnie and Clyde and this Buck Barrow, who turned out to be Blanche’s second husband. Esther was dumbstruck, but fascinated. As Blanche described Buck in detail, Esther was amazed at how similar he seemed to be to Eddie, especially with respect to personality. But Esther remained speechless as she sat there in utter disbelief listening to her friend, this Sunday school teacher, poring over events from another life, another world—recounting robberies, incredible escapes, the bloody bodies of slain officers, shards of glass spraying into her eyes, brain tissue oozing from her husband’s head, and gunfight after gunfight. The stories flowed from Blanche much the way her memoir reads, like a catharsis. At times, it seemed as if Esther were no longer in the room, that Blanche was suddenly alone with her ghosts. Then, just as quickly as it had begun, the episode ended. Everything returned to 1952 and the box went back in the closet.
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Esther by then had been notified that her ex-husband had returned their child safe and sound and had left for another state. She could go home.
But she never forgot how Blanche had opened so many old, secret wounds in an effort to take Esther’s mind off of the present long enough to calm down. Blanche’s ruse had worked, but looking back on it and considering Eddie’s feeling about his wife’s past, Esther suspected he knew nothing of that box in the closet.

Eddie and Blanche at a New Year’s Eve party. (Courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

Not long after the revelation in the kitchen, Esther received news of a new experimental drug-treatment program that her son was qualified to join. She moved back to her hometown in Michigan and over the years lost contact with Blanche.

Throughout the remainder of the 1950s and well into the 1960s, Blanche and Eddie lived what friends described as “a good life together.”
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Eddie Frasure became supervisor of George L. Dahl Architects and Engineers at 2101 North St. Paul in Dallas. He and Blanche bought property in Seagoville, Texas, at the end of Beltline Road in southeast Dallas County. There, among other things, they raised horses. Blanche was known to treat her animals as the children she could never have.

Blanche and Eddie Frasure traveled a lot. There were trips through the Plains states, to West Texas, and even to Disneyland shortly after it opened
in the 1950s. There was also a visit to the ancient cliff dwelling in southern New Mexico called “Montezuma’s Castle.” As had always been the case, Blanche’s camera went with her.

Buck Barrow near Crockett, Texas, 1931. To some, the resemblance between Barrow and Frasure was quite evident. (Photograph by Blanche Barrow, courtesy of Rhea Leen Linder)

In the mid-sixties, much to Eddie Frasure’s trepidation, Blanche’s past began to interest Warner Brothers Pictures. She was contacted by a young actor and prospective producer named Warren Beatty about purchasing the rights to her name for a proposed movie about Bonnie and Clyde. There had already been a number of motion pictures made dealing in whole or in part with the lives and times of Blanche’s former brother-in-law and his girlfriend, most notably Fritz Lang’s
You Only Live Once
with Henry Fonda (1937) and
They Live by Night
with Farley Granger (1949). There were also some lesser films like
Gun Crazy
(1949) and the thoroughly hideous
The Bonnie Parker Story
(1958). However, Blanche had never been approached by the producers of those films, probably because her name was never used. Beatty, however, wanted to portray not only Bonnie and Clyde, but Buck and Blanche as well. And he wanted to use their real names. Blanche
agreed to meet Beatty’s representatives at her lawyer’s office to review the proposed script.
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The events leading up to the production and eventual release of the 1967 movie
Bonnie and Clyde
actually began with two magazine writers. Robert Benton and David Newman had long wanted to break into the field of screenwriting. In the late 1950s, influenced by the financial success and raw filmic artistry of a series of inexpensive movies eventually identified as “the French New Wave,” and led by young directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard, Benton and Newman began looking for a suitable subject of their own to develop in a similar fashion. They were not the only ones. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 adaptation of the Robert Bloch novel,
Psycho
, was by Hitchcock’s own admission influenced in every way by the French New Wave, as was Richard Lester’s equally intriguing, yet quite different 1964 classic
A Hard Day’s Night
starring the Beatles. Perhaps because of the fact that Benton was a native Texan and remembered stories about depression-era outlaws, the subject of Bonnie and Clyde was broached and ultimately accepted by the two writers as the topic of their screenplay.

Benton and Newman apparently conducted a lot of research and crafted an original screenplay that was relatively accurate historically yet still entertaining. They first approached Truffault and Godard with their work, but both directors passed on the project. That’s when Warren Beatty entered the picture. Beatty had been making a name for himself as a leading man in movies like
Splendor in the Grass
(1960), but he was becoming more and more interested in the business side of the movie industry, particularly producing. And influenced in his own way by the French New Wave, especially with respect to independent production and distribution, Beatty would become one of the many producers and directors to emerge in the 1960s who would completely change the way the movie industry conducted business. He started by purchasing the rights to Benton and Newman’s screenplay.
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And it was that screenplay Blanche reviewed in her lawyer’s office.

Blanche thought the story seemed reasonably accurate and signed a contract allowing the use of her name in the finished movie. Blanche later said she made enough money from the movie deal to pay for a new fence on her property in Seagoville.
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Production of the movie started in 1966. Much of it was filmed on location in and around Dallas and featured performances by soon-to-be megastars like Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman,
Estelle Parsons, and even a very young Gene Wilder. Blanche clipped articles about the production and added them to her thirty-year-old scrapbooks.