But back on the inside, Bunker was hard and vicious and proud of it. He stabbed a mass murderer in the showers while at L.A.’s notorious County Jail. He was feared and he was respected (some regarded Bunker as a little crazy but in Mr Blue, he stated it was a protective mechanism on his part so that people would leave him alone). The last vestiges of civilisation’s thin veneer had been scraped away in prison, leaving the inner core of one’s being. In prison, men reverted back to animalistic behaviour: the predator and the prey. In spite of his youth, Bunker made it patently clear he was not in the latter category. If anyone messed with him, they’d find themselves either dead or in hospital (in truth, Bunker was not a cold-blooded killer but would not hesitate to ruthlessly defend himself). Furthermore, he knew the consequences of his lifestyle, heedful of the old prison adage “if you do the crime you do the time.” It was a simple equation that Bunker understood implicitly and accepted without question.
Hollywood’s Helping Hand
During his rampant teenage years, Bunker made an important acquaintance with an affluent fifty-something woman who was to help him change his life. She was Louise Fazenda Wallis, wife of the legendary Hollywood movie producer, Hal B. Wallis, the mogul behind such cinematic classics as Little Caesar, Casablanca and Gunfight At The OK Corral. Louise Wallis had been a movie star herself in the 1920s, a slapstick comedienne starring in some of Max Sennett’s riotous silent reels. In the 1950s, when she met Edward Bunker, she was involved in helping out those less fortunate than herself. When Bunker left L.A. County Jail she gave him work. Initially, Bunker was perplexed by Mrs. Wallis’s interest in him and was under the impression that her motives were less than honourable: he imagined she might want a teenage gigolo or else wanted to hire him to kill her husband. But Bunker’s suspicions were soon allayed by Louise Wallis’s warm, ingenuous nature and zany sense of humour. She really did want to help him and gave strong words of encouragement without reproaching him for his past. Bunker was more fortunate than many of his peers in having such a magnanimous benefactress. He spent many pleasurable hours in her company, not only doing chores for her but also lounging in the swimming pool at her mansion. He also met many of that period’s celebrities, including the boxer Jack Dempsey, the writers Aldous Huxley and Tennessee Williams and even the media magnate, William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane). By this time, Hearst was infirm and wheel-chair bound. Bunker actually was taken to Hearst’s palatial residence at San Simeon and was there, dipping in the old man’s swimming pool, the day the mogul died.
But apart from his friendship with Louise Wallis, Bunker continued to hang-out with low lifes: pimps, whores, dope-addicts and boosters. He tried heroin and then began selling crudely-harvested marijuana. While out on a delivery a police car pulled up alongside him, indicating him to stop. Bunker drove off but crashed into a car and a mail truck. Apprehended by the law, he was sent to L.A. county jail. Fortunately, Bunker didn’t have the proverbial book thrown at him (he was charged with violating parole and put on probation) and ended up at a parole centre from which he escaped, returning to drug-selling. He was eventually caught again and was charged with assault with a deadly weapon. It was 1951 and Bunker was seventeen. The exasperated authorities finally sent him to his destiny: the notorious San Quentin prison.
San Quentin—Blood and Books
At that time, in 1951, seventeen-year-old Edward Bunker had the dubious honour of being San Quentin’s youngest ever inmate. While banged up in solitary (aka “the hole”), Bunker could hear the incessant clicking of a typewriter. It came from the cell of death-row inmate, Caryl Chessman. Chessman, known as L.A.’s notorious “red light bandit”, had written a thinly-disguised autobiographical novel about prison life called Cell 2455 Death Row. Bunker already knew Chessman from an earlier meeting. Chessman sent over to Bunker’s cell (via a sympathetic guard) a copy of Argosy Magazine in which the first chapter of his book appeared. Bunker was inspired by Chessman’s example. He also identified with the writers Cervantes and Dostoyevsky, both of whom had written while incarcerated. Later, Louise Wallis (who kept Bunker on her mailing and visiting list) procured him a typewriter. Learning the fundamental mechanics of writing as he went along, over the course of the next eighteen months Bunker would eventually produce a novel which was smuggled out to Wallis who showed it her friends and declared that although it was unpublishable, Bunker evinced a nascent writing talent. But it would take a further seventeen years before a book of Bunker’s reached publication (that book, No Beast So Fierce, would actually be his sixth completed novel). Bunker, who had a voracious appetite for reading books since a child, spent much of his time acquainting himself with the contents of the prison library, accruing, as a result, a vast and encyclopaedic knowledge. Louise Wallis (who by this time Bunker addressed in his correspondence as “Mom”) gave him a subscription to the New York Times Book Review. Bunker even sold his blood to pay postage costs and the fees for a university correspondence course.
Cars and bars
Bunker was twenty-two when he was finally paroled. It was 1956. He had served almost five years inside San Quentin. The important thing was that he had survived (and without becoming anyone’s punk!). But survival on the outside was a different matter. In fact, it seemed a far harder task to do it by honest endeavour, despite the many doors that Louise Wallis opened for him with her altruism. She wanted to assist Bunker in helping himself and pointed him in the right direction by finding him work and accommodation. But Bunker, as a former con, felt ostracised by a society which never truly felt comfortable with convicted criminals in its midst. And besides, after his being banged up for half a decade, the temptations were just too overwhelming.
For a time, Bunker stayed clear of trouble. However, his benefactor, Louise Wallis, evinced increasingly erratic behaviour and seemed at the point of recklessly giving all her wealth away. Although she bought him a car and kitted him out in expensive clothes, Bunker never tried to take advantage of her good nature. After a drunken outburst at her home, Louise Wallis was diagnosed as having a nervous breakdown and while she went to hospital to recuperate, her husband Hal Wallis alienated her network of old friends and acquaintances, including Bunker. He had harboured ambitions of becoming a screenplay writer but overnight had become a persona non gratis in the Wallis household (Louise Wallis would die not long after, in 1962). So he tried his hand at selling used cars for a short time and then worked as a salesman at a small garage owned by an English ex-patriot. It wasn’t long, though, before he descended into L.A.’s seamy underworld and returned to crime to make ends meet: orchestrating robberies (though not actually taking part himself, he took a percentage for the planning), forging cheques and involving himself in extorting protection money from pimps.
Within a couple of years, Bunker found himself back on the inside again, having been found consorting with known felons (he happened to be travelling in a car owned by two burglars who had their tools in the boot of the vehicle). Details of Bunker’s misdemeanours together with a damning report by his hard-ass probation officer conspired to give him a ninety day jail sentence which included being sent out on work detail to the county farm (where low risk prisoners were sent). Bunker escaped almost immediately by climbing over a poorly guarded fence. He was a fugitive from justice once again and stayed on the run for over a year, despite a couple of close shaves with the police. Robbed of his cash while staying in an hotel during a road trip to New York, Bunker resorted to armed robbery out of desperation for immediate funds.
Inevitably, the agents of justice caught up with Bunker, but not before a failed bank heist and a wild car chase had ensued.
Bunker tried to get out of going back to prison by pretending to be insane. He gave a convincing performance (faking suicide and declaring that the Catholic Church had inserted a radio inside his head!) and was declared criminally insane. Bunker was shunted back and forth between Atascadero State Hospital and the California Medical Facility at V
acaville (where he edited a prison newspaper). Although Bunker was eventually freed, he could not keep out of trouble. His notoriety as a criminal mastermind put him on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. In San Francisco in the early ’70s, Bunker ran a profitable drug empire. He was eventually caught after the cops had put a tracking device on his vehicle and followed him to Los Angeles where he boosted a bank (in fact, the police couldn’t believe their luck—they were under the erroneous impression that a drug deal was going down). With a helicopter and five cop cars on his trail, Bunker was apprehended after a car chase. He expected the book to be thrown at him for the robbery, anticipating at least a twenty-year sentence. Miraculously and largely due to the solicitations of influential friends and a lenient judge, he got only a five year custodial sentence.
Back in prison, Bunker focused on improving his writing skills. His perseverance (he produced six novels and fifty short stories between 1953 and ’72) was rewarded by encouraging words from an genuinely interested literary agent. By 1972, Bunker had finally produced a novel, No Beast So Fierce, which, after some judicious pruning was accepted by the publisher, WW Norton. At the same time, Bunker’s essay “War Behind Wall” about San Quentin’s internecine race wars was published in the prestigious Harper’s magazine.
Straight Time
When Eddie Bunker was released on parole in 1975, he had spent eighteen years of his life in prison institutions. Despite his new career as a writer, for a time, a life of crime still had its temptations, particularly when money got tight. But once Bunker was earning money from his writing and film appearances, he had no need to resort to crime to survive. His own view of his descent into criminal activity was that it was dictated solely by circumstances and necessity—once those circumstances changed for the better, the criminal impulse died in him.
A second published novel, Animal Factory, appeared in 1977 and articles followed in The New Yorker and both the New York Times and LA Times. Happily for the ex-convict, the actor, Dustin Hoffman, who had bought the film rights to No Beast So Fierce, in 1975, made a favourable deal with First Artists which allowed him not only to direct the movie but also supervise its all-important final cut. But taking on the mantle of director as well as starring in the main role as convict Max Dembo proved too much for Hoffman, who persuaded his old pal Ulu Grosbard to take over directorial duties. To Hoffman’s dismay, First Artists reneged on their earlier decision to allow him the final cut and tampered with the film’s editing in such a way that Hoffman sued for damages. Controversy aside and despite disappointing critical and commercial responses, Straight Time was a good movie and a faithful representation of life in the U.S. penal system. Bunker collaborated with Alvin Sargeant and Jeffrey Roam on the movie’s screenplay. The film was also significant for Edward Bunker in that it represented his first acting part in a movie. It would be the first of many fleeting cameos that Bunker would play over the next two decades, including playing the part of a cop (Captain Holmes) in Tango and Cash (1988) and culminating with his famous role as Mr Blue in Tarantino’s acclaimed Reservoir Dogs. Indeed, Bunker’s minor thespian exertions even made him eligible for a Screen Actors Guild pension.
In 1979, Bunker claimed that he found true salvation in an attractive young lawyer, Jennifer, whom he married (despite a difference in age and background they are still together and have a young son, Brendan, born in 1994).
In 1981, Bunker produced a third novel, Little Boy Blue, which contained some of his most impressive and eloquent writing. In 1985, Bunker wrote part of the Academy Award-nominated screenplay to the film Runaway Train, starring Jon Voigt as a fugitive con (Bunker mainly wrote the opening half-hour of the movie depicting prison life).
In 1991, Bunker was cast by wunderkind director, Quentin Tarantino (at the suggestion of Chris Penn) in Reservoir Dogs as Mr Blue. Tarantino, in fact, had apparently studied the movie Straight Time while attending a course at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute for young film-makers. A couple of years later, in 1994, Bunker was hired as a consultant on the film American Heart, starring Jeff Bridges as the con Jack Kelson, who has just been released from the slammer and is hoping to go straight by cleaning windows. In Michael Mann’s slick 1995 thriller, Heat, starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, some of the cast picked Bunker’s brain about the nature of the criminal mind (Jon Voigt’s character, in fact, was made to resemble Bunker in appearance).
In 1996, Bunker produced his fourth crime novel, the action-packed Dog Eat Dog, based upon a story a fellow con had related to him while in prison. His latest book, Mr Blue, a candid autobiography, has just been published with the possibility that one of his earlier, previously unpublished novels, a sort of Jim Thompson-esque, noir novel, will follow shortly afterwards.
Ironically, Edward Bunker continues to make a living from crime—but for the last quarter of a century, he’s only been writing about it. After having begun life in somewhat unfortunate circumstances in Hollywood some sixty-six years ago, Edward Bunker has returned to whence he came to reside in tinsel town as a model citizen. No longer the human equivalent of an earthquake, Bunker (though still unrepentant about his criminal exploits), lives in relative serenity after many turbulent years evading the law.
Edward Bunker titles can be obtained from
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Copyright
First published in the UK in 1994
by No Exit Press
an imprint of Oldcastle Books
P O Box 394,
Harpenden, AL5 1XJ
www.noexit.co.uk
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
© Edward Bunker 1977
The right of Edward Bunker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN
978–1–84243–267–9 (print)
978–1–84243–757–5 (epub)
978–1–84243–758–2 (kindle)
978–1–84243–759–9 (pdf)
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For more about Crime Fiction go to www.crimetime.co.uk / @crimetimeuk
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The Animal Factory Page 23