The Animal Factory (28 page)

It was as good a way to look at it as any other.

Despite assurances from scientists about the nature of earthquakes, supernatural beliefs regarding the significance of seismic land-upheavals still persist in some parts of the world. Of course, in ancient times, natural disasters were often perceived as punishment from an angry deity. Although now, in the late twentieth century, we live in the epoch of the global village and at a time when science is regarded as an
infallible
avatar, superstitious notions are still harboured by many of the world’s inhabitants. One such person who didn’t accept earthquakes at face value was Edward Bunker’s mother, Sarah.

A sense of profound foreboding (call it superstition if you will) affected the troubled mind of this young woman who, during the 1930s, had worked in vaudeville theatre and been a chorus girl in Busby Berkeley’s extravagant Hollywood musicals. She sensed some portentous event had occurred at the moment of her son’s conception. That was March, 1933, in Southern California. A major earthquake—resulting in fatalities and extensive damage to buildings—terrorised Los Angeles’s inhabitants. It also mortified Bunker’s parents, who were coupling at the exact moment the first tremors of the earthquake struck. To make matters worse for Bunker, at the time he made his unpropitious entry into the world (at Hollywood’s Cedar Of Lebanon Hospital on December 31st, 1933), Los Angeles was in the grip of a torrential downpour of almost Biblical proportions with trees and even houses being swept away by dangerous currents. The alarming synchronicity of both cataclysmic events confirmed in his mother’s mind that Edward would be trouble. For her, there was no denying that Bunker Junior was born under a bad sign, and sadly, she instilled this belief into him when he was an
impressionable
youngster.

Well, for young Edward and his parents, it was not long before the seeds of that pair of bad omens seemed to bear substantial fruit. At the age of two, Edward wandered off from a family picnic in a local park but was eventually located after a search-party of two hundred men had combed the area. Then he accidentally set fire to a neighbour’s garage! On the face of it, young Ed may have seemed the toddler from hell but it’s more likely that these incidents resulted from his parents’ abject lack of
supervision
rather than any innate inclination on his part to do harm. Indeed, Bunker’s abiding memories from this period focus on the deteriorating relationship of his parents, who fought and argued with an intensity that resulted in the police frequently being called out to intervene. Bunker’s father, incidentally, Edward Snr, like his wife, worked in Hollywood. Principally he was a stage-hand although occasionally he worked as a grip (a specialised technician who builds film sets). He was almost fifty when his only son, Edward Junior was born. As the marriage became increasingly acrimonious (fuelled in part by alcoholism), so young Ed was left to his own devices.

Bunker was only five when his parents’ troubled marriage was finally dissolved. A consequence of the divorce proceedings was that he was sent to a boarding/foster home. Profoundly unhappy, he ran away for the first time and found himself roaming the city streets at night. For this, the foster home rejected him and Bunker then went through a succession of draconian institutions which attempted to curb his defiant, rebellious nature with harsh discipline and sadistic, often brutal practices. He attended a military school for a couple of months (where, through peer pressure, he took to theft). He ran way from here, boarded a train and found himself four-hundred miles away in a hobo camp. The
authorities
were alerted and Bunker was accosted but this chaotic, peripatetic lifestyle persisted throughout his formative years. Shoplifting and the theft of ration coupons eventually landed Bunker in a heap of big trouble and he was sent to an institution known as a Juvenile Hall, a kind of borstal or reform school. Here, Bunker became acquainted with hardened young criminals and quickly realised that if he wanted to survive this experience or at least avoid being somebody’s punk (being sodomised) he had to learn the rules of the jungle. Although younger and smaller than most of his fellow inmates, Bunker was smart (his IQ had been estimated at 152), highly literate, streetwise and recalcitrant. He soon became fearless and inured to the dog-eat-dog brutality of the place. After a fight with a fellow inmate, Bunker was sent to a state hospital for observation from which he soon escaped, living rough on the streets. He was caught by the cops after a car he hot-wired crashed. He was then sent to an insane asylum to be assessed and was almost beaten to death by an attendant. Fortunately, Bunker was declared sane, and was allowed to leave with his life just about intact. It was not long before he escaped reform school and was back roughing it on the streets. Three months later, he was apprehended by the cops living in an a old car in someone’s backyard. He was then shunted on to the Preston School of Industry which was designated for older teenagers. Bunker was still only fourteen. Eventually, he was paroled to his aunt. By this time his estranged mother had remarried and his father (now sixty-two) languished in a rest home because of premature senility. While with his aunt, Bunker continued to keep bad company and late hours. It was only a matter of time before he fell foul of the law again, this time for an outstanding parole
violation
. But Bunker’s reputation as a troublemaker had catapulted him beyond the remit of California’s Youth Authority. Despite his age, he was in the big league now. This time it was serious. This time it was prison.

While most teenagers were still at high school, Edward Bunker was a veteran of California’s stern custodial institutions for young offenders. From his earliest days, his life had been hurtling on a relentless
trajectory
towards a life in crime that would ultimately lead to lengthy
incarceration
in prison. And that’s where he found himself at sixteen years-of-age. But it didn’t chasten him one iota. To the proud,
hardened
Bunker, prison was an underground university of life. He gained the acquaintance of some of America’s most notorious criminals and from this experience gleaned knowledge which not only helped him to survive on the inside but inspired schemes and scams when he was back on the outside.

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.

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.

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.

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.