Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Public Enemies

In 1973, Alston Purvis was on a transatlantic flight to the Netherlands when Dillinger, starring Warren Oates and Ben Johnson, came on the screen.

As Johnson appeared, Purvis turned to the man sitting next to him and said, “That man is playing my father.” Purvis, a College of Fine Arts associate professor of art, recalls the neighboring passenger shaking his head and saying, “Yeah, and my dad’s Napoleon.”

In the glamorized gangster era of the 1930s, Melvin Purvis became the personification of the good guys, the FBI agent who led manhunts for infamous outlaws like John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson, and “Pretty Boy” Floyd. He gained star status, dating Jean Harlow, becoming pals with Clark Gable, and getting his own Parker Brothers board game, Melvin Purvis’ “G”-Men Detective Game, in 1937.

But his celebrity was a threat to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (right, with Purvis), who blocked appointments and promotions for Purvis, resulting in his resignation from the bureau in 1935. Their relationship is chronicled in Alston Purvis’ book The Vendetta: FBI Hero Melvin Purvis’s War Against Crime, and J. Edgar Hoover’s War Against Him (PublicAffairs, 2005).

Almost 50 years after his death, Public Enemies, the latest film to feature Melvin Purvis’ life and times, opened last week to reviews ranging from rave to bash. BU Today caught up with Alston to see what it was like to give Christian Bale a few pointers on being his father.

BU Today: How did you feel, seeing Christian Bale play your father?
Purvis: The movie is a drama. Christian told me, “Don’t expect this to be a documentary, because you’ll be very disappointed.” For example, my father got “Pretty Boy” Floyd three months after he got Dillinger, yet in the movie, he got “Pretty Boy” Floyd first. Michael Mann, the director, thought that was a good way of moving the story along.

That must be frustrating.
It is, because you provide all this material. And in my book, even though people might have gotten mad about what I wrote, there’s not a thing I can’t back up.

You wrote the book to set the record straight about your father?
J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI for 50 years, said in a memo one time that he wanted to erase Melvin Purvis’ name from history. And he did for a while. But the FBI has been totally supportive of me now. We don’t discuss Hoover. The first blurb on the book is by Robert D. Grant, special agent in charge of the Chicago office. He has the job my father had in the ’30s. This is the first time that a sitting special agent in charge has been willing to write something for a current book.

So relations have improved?
That’s an understatement. There are two things that were gratifying when this book came out: first is that my father’s place in history is really secure, and second is the wonderful support from the FBI.

When you were researching the book, was the FBI less helpful?
Well, it’s called the Freedom of Information Act. They have to release files. But a typical file of a former agent is at most an inch thick, perhaps thinner. When I got my father’s files, they filled up eight wine boxes. Hoover even kept files on my father 10 years after he died.

My father loved the FBI; he loved the people in it. He never once said anything against the FBI — just Hoover. I think most people at the FBI were glad to get rid of the old bastard.

What was it like for you growing up? Did your father tell stories about apprehending gangsters?
This was not dinner table conversation at all. As a little boy, one of my friends in South Carolina asked my father if he’d shot Dillinger or Floyd, and my father said, “There’s no pleasure or honor in killing a man. These were things we had to do, these were gangsters who did a lot of damage.”

He had his scrapbooks, which I thought were pretty normal stuff.

You thought everyone’s father had scrapbooks full of tales of tracking gangsters?
I have the ad from 1937 showing two new games from Parker Brothers. One is Monopoly, and one is the Melvin Purvis “G”-Men game. In 1934, there was a magazine called the Literary Digest. There was a poll of the 10 most famous people in the world. The only one who topped my father was Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover didn’t make the list, which didn’t help anything.

I think my father did bask in a bit of glory back then, but in the FBI, he did not seek it out. At that time, the heroes on the screen were like John Dillinger — it was the Depression, and the gangsters were seen as heroes. But, the press caught on to my father. He was handsome and charismatic — totally unlike Hoover.

He was young when this all happened, too.
They were all young. In 1934, when they shot Dillinger, my father was 31 years old. The only one surviving is my father’s private secretary, Doris Rogers Lockerman. She lives in Atlanta, and she’s 98. I call her up, ask how she’s doing, and she says, “I’m doing fine, Alston, I’m just so damned old.” She was one of my main sources. She came up from Birmingham with my father to the Chicago office. She’ll say, “Alston, I can’t remember where I left my keys yesterday, but about that office, I remember everything.” And she did. She gave the book a real presence.

How did you get involved with Public Enemies?
I served as a consultant. The movie title is not my title, and comes from what I think is a second-rate book. It really attacks my father. But the interpretation of my father is from my book, The Vendetta, which Christian used.

The movie focuses a lot on Dillinger. Does it touch on the conflict between Hoover and your father?
They imply that. Hoover has a very minor role in this film, but he does not get a sympathetic treatment.

Were any of the details you shared in the film?
He wore a replica of my father’s ring in the film. And on the shelves in his office, you can see a picture of my grandfather.

The last scene was shot in Chicago at the Biograph Theater, which is still there, but is used for live theater now. They transformed the street to 1934, and even Christian was impressed, and he’s seen everything. Even the shop across from the theater selling women’s hats had little labels with 1934 prices.

Did you meet Christian Bale on the set?
Christian and I met for the first time in South Carolina. He wanted to see where we came from. He had me read all of my father’s lines in the script, and he recorded them. I suggested that he look at old newsreels to get my father’s voice, not mine. But he said that newsreels were too rehearsed.

When Christian and I met, it was around 9:30 on the morning of February 29, 2008. I shook his hand 48 years to the minute after my father died. And we didn’t plan this. We just were silent for a minute. One of my friends said, “Alston, that was probably what we’d call a ‘nod from God.’”

It was very important to him that I liked what he did, and I did.

You write mostly design books; do you think you’ll write another about your father?
This will probably be the only one I ever write about him. This book took so long; while I wrote it, I wrote six or seven other books in-between.

There’s a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald I use in the beginning: “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” And it’s definitely a tragedy. My father died by gunshot wound, whether suicide or accident only he will ever know. So the book was very painful in a way.

I didn’t meet him until I was two years old. He was a colonel in the army in North Africa, England, Germany, and then at the Nuremburg Trials. When he came home, I was two-and-a-half. He died when I was 16. In writing the book, I learned a lot about my father that I didn’t know. He became a much clearer figure to me.

Kimberly Cornuelle can be reached at kcornuel@bu.edu.