Life Savings

By John Show

WHERE THE MONEY WAS. THE MEMOIRS OF A BANK ROBBER by WILLIE SUTTON with EDWARD LINN 339 pages. Viking. $10.

A note oddly resembling honesty sounds now and then in this cheerful book of jailhouse blues by Bank Robber Willie ("The Actor") Sutton. All the world knows Sutton as the man who said, when asked why he robbed banks, "Because that's where the money is."

Well, says Willie--now 75 and sprung--it's a good line. But the fact is that some reporter made it up. Thus Sutton declines credit for the most perceptive self-analysis since Cardinal Newman's Apologia pro vita sua. Obviously he is an autobiographer devoted to veracity at all costs.

Emptying Banks. He admits that during the several decades he spent in jail, he worked without letup at breaking out (succeeding three times). During the few years he spent at large, he thought about almost nothing but emptying banks (he succeeded an undisclosed number of times, but failed often enough to account for his years in the cooler). Sutton confesses to being unreformable, and does not pretend that the buffetings of fate made him that way. Having thus alarmed his readers, he goes on shamelessly to reveal that he is kind, brave, generous, loyal, patient, intelligent, well read, nonviolent, and courteous to old ladies. Less deserving souls have been appointed to federal judgeships.

The reader, a shade skeptical and several shades amused, is reminded of another self-portrait Sutton says he made. It was a plaster cast of his own head, cunningly painted and landscaped with cuttings from his hair. This marvel, sculptured surreptitiously in a Pennsylvania prison, was supposed to take Sutton's place in his cell bunk on the occasion of a jailbreak. But the cell block was searched and the extraordinary head found before Sutton could test its effect. The artist does not seem to have been unduly discouraged. He had, after all, astonished his audience.

Sutton robbed banks and engineered his elaborate escapes because that is where the applause was. He was born in Brooklyn's Irishtown at the turn of the century, and there was a point in his teens when a slight tilt of circumstance might have sent him--street-wise and nervy--into one of the gaudier branches of lawyering. He went into armed robbery instead. He would appear at a bank door, wearing the uniform of a messenger or a cop, after the help had begun to arrive but before the doors opened to customers. A colleague or two would help him intimidate the staff and collect the cash. When things went right, the bandits would disappear into the street crowds.

When things went wrong, Sutton says, his pals would sell him out to the cops. Yet he never changed the method of operation that put him at the mercy of accomplices. He learned a bit about philosophy and a lot about law in prison libraries, and enough about literature to have a firm opinion about the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy (Shakespeare all the way). But he seems to have had no new ideas about his own profession since he pulled his first job.

The history of this bright, vain man is diverting. Not many people are truly fond of banks, or of prisons, and it is fun to watch Sutton deflate their institutional dignity. It would be even more fun if he spoke with his own voice. Unhappily, his book is one of those first-person ghostwriting dilutions that make Masaichieftains, subliterate footballers, and Brooklyn bank robbers sound as if they were serving ten years to life in journalism school.

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