The oppressive conditions of the Big House are rarely conducive to illuminating prose, but for a rare handful who have toiled behind locked doors, the results are essential. From Socrates to de Sade, Chekhov to Caryl Chessman - not to mention the Russian giants, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - the work of prison writers has one common thread. The incarcerated men hold up in their writing what Bunker calls "the funhouse mirror of prison society", a distorted reflection which reveals the fears and hidden brutality of the 'straight' world.
Where Solzhenitsyn makes plain the horrors of Communism, Bunker exposes the flaws of a US society that appears equally hypocritical and intolerant. In his new biography Mr Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade, he reveals a life of extremes.
Born amid a violent storm in 1930s Hollywood, to a mother who was a dancer for Busby Berkeley and a father who was a studio hand, Bunker was destined to live between the glitter and the gutter of LA. When, at the age of four, his parents split up, he was consigned to living in a series of 'boarding homes': virtual prison prep schools. All but one of them were rife with ritual beatings and sadistic punishment, meted out both by staff and the pecking order of institutionalised kids. Unable to tolerate authority, Bunker ran away at every opportunity, became adept at hiding out, thieving and looking out for himself. Of course, each time he was picked up, he was sent to a tougher juvenile home, until - at the age of 17 - he became San Quentin's youngest-ever inmate.
Despite being the archetypal teenage hood, Bunker had a high IQ and had always found relief from prison's unrelenting atmosphere by reading. During his stints inside, he found an unlikely patron, Mrs Hal Wallis. The wife of the millionaire Hollywood director, Louise Wallis was profoundly altruistic and had a mission to help wayward teens. She bought young Eddie a typewriter, and between his jolts inside, gave him jobs on her estate, and confidence in his own abilities.
"It was a lifeline," Bunker remembers. "It didn't change my life overnight but it was a longterm change. When I first went to prison, I thought I was gonna kill someone but, because I had her out there, it stopped me. There were situations where I would have cut somebody's head off or stuck it to them but I knew I couldn't blow it because of her."
Bunker survived his prison years by applying a precocious talent for psychology. Deciding it would make his passage through the tough ranks of the Big House easier if he appeared crazy, he fostered a reputation that made him popular with the older, hardened crims (including Death Row inmate and writer Caryl Chessman) and kept the real crazies at bay. Once Bunker had mastered the prison 'code', he survived not only the worst excesses of 'The Hole' (solitary confinement in total darkness) but also the prison race wars that flamed in the 1960s.
The books he would write about his experiences - No Beast So Fierce, The Animal Factory, Little Boy Blue, Dog Eat Dog and Mr Blue - convey opinions, psychoanalysis and home truths about criminals, their relation to society and the failures of the 'reform' system. But what makes Bunker unique in the field of prison writers is the relationship he has always had with the successful side of LA - and Tinseltown would eventually beckon him as both actor and scriptwriter.
One of the most surreal interludes in Mr Blue is the day Louise Wallis takes the teenage Bunker to San Simeon, the fabled estate of billionaire newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and he is swimming at sunset in the Egyptian pool when the news of Hearst's death is announced. The twilight of the Gods in one afternoon.
"It seems more way out now than it did at the time," Eddie reflects. "I didn't realise then what a way out thing it was to meet Hearst before he died. All I knew about at the time was Citizen Kane, the movie they made about him. I didn't really know what he was, that he started wars."
Bunker's life is pitted with moments of cultural poignancy. Between his spells in San Quentin and Folsom, he hung out at LA's legendary jazz joints, digging Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. He knew Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley and Jack Dempsey. He was even caught by the fuzz in the company of Manson girl, Squeaky Fromme.
"Yeah, I got arrested once with Squeaky and they let her go! What kinda damn shit is that?!" he laughs. How did he hook up with the woman tried to assassinate President Ford? "It's a long story. I got out of the joint and I had a little drug empire going in San Francisco, so I used to go down there once a week or so to pick up drugs.
"Some friends of mine had been with Charlie (Manson) in county jail and he'd seen I'd written an article about race war in San Quentin. They wanted to meet me 'cos Squeaky had a manuscript and they wanted to show it to me.
"So when I went down there, I got in touch with them because I was curious. I picked her up and I was taking her to the Holiday Inn with the manuscript and the dope, and the narcs were waiting for me. They ran out of all the rooms and threw down on me. They didn't want her, they let her go."
The story has an amusing postscript: "I brought Squeaky to court as a witness for probable cause - if they should have stopped me and searched me. By the time of the hearing, she was in jail for the Ford incident, so they brought her into court with 20 deputies!" What was her story like? "Illiterate."
At the time of this arrest, Bunker was headed for his first major breakthrough. Eighteen years after he first put pen to paper, after writing five novels and 50 short stories, he was about to become a published author. No Beast So Fierce, the largely autobiographical account of armed robber Max Dembo's attempts to adapt to life outside prison, not only hit the bookstands but became a major film, the Dustin Hoffman vehicle Straight Time.
"I wrote the book in San Quentin and Folsom," he recalls. "I had to sell my blood to get the postage money to send it to an agent." The reason this book worked he thinks, is the attitude he brought to it: "I thought fuck it, I'm gonna write a book from the standpoint of a criminal - and tell the truth. Most crime books are the writer observing the criminal. No Beast So Fierce is the criminal observing society."
Since his final parole in 1975, Bunker has kept to the bright side of the city lights, seeing his novels turn into bestsellers, writing an Oscar-nominated screenplay for the 1985 movie The Runaway Train, advising on films like Heat (in which Runaway Train star Jon Voigt is made up to look like Bunker) and acting in over 20 films. The most high-profile of these jobs, Reservoir Dogs, gave him the pseudonym of his autobiography and introduced him to Steve 'Mr Pink' Buscemi, who has just finished directing the movie of Bunker's awesome The Animal Factory.
"I know I got lucky," he modestly assesses. "I've gone way further than I ever expected. There were big odds in 1975 that I wouldn't stay out. You could have got 15-to-1 on me going straight back in."
Does he ever look back on his childhood and think that he had little choice but to become a crim?
"I don't know about no choice. You're determined by what you are. I could have gone along with the programme, but it was my nature to rebel. I used it in my dialogue for Runaway Train and I've heard it a thousand times: if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. The more you've gone through, the more you can withstand. I've lost everything - every stitch of clothes, every relationship - I've done that five, six, seven times. You go to jail and everything goes, then you get out and start with nothing again. You can get up off the canvas, no matter what."
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