The Real Life Taxi Driver: A Biography of Arthur Herman Bremer (The Real Inspiration of Travis Bickle)
Robert De Niro has played many different people, but he is perhaps most remembered for his performance in Taxi Driver. What's more crazy than the person De Nero portrayed is the fact that it was actually based on a real person: Arthur Bremer.
What turned a innocent kid from Milwaukee into a crazed lunatic who attempted to assassinate presidential candidate, George Wallace? Find out in this fascinating profile.
What turned a innocent kid from Milwaukee into a crazed lunatic who attempted to assassinate presidential candidate, George Wallace? Find out in this fascinating profile.
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Excerpt
Prologue: A Penny for Your Thoughts
May 15th, 1972
A penny for your thoughts.
Those were the words twenty-one-year-old Arthur Bremer was going to shout out when he assassinated governor of Alabama and presidential candidate George Wallace. And as he stood in the crowd outside the shopping center, applauding enthusiastically as Wallace delivered a campaign speech to the good people of Laurel, Maryland, he felt with greater and greater certainty that he would get his chance to say those words very soon. The old, familiar phrase would serve as both his battle cry and his declaration of triumph.
A penny for your thoughts.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly as weighty as John Wilkes Booth’s “Sic semper tyrannis,” but then, Wallace wasn’t exactly Lincoln, either. He was nothing but a racist hatemonger and Bremer would be doing the country a favor by ending his life.
Not that that was why he was doing it. He didn’t care about Wallace’s views one way or the other. The main thing that had put him in Bremer’s sites in the first place was the simple fact that Richard Nixon was too hard to reach…not that he really gave a shit about Nixon or his policies, either. Truth be told, Arthur Bremer had never really had much of an interest in politics. That’s not what this was about.
A penny for your thoughts.
For years, people would debate what the words meant, but even if he survived this day—and he didn’t expect to—he would never tell. Their meaning wasn’t important, anyway. What was important was that they were words he would be remembered by. From that day forward, no one would ever be able to say or even think that old idiom again without Arthur Bremer coming to mind. It would be associated with him for generations to come. It was going to make him immortal.
A penny for your thoughts.
He had set out to do the deed that morning at a rally in Wheaton, Maryland, but that had been a rough crowd. Wallace was a controversial candidate, and you never knew if the people who showed up to his appearances were going to be friend or foe. The Wheaton audience had been comprised mostly of the latter, and they heckled Wallace and his rhetoric relentlessly, and even threw tomatoes at him. There was no way the Secret Service would have allowed him anywhere near that bunch, and that’s what Bremer needed to get the job done. It wasn’t too much to ask for, was it? He just needed the governor to do what politicians do and come into the crowd to shake some hands and kiss some babies. That was all it would take to give him his moment, but he didn’t get it in Wheaton.
Here in Laurel, though, the vibe was different. It was a much friendlier, much more supportive group and Wallace would feel safe walking among them. And when he did, he would see Bremer dressed from head to toe in patriotic red, white and blue with a great big WALLACE IN ’72 button pinned right on his chest. He wouldn’t be able to resist a photo op with such a big fan. Wallace would let him in close, and when he did, Arthur would stick out his hand and say, “A penny for your thoughts.” And then, while Wallace mused over his answer, he would reach out to shake Arthur’s hand and find that there was a gun in it. He would look back up into Arthur’s smiling face with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was going to be such a powerful moment, looking into the eyes of a man who knows you control whether he lives or dies. But he would only savor it for the briefest of instants. Then he would calmly squeeze the trigger and fire a single shot straight into the governor’s heart. A moment later, the Secret Service and the dozens of cops that were watching over the area would undoubtedly open fire on him, sending him out in a hail of bullets and a blaze of glory. It was going to be beautiful.
A penny for your thoughts.
Wallace wrapped up his speech and walked out from behind the 800-pound bulletproof podium. Just as Bremer had dared to hope, instead of exiting to the side of the stage, ducking into an awaiting car and speeding off to the next stop on his campaign trail, Wallace came down the front steps and approached the crowd. Bremer took a deep breath, put his hand in his pocket and wrapped his fingers around the grip of his five-shot snub-nose .38 revolver. This was it. This was really happening. He could not back out and he could not fail. Arthur Bremer’s entire life had been building to this exact moment in time.
People crowded around the governor, reaching over one another in the hopes of receiving a handshake or maybe the chance to exchange a few words. They pushed towards him with such ferocity that Bremer, at a diminutive 5’6” and 145 pounds, started getting edged out, churned towards the back of the crowd, further away from his target. Panicking, he pulled the gun out of his pocket, realizing immediately that he had done so way too soon. He could barely even see Wallace from where he was. But there was nothing he could do about it now; the gun was out, he might as well use it. He charged forward through the crowd, gun in hand, arm outstretched. When the candidate finally came into Bremer’s view, the only thing that stood between them was a little old lady. Bremer reached over the woman’s shoulder, pointed his gun at Wallace’s midsection, and started firing.
He squeezed the trigger over and over again, as fast as he could until the gun went click. He saw Wallace go down an instant before he was taken down himself. The crowd had swarmed around him, swallowed him up and forced him to the ground hard and fast. And as Arthur Bremer lay there, being beaten and kicked within an inch of his life, he took comfort in the fact that he had finally made something of himself. Maybe it didn’t go down exactly like it was supposed to, but the result had been achieved. Wallace was dead. He had to be. He was sure he had been hit three times, maybe more. He had done it. Everyone would now know the name Arthur Bremer. And even if he died here, he would forever live on in the words…
Damn it.
He forgot to say, “A penny for your thoughts.”
Chapter 1: Growing Up Bremer
The sad and lonely life of Arthur Herman Bremer began on August 21st, 1950 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was the fourth of William and Sylvia Bremer’s five children, which was probably at least three more than they could realistically afford. The Bremer clan was as blue-collar as it gets and twice as dysfunctional. Never having what most families would consider a home, they occupied a series of small apartments near the industrial sector on Milwaukee’s South Side, each of them soaked in alcohol and steeped in emotional and physical abuse.
William worked two jobs; driving a truck for the Krohn Cartage Company by day and selling beer during the Milwaukee Braves games at County Stadium by night. He was too old-fashioned and proud to allow his wife to get a job, but Sylvia didn’t seem to have any interest in working anyway. She didn’t seem to have any interest in housekeeping either, as the family was regularly evicted for running their apartments into the ground. What did interest her, however, was horse racing. While William slaved away to keep food in the mouths and a roof over the heads of his wife and five children, Sylvia took his paychecks to Chicago and gambled them away at the track, holding back just enough so she could still afford to buy all the family’s clothes at the Salvation Army store.
Whether they were causes or effects of their lifestyle is open to debate, but either way, there was a lot of drinking and a lot of fighting at the Bremer residence. Not one single member of the family seemed to get along with any of the others. Arthur’s half-sister, Gail, and older brothers, William Jr. and Theodore, couldn’t get away fast enough, striking out on their own as soon as they were able. When they were gone, they more or less disappeared off the face of the planet as far as the rest of the family knew. None of them kept in touch at all and they became little more than vague memories to Arthur and his younger brother, Roger.
Arthur and Roger couldn’t have been more different from one another if they tried. While Arthur was quiet and shy, Roger was always lashing out at the world around him, often gaining the unwanted attention of Milwaukee’s juvenile authorities. But unwanted attention was better than no attention at all, at least as far as Arthur was concerned. He seemed to resent Roger’s outgoing nature and every so often, he’d take that resentment out on him…or he’d try to, anyway. Even though Roger was several years younger and a lot smaller than Arthur, he still usually won their fights.
Arthur didn’t just fight with Roger, he also got into it with his father all the time, usually over pointless, trivial little things, and he usually lost those fights, too. The more fights he lost, the fewer he started, and he began to deal with his frustrations by running off into his own private little world. He would later write in a high school essay that he endured his childhood by pretending “that I was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home, and no one hit me.”
But no matter how many times he got beat up by his little brother or put in his place by his father, his hatred for them was nothing compared to how he felt about his mother. He absolutely despised Sylvia, probably because they were so much alike. He could see in her what he would one day grow into himself and it disgusted him.
Sylvia was extremely introverted, rarely saying hi to her neighbors and never under any circumstances letting anyone inside her apartment. She guarded her filthy and cluttered home like a dirty secret, keeping the door shut and the blinds closed tight, even on the hottest days of summer. And she was controlling and manipulative, too. She criticized Arthur endlessly for never going out to play and berated him for not having any friends, even though they both knew damn well that she liked him just the way he was. Never going out meant never getting into trouble, and Roger got into enough trouble for the both of them. So she belittled him for doing exactly as she wanted, and it got to the point where Arthur couldn’t stand to listen to a single word she said. If they were in the same room and she opened her mouth to say anything at all, even if it was just to comment on the weather, Arthur would get up and go into his bedroom.
The only time Arthur ever actually left the apartment was to go to school, where he proved to be a thoroughly average student. One of his first teachers described him as “a pleasure,” likely because he was so quiet and reserved when compared to the other children. But a couple years later, what had been taken for an asset became a cause for concern. It wasn’t just that Arthur was quiet and well behaved in class; he never did anything or said anything to anyone. Whether at lunch in the cafeteria or out on the playground during recess, he never made the slightest effort to make any friends.
In fairness though, making friends would probably never have been very easy for Arthur Bremer; he had a lot of things working against him. He was short, stocky, and wore glasses, which is a pretty tough starting point for even the most resilient of kids. But his physical shortcomings were the least of his problems. He had a strange way of walking, waddling around like a duck with his chin planted on his chest, avoiding eye contact at all costs. Whenever social interaction was unavoidable, he’d meet it with panic, laughing a weird, nervous laugh that made everyone uncomfortable. All these characteristics added up to make him an easy target for bullies—too easy, really. He was so boring that even beating him up wasn’t very much fun. So most of the time, he was simply ignored.
When he was old enough to attend South Division High School, Arthur came very close to finding a place to fit in. He joined the football team and to everyone’s amazement, his own most of all, found himself to be a pretty decent player. For a kid having such a hard time with life, it was everything he needed. Football would teach him to interact with people, it would teach him how to rely on others and see how it feels to have others rely on him, it would give him the confidence and sense of self-esteem that he had always lacked. With time, he and his teammates would even form friendships, or at the very least gain a sense of camaraderie. He would be a part of something bigger than himself, which is what he so desperately needed. Football would do amazing things for him…or at least, it might have if his mother hadn’t sent a note with him to school, declaring that her son was “too sickly” for football and forbidding him to play.
Arthur had learned his lesson. He was doomed to his bleak, solitary existence, and settled into his place in the world, which was off in the corner, out of everyone else’s way. He was neither seen nor heard for the rest of his high school career, until he graduated in January of 1969. The yearbook has his name in the index, but he is not pictured and there is no other reference to him.
He couldn’t possibly be summed up better.
May 15th, 1972
A penny for your thoughts.
Those were the words twenty-one-year-old Arthur Bremer was going to shout out when he assassinated governor of Alabama and presidential candidate George Wallace. And as he stood in the crowd outside the shopping center, applauding enthusiastically as Wallace delivered a campaign speech to the good people of Laurel, Maryland, he felt with greater and greater certainty that he would get his chance to say those words very soon. The old, familiar phrase would serve as both his battle cry and his declaration of triumph.
A penny for your thoughts.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly as weighty as John Wilkes Booth’s “Sic semper tyrannis,” but then, Wallace wasn’t exactly Lincoln, either. He was nothing but a racist hatemonger and Bremer would be doing the country a favor by ending his life.
Not that that was why he was doing it. He didn’t care about Wallace’s views one way or the other. The main thing that had put him in Bremer’s sites in the first place was the simple fact that Richard Nixon was too hard to reach…not that he really gave a shit about Nixon or his policies, either. Truth be told, Arthur Bremer had never really had much of an interest in politics. That’s not what this was about.
A penny for your thoughts.
For years, people would debate what the words meant, but even if he survived this day—and he didn’t expect to—he would never tell. Their meaning wasn’t important, anyway. What was important was that they were words he would be remembered by. From that day forward, no one would ever be able to say or even think that old idiom again without Arthur Bremer coming to mind. It would be associated with him for generations to come. It was going to make him immortal.
A penny for your thoughts.
He had set out to do the deed that morning at a rally in Wheaton, Maryland, but that had been a rough crowd. Wallace was a controversial candidate, and you never knew if the people who showed up to his appearances were going to be friend or foe. The Wheaton audience had been comprised mostly of the latter, and they heckled Wallace and his rhetoric relentlessly, and even threw tomatoes at him. There was no way the Secret Service would have allowed him anywhere near that bunch, and that’s what Bremer needed to get the job done. It wasn’t too much to ask for, was it? He just needed the governor to do what politicians do and come into the crowd to shake some hands and kiss some babies. That was all it would take to give him his moment, but he didn’t get it in Wheaton.
Here in Laurel, though, the vibe was different. It was a much friendlier, much more supportive group and Wallace would feel safe walking among them. And when he did, he would see Bremer dressed from head to toe in patriotic red, white and blue with a great big WALLACE IN ’72 button pinned right on his chest. He wouldn’t be able to resist a photo op with such a big fan. Wallace would let him in close, and when he did, Arthur would stick out his hand and say, “A penny for your thoughts.” And then, while Wallace mused over his answer, he would reach out to shake Arthur’s hand and find that there was a gun in it. He would look back up into Arthur’s smiling face with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It was going to be such a powerful moment, looking into the eyes of a man who knows you control whether he lives or dies. But he would only savor it for the briefest of instants. Then he would calmly squeeze the trigger and fire a single shot straight into the governor’s heart. A moment later, the Secret Service and the dozens of cops that were watching over the area would undoubtedly open fire on him, sending him out in a hail of bullets and a blaze of glory. It was going to be beautiful.
A penny for your thoughts.
Wallace wrapped up his speech and walked out from behind the 800-pound bulletproof podium. Just as Bremer had dared to hope, instead of exiting to the side of the stage, ducking into an awaiting car and speeding off to the next stop on his campaign trail, Wallace came down the front steps and approached the crowd. Bremer took a deep breath, put his hand in his pocket and wrapped his fingers around the grip of his five-shot snub-nose .38 revolver. This was it. This was really happening. He could not back out and he could not fail. Arthur Bremer’s entire life had been building to this exact moment in time.
People crowded around the governor, reaching over one another in the hopes of receiving a handshake or maybe the chance to exchange a few words. They pushed towards him with such ferocity that Bremer, at a diminutive 5’6” and 145 pounds, started getting edged out, churned towards the back of the crowd, further away from his target. Panicking, he pulled the gun out of his pocket, realizing immediately that he had done so way too soon. He could barely even see Wallace from where he was. But there was nothing he could do about it now; the gun was out, he might as well use it. He charged forward through the crowd, gun in hand, arm outstretched. When the candidate finally came into Bremer’s view, the only thing that stood between them was a little old lady. Bremer reached over the woman’s shoulder, pointed his gun at Wallace’s midsection, and started firing.
He squeezed the trigger over and over again, as fast as he could until the gun went click. He saw Wallace go down an instant before he was taken down himself. The crowd had swarmed around him, swallowed him up and forced him to the ground hard and fast. And as Arthur Bremer lay there, being beaten and kicked within an inch of his life, he took comfort in the fact that he had finally made something of himself. Maybe it didn’t go down exactly like it was supposed to, but the result had been achieved. Wallace was dead. He had to be. He was sure he had been hit three times, maybe more. He had done it. Everyone would now know the name Arthur Bremer. And even if he died here, he would forever live on in the words…
Damn it.
He forgot to say, “A penny for your thoughts.”
Chapter 1: Growing Up Bremer
The sad and lonely life of Arthur Herman Bremer began on August 21st, 1950 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was the fourth of William and Sylvia Bremer’s five children, which was probably at least three more than they could realistically afford. The Bremer clan was as blue-collar as it gets and twice as dysfunctional. Never having what most families would consider a home, they occupied a series of small apartments near the industrial sector on Milwaukee’s South Side, each of them soaked in alcohol and steeped in emotional and physical abuse.
William worked two jobs; driving a truck for the Krohn Cartage Company by day and selling beer during the Milwaukee Braves games at County Stadium by night. He was too old-fashioned and proud to allow his wife to get a job, but Sylvia didn’t seem to have any interest in working anyway. She didn’t seem to have any interest in housekeeping either, as the family was regularly evicted for running their apartments into the ground. What did interest her, however, was horse racing. While William slaved away to keep food in the mouths and a roof over the heads of his wife and five children, Sylvia took his paychecks to Chicago and gambled them away at the track, holding back just enough so she could still afford to buy all the family’s clothes at the Salvation Army store.
Whether they were causes or effects of their lifestyle is open to debate, but either way, there was a lot of drinking and a lot of fighting at the Bremer residence. Not one single member of the family seemed to get along with any of the others. Arthur’s half-sister, Gail, and older brothers, William Jr. and Theodore, couldn’t get away fast enough, striking out on their own as soon as they were able. When they were gone, they more or less disappeared off the face of the planet as far as the rest of the family knew. None of them kept in touch at all and they became little more than vague memories to Arthur and his younger brother, Roger.
Arthur and Roger couldn’t have been more different from one another if they tried. While Arthur was quiet and shy, Roger was always lashing out at the world around him, often gaining the unwanted attention of Milwaukee’s juvenile authorities. But unwanted attention was better than no attention at all, at least as far as Arthur was concerned. He seemed to resent Roger’s outgoing nature and every so often, he’d take that resentment out on him…or he’d try to, anyway. Even though Roger was several years younger and a lot smaller than Arthur, he still usually won their fights.
Arthur didn’t just fight with Roger, he also got into it with his father all the time, usually over pointless, trivial little things, and he usually lost those fights, too. The more fights he lost, the fewer he started, and he began to deal with his frustrations by running off into his own private little world. He would later write in a high school essay that he endured his childhood by pretending “that I was living with a television family and there was no yelling at home, and no one hit me.”
But no matter how many times he got beat up by his little brother or put in his place by his father, his hatred for them was nothing compared to how he felt about his mother. He absolutely despised Sylvia, probably because they were so much alike. He could see in her what he would one day grow into himself and it disgusted him.
Sylvia was extremely introverted, rarely saying hi to her neighbors and never under any circumstances letting anyone inside her apartment. She guarded her filthy and cluttered home like a dirty secret, keeping the door shut and the blinds closed tight, even on the hottest days of summer. And she was controlling and manipulative, too. She criticized Arthur endlessly for never going out to play and berated him for not having any friends, even though they both knew damn well that she liked him just the way he was. Never going out meant never getting into trouble, and Roger got into enough trouble for the both of them. So she belittled him for doing exactly as she wanted, and it got to the point where Arthur couldn’t stand to listen to a single word she said. If they were in the same room and she opened her mouth to say anything at all, even if it was just to comment on the weather, Arthur would get up and go into his bedroom.
The only time Arthur ever actually left the apartment was to go to school, where he proved to be a thoroughly average student. One of his first teachers described him as “a pleasure,” likely because he was so quiet and reserved when compared to the other children. But a couple years later, what had been taken for an asset became a cause for concern. It wasn’t just that Arthur was quiet and well behaved in class; he never did anything or said anything to anyone. Whether at lunch in the cafeteria or out on the playground during recess, he never made the slightest effort to make any friends.
In fairness though, making friends would probably never have been very easy for Arthur Bremer; he had a lot of things working against him. He was short, stocky, and wore glasses, which is a pretty tough starting point for even the most resilient of kids. But his physical shortcomings were the least of his problems. He had a strange way of walking, waddling around like a duck with his chin planted on his chest, avoiding eye contact at all costs. Whenever social interaction was unavoidable, he’d meet it with panic, laughing a weird, nervous laugh that made everyone uncomfortable. All these characteristics added up to make him an easy target for bullies—too easy, really. He was so boring that even beating him up wasn’t very much fun. So most of the time, he was simply ignored.
When he was old enough to attend South Division High School, Arthur came very close to finding a place to fit in. He joined the football team and to everyone’s amazement, his own most of all, found himself to be a pretty decent player. For a kid having such a hard time with life, it was everything he needed. Football would teach him to interact with people, it would teach him how to rely on others and see how it feels to have others rely on him, it would give him the confidence and sense of self-esteem that he had always lacked. With time, he and his teammates would even form friendships, or at the very least gain a sense of camaraderie. He would be a part of something bigger than himself, which is what he so desperately needed. Football would do amazing things for him…or at least, it might have if his mother hadn’t sent a note with him to school, declaring that her son was “too sickly” for football and forbidding him to play.
Arthur had learned his lesson. He was doomed to his bleak, solitary existence, and settled into his place in the world, which was off in the corner, out of everyone else’s way. He was neither seen nor heard for the rest of his high school career, until he graduated in January of 1969. The yearbook has his name in the index, but he is not pictured and there is no other reference to him.
He couldn’t possibly be summed up better.
