Susan, or Suze, Rotolo was Bob Dylan's first serious girlfriend, and unlike
many other characters from his pre-iconic phase she has, up until now,
revealed little about their four-year relationship. Rotolo is best known as
the woman hugging his arm on the front of his second album, The Freewheelin'
Bob Dylan. A touchingly intimate, romantic image, it remains one of the
first and last of its kind. Less than a year after that shot was taken in
January 1963, he changed style: later photographs typically showed him as an
enigmatic loner, hidden behind dark glasses, the epitome of an aloof cool
that has pretty much defined rock stars ever since.
This was not the Bob Dylan that Rotolo first met in July 1961 at a Sunday folk
marathon in Manhattan. She was 17, a New York born-and-bred
Italian-American. Three years older and an out-of-towner from the Midwestern
sticks, he was a fringe member of the lively folk scene based in a handful
of tiny clubs around Greenwich Village. In his rumpled shirt, jeans and
black corduroy hat, Dylan struck Rotolo as a bit of a hick, “oddly old-time
looking, charming in a straggly way”. His impishness reminded her of Harpo
Marx, but she warmed to an “intensity that was not to be taken lightly”.
Within a year, the pair were living together in a tiny rented apartment in
West 4th Street, the first fruits of Dylan's new contract with Columbia
Records. For an unmarried couple this was, by the standards of the day, an
unconventional arrangement. At a record company conference in Puerto Rico
they had to be booked into a hotel as Mr and Mrs Dylan, “because that was
the only way we could have a room together”.
Rotolo dislikes the way she has been described as Dylan's muse - she
specifically denies having inspired any of his songs - but she is well aware
that she accelerated his entrée into New York's downtown bohemian culture.
“I was exposed to a lot more than a kid from Hibbing, Minnesota.” A
so-called “red diaper baby”, whose parents were both committed socialists,
Rotolo fostered his interest in civil rights and the anti-nuclear movement.
She took him to see Picasso's great anti-war painting, Guernica, introduced
him to the poetry of Rimbaud and, through her work as a theatre designer,
the plays of Bertolt Brecht. She noted his distrust of the avant-garde set,
particularly Andy Warhol, and was amused by his reaction to Alain Resnais's
cult art film Last Year in Marienbad, which Dylan waggishly suggested should
have been retitled Marienbad Insane Asylum.
Annoyingly for her, boho New York had yet to embrace feminism, and Rotolo soon
found herself being treated as a musician's “chick” - which “made me feel as
if I weren't a whole being”. She didn't mind being phoned up by Pete Seeger,
“who wanted to tell me how special Bob was and how I was an important part
of that,” after Dylan's breakthrough concert at Carnegie Hall. But she took
great exception when the veteran folk archivist Alan Lomax praised her for
putting her genius boyfriend first, “unselfishly tending to his needs and
desires . . . I was offended. I chafed at the notion of devoting my young
self to serving somebody”.
Especially a somebody as tricksy as Bob Dylan. She admired his brazen creative
thieving, and amusingly recounts him turning up at a folk club one night
announcing, “Hey, you gotta listen to this song I just wrote! Or at least I
think I wrote it, but maybe I heard it somewhere.” But what Rotolo grew to
distrust in her funny but evasive boyfriend was “his facility for not
telling the truth” about himself.
She was dismayed one night to discover that his surname was not Dylan after
all, but Zimmerman, and took to calling him Raz “because I knew it annoyed
him”. More troubling was his persistent, clandestine womanising, which
surfaced after the Newport folk festival of 1963, when Dylan publicly took
up with his co-star Joan Baez. He was, Rotolo concluded, “a lying shit of a
guy with women, an adept juggler really”.
But, even after she moved out of West 4th Street and went to live with her
sister, the love affair persisted. On his infrequent visits Dylan would, she
says, beg her to marry him, and although she doubted his sincerity - “I do
not think of him as an honourable person,” she wrote in her diary in 1964 -
she became pregnant by him. The subsequent abortion brought things to an
end. In the last conversation she reports between them, the by now ineffably
famous and probably drug-fuelled Dylan has darkened, telling her, “You
cannot need anyone, or anything...all is meaningless.” Her last words on the
man whose life “has always been a presence...alongside my own” are bleak:
“How painful it was to know him.”
While A Freewheelin' Time will inevitably be picked over by geeky
Dylanologists - with whom Rotolo has had a few public spats recently - this
is more her story than it is his. And she has not had it easy. The most
moving passages here describe her troubled, impoverished adolescence,
scarred by the death of her father in her early teens and her volatile
mother's battle with alcoholism. She was facially disfigured and nearly died
in a serious car accident at 14, and suffered an apparent arson attack by a
deranged actor acquaintance that destroyed her New York apartment in 1966.
Hearteningly, she remains totally unembittered throughout the book, never
losing sight of the idealistic, creative energy that infused New York in the
early 1960s. There is no better guide to the people, the places, the movers
and shakers that turned Greenwich Village into one of the launch pads of
rock's counter-culture - and made one of its luckier and more talented
inhabitants into a superstar whose songs can still hypnotise across the
generations. “We were a passionate lot,” Rotolo concludes, in her
refreshingly straightforward way. “And cool and hip as we might have been,
or thought ourselves to be...we had something to say, not something to sell.”
A Freewheelin' Time by Suze Rotolo
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