I was saddened to learn Suze Rotolo passed away last Thursday. She died of cancer, at the age of 67. Although most famous for being on the most romantic album cover of all time, and Bob Dylan’s girlfriend, she was very much her own person. I recently read her memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, and enjoyed it so much, I gave it to a friend for Christmas.
Every time I walk by Jones Street, I think about her. The iconic picture was taken just down from where she lived with Dylan on West 4th.
Rotolo grew up in Jackson Heights, moved to Greenwich Village as a teen, and knew just about everyone in the teeming Village folk-rock scene. A red-diaper baby with art-loving parents, the strong-willed, bohemian, and socially aware girl was not only Dylan’s first serious relationship, she was his muse.
As Richard Williams of the Guardian wrote,
She introduced him to the work of Paul Cézanne and Wassily Kandinsky, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Together they went to see Picasso's “Guernica” and François Truffaut's Shoot the Pianist. After she told him the story of a 14-year-old African American boy who had been brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955, he wrote “The Ballad of Emmett Till”, one of his early broadsides against injustice.
Her constant sketching inspired him to take up drawing and painting, and some of the songs relating to their relationship were written during a months-long separation while she studied art in Italy.
Among other songs, he wrote “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” for/about her. While together, Dylan was becoming Dylan; she only found out his real name when they were already living together, and his draft card dropped out of his wallet.
While Dylan is one of the most important artists of the 20th century, whose influence is immeasurable, that doesn’t mean he was a great boyfriend. Alternating between screwing around semi-publicly (with Joan Baez — ugh) and his marriage pleas, grated on the always-independent Rotolo. As she wrote, Dylan was “a lying shit of a guy with women”. Unwilling to play the passive role of ‘rock-star/genius’ girlfriend’, she broke up with him.
But she told no tales out of school, created art, and made a life with Enzo Bartoliocci, a film-maker. She waited 40 years to write her memoir. In it, she was kinder to Dylan than he deserved.
“Bob was charismatic: he was a beacon, a lighthouse,” she wrote. “He was also a black hole. He required committed backup and protection I was unable to provide consistently, probably because I needed them myself.”
In his own memoir, Dylan describes first meeting her when he played at Riverside Church. He was 20, and she was 17.
“She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin.”
She is survived by her husband, and their son, Luca.
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