« Review: Richard Zoglin’s “Comedy at the Edge” | Home | More “Juno” Non-Love »
Suze Rotolo Speaks, Bob Dylan Cringes
By Kyle | February 9, 2008
The girl from the cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” who dated Bob Dylan for about three years starting shortly after he arrived in Greenwich Village in 1961, has finally spoken up, in her upcoming memoir “A Freewheelin’ Time. I have an advance copy. Here are a few highlights.
Rotolo (who recalls that during the cover shoot for “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” “we were freezing; certainly Bob was, in that thin jacket. But image was all”) writes mournfully about aborting her child by Dylan–which was illegal at the time–and says she had an emotional breakdown during their protracted split. She paints a picture of Dylan as canny about marketing himself and supremely confident, though increasingly haunted and suspicious after making it big.
In the book, due in May, Rotolo says she found out Dylan wasn’t “Bobby’s” real name after he got drunk one night and dropped his wallet. His draft card, reading “Robert A. Zimmerman,” fell out. They’d already been dating for months. “I called him Raz now and then, taken from his initials, just because I knew it annoyed him,” she says.
“Much time was spent in front of the mirror trying on one wrinkled article of clothing after another, until it all came together to look as if Bob had just gotten up and thrown something on. Image was all,” Rotolo recalls, noting that she more or less invented the bell bottoms for him: she slit the jeans he wears on the cover of “Another Side of Bob Dylan” and inserted fabric from another pair to fit them over his boots.
Rotolo and Dylan met backstage a few months after he arrived in New York City, at a July 1961 folk concert at Riverside Church in Manhattan, where “he made me think of Harpo Marx, imprish and approachable.” He tended to manufacture tall tales–”the sad story he told of being abandoned at a young age in New Mexico and then going to live with a traveling circus didn’t jibe with his stories of growing up in Duluth,” she notes dryly. The pair moved in together on the fourth floor of 161 W. 4th St, though they waited until after her 18th birthday in November because they weren’t sure it was legal.
Rotolo recalls a night when Irish playwright Brendan Behan–a favorite of Dylan’s–showed up at a Village theater that was showing his play “The Hostage.” She ran to call Dylan, but by the time Dylan rushed over to the theater, “Behan was very drunk” and wobbled over to the White Horse Tavern, Dylan trailing behind, “hoping for a conversation, but Behan was in no shape for anything remotely resembling talk.” The White Horse is where Dylan Thomas, whose name Dylan would borrow, drank himself to death in 1953.
Rotolo shares letters Dylan wrote while she visited Italy (during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he wrote that he thought “the maniacs were really going to do it this time” and only hoped he would “die quick and not have to put up with radiation”). But she adds, “It was as if every letter Bob had written to me and every phone call he had made had been performed in front of an audience.” Among his strange habits was obsessively cracking a bullwhip for hours backstage at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1963. “Bobby practiced cracking that bull whip whenever he found the space.”
After he began to rise in late 1961, Dylan was at first calmly confident (”Quietly Bob said: This is the beginning of what I have always known. I am going to be big”) but later “his paranoia was palpable,” she said. “It was as if he expected someone to show up and blow his cover and expose him”–which did happen when Newsweek revealed his real name and middle class background in October of 1963. “Bob was extremely angry; he felt violated.” Unable to handle the “pressure, gossip, truth and lies that living with Bob entailed,” she says, she had moved out of the apartment two months earlier.
Summing up Dylan, Rotolo writes, “He had an uncanny ability to complicate the obvious and sanctify the banal–just like a poet….Bob was charismatic; he was a beacon, a lighthouse. He was also a black hole.”
Topics: Books, Music, New York City |
February 11th, 2008 at 12:18 am
how very sad she was only sorry she aborted her child after he became famous.At least this book will bring her some much needed cash–it should sell well.
February 11th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Bob Dylan is a genius. His contributions to music and his art cannot be calculated. His works will be enjoyed, studied, rediscovered and appreciated for many generations to come. Like the great composers of the past his music will continue to inspire far into the future. So what if he is vain and eccentric. I wonder if Mozart’s ex girlfriend ever wrote a book about him exposing is eccentricities?
March 12th, 2008 at 10:30 am
I feel Suze Rotolo is really cheap in exploiting Bob’s fame for her own benefit. Bob, you didn’t lose anything special!!!
Suze, you are a cheapo!!!
March 12th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
This book could be another punch in the stomach to Bob Dylan. I can’t get over such a lack of dignity in this woman to write anything about Bob Dylan after such a long time, since she MUST know how he values his privacy!! In the heat of passionate revenge, one might possibly forgive such an indiscretion, but not in this case!!! If Bob’s friends are reading this: Stay strong kiddo!! Suze was never worth all that suffering back then. Bob did the right thing to focus on his musical destiny, and it takes that much time (40+ years) to see the past with TOTAL clarity even if it is painful. Life is all about learning. Remember this, Bob’s words: They just think they’ve really found you. They haven’t!!! I have taken refuge in this words when jelous women talked behind my back. You do the same, Bob!!!
April 5th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Look at the cover of the book, the title of the book, and honestly say that she isn’t making money off of someone else’s career. She shares her letters? Ha she actually has some left that she didn’t auction off. Bob is no saint by any means, but neither is Suze. From what I have read about this so called lady (and I use the term loosely), I don’t care for her. As far as her recent actions 40 years later, ie selling photos, cards, letters that Bob gave her for her b day or Valentine’s Day, she is trash out trying to make a buck off of someone else.
April 5th, 2008 at 12:40 am
How very sad she aborted his baby? She had the last say in it!!! How sad was she since she went through with it?
April 1st, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Last time I checked this was America!The only thing Bob Dylan probably hates more than books being written about him is obsessed fans idealizing him!People he is just human!I love his music but he also has made many mistakes in his life like the rest of us.If Suze wants to write about ‘her’ life with him then she is entitled to do so.She could have ripped him to threads but she wrote very tastefully IMHO.BD also had numerous affairs on his wife.Should she just have put up with it?She sued him and won $36 million and custody of the kids’.So is she a b—h too?
I think this thread would sicken Bob.