Who is she?
It’s a great photo! This is one of the best-known album covers of all-time. It’s Bob Dylan’s second vinyl, pressed and released in 1963. Look at Dylan - he’s beyond shivering and thinking “Man, I shoulda wwwwworn a heavier coat.”
But how about his sidekick? She looks like the happiest girl on the planet - comfy and not a care in the world.
Who is she?
She is Suze Rotolo, “a shy girl from Queens,” as she called herself in her book A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008).
In his autobiography Chronicles Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004), Dylan wrote, “She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness—a Rodin sculpture come to life.”
She was 17 when she met Dylan, then 20, in 1961 - the beginning of a three-year relationship detailed in her memoir. Those details include portions of letters from Dylan that give the reader a sense of the charm of the young folksinger in the very early days of his career - and how Suze dealt with Bob who “always did as he saw fit.”
But the memoir is less about Dylan and more about the Greenwich Village vibe of the Sixties and the many colorful characters (young, quirky, gifted - musicians, actors, poets), clubs, theaters, and bars that made up the fabric of the neighborhood. She even includes a helpful map.
And it’s about Suze’s family and her struggle with faith and politics:
“Culturally, we were Catholic, but my parents had long ago left the Church for the idealistic wing of the American Communist Party. The only thing that passed for a religious education was sitting in my father’s lap while he paged through a big book of Renaissance Italian paintings.”
Nonetheless, her approach to the memoir has a “Catholic feel” to it: she writes, “I see history as a reliquary - a container where relics are kept and displayed for contemplation.” It’s a great analogy - her memoir is like that - written and presented in that manner.
Suze was an artist in her own right, an illustrator and painter, and a political activist. In 1967 she married Enzo Bartociolli, a film editor and producer. They were married 44 years until Suze’s death of lung cancer in 2011, aged 67.
Reporting her death, the British newspaper The Guardian, defined her as "the girl with the wistful eyes and hint of a smile whose head is resting on the suede-jacketed shoulder of a nice-looking young man as they trudge through the snow on the cover of 1963's The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan."
I’m glad Suze Rotolo wrote her memoir, because a life should not be defined by a photo taken at age 19 - no matter how great that photo is.
