Regardless of the contents of Suze
Rotolo's A
Freewheelin'
Time: A Memoir Of Greenwich Village In The Sixties,
her four-year relationship with Bob Dylan will
still be represented in the public imagination by her presence on the cover of
The
Freewheelin'
Bob Dylan,
where she hangs on the singer's arm in a snowy city scene.
(This scene was recreated in Todd Haynes' I'm
Not There
with Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose character is considered a fusion of Rotolo and
Dylan's
first wife,
Sara.) Her claim that
she hadn't anticipated being on the album cover
is just
a reminder that the stories behind those iconic images never seem to measure up
to their fictions.
Rotolo grew up in working-class Queens, the
daughter of Italian-American Communists. She became
absorbed in the Greenwich Village folk scene as a teenager to
escape her mother's
short temper. Working as a waitress or a set designer when she needed the money,
and going to folk shows every night, Rotolo met Dylan at a showcase and moved
in with him as soon as she turned 18, experiencing
firsthand the making of
his first few albums and his reputation.
A Freewheelin'
Time aims to paint Rotolo's
relationship with Dylan as only one in a number of quintessential '60s experiences
she had, from
picketing a New York City Woolworth's to making clandestine trips to Cuba
after
the State Department ban. But these stories are directionless, and only
intermittently interesting. It's a
fine thing to be freewheelin', but Rotolo talks about her life as if she's
withholding a major part—which, really, she is. Her memoir openly
admits
Dylan was her first love, but provides only tantalizing glimpses of
their years together, resorting to familiar language about the tensions of fame
and the unwanted role of the rocker's "chick." In
choosing
not to kiss and tell (and certainly there's something
admirable in not going the Angela Bowie route over a relationship which undoubtedly
had its difficulties) Rotolo
writes about their
love and surroundings with a palette of words as bland as a PBS special, made
all the more frustrating when she references Dylan songs she says she inspired,
like "Don't
Think Twice, It's
All Right."
She was lucky enough to have her place in the Bob Dylan mythology captured on
film forever,
but her account adds to that mythology instead of clarifying it.