You probably don’t know her name, but you definitely know her face — bright and beaming, covered in chestnut hair, a few feet away from a blue Volkswagen bus. She’s wearing a green loden coat she just bought on a eight-month trip to Italy, a perfect match for the black leather boots on her feet, trudging through the slushy snow of New York’s Greenwich Village. She’s clutching the arm of Bob Dylan, whose hands are keeping warm in his denim pockets. His brown suede coat is absolutely way too thin for this freezing winter climate, so he’s hunched over — a spontaneous pose that would one day become the TikTok trend “Bob Dylan Core.” But for now, it’s February 1963, smartphone-free for another few decades.
This image of Bob Dylan and his then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo, captured by Don Hunstein, became famous for being the cover of 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It epitomized the folky, bohemian magic of Greenwich Village in the early Sixties, the dawn of counterculture, and an artist on the cusp of becoming a global phenomenon. But as with most beloved pop culture moments, fans intensely romanticize it more than those who were actually involved. “Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters,” Rotolo recalled to music journalist Anthony Decurtis in 2008. “On top of that I put a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage. Every time I look at that picture, I think I look fat.”
By the time The Freewheelin’ cover was captured, Dylan and Rotolo’s relationship was already crumbling, and they parted ways in 1964. But their relationship — and the several Dylan classics she inspired — defined her for the rest of her life. The Italian-American artist was fiercely private about her time with Dylan, until she released the fantastic memoir A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties in 2008. She died just three years later of lung cancer, when she was 67.
The Freewheelin’ cover has been replicated constantly throughout the decades, from Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky to Todd Haynes’ 2007 Dylan film I’m Not There. Its aesthetic also influenced the entire look of the Coen brothers 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis: “It was kind of the reference point in terms of color and everything,” Ethan Coen said.
Now, 13 years after her death, James Mangold’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown will arrive in theaters on Christmas Day. Starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, the film centers around his early years in the Village folk scene, with Elle Fanning as Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo).
But beyond that winter day, beyond “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” and “Boots of Spanish Leather,” who was Rotolo? You’ve gotten the 101 on Dylan. Now, here’s everything you need to know about Suze Rotolo.
All of the characters in A Complete Unknown use real names, but Dylan personally requested Rotolo’s be changed
In our recent Rolling Stone cover story, Fanning says Dylan didn’t want her character to be named after Rotolo, because she was “a very private person and didn’t ask for this life. She was obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob.” Instead, we meet the politically passionate artist Sylvie Russo. And while the film takes some liberties with her character (her trip to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival will raise some Dyanologist eyebrows), she is Rotolo in all but name, working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and wearing black short-sleeve turtlenecks.
She was born in 1943 and raised in Queens
Rotolo was a “red diaper baby” born at the height of the McCarthy era, the daughter of Communist Italian immigrants Giachino and Mary. Her parents relocated from the Village to Sunnyside, Queens around 1940, shortly before the births of Suze and her older sister, Carla. The Sicilian Giachino (who went by Pete, after his middle name Pietro), died of a heart attack in 1958. Her mother, a journalist at the Italian Communist paper l’Unità, planned to relocate to Italy with Rotolo in 1961, but the plan fell through after they were both injured in a car crash.
Rotolo moved to the Village, working odd jobs — even making puppet body parts at one point — and house sitting at an apartment on Waverly Place. “Since I was born in one of the boroughs of New York City, the concept of coming to the city to find (or lose) oneself doesn’t apply,” she writes in A Freewheelin’ Time (recommended reading for fans of Patti Smith’s Just Kids.) “But it was to Greenwich Village that people like me went — people who knew in their souls that they didn’t belong where they came from. I was drawn to the Village with its history of bohemia — where the writers I was reading and the artists I was looking at had lived or passed through. Their spirits led the way, showed me the road, and named the place. I got on the subway.”
She met Bob Dylan in 1961, and got him involved in politics and civil rights
Rotolo met Dylan when he performed at an all-day folk concert at Riverside Church in July 1961, when he was 20 and she was just 17 (Sound familiar? “I once loved a woman, a child, I’m told”). Dylan was performing at the event, and Rotolo remembers flirting and talking backstage for most of the day. “He was funny, engaging, intense, and he was persistent,” she said. “These words completely describe who he was throughout the time we were together; only the order of the words would shift depending on mood or circumstance … As inexperienced as I was in the ways of love, I felt a strong attraction to this character. It was as if we knew each other already; we just needed time to get better acquainted. And so we did over the next four years.”
In his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, Dylan also reflects on that electric moment: “Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blooded Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard … Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. 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.”
They took trips to the Museum of Modern Art, discussed Arthur Rimbaud and Bertolt Brecht, while Rotolo ignited Dylan’s political awakening. She took him to CORE meetings and teaching him about the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till, which inspired him to write “The Death of Emmett Till.” “How many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to [Suze] and asked, ‘Is this right?’” Dylan later recalled to his biographer Robert Shelton. “Because I knew her mother was associated with unions, and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was. I checked the songs out with her. She would like all the songs.”
In David Hajdu’s 2011 book Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña, Rotolo remembers, “A lot of what I gave him was a look at how the other half lived — left wing things that he didn’t know. He knew about Woody [Guthrie] and Pete Seeger, but I was working for CORE and went on youth marches for civil rights, and all that was new to him.”
Her eight-month trip to Italy a year later strained their relationship — and inspired some of his best songs
On June 9, 1962, Rotolo boarded the Rotterdam and headed to Perugia. What was initially a three-month trip resulted in eight months, in which Rotolo studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Perugia. “He didn’t want me to go, but at the same time he didn’t want to put pressure on me,” Rotolo told Terry Gross on Fresh Air. “In the end, I think I went for many reasons. One being because I couldn’t stand the arguments anymore that were going on in my own head of, ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’ And it did seem like a good thing to do, a real opportunity. And also, the Village was getting oppressive in many ways. It was so much the folk music scene, and I wasn’t a musician and I couldn’t keep on obsessing about folk music the way the musicians would. So it also seemed like a nice way to get away.”
Dylan wrote several classics during this time, like the devastating “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “One Too Many Mornings,” and “Boots of Spanish Leather” (no, Rotolo did not actually bring him Spanish shoes). He was distraught with her absence, writing her heartfelt letters. “Not much is happening here I guess,” he writes in one. “Bob Shelton is waiting for Jean — the dogs are waiting to go out, the thieves are waiting for an old lady — little kids are waiting for school — the cop is waiting to beat up on someone — them lousy bums are waiting for money — Grove Street is waiting for Bedford Street — the dirty are waiting to be cleaned — Everybody is waiting for cooler weather — and I am just waiting for you.”
Their relationship resumed when Rotolo returned, but their time apart, combined with Dylan’s rising career, put immense strain on them. “It was all this stuff that was going on around his fame, and there was so much pressure,” Rotolo told Gross. “I just felt that I no longer had a place in this world of his music and fame, and I felt more and more insecure, that I was just a string on his guitar, I was just this chick. I was losing confidence in who I was and the way I felt in Italy, that I was my own self and could continue my life and not become this object that’s next to Dylan.”
In August 1963, Rotolo moved out of her West Fourth Street apartment with Dylan and into an apartment on Avenue B with her sister, Carla. Shortly after, she got pregnant. “The decision to have an abortion was not easily made, but we made it in the end,” Rotolo wrote. “Through friends, a good doctor was found right in New York City. Everything went smoothly, the only complication was my uneasy state of mind. I withdrew more into myself and let people think I was feeling physically weak from the procedure. Instead I was depressed and wanted to sleep reality away.”
Rotolo also inspired the most bitter song he ever wrote, one he deeply regrets
Rotolo’s mother and her sister Carla were not fans of Dylan, to put it mildly. “Bob and Carla argued and fought, slinging words back and forth,” Rotolo remembered. “She had many grievances. He had truths to tell. When he wasn’t around, the harangue continued. I was sick from it.” Their differences came to a head when Dylan released “Ballad in Plain D,” from 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan. “Of the two sisters, I loved the young,” he sings, before describing Carla as a social-climber: “For her parasite sister I had no respect/Bound by her boredom, her pride to protect/Countless visions of the other she’d reflect/As a crutch for her scenes and her society.”
“I understood what he was doing,” Rotolo later told Victoria Balfour, who wrote 1987’s Rock Wives: The Hard Lives and Good Times of the Wives, Girlfriends, and Groupies of Rock and Roll. “It was the end of something and we both were hurt and bitter. His art was his outlet, his exorcism. It was healthy.”
Yet Dylan expressed regret over the track: “I look back and say ‘I must have been a real schmuck to write that,’” he told Bill Flanagan in 1985. “I look back at that particular one and say, of all the songs I’ve written, maybe I could have left that alone … At that time my audience was very small. It overtook my mind so I wrote it … I’ve got to think I can do better than that. It’s not going to positively help anybody to hear about my sadness. Just another hard luck story.”
Dylan didn’t take a liking to Rotolo’s eventual husband
Rotolo married Italian film editor Enzo Bartoccioli — whom she first met during her 1962 trip to Perugia — in 1970. “We met up again many years later,” she told Gross. When Gross asked if Bartoccioli was her boyfriend while she was in Italy, she simply answered, “I knew him then. That’s when I first met him.”
Regardless of their initial relationship, Dylan did not like Bartoccioli. In the liner notes to Another Side of Bob Dylan, titled “Some Other Kinds Of Songs . . . Poems by Bob Dylan,” he includes some thoughts about him. They’re jumbled, but the section reads, “I used t’ hate enzo i used t’ hate him so much that i could’ve killed him he was rotten an’ ruthless an’ after what he could get i was sure of that my beloved one met him in a far-off land an’ she stayed longer there because of him i croaked with exhaustion that he was actually makin’ her happy i never knew him sometimes i would see him on my ceilin’ i could’ve shot him the rovin’ phony the romantic idiot i know about guys for i myself am a guy poison swings its pendulums with a seasick sensation an’ i used t’ want t’ trample on him i used t’ want t’ massacre him i used t’ want t’ murder him i wanted t’ be like him so much that i ached i used t’ hate enzo.”
Rotolo and Bartoccioli had a son named Luca, who became a musician. She spent the rest of her life immersed in art, teaching, painting, and illustrating. In an interview with the New York Times, she said she was also a “book artist,” where she reimagines books “as an art object” and combines “drawing, painting, collage, and found objects.”
Even in 1975, Dylan was still reflecting on their relationship
Dylan swears that Blood on The Tracks, one of his greatest records, was not autobiographical. “’You’re a Big Girl Now,’ well, I read that this was supposed to be about my wife,” he told Cameron Crowe in 1985. “I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean, it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks these interpreters sometimes are … I don’t write confessional songs. Emotion’s got nothing to do with it.”
However, fans have speculated otherwise for decades. The personal nature embedded in the gut-wrenching songs is undeniable, particularly through the lens of his divorce from Sara Lownds. But the highlight “Simple Twist of Fate” has his relationship with Rotolo written all over it, and the heartbreak he felt when she went went off to Europe for eight months and left him in New York. “He hears the ticking of the clocks,” he wrote. “And walks along with a parrot that talks/Hunts her down by the waterfront docks where the sailors all come in/Maybe she’ll pick him out again, how long must he wait/Once more for a simple twist of fate.”
The original title of the song in his lyric notebook is “West 4th Street Affair,” a clear reference to the apartment they shared together in the West Village. And he added new lines to live performances in recent years that make the connection to Rotolo even more clear: “He woke up and she was gone/He didn’t see nothing but the dawn/Got out bed he put his shoes back on/Then he pushed back the blinds/Found a note she’d left behind that said/You should have met me back in ’58/We could have avoided this little simple twist of fate.”
It’s a heartbreaking admission that had Suze only came into his life back in his Bobby Zimmerman days, their relationship may have had a very different twist of fate.
She avoided talking about Dylan for decades, until 2008, when she released A Freewheelin’ Time
Rotolo’s memoir, recommended reading for fans of Patti Smith’s Just Kids, marked the first time she’d gone public about her relationship with Dylan, respecting his privacy for decades. According to her interview with The New York Times, Dylan’s own memoir and the 2005 Martin Scorsese-directed Dylan doc No Direction Home changed her perspective. “The feeling I had was, sure, it’s about Dylan, he’s the focal point, but it was my life,” she said of the latter. “This is what we all lived through, and what an exciting and pivotal time it was. I came to grips with the fact that this is important, and I should stop being so private.”
She died in 2011 from lung cancer
Rotolo was alive to see herself portrayed in 2007’s I’m Not There, by an excellent Charlotte Gainsbourg. (The British-French actress was an incredibly fitting choice, considering Rotolo writes in her memoir that when she was young she “cultivated a French accent and used it whenever anyone I didn’t know spoke to me or if I was in a store buying something.”) Though she’s not alive to see Fanning portray her in A Complete Unknown, her legacy lives on.
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