Suze Rotolo dies at 67; Bob Dylan's girlfriend was on iconic album cover
She dated the folk singer for 4 transformative years and wrote an acclaimed book about Greenwich Village in the '60s. The cover of 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' shows the couple walking arm-in-arm.

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
March 1, 2011

Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan's former girlfriend in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, who appeared walking arm-in-arm with him on the iconic cover of his album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," has died. She was 67.

Rotolo, who played a role in the young Dylan's evolution as a singer-songwriter and later had a career as an artist, died of cancer Friday at home in Greenwich Village, said her son, Luca Bartoccioli.

She was a 17-year-old art- and poetry-loving civil rights activist from Queens when she met the 20-year-old folk singer from Minnesota at an all-day folk concert at Riverside Church in Manhattan in the summer of 1961.

"Right from the start, I couldn't take my eyes off her," Dylan wrote in "Chronicles: Volume One," his 2004 memoir. "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen."

Rotolo later wrote that Dylan "made me think of Harpo Marx, impish and approachable, but there was something about him that broadcast an intensity that was not to be taken lightly."

So began a four-year relationship that was immortalized on a wintery day in 1963 when photographer Don Hunstein captured the young couple walking down a snowy Greenwich Village street, Dylan's hands thrust in his pockets and Rotolo's hands wrapped snuggly around his arm.

"It was freezing out," she recalled in a 2008 interview with the New York Times. "He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all. Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters. On top of that I put a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage."

The photo became the cover of Dylan's breakthrough second album, which includes the songs "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Masters of War."

"The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" also inspired the title for Rotolo's 2008 memoir, "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties," which reviewers praised for capturing the era's Bohemian atmosphere.

"She was happy she came out with it because it kind of helped satisfy people's curiosity about what went on" with her relationship with Dylan, Rotolo's son said Monday. But, he added, the book is "about her life — about who she was — and not being just this guy's girlfriend."

Rotolo was born in Queens, N.Y., on Nov. 20, 1943, a so-called red-diaper baby whose parents were members of the American Communist Party. Her father died when she was a teenager, and she traded Queens for Greenwich Village after graduating from high school.

She was working in the office of the Congress of Racial Equality — and had seen Dylan perform at a small club in the Village — when she met him at the folk festival.

Rotolo, who moved into a tiny apartment on West Fourth Street in the Village with Dylan when she was 18, is credited with introducing him to modern art and poetry, avant-garde theater and civil rights politics.

"You could see the influence she had on him," Sylvia Tyson, of Ian & Sylvia, recalled in a 2008 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "This is a girl who was marching to integrate local schools when she was 15."

Some rock historians, The Times' story noted, believe Rotolo inspired numerous Dylan songs, including "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time."

"She'll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her: 'Is this right?' " Dylan told his biographer Robert Shelton. "Because I knew her father and mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was."

After time apart studying art in Italy for six months in 1962, Rotolo resumed her relationship with Dylan. But as his career took off, she found herself unwilling to be just a "string on Dylan's guitar."

"Suze was her own person, who loved this guy very much," blues singer Maria Muldaur told the L.A. Times in 2008. "Suddenly people were stepping over her, pushing her aside to talk to him."

Describing Dylan in her book as "a beacon and a black hole," Rotolo wrote that he "had this intensity about him, and you got sucked in. I certainly felt that, as his girlfriend, I disappeared and became a non-entity. Even if he didn't see me that way, that's what happened. That was always a struggle."

Their relationship ended after about four years.

"We loved each other very much and when it ended it was mutual heartbreak," she wrote in her memoir. "He avoided responsibility. I didn't make it easy for him either.... I knew I was not suited for his life."

In 1967, Rotolo married Italian-born Enzo Bartoccioli.

Bartoccioli, a film editor, said he understands the enduring interest in his wife's famous album-cover photo with Dylan.

"She became an icon; nobody cares about anything else," he said, noting that his wife described Dylan in her book as "the elephant in the room of my life."

"Meaning," he said, that everyone was interested in asking her about Dylan, "and no one asks, 'How are you?' People forget she was a person by her own."

His wife, Bartoccioli said, "was very happy" being an artist.

"She was not famous in her own, but she always managed to more or less make a good living," he said. "She enjoyed very, very much what she was doing."

J. Hoberman, a senior film critic at the Village Voice who had known Rotolo since the early '80s, said she "was herself a strong and compelling personality."

"To me, she had an interesting life, of which Dylan was part," he said. "But her account of the whole folk music revival in the early '60s is much more than being about him. She was somebody who was part of that scene."

And it was an era that mattered, Rotolo wrote in her book, because "we all had something to say, not something to sell."

In addition to her husband and son, she is survived by a sister, Carla Rotolo.

rocky raccoon wrote:

Jane Russell, the busty brunette who shot to fame as the sexy star of Howard Hughes' 1941 Western "The Outlaw," died Monday of respiratory failure, her family said. She was 89.
Although Russell largely retired from Hollywood after her final film, 1970's "Darker Than Amber," she had remained active in her church, with charitable organizations and with a local singing group until her health began to decline just a couple weeks ago, said her daughter-in-law, Etta Waterfield. She died at her home in Santa Maria.

"She always said I'm going to die in the saddle, I'm not going to sit at home and become an old woman," Waterfield told The Associated Press. "And that's exactly what she did, she died in the saddle."


Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, put her onto the path to stardom when he cast her in "The Outlaw," a film he fought with censors for nearly a decade to get into wide release.

With her sultry look and glowing sexuality, Russell became a star before she was ever seen by a wide movie audience. The Hughes publicity mill ground out photos of the beauty in low-cut costumes and swim suits, and she became famous, especially as a pinup for World War II GIs.

Then in 1948 she starred opposite Bob Hope in the box-office hit, "The Paleface," a comedy-western in which Russell was tough-but-sexy Calamity Jane to Hope's cowardly dentist.

Although her look and her hourglass figure made her the subject of numerous nightclub jokes, unlike Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and other pinup queens of the era, Russell was untouched by scandal in her personal life. During her Hollywood career she was married to star UCLA and pro football quarterback
Bob Waterfield.

"The Outlaw," although it established her reputation, was beset with trouble from the beginning. Director Howard Hawks, one of Hollywood's most eminent and autocratic filmmakers, rankled under producer Hughes' constant suggestions and finally walked out.

"Hughes directed the whole picture — for nine bloody months!" Russell said in 1999.
The film's rambling, fictional plot featured Russell as a friend of Billy the Kid as he tussles with Doc Holliday and Sheriff Pat Garrett.

It had scattered brief runs in the 1940s, earning scathing reviews. The Los Angeles Times called it "one of the weirdest Western pictures that ever unreeled before the public."

But Hughes made sure no one overlooked his No. 1 star. The designer of the famous "Spruce Goose" airplane used his engineering skills to make Russell a special bra (which she said she never wore) and he bought the ailing RKO film studio to turn it into a vehicle for her.

Wisely, he also loaned her to Paramount to make "The Paleface," because at RKO she starred in a series of potboilers such as "His Kind of Woman" (with Robert Mitchum), "Double Dynamite" (Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx), "The Las Vegas Story" (Victor Mature) and "Macao" (Mitchum again).


Hughes had rewarded her with a unique 20-year contract paying $1,000 a week, then he sold RKO and quit making movies. Russell continued receiving the weekly fee, but never made another film for Hughes.
Her only other notable film was "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," a 1953 musical based on the novel by Anita Loos. She and Monroe teamed up to sing "Two Little Girls From Little Rock" and seek romance in Paris.
At a 2001 film festival appearance, Russell noted that Monroe was five years younger, saying, "It was like working with a little sister."

She followed that up with the 1954 musical "The French Line," which like "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" had her cavorting on an ocean liner. The film was shot in 3-D, and the promotional campaign for it proclaimed "J.R. in 3D. Need we say more?"

In 1955, she made the sequel "Gentlemen Marry Brunettes" (without Monroe) and starred in the Westerns "The Tall Men," with Clark Gable, and "Foxfire," with Jeff Chandler. But by the 1960s, her film career had faded.

"Why did I quit movies?" she remarked in 1999. "Because I was getting too old! You couldn't go on acting in those years if you were an actress over 30."

She continued to appear in nightclubs, television and musical theater, including a stint on Broadway in Stephen Sondheim's "Company." She formed a singing group with Connie Haines and Beryl Davis, and they made records of gospel songs.

For many years she served as TV spokeswoman for Playtex bras, and in the 1980s she made a few guest appearances in the TV series "The Yellow Rose."

She was born Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell on June 21, 1921, in Bemidji, Minn., and the family later moved to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Her mother was a lay preacher, and she encouraged the family to build a chapel in their back yard.

Despite her mother's Christian preachings, young Jane had a wild side. She wrote in her 1985 autobiography, "My Paths and Detours," that during high school she had a back-alley abortion, which may have rendered her unable to bear children.

Her early ambition was to design clothes and houses, but that was postponed until her later years. While working as a receptionist, she was spotted by a movie agent who submitted her photos to Hughes, and she was summoned for a test with Hawks, who was to direct "The Outlaw."

"There were a lot of other unknowns who were being tested that day," she recalled in a 1999 Associated Press interview. "I figured Jack Beutel was going to be chosen to play Billy the Kid, so I insisted on being tested with him."

Both were cast, and three months would pass before she met Hughes. The producer was famous for dating his discoveries as well as numerous Hollywood actresses, but his contract with Russell remained strictly business. Her engagement and 1943 marriage to Waterfield assured that.

She was the leader of the Hollywood Christian Group, a cluster of film people who gathered for Bible study and good works. After experiencing problems in adopting her three children, she founded World Adoption International Agency, which has helped facilitate adoptions of more than 40,000 children from overseas.
She made hundreds of appearances for WAIF and served on the board for 40 years.


As she related in "My Path and Detours," her life was marked by heartache. Her 24-year marriage to Waterfield ended in bitter divorce in 1968. They had adopted two boys and a girl.
That year she married actor Roger Barrett; three months later he died of a heart attack. In 1978 she married developer John Peoples, and they lived in Sedona, Ariz., and later, Santa Barbara. He died in 1999 of heart failure.

Over the years Russell was also beset by alcoholism.

Always she was able to rebound from troubles by relying on lessons she learned from her Bible-preaching mother.
"Without faith, I never would have made it," she commented a few months after her third husband's death. "I don't know how people can survive all the disasters in their lives if they don't have any faith, if they don't know the Lord loves them and cares about them and has another plan."

Survivors include her children, Thomas K. Waterfield, Tracy Foundas and Robert "Buck" Waterfield, six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

A public funeral is scheduled March 12 at 11 a.m. at Pacific Christian Church in Santa Maria.
In lieu of flowers the family asks that donations be made in her name to either the Care Net Pregnancy and Resource Center of Santa Maria or the Court Appointed Special Advocates of Santa Barbara County.

UD: Whatever happened to Daddy Wags?

rocky raccoon wrote:Suze Rotolo dies at 67; Bob Dylan's girlfriend was on iconic album cover
She dated the folk singer for 4 transformative years and wrote an acclaimed book about Greenwich Village in the '60s. The cover of 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' shows the couple walking arm-in-arm.

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
March 1, 2011

Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan's former girlfriend in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, who appeared walking arm-in-arm with him on the iconic cover of his album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," has died. She was 67.

Rotolo, who played a role in the young Dylan's evolution as a singer-songwriter and later had a career as an artist, died of cancer Friday at home in Greenwich Village, said her son, Luca Bartoccioli.

She was a 17-year-old art- and poetry-loving civil rights activist from Queens when she met the 20-year-old folk singer from Minnesota at an all-day folk concert at Riverside Church in Manhattan in the summer of 1961.

"Right from the start, I couldn't take my eyes off her," Dylan wrote in "Chronicles: Volume One," his 2004 memoir. "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen."

Rotolo later wrote that Dylan "made me think of Harpo Marx, impish and approachable, but there was something about him that broadcast an intensity that was not to be taken lightly."

So began a four-year relationship that was immortalized on a wintery day in 1963 when photographer Don Hunstein captured the young couple walking down a snowy Greenwich Village street, Dylan's hands thrust in his pockets and Rotolo's hands wrapped snuggly around his arm.

"It was freezing out," she recalled in a 2008 interview with the New York Times. "He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all. Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters. On top of that I put a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage."

The photo became the cover of Dylan's breakthrough second album, which includes the songs "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Masters of War."

"The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" also inspired the title for Rotolo's 2008 memoir, "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties," which reviewers praised for capturing the era's Bohemian atmosphere.

"She was happy she came out with it because it kind of helped satisfy people's curiosity about what went on" with her relationship with Dylan, Rotolo's son said Monday. But, he added, the book is "about her life — about who she was — and not being just this guy's girlfriend."

Rotolo was born in Queens, N.Y., on Nov. 20, 1943, a so-called red-diaper baby whose parents were members of the American Communist Party. Her father died when she was a teenager, and she traded Queens for Greenwich Village after graduating from high school.

She was working in the office of the Congress of Racial Equality — and had seen Dylan perform at a small club in the Village — when she met him at the folk festival.

Rotolo, who moved into a tiny apartment on West Fourth Street in the Village with Dylan when she was 18, is credited with introducing him to modern art and poetry, avant-garde theater and civil rights politics.

"You could see the influence she had on him," Sylvia Tyson, of Ian & Sylvia, recalled in a 2008 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "This is a girl who was marching to integrate local schools when she was 15."

Some rock historians, The Times' story noted, believe Rotolo inspired numerous Dylan songs, including "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Tomorrow Is a Long Time."

"She'll tell you how many nights I stayed up and wrote songs and showed them to her and asked her: 'Is this right?' " Dylan told his biographer Robert Shelton. "Because I knew her father and mother were associated with unions and she was into this equality-freedom thing long before I was."

After time apart studying art in Italy for six months in 1962, Rotolo resumed her relationship with Dylan. But as his career took off, she found herself unwilling to be just a "string on Dylan's guitar."

"Suze was her own person, who loved this guy very much," blues singer Maria Muldaur told the L.A. Times in 2008. "Suddenly people were stepping over her, pushing her aside to talk to him."

Describing Dylan in her book as "a beacon and a black hole," Rotolo wrote that he "had this intensity about him, and you got sucked in. I certainly felt that, as his girlfriend, I disappeared and became a non-entity. Even if he didn't see me that way, that's what happened. That was always a struggle."

Their relationship ended after about four years.

"We loved each other very much and when it ended it was mutual heartbreak," she wrote in her memoir. "He avoided responsibility. I didn't make it easy for him either.... I knew I was not suited for his life."

In 1967, Rotolo married Italian-born Enzo Bartoccioli.

Bartoccioli, a film editor, said he understands the enduring interest in his wife's famous album-cover photo with Dylan.

"She became an icon; nobody cares about anything else," he said, noting that his wife described Dylan in her book as "the elephant in the room of my life."

"Meaning," he said, that everyone was interested in asking her about Dylan, "and no one asks, 'How are you?' People forget she was a person by her own."

His wife, Bartoccioli said, "was very happy" being an artist.

"She was not famous in her own, but she always managed to more or less make a good living," he said. "She enjoyed very, very much what she was doing."

J. Hoberman, a senior film critic at the Village Voice who had known Rotolo since the early '80s, said she "was herself a strong and compelling personality."

"To me, she had an interesting life, of which Dylan was part," he said. "But her account of the whole folk music revival in the early '60s is much more than being about him. She was somebody who was part of that scene."

And it was an era that mattered, Rotolo wrote in her book, because "we all had something to say, not something to sell."

In addition to her husband and son, she is survived by a sister, Carla Rotolo.

I've always been a sucker for artistic and/or artsy/fartsy chicks.


Suze Rotolo looks like a girl I would have enjoyed knowing.

J.R. wrote:UD: Whatever happened to Daddy Wags?

I haven't seen him in a while, but this is a great chance to ping him and lure him back. I believe his eldest son Karl is now at The OSU!

My middle son goes to Ohio State too!

Uncle Dennis wrote:

J.R. wrote:UD: Whatever happened to Daddy Wags?

I haven't seen him in a while, but this is a great chance to ping him and lure him back. I believe his eldest son Karl is now at The OSU!

Feel free to ping away, then. Do people still do that?

J.R. wrote:

Uncle Dennis wrote:

J.R. wrote:UD: Whatever happened to Daddy Wags?

I haven't seen him in a while, but this is a great chance to ping him and lure him back. I believe his eldest son Karl is now at The OSU!

Feel free to ping away, then. Do people still do that?

Not everyone, some Pong!

request for medical advice. going to Brecksville VA Thursday to see if I have a broken collarbone. They already determined complete rupture of ligaments in the shoulder. Since I am not getting younger, should I insist on surgery to help the healing process?

If I did not tell you folk's, I hit ice 2 Sunday's ago, slid into utility pole(hit drivers side between front & back door).

Dang, Larry, sorry to hear that! I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, so don't know what to tell you, but good luck!!

MCDOC82 wrote:request for medical advice. going to Brecksville VA Thursday to see if I have a broken collarbone. They already determined complete rupture of ligaments in the shoulder. Since I am not getting younger, should I insist on surgery to help the healing process?

If I did not tell you folk's, I hit ice 2 Sunday's ago, slid into utility pole(hit drivers side between front & back door).

Your family has had it's share of accidents lately. Hope you get a streak of good luck.


I'm not a doctor either, but I have talked about tearing my achilles tendon here (well...the "other board" that is going away on tax day).

In both cases the tendon was still partially attached and since I traveled all the time for work the docs touted me on "conservative treatment" that included boots and months of titanium leg braces.

Well with the "conservative treatment" the damned thing never did heal right either time.

It was until I got lucky and shattered my hand that I got to tell THAT orthopedic surgeon my achilles story and pain of 10 years. He ordered an MRI and told me that if I let him operate it might be much better, and guaranteed it would not be any worse.

I told him that over the years I had often been tempted to cut it open myself, so I'd certainly let him have a crack.

So I did.

The day after the surgery, even with a 7 inch slice and stitches in the back of my leg from the cutting, I had less pain than I had had each day of the prior ten years.

I get pissed at myself every now and then for going a decade as a partial cripple....I couldn't run......until I let the California doctor hack at it and get it right.

I can run now, and do a spontaneous 10 mile hike with ease.

update:


MRI - revealed completely separated clavicle. torn ligaments. no breaks.

nice people - had a blow out Saturday, started working on changing, guy for a competing pizza shop stopped & insisted on taking over. Sunday, I stopped at a gas station for a cup of coffee,
& all I had on me was my debit card, didn't really want to run it for 89 cents. Younder guy behind goes " sir, I would be more than happy to pay that & thank you for your service & SemperFi"

MCDOC82 wrote:update:


MRI - revealed completely separated clavicle. torn ligaments. no breaks.

nice people - had a blow out Saturday, started working on changing, guy for a competing pizza shop stopped & insisted on taking over. Sunday, I stopped at a gas station for a cup of coffee,
& all I had on me was my debit card, didn't really want to run it for 89 cents. Younder guy behind goes " sir, I would be more than happy to pay that & thank you for your service & SemperFi"

Awesome experiences, and thanks for sharing McDoc.


So what's next for the separated clavicle?