Iconic Dylan girlfriend dies at 67

LOS ANGELES – 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 wintry 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.

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. But, he added, the book is “about her life – about who she was – and not being just this guy’s girlfriend.”

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. “This is a girl who was marching to integrate local schools when she was 15.”

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.”

Their relationship ended after about four years.

In 1967, Rotolo married Italian-born Enzo Bartoccioli, a film editor. Bartoccioli 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.

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.”