Suze Rotolo is perhaps the most famous arm charm in rock’n’roll, quite literally. On the cover of Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
she clutches the singer’s side as they make their way down a wintry
West Village street in 1963. Rotolo was 19 at the time, and the
girlfriend of the 22-year-old artist who was just beginning to be
recognized as a colossal folk and rock talent. Talk about pressure.

Before and after that photo, of course, Rotolo had a life story of her own, as she tells in A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
(Broadway). She was a red diaper baby, the daughter of communist
Italian-Americans, who became an artist. She was a beautiful,
intelligent New York City girl, whose political, intellectual, urban
upbringing probably seemed exotic to the exile from small-town
Minnesota. One gets the sense from this memoir that Rotolo was and is
very much her own woman – albeit a fragile young person with a
difficult home life, who probably tended to break “just like a little
girl.”

Freewheelin’ is by no means a tell-all. In fact,
the author tells very little of the personal details of her
relationship with Robert Zimmerman (she does reveal that not even she
knew his real name and identity until a news story revealed it).
Neither rancor nor a great deal of sentimentality drive the narrative.
Four decades later, she is eminently respectful of the four-year love
affair and her ex’s privacy – that tactfulness, so refreshing in the
age of endless celebrity dish, itself speaks volumes about both Rotolo
and Dylan.

Freewheelin’ is most interesting as a document
of Downtown New York during the folk boom and the birth of ‘60s
counterculture. Mostly, Rotolo pays tribute to the incredible talent
pool that was her community, people like Sylvia and Ian Tyson, Dave Von
Ronk, and Janet Kerr. I absolutely eat up books like these, documents
of bohemian places and times – god, it must have been fabulous to live
there and then, I sigh as I turn their pages (even as an equally
happening scene may be unfolding outside my window).

Rotolo
also captures the souring of the hippie experience – the good trip gone
bad. Unsurprisingly, her relationship with Dylan collapses under the
weight of their greatly changed lives, as his fame mounts. She is
stalked, her apartment burns, and she has the kind of nervous collapse
that so many people, living on the edge in pursuit of a dream, had at
that time.

The book falls apart a bit too; it’s unclear what
Rotolo’s point is, as she grasps for a special light to shed on a
much-illuminated era. Still, she has a vivid, clear way of describing
her memories that’s enchanting; you can see how a guy would fall for
her. “We were full of truths and enthusiasms, non sequiturs, stories,
insights, pronouncements, resentments, and of course poetry, prose, and
song,’’ she writes.

The Freewheelin’ photo is a
portrait of youth in love, two people sheltering in each other’s arms
on a cold city street. Rotolo is no mere ornament – and unlike the
usual rocker arm candy, her body is completely covered in a bulky
winter coat (she told the New York Times
she felt like an Italian sausage). Still, she’s the full-maned
bohemienne giving flesh to the skinny bard’s songs. An emancipated
woman living with her lover – Rotolo was the embodiment of
freewheelin’. Her memoir reveals that she was more than just a symbol,
though, that she had her own life and stories to tell.