A Freewheelin' Time (22 page)

Woman Troubles

There was an attitude
toward musicians’ girlfriends—“chicks,” as we were called, or “old lady,” if a wife—that I couldn’t tolerate. Since this was before there was a feminist vocabulary, I had no framework for those feelings yet they were very strong. I couldn’t define it, but the word
chick
made me feel as if I weren’t a whole being. I was a possession of this person, Bob, who was the center of attention—that was supposed to be my validation.

A lot of the problems women, married or not, had in their relationships in the 1960s probably stemmed from confusion over who they were and where they fit. Many women were relegated to the background because that was the way it was, not because men were bad. Make the coffee, serve the drinks, sit down and listen, was the tune. The side effects of this scenario made for feelings of insecurity and doubt, which snowballed into dissatisfaction and unhappiness that were difficult to articulate.

I couldn’t find my way with anyone, really. Everything was centered on folk music, which was fine, because music was a big part of my life, but it wasn’t my life’s work. The politics of the time were what we all had in common, pretty much, but no one was choosing politics as a profession. Politics were the foundation upon which many other things were built. But I was also interested in the theater, where I was involved with productions that were breaking new ground, and curious about art that was erupting into something no one except Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists, perhaps, could have foreseen. I was very young, I was still forming myself, but I did know I wasn’t a musician, nor was I a musician’s “chick.” And you could bet the neck of a Gibson I had no desire to graduate to “old lady.”

The Carnegie Hall concert in October 1963 was the culmination of a series of high steps up the ladder of success for Bob. In August the Newport Folk Festival had been a big deal, but it was a folk festival. The audience at Carnegie expanded to encompass a much bigger group of people. Peter, Paul, and Mary had a huge hit single with Bob’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the
Freewheelin’
album was getting attention. Word had spread. Outside of the hall there were blowups of the cover of the album in black and white. Bob’s reaction to seeing those larger-than-life pictures in the middle of Fifty-seventh Street was a surprised and embarrassed laugh, while I was amazed and self-conscious at the same time.

During the concert, the audience hung on every word Bob spoke and sang, and when it was over they gave him a raucous standing ovation. Backstage with Albert Grossman, Dave Van Ronk, Terri Thal, and others, I watched and absorbed what was happening. We all sensed a sea change and it was exhilarating.

At the end of the concert, there was a huge mob waiting for Bob at the stage door, and Albert was concerned that he get into the rented limo in one piece.

Acting as decoys, Terri and I diverted some of the fans by walking in the opposite direction, while Bob and the others jumped into the waiting limo. Those in the crowd who hadn’t fallen for the ruse got to the limo just as Bob was sliding into it. Terri and I ducked around the cars to circle back, and as the crowd surged around us we clambered in the door Albert held open.

I remember being very frightened by the energy of the crowd. They literally charged the limousine, pounding on the roof and slapping at the windows, yelling to get Bob’s attention. He gave a few staccato waves and then turned away.

As the car slowly moved out into traffic, we gradually lost the fans, who ran behind us. Albert had a Mona Lisa smile on his face. We were all pretty quiet, except for the odd quip, because it was both exciting and scary. Bob was in the right place at the right time with the right stuff. This truly was the beginning of his future: Bobby had become Dylan.

P
ete Seeger called me after the Carnegie Hall concert. We were on the phone for a long time and he did most of the talking. He said I was a muse to an exceptional songwriter and artist. He talked about his philosophy of life. He talked about his wife, Toshi. He talked about many things, but above all he wanted to tell me how special Bob was and how I was an important part of that. He wanted to acknowledge my role since I, too, was a rare soul. I felt honored by his call and warmed by his words. His thoughtfulness in making the call, his regard for how I might be feeling in this whirlwind time of rising fame for Bob, was generous and genuinely helpful. Even though he saw me in the role of the woman behind the great man, I was not offended.

Alan Lomax also gave me what was intended as a compliment. He believed I was exceptional because, in so many words, I stood by the poet, the genius. I unselfishly tended to his needs and desires. I put him first. I was a rare girl for these times.

I was offended and found nothing complimentary in that description. I didn’t see myself as subservient to my boyfriend or anyone else—nor was this what I aspired to be. I seriously doubted Bob saw me that way, either. We live within our own time and at that time, prefeminism, not many gave a thought to equality between men and women. Striving for equality meant fighting to integrate lunch counters and schools. Equality was a goal for blacks within a whites-only society.

I chafed at the notion of devoting my young self to serving somebody, since I was still curious about life—questing. I hated being thought of as so-and-so’s chick: I did not want to be a string on Bob Dylan’s guitar. Because I was with my boyfriend didn’t mean I had to walk a few paces behind, picking up his tossed-off candy wrappers.

But I didn’t know where to put that frustration. This was before the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, when many of these issues were articulated. I resented not being able to wander off by myself and sit in a café to draw, read, or write the way the guys could, without getting hit on. And forget about going to a movie alone. A girl at the movies by herself meant she was fair game, asking for trouble. And she usually got it.

B
etween theater jobs, I was working as a waitress in a kosher deli on Avenue B, up the street from Tompkins Square Park. Long and narrow, with the deli counter at the front and table service in back, it was a busy place at lunchtime. My first day at work the owner took me to the kitchen to show me the lay of the land. He said I must never let the customers see me take the milk from the same refrigerator where the meat was kept. He didn’t keep separate dishes, either, yet the place was advertised as strictly kosher.

On top of my clothes I had to wear a silly white milkmaid type of apron. As I walked down the narrow aisle taking or serving orders, inevitably a man would yank the tie on my apron or tug at the pocket, pretending to put money in. Though it was maddening, I had to smile; these were regular customers and I needed the job. The owner used to holler from the front for them to lay off but it meant nothing really—just the old “between guys” game going on.

After I had worked there a few weeks, a young man began coming in often and paying attention to me. He said he knew I had to be more than “just a waitress” and tried to engage me in conversation. He left really nice tips and pestered me for my phone number. The owner didn’t like this at all. One day he made a loud speech about men harassing his hired help and threw the man out. Though the owner never seemed to mind true harassment of his hired help, he was happy to grandstand with the friendly customer who even berated the old men who yanked at my apron strings.

As a birthday present to myself, I quit. I would think about the future in a few days. But two days later Kennedy was shot, and the future suddenly had a different meaning.

Time Out
of
Mind

I had moved
out of the West Fourth Street apartment in August 1963 because I could no longer cope with all the pressure, gossip, truth, and lies that living with Bob entailed. I was unable to find solid ground—I was on quicksand and very vulnerable. I felt pulled every which way by well-meaning people with good and bad advice. But there were those who were not well-meaning at all. Someone who fit the latter profile called me one night when Bob wasn’t home and began to speculate about Bob and about me. He hinted, questioned, and then judged our behavior and abilities; he gossiped and then played the therapist. He succeeded in further scrambling my already scrambled brains. It was a bad night.

In the end the solution was to move out. I got an apartment with my sister on Avenue B. I needed to get my bearings. I began taking classes at the School of Visual Arts at night and struck up friendships with a few artists. With them I spent time talking about many things, none of which involved the world of folk music.

The Avenue B apartment was a floor-through railroad flat. Certain tenement apartments in New York City were called railroad flats because one room was behind the other and the passage from room to room was a narrow corridor.

The front room—the living room in this apartment—had an exposed brick wall and two windows that looked out onto the avenue, followed by two “bedrooms” with no doors, no windows, and an airshaft between them. The kitchen, with windows facing the back of the building, was the next room in the line and had a bathtub next to the sink. Off to the side was a minuscule room with a toilet. There was no privacy because there were no doors except the one to the so-called bathroom. The ceilings were high, but the rent wasn’t.

The building was on the corner of East Seventh Street, across from Tompkins Square Park. On one side of the entrance door was an old dark bar and on the other a Pentecostal church. That made for a nice contrast of rousing church music by day and rowdy bar noises by night.

B
ob and I got along better when we weren’t under the same roof and came together when we both felt like it. At least it seemed that way. When he was in New York, he was always at the Avenue B apartment, which was rough on Carla. They didn’t get along well and she felt I was better off without the lyin’ cheatin’ manipulatin’ bastard.

She had a valid point but, alas, I was caught in the whirlpool of indecision that is tortured young love. And we sure tortured and young loved each other to distraction. I didn’t manage to get away from him for a long time—and not for want of trying, either.

November 22, 1963, was a day that yanked the rug out from under us all in a way that even the Cuban missile crisis of the previous year hadn’t. It is hard to place anybody in a specific location when the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination began to spread. Nothing seemed real, and everything seemed to be happening either in slow motion or speeded up. There was disbelief and shock. It didn’t seem conceivable that a president of the United States could be assassinated in the time you were living in; such things were the horrors of history. The days following the assassination were even more shocking.

Bobby, Carla, and I were together at the Avenue B apartment sitting on the rickety wicker couch, cigarettes in hand, in front of the old black-and-white television set to watch Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged lone assassin, be arraigned. We watched him get shot right there, live, on national TV. If we’d turned to flick an ash, we would have missed it.

Chaos ensued, both on TV and everyplace else.

Did you see that?!

The three of us froze and went deadly serious. There was no instant replay; these were the days before video cameras. The attack had been captured on film. The news commentators would have to explain what they saw or knew until the film was processed. Bob barely spoke and could not leave the TV. He was fastened to it. Everyone was.

Would it ever end—the endless speculation, the endless funeral, the endless questions, the endless mourning, in the endless, endless, upside-down, fear-filled world?

L
ater that month Bob and I, with Pete Karman and his girlfriend, went to see Lenny Bruce at the Village Theater (later known as the Fillmore East) on Second Avenue and Sixth Street. The place was packed and expectations were high for every reason you could think of, but especially in anticipation of what Bruce would make of the Kennedy assassination and the murder on live TV of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.

But Bruce was not ready to face his public that night. We were getting rowdy, stomping our feet, applauding, yelling encouragement for him to come out from behind the heavy red curtain and speak to us. He would peek out and then withdraw behind it. Someone would announce something, and then we had to wait some more.

At that time, Lenny Bruce was being hounded by lawsuits and lawyers, fighting obscenity charges filed against him from coast to coast. He had enough paperwork for an archive and when he finally walked hesitantly out in front of the curtain, he was clutching a big part of it. Discombobulated, he began shuffling the pages and reading from his trial transcripts. When the crowd got restless, he said, He is dead, he is dead, it is done, and went back to reading and commenting wryly on the legal absurdities overwhelming and destroying him.

I don’t know what we expected from Lenny Bruce that evening, but it wasn’t that. No one could put anything back on a recognizable, definable path. Whatever had been set in motion by the assassination and murder was as yet undefined. Chaos wasn’t necessarily pandemonium; chaos could just be formless. The performance Bruce gave that night reinforced that feeling.

POLITICS AS USUAL

In December 1963, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, ECLC, presented Dylan with the annual Tom Paine Award in “recognition of distinguished service in the fight for civil liberty.”

Bob’s acceptance speech was akin to performance art. He was very uncomfortable with the formality of the situation and uneasy about making a speech. It was a fiasco in many ways. Most of what he said was misconstrued by the members in attendance at the ceremony. He jumped from one thing to another like a grasshopper, yet there was a point to it all.

Bob was twenty-two and had shot to fame meteorically since the release of
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
in May. In the course of the year that was about to end, JFK had been assassinated, the battles for civil rights were still being fought, and the huge March on Washington with the now legendary speech given by Martin Luther King had taken place in August. Bob had been to Mississippi in June with Pete Seeger and others to support a voting rights campaign, and he had had a breakthrough appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in July. He had performed at Town Hall to a small but enthusiastic audience a month before the release of his album; in October he’d been mobbed by fans after his concert at Carnegie Hall. Then there had been the snide story in
Newsweek
“outing” him as Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota.

Coinciding with the release of
Freewheelin’
he had walked off the
Ed Sullivan Show
because CBS refused to let him sing his song about the John Birch Society. The oppressive mentality of the Cold War still held sway over the culture, and everyone working to change the status quo, whether through the arts or in politics, was chomping at the bit. To be young and on society’s edge in those years made you feel you were standing at the crossroads of something important, energized for what was to come.

When he got up to accept his award, Bob, who was beginning to look like the one giving directions, was dealing with all these things.

During the summer of 1963 a group of young people had gone to Cuba to test the constitutionality of the Kennedy administration’s recent ban on travel to Cuba by American citizens. Bob knew a few of the people who had made the trip, as did I (Pete Karman was among them). It was very exciting to listen to these friends talk about their trip to Cuba and recount the plans Castro had for his country, now free from the dictator Batista. A revolution carried out by a ragtag bunch of rebels hiding out in the Sierra Madre mountains was appealing to American kids engaged in the upheavals of the times. Youth culture was on the rise. Young people were angry and dissatisfied with the world as it was.

With all the changes in the world, and everything that had happened to him personally, Bob was in a heady place. And his speech reflected that, not to mention what he’d been imbibing beforehand to calm his nerves.

He got up to the podium and rambled on a bit about looking out on an audience of old people without any hair—that it was time for them to make way for the young, “who took a long time to get young.” To scandalized gasps, he said he saw something of himself in Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald crossed the line—he, Bob, could never cross such a line. He added that the government should not ban travel to Cuba, because freedom to see for oneself is an American freedom.

He accepted the award in the name of James Forman (of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and Philip Luce, one of the people who had gone to Cuba. Ironically, Luce was later revealed to be an agent of the FBI, sent on the Cuba trip to get information about those who organized it. Many of the “old people” at the ceremony had fought the good fight in the thirties and forties, and some were still at it. Many of them were highly offended by Bob’s words, while others understood his point, disjointed though it was in presentation. Later he sent the ECLC a letter-poem written after the fact that better expressed how he felt about the award, the significance of Tom Paine, and what he had intended by his words at the ceremony.

T
he people from the old left looked to Dylan as the new spokesperson who would lead the next generation to join the good fight they had so nobly fought. They had struggled long and hard, only to be vilified by their own country, the country they deeply loved and honored, above all. They were not bitter; instead, they continued in the spirit of their belief in the better, more just world that Communism, in the theories of Karl Marx, not Stalin, had outlined.

Bob Dylan had to be the Next One, the Prophet. He fit the bill with the extraordinary songs he was writing, which expressed wisdom beyond his years. The old-left wanted to school him so he would understand well and continue on the road they had paved, the one that Woody Guthrie and Pete Seegerand others had traveled before him. They explained the way of the road and its borders.

Bob listened, absorbed, honored them, and then walked away. An artist can’t be made to serve a theory. He headed toward the lights that beckoned at the end of the tunnel. He made for the exit and from there he took the open roads that led him where he chose to go instead. He didn’t want to accept the torch they were trying to pass to him.

With Dave Van Ronk in the Village, winter 1963

The scary thing was that many from the so-called New Left of the sixties felt equally betrayed by Dylan. The orthodoxy that had kept the left cemented to Stalinism should not have even remotely been carried forward into the movements of the sixties. But old philosophies and attitudes tend to linger on and have an influence even after the declaration of their demise.

T
hough Christmas is supposed to be a festive time of year, by the holidays in 1963 most people felt off-kilter, still in a state of shock from the Kennedy assassination. The only solution was to have a good time.

My mother and Fred invited Carla and Bob and me to their apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, on Christmas Eve, and in turn we asked a friend or two to come along.

Virginia Eggleston, a family friend for many years, was another guest. An elegant bohemian in her early sixties, she got along better with young people than with her peers because of her outspoken informality and penchant for smoking pot and knocking back martinis. She had been at the ECLC fund-raiser the previous week and was one of the few who staunchly defended Bob. She genuinely liked him and his music. Apart from my mother’s diffidence towards him and her misgivings about our relationship, and Fred’s professorial smiles, the evening went well enough.

For Christmas Day my sister and I had decided to throw a party back in the city at the Avenue B apartment. Albert Grossman brought some really good wine to help make it a good one. People came and went as Carla and I worked at cooking a turkey in the very unreliable oven. We seasoned the bird the Italian way we had learned from our mother, with rosemary, garlic, a coating of olive oil, and a bath of white wine.

As a gift, Bob gave me a handmade, embroidered Romanian sheepskin jacket he had found in one of the East Village stores that catered to the Romanian, Ukrainian, and Polish residents of the neighborhood. It was beautiful and very warm: I loved it. I’m wearing it in a series of pictures that the photographer Jim Marshall took of us that winter.