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AND A VOICE TO SING WITH -- A MEMOIR |
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This morning, in spite of a darkening sky, I took the wash out to hang with bright-colored clothespins on the circular clothesline. The big German shepherd and pint-size Sheltie danced around my feet in hopes that I would throw the ball for them. As I was reaching up to grab a yellow clothespin to tuck into my mouth, the dogs knocked over the basket. I started to scold them softly and leaned down to scoop up the towels and socks. My hand came back in a startled reflex. It was filled with uncut gems. And as I hunched over the tipped basket, yanking my blue jean skirt out of the dew, my throat clutched painfully at a long-forgotten memory and tears spilled rapidly down my face, landing in the emeralds, which sparkled in their own light. There were garnets and sapphires, too, and rubies. And there were diamonds. Ten years ago I bought you some cufflinks Only it was twenty years ago, not ten. I wiped my nose, stood up, and hung out the wash. *** I first saw Bob Dylan in 1961 at Gerde's Folk City in Greenwich Village. He was not overly impressive. He looked like an urban hillbilly, with hair short around the ears and curly on top. Bouncing from foot to foot as he played, he seemed dwarfed by the guitar. His jacket was a rusty leather and two sizes too small. His cheeks were still softened with an undignified amount of baby fat. But his mouth was a killer: soft, sensuous, childish, nervous, and reticent. He spat out the words to his own songs. They were original and refreshing, if blunt and jagged. He was absurd, new, and grubby beyond words. When his set was over, he was ushered to my table and the historic event of our meeting was under way. He stood there nervously, mumbling politely, smiling and looking amused. I sipped my Shirley Temple, feeling like the old dowager of the folk scene, and wished Michael would evaporate. I wanted the freedom to gush over Bobby, and couldn't under Michael's suspicious and critical eye. There was no question that this boy was exceptional arid that he touched people, but he had only just begun to touch me. The next image I have of him is in the doorway of Gerde's, on another night, his round face white under his corduroy railroad hat, asking where my sister Mimi was. I was quietly jealous of his interest in her but managed to laugh and tease him. He seemed very small and very young. I was older by six months, and I felt like his mother. Back home in Big Sur, some of my East Coast friends told me that Big Albert (Grossman) had approached Bob and the talk of the music scene was that Bob was going to make it "Big." I was dubious. "Bigger than Elvis Presley," they told me. "You're nuts," was my response, remembering the unglamorous scruffball who had mumbled and blurted his nasal-toned songs. "Yeah," one of them continued, "and you know the first thing Dylan did when they started talking about how much money he could make? He went over in a corner by himself, and started scribbling down a list of who his friends were, because if he was gonna be rich, he'd have to know." I smiled, but couldn't quite imagine that rebellious-looking hayseed in the undersized jacket caring about money.
Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling all around The crummy hotel over Washington Square was twelve dollars a night. It had no room service, and a regular clientele of junkies, pushers, transsexuals in transition, young alcoholics, and other dubious New York street riffraff. It made me feel "beat" and made Bob feel quite at home. I bought Bob a big black suit jacket which almost fit. He had been wary, but had also succumbed to a white shirt and -the crowning glory-a pair of cuff links made out of lumpy, opaque, violet rocks. I was falling in love. We sat in our room being interviewed about our respective careers. Maybe that afternoon was the closest I ever felt to Bob: his eyes were as old as God, and he was fragile as a winter leaf. He was a Sunday child, fidgeting there on the couch in an oversized jacket and new cuff links, and I was Mom. But I was also sister mystic and fellow outlaw, queen to his jack, and a twin underground star. We were living out a myth, slumming it together in the Village. We walked around the windy streets and had afternoon breakfast on MacDougal Street. Our breath came out white clouds, mingled, and hung in the air ... and speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there. Bob spoke bad English in quick startling images, and most of what he saw was for his eyes only. The thoughts he shared were usually unfinished. Years before, when walking in the woods in Massachusetts, I came upon a woman perched on a stool, 'drawing furiously on a big art pad which she clutched with her other hand in her lap. She looked up occasionally and scrutinized the trees. I greeted her, and peered for a while at her creation. The page was filled with goblins, monsters, snakes, Goya-esque eyes shaped like nooses. Unable to restrain myself, I asked the idiotic question, 'What are you drawing?" She glanced up and said pleasantly, indicating the trees with a wave of her hand, "Oh, just what I see," I imagined Bob's most moderate fantasies to be a lunatic psychedelia, racing at astrospeed. He was rarely tender, and seldom reached out to anticipate another's needs, though occasionally he would exhibit a sudden concern for another outlaw, hitchhiker, or bum, and go out of his way to see them looked after. He was touching and infinitely fragile. His indescribably white hands moved constantly: putting a cigarette almost to his mouth, then tugging relentlessly at a tuft of hair at his neck, inadvertently dumping the cigarette ashes in dusty cavalcades down his jacket. He would stand thinking, his mouth working, his knees flexing one at a time, right, left, right, left. He seemed to function from the center of his own thoughts and images, and like a madman he was swallowed up by them. His humor was dry, private, and splendid. Sometimes he would start to chuckle. A little at a time, his lips would move from a genuine smile to a pucker. Then, instantly, he would tighten them back in, until a tiny convulsion of laughter would bring them back to the smile, and sometimes, a full grin followed by laughter. I was always flattered when he would share one of his bizarre images with me, or ask me what a line in a song meant. If I guessed right, he would say, "How the fuck did you know? Once, at his request and for his amusement, I told him my interpretation of a whole song. He seemed impressed. Then he said, "You know, when I drop dead, people are gonna interpret the shit outta my songs. They're gonna interpret every fuckin' comma. They don't know what the songs mean. Shit, I don't know what they mean." There were times to come when we would sing together, laugh and horse around, get crazy, talk, go to movies, ride motorcycles, sleep. But never again, after that day in the Village, would I feel the naturalness of just being with him, and understanding, for awhile, that nothing we did or said to each other had to be second-guessed or guarded. From that day forward, it was as though we moved slowly out of the eye of the hurricane into the turbulence, the wind knocking his hand away from mine at the first step. Bobby invited me, Mimi, and her husband, Dick Farina, to housesit Albert Grossman's, in Woodstock, New York. Dick and Bob were writing, Mimi was singing and being a wife, and I was hanging out between tours. Bob had a 350 Triumph motorcycle which I rode around in the woods and on the back roads, sometimes with him on the back. Most of the month or so we were there, Bob stood at the typewriter in the corner of his room, drinking red wine and smoking and tapping away relentlessly for hours. And in the dead of night, he would wake up, grunt, grab a cigarette, and stumble over to the typewriter again. He was turning out songs like ticker tape, and I was stealing them as fast as he wrote them. In the coolness of selective recall I never would have betrayed my gushing enthusiasm for the time spent with Bobby in Woodstock. I found it here in a letter home, along with an interesting addendum. Summer, 1964 Dear Mummy- Better not let the old man see this-Bobby Dylan wrote it. I've gotten very close to Bobby in the last month. We have such FUN! Wow and he takes baths and everything. Anyway I said "I think I'll write Mummy today" and he jumped up in the air and said he wanted to write it as though it was from me and made me promise I'd sign it. It's a little lewd-he giggled over it for an hour. He is beautiful to me. He bought me a beautiful coat and a dress and earrings, and he's just a joy to be with. We understand each other's need for freedom and there are no chains, just good feelings and giggles and a lot of love. And I enjoy his genius. The record is done, and should be out in a month, and so should the book. I'm going home alone. It's been fun all this trip, most of the time has been spent with Bobby, but I want to be alone again for a while, and start spending time with Ira. My house is supposed to be finished when I get home. I'm gonna meet the Beatles in Denver. I just adore them, then home on a train. It will be good to be alone. Bobby is a very good business man, and he's given me the name of a business advisor in L.A. to help me out with all my damned lawyers, managers, etc. They need to be pushed. Bobby has his things amazingly well taken care of. You'd never guess it. He's just smart. Everything is cool. Mimi and Dick aren't too cool, but it comes and goes. I think Bobby will come out and stay with me for a while if my house is done, but he has a tour starting Sept. 8. You would be pleased to see what fun we have together. I really love him.
Love on the 21st sometime dear mummy it's me here. I'm up in woodstock at uncle alby's. nice house you oughta be here. swimming pool. all that stuff. i'm with youknow who. dick an mimi're also round the place but i've hardly seen them sinse you-know-who got a hold on me. mummy you must believe me. i was gonna stay at the foremans as planned i mean i was all set to an everything. anyway when me an mimi got t town right away first thing we did was t go there. an you know me i was tired and it was already past noon an well i fuigureed like t get t sleep you know an well i got in t bed y'know an jesus i pulled back the blankets an who do you think was hiding under the quilt? yeah him. i mean like i dont know if you'll believe me or not but i swear t gawd he was rolled up I like a ball inside the pillow. mummy, i shit. the first thing i did was t call for mimi. mimi came running down the hall but do you think it did anygood? you-know-who just slowly stood up an jumped on the floor. mummy, his hair had grown down past his waist. he was wearing this monster sweater that stank like he hadn't taken a bath for a year. mummy, he was terrible. i mean like even alfredo the cuban was heard t comment later, "ay tairdbil" (aye, que terrible) anyway, mimi saw him there an she turned an ran. mummy, she just turned an ran. you"know-who didnt waste any time let me tell yuh. he threw me on the bed like some kind of caveman. (he hadnt shaved for about four days mummy. honest t gawd. four days!) an you know how tired i get. i mean like i was in no position t fight. an he wa sayin something. he was sayin like i never heard before. i mean like i never heard it in any movie. i mean like he was sayin "hey c'mon hey c'mon" over an over again. hey an you know me like i just fall like an anvil. clunge. when it comes t new things that i aint never heard before. i mean like i dont want you t think he's (you-know who) influenced me or nuthin mummy i just fall into all these traps. maybe that second shrink was right. maybe i DONT know myself as i should know myself. maybe he was right when he said "Joannie darling, you just dont know yourself" anyway, you*know- who, for lack of better word, just about seized me. it wasnt like any captain kid came swirling down from the masttype thing but still it was kind of wierd. i mean he really did sort of take me by surprise. i mean like what would you do? i mean i fought an everythin. mummy i fought him no end. i bit the shit out of his nose. kicked him where it really hurts. clawed the back of his neck till blood came out a his bellybutton. mummy, i blew so hard in his ear, i thought his eyes would pop out. but then he did this dumb thing. i mean like he was still sayin "hey c'mon, c'mon" but then also too now he started reciting poetry. like it was about the time i was scratching an trying t bend his elbow off he started calling me ramona. i swear at first i thought it was some game. he kept sayin things like "no use tryin" an words like "exist" an mummy i swear he even mentioned something about crack country lips. mummy, i couldnt fight. i mean like i just couldnt fight. yeah like so i passed out. yeah an i woke up here. aint played a concert for a month. manny is calling perpetually. victor keeps answering the phone an says "no, she's not here" in a funny voice an you*know-who doesnt say nothin excpt "everything's all right" an "nuthin matters" yeah well i gotta go. you-know who's making this movie an he wants me t rub his head while he gets ready. all in all everything i guess is ok. house is coming along. oh, i signed over my car t you- nowwho. yeah, he said it'd take a lot of worry off my mind about owning things an well it has a little i guess. i wouldn't mind that too much but well you-know-who sold the car. he says that's better that way cause now i wont be pesterin him t let me drive it. mummy, he's the worst driver in the world. i swear i nearly have a bird everytime he takes me t the shrink. my shrink hates him but that's another story an i'll write you later about it.
ok then faretheewell
oh, p.p.s
mummy, i'm fine.
oh oh! here comes you-know-who Bob had the kind of charisma which never really allowed him privacy. Everyone wanted to be the one to get under his skin, to say the clever thing which would make him laugh, to somehow score a point so later on they could think back to that moment and feel special. Even though I had a proximity to him, and had a coveted position in the growing world of Dylan fans, I felt the same way. He held us all at a distance except for rare moments, which we all sought. Although I wished to be the one person who wouldn't clutch at Bob, I was ferocious in my possessiveness. One evening at the restaurant with Mimi and Dick, some other friends, and me, Bob caught the eye of a recently arrived pilgrim sitting across the room staring imploringly at our table. As Bob returned her stare, Mimi and I began to cluck like two angry old hens, commenting snidely on the poor girl's pallor, miserable and slightly crazed expression, and stereotypical rags and tatters. I knew that Bob gorged when he got drunk, so I filled his glass over and over until his wandering eyes were red and bleary, and then offered him dessert. As soon as he had finished one dessert, I would shove another one under his chin, and he would poke at it, looking kind of forlorn, as though he wished it would go away, and then he'd eat it, washing it down with more wine and coffee. Finally, the girl, responding to Bob's more and more frequent stares, floated across the room and landed unceremoniously at the table, sinking clumsily into a chair, her eyes riveted upon him. He was drunk, flattered, disgusting, and rude. My fury was twofold. Fifty percent was jealousy of Bob's attention to the girl, the other of her attention to him: the outrage of seeing a look of adoration which was usually reserved for me, now bestowed upon the drunken sot sitting next to me. I went to the ladies' room and fumed, Mimi blew up at Bob, and the next thing I remember was waiting out in the alley for Bob to come find me and say something wonderful like, ''I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me. How could I have been such an idiot when all I really want to do is be with you." Instead, he just kept repeating that his stomach was killing him, and what- all had he eaten, for Chrissake. I told him what he'd eaten, and then began to feel sorry for him, he looked so miserable with his stomach hard as a rock and bulging under his T-shirt. So finally I drove him home, certain at every curb that he would throw up two custard pies and a pecan fudge cake before we could get to a tree. But instead, he fell asleep and snored, and I had to wake him up and practically carry him to bed, where he fell immediately back into what looked very much like a guiltless slumber. In August of 1963 I went out on tour and invited Bobby to sing in my concerts, following the example set for me by Bob Gibson four years before. I was getting audiences of up to ten thousand at that point, and dragging my little vagabond out onto the stage was a grand experiment and a gamble which I knew he and I would eventually win. The people who had not heard of Bob were often infuriated and sometimes even booed him when he would interrupt the lilting melodies of the world's most nubile songstress with his tunes of raw images, outrage and humor. I would respond by wagging my finger at the offenders like a schoolmarm, advising them to listen to the words, because this young man was a genius. They listened. One afternoon on tour I drove us into a hotel parking lot and asked Bob if he would go and check us in. When I got to the desk, I was greeted warmly, but the management was eyeing Bob most unenthusiastically. "And do you have a room for my friend?" I asked. No, they did not. Bob was nosing around a stand-up ashtray on the other side of the lobby, looking, to the artistic eye, like a poet, but to the untrained eye, more like a bum. I was in an impetuous protective rage by the time the management rustled up a room, which they did only after I told them I would go elsewhere if they didn't find a "really nice room" for Mister Dylan. I apologized to Bob, who said it didn't bother him none. But that evening, by the time the concert was over, he had written an entire song called, "When Your Ship Comes In." It was outraged, vengeful, strong, and lyrical. I've never experienced charisma like that which Bob displayed in his reverse-showmanship performances. There was a strange out-of-place forlornness about his appearance on stage. Even now, though he has been a seasoned rock and roller for more than twenty years, and single-handedly controls his management, crowd, security, and stage personnel with only a word or a scowl, when the lights come on and the crowd roars in anticipation, he manages to find his way onto the stage with his back to the audience, fidgeting with a harmonica or two. When he faces the crowd, he looks as though he'd rather be in a dark parlor playing chess. Perhaps in a sense he is. Once in a while (as much later on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975), he seemed terribly happy. Happy to put on a hat bedecked with bright flowers, happy to walk jauntily out on the stage, happy to see the crowd. (I don't think he sees very far. One of the last times I talked to him was at a swimming pool in Berlin during a tour. He was squinting at where he thought I was sitting. "I'm over here, Bob," I said, pointing to some chairs at my left. He squinted over to where I was pointing. "How far can you see?" I asked as he stood there in a floor-length bathrobe with a pointed hood. "Oh, the eye doctor says my eyes are gettin' better." "How far can you see, Bob?") For a while, he wore bright-colored scarves and white-face, and would grin at the band, and smile to himself behind the makeup, and say ridiculous things to the audience, which would try to decipher his words as if they had just sprung from the holy tablets up on the mountain. I think he was enjoying his big joke on everybody, but it didn't matter. The songs were powerful, the musicians captivating, and the stage a mad circus. On the Rolling Thunder tour, I never missed a night of hearing him. It was the intensity, I guess, and the words. Before Bob "went electric," there was just him and the guitar, and his disjointed, magnificent, mystical words. Those words, which Bob would drop onto an empty page like so many gold nuggets shaken from somewhere up his sleeve, were the words which would move me out of the ethereal but archaic ballads of yore and into the contemporary music scene of the 1960s. More than once I had stood on stage and said, even stopping in the middle of a song, so strong was the feeling, "I have something to say, but I don't know what it is ... It has to do with this poor old world of ours." And I'd go back into the song, a ballad which relayed compassion, depths of human struggle, and caring, but in a way so personalized that I felt it was divorced from the more-and-more pressing issues of the day. Bob was with me the first time I sang "With God on Our Side" in concert. I had barely finished memorizing it and the auditorium was very hot. There was perspiration running down the small of my back and behind my knees. I was nervous, excited, and exhilarated. Up until then, the songs which integrated my music and my deep social concerns were "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream," "We Shall Overcome," and some black spirituals. Bob's songs seemed to update the concepts of justice and injustice. And if the songs were not about justice, he made you think they were, because of his image, his rejection of the status quo, set against the mounting turbulence in the country. Nothing could have spoken better for our generation than "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The civil rights movement was in full bloom, and the war which would tear this nation asunder, divide, wound, and irreparably scar millions upon millions of people was moving toward us like a mighty storm. When that war began, I, along with thousands of others, would go to battle against it. We would lose Bob to other things, but before the first official bullet was fired, he had filled our arsenals with song: "Hard Rain," "Masters of War," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "With God on Our Side," and finally, "Blowin' in the Wind," which endured the sixties to become everything from a fireside camp song for German Boy Scouts to Hyatt House Muzak to the best-known anthem of social conscience throughout the world. Bob Dylan's name would be so associated with the radical movements of the sixties that he, more than all the others who followed with guitars on their backs and rainbow words scribbled in their notepads, would go down forever in the history books as a leader of dissent and social change, whether he liked it or not, and I gather he doesn't much care one way or the other. Even now, in the 1980s, "Farewell, Angelina," a beautiful little love song laced with cockeyed imagery, is enough to transport a festival audience of forty thousand people in France back to the meaningful days of the sixties, and to give them a sense of empowerment, because for a few minutes they can become a part of a dream from the years when "everything was happening," life seemed to have a purpose, and everyone made a difference. And that, dear Bob, is not fuckin' bad. I left Woodstock and went home to Carmel Valley, where you planned to come and stay after a while. You and Mimi and Dick saw me off, and I'm told you went directly from the train to a phone booth and called up Sara. Ignorant that there even was a Sara, I left happily with memories, songs, some disillusionment, and a blue nightgown I'd found in a closet in Albert's house, which you had said I could keep. Twelve years later, when I finally met and became friends with Sara, we talked for hours about those days when the Original Vagabond was two-timing us. I told Sara that I'd never found Bob to be .much at giving gifts, but that he had once bought me a green corduroy coat, and had told me to keep a lovely blue nightgown from the Woodstock house. "Oh!" said Sara, "that's where it went!" When you came to stay in Carmel Valley, we went to coffee houses on Cannery Row, drove up and down the Big Sur coast, and bought an upright piano for two hundred dollars. You stood at the big kitchen windows with your typewriter perched on top of a waist-high adobe structure and faced the hills. You wrote "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word" and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," among other things, and one evening, while you were talking, you picked all the meat out of a stew I'd made, and ate it, leaving only vegetables and potatoes for anyone else. You and I talked in a playful way over that summer month about "our futures." We even named a baby. I think the name was Shannon. As I remember it, you called me one day after you'd returned to Woodstock and, with what sounded like a party in the background, mumbled something about marriage. I do remember that I said "no." It had not been a proposal; it had been a noncommittal continuation of our fun and games which might very well have led to a noncommittal joining of two lives in a noncommittal marriage. That is my memory. I'm sure you remember it differently, if at all. In spite of what did or did not happen that summer, we made plans to sing together in a short concert tour of the States in March and April of 1965. Manny was in charge of the poster, which we both had to okay. The billing was to be exactly equal, and a design by Eric Von Schmidt was finally agreed upon which had Bob's head a little higher than mine, and my name a little higher than his, and somehow, especially at first glance, gave no deference to either one of us. We were something of a phenomenon, packing houses and getting rave reviews. The show was divided exactly in half. We opened together, I sang for forty minutes, there was an intermission, Bob sang for forty minutes, and we closed together. We had fun; we traveled a lot by car, we were a big deal, and we were taken to meet the Beatles. (A letter home) Dear Everyone- Sometimes I'm so lucky it's just ridiculous. There were at least 10,000 people who would gladly have given their right arm and leg to touch, talk to, or just be in the same room with anyone of the Beautiful Beatles. I must say I felt pretty much the same way. As it turned out, I was taken by the press to their press conference. They found out I was there and asked to see me and I ended up watching their "performance" from the stage after having fixed their ties, cufflinks, hair, etc. and leaving with them in their limousine with police sirens, motorcycles, etc. all the way to the hotel, going up to their suite for what I imagined would be a horrible noisy party, but they got rid of everyone and the five of us just sat around and giggled and acted goofy and sang songs until 3:00 a. m. I loved the fame, attention, and association with Bob, but soon our real differences surfaced and began to dominate our relation- ship. Once I asked him how he came to write "Masters of War." His reply was that he knew it would sell; I didn't buy his answer then and I don't now. I think his active commitment to social change was limited to songwriting. To my knowledge, he never went on a march. He certainly never did any civil disobedience, at least that I knew about. I've always felt that he just didn't want the responsibility. Once he commented to me about the kids in the audience calling out for "Masters of War": "They think I'm something I ain' t." And then he joked about it and told me to take care of them and "all that stuff." I told him I'd do my best. We were outside somewhere; I was yanking up blades of grass, troubled that our paths were splitting and going in very different directions. I asked him what made us different, and he said it was simple, that I thought I could change things, and he knew that no one could. I was upset by his remark. Perhaps he would end up Rock and Roll King to my Peace Queen. One day we went to get something to eat before the show. Bob had left what I referred to as his vomit jacket hanging on a coat rack in the dressing room. I had been trying (one of my sterling qualities) to get him to wear something other than that revolting, undersized, beat-up, unflattering English orphan jacket, which he loved with all his heart. I must have temporarily won, because when we went for hamburgers he was wearing something else, arid when we got back the jacket was gone. I felt terrible, and Bob screamed, red-faced, at the six-and-a-half-foot-tall black security guard to "Get the fuck outta here!" The guard slunk out. Bob turned to me and continued screaming. His face was distorted and the veins were popping out and his eyes were brimmed with red. I got ahold of myself and told him never to talk like that to me or anyone else in the world, and said that when he was ready to rehearse I'd be in my dressing room. I exited, a pillar of strength to any onlooker and a mass of jelly within. Bob was fine when we rehearsed, and his part of the concert was stupendous. I made the brilliant remark after the show that he ought to get mad more often because his performance had been even better than usual, and he blew up all over again, saying that he wasn't mad, and hadn't never bin mad. So we knew something about each other by the time we left for Europe. Bob had invited me on his tour of England, and I was thrilled. Sometimes I think that you pulled away from all reality on that English tour of spring 1965. You were mantled with praise, sought after by hysterical fans, appealed to by liberals, intellectuals, politicians, the press, and genuinely adored by fools like me, and I don't think you ever really recuperated. You had invited me to come, and I assumed you'd invite me up to sing with you. Did you know how wonderful that would have been for me? I had introduced you in the States, and to have returned the favor not only would have been natural, but would have given me the perfect leg up I needed before my own tour, which followed directly after yours. Apparently it was not in the cards. When we landed at Heathrow Airport I decided to stay out of your way, as this was clearly your moment. You gave a typical Dylan press conference, playing with a giant light bulb and confounding the press with your nonanswers, some of which were hilariously funny. In a crush of people you headed for the door, and for a split second you looked around, saw me, and reached out your hand. Did I imagine that fleeting moment and imploring gesture? You looked vulnerable and wild. You were about to be gobbled up by fans, but I thought it would be out of place to grab your hand at that moment, so I stayed back, shaking my head and smiling encouragingly as you were swallowed up by tweed jackets and raincoats. I thought we would talk sometime later, after it all calmed down, when you just wanted a quiet cup of tea. It never calmed down. And why the hell would you want a quiet cup of tea with me, ever again? They thought you were God. I thought you were my friend, and I wanted to be on the stage with you and share in the success and excitement. You wanted that tour all to yourself, and if I had not been so devastated that I lost all reason, I would have flown home after a quiet visit to the London Bridge, which was still in England at that time. It was not love that made me such a nuisance for that entire tour, Bob (though I am sure you were completely unaware that I was unhappy); it was desperation. For the first time in my short but monumentally successful career someone had stolen all my thunder from under my nose. I simply hung around and got sick. If it hadn't been for Neuwirth, our mutual friend, acting as your traveling companion and my suicide-control center, I would have had a total collapse. One night I went to Neuwirth's room crying. He put his arms around me and mopped a pint of tears off my cheeks and chin, and begged me to pack up my bags and leave the tour. "But Bob asked me to come. He asked me," I protested. "I know, but he don't know what's happening anymore, can't you see? He's just out there spinnin' and he wants to do it by himself." One morning, Bob's large entourage was piling into limousines to head off to Liverpool. No one ever knew where to sit, and Bob never invited anyone. I was concerned about some new guest he'd asked along, and ventured to Bob, "Don't you think so-and-so ought to sit with you today?" Bob's face clouded over in instant annoyance. "Ought to sit here?! Ought to sit here?! I don't give a fuck where they sit. Let 'em take care of themselves." And he plowed head first into the limousine, leaving the hordes to muddle things out for themselves. I climbed in after him. He picked up the stack of daily newspapers and began reading about himself. He carne across a quote from me. I had been asked, at an inopportune moment, what the real Bob Dylan was like. I had toyed for a fleeting second with giving an honest answer, but had decided against it, and said, simply, "Bob is a genius." "What the fuck is this?" Bob's mood was blackening. "What the fuck is what?" "Quotes you as saying that I'm a genius. What the fuck is that all about?" I was deceivingly calm. "It's what you say when you can't think of anything else, Robert." "Where do you get off calling me a genius?" "Would you rather I told them what I really think?" Sometimes I thought I was the only one who saw what was really happening to him. Bob was being spoiled to death on his first tour. He was tacking pictures up on the Savoy walls, ordering heaps of food and letting it pile up around him. Albert was footing the bill, and the room was filled with sycophants who praised each new line that he peeled off the typewriter. It didn't occur to me that I was also a sycophant. I was still desperately hanging on to the hope that I would be asked to sing. But despite petitions to Bob from English kids to hear me sing (which were probably never delivered to him by his protective staff), I was never asked. I was a wounded but still impetuous queen, long since dethroned but hanging on by the teeth to dreams of power. The tour ended up with Bob sick in bed after a spur-of-the-moment trip to some exotic restaurant for dinner. I gave my own concert in London. It was a sold-out success, but I was too sick to enjoy it, especially since almost all of the remaining entourage stayed in the hotel with Bob. That sold-out concert was the first of many to come, but I couldn't know that at the time. I'd forgotten that I had a career, a huge following, a voice of my own. It never occurred to me that many English and European fans had followed me for five years already and didn't care about the original vagabond, the unwashed phenomenon, at all. I had not been asked to his room, but went out to find him a present anyway. My mother and father, in London to see my debut at the Royal Albert Hall, went with me. Having bought him a dark blue Vyella shirt, with great trepidation, I went unannounced and uninvited to knock at his door. It was answered by Sara, whom I'd never seen before and who had been flown in to look after Bob. Everyone had carefully avoided telling me she was there. She took the package from me with a patient and quizzical look on her lovely face, blinked her massive black eyes, thanked me softly, and shut the door.
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