Bob Dylan is an enigma that people haven't been able to solve and still don't know all the answers to.
There are few celebrities who remain an enigma throughout their lives. Singer Bob Dylan might be one of those few, who actively choose to keep their private lives out of the public eye.
In fact, he is so private that he kept a marriage, wife, and a child out of prying eyes. He had married for the second time in 1986, something that was revealed much later in 2001. By that time, the couple had already been divorced for more than a decade.
Dylan had first married Sara Lownds, a former Playboy bunny in 1965. Dylan biographer Robert Shelton wrote that Sara "had a Romany spirit, seeming to be wise beyond her years, knowledgeable about magic, folklore, and traditional wisdom," according to Rocksoffmag. The Like a Rolling Stone singer and she had a son, Jesse, and he adopted her daughter Maria from a previous marriage. They had three more kids together. More than a decade after their wedding, Sara filed for a divorce claiming that he abused her.
As a divorce settlement, she received half the royalties from the songs he had written while they were married. The total amount came to be around $36 million. However, she had received it on the one condition that she would not say anything about their life together.
When he married again, people didn't know for years that he had. Carolyn Dennis, who was once his backing singer, became his wife in June 1986. It is not known how their love story came to be. He kept this marriage and the existence of his daughter Desiree a secret for 15 years. He was able to help Dennis get a home in a Los Angeles suburb and visited her discreetly. Nobody knew about their relationship. Six years after they got married, the couple divorced and even that was out of the spotlight. It is believed that he has more wives and children.
Their daughter, Desi, was a member of The Young Americans, a traveling troupe who take music, theatre, dance, and concerts to schools around the world, in 2009, according to Daily Mail.
Dennis had confirmed through a statement via a publicist that they were married. "Bob and I made a choice to keep our marriage a private matter for a simple reason - to give our daughter a normal childhood," she said.
She added that the Mr. Tambourine Man singer had been a good father to the girl and, in private, had very much acknowledged her. As per Independent.ie, to those who claimed that he had not acknowledged his daughter, she said, "To portray Bob as hiding his daughter is just malicious and ridiculous. Bob has been a wonderful, active father to Desiree."
Those who know him say that he has lived an unusual life, but he is not the recluse that everyone painted him out to be. Howard Sounes, author of the singer's biography Down The Highway, said that his muse has lived an unusual life.
"Mostly he lives on the road, doing around 100 shows a year, and travels for ten out of 12 months. He has a month off in the summer, which he spends with his children and grandchildren in Malibu. In the mid-winter, he likes to go to his home in Minnesota and have a winter break there. It's a country house and his brother lives in the house next door. It's about 100 miles away from where he was born, near to the border with Canada," he added, as per Daily Mail.
"When the children were younger he would put them in an old pick-up truck and they would go to the movies or go skating, so they did live a fairly regular life. He's not a recluse - but he is certainly not part of the media scene. I think in his entire career he has only ever done one chat show," the author added.
Regardless of how he was as a husband, his kids seem to love him. "He was affectionate. When I was a kid, he was a god to me for all the right reasons. Other people have put that tag on him in some otherworldly sense. I say it as any kid who admired his dad and had a great relationship with him. He never missed a single Little League game I had. He's collected every home-run ball I ever hit. And he's still affectionate to me... maybe he doesn't want people to know that," said Jakob Dylan, the youngest child of Lownds and the singer, according to Independent.ie.
References:
https://www.rocksoffmag.com/sara-dylan/
https://www.independent.ie/life/bob-dylan-the-secret-life-and-loves-of-a-musical-icon-35664688.html
