A Simple Twist of Fate: The Surprising Connection Between Bob Dylan and Nora Ephron

If you’ve seen A Complete Unknown, the Oscar-nominated film directed by James Mangold about the early folk years of Bob Dylan’s career, then you know by now that the movie finds Dylan caught at a crossroads both professionally and romantically.

As the film builds to its climax at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, we see Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) weigh whether or not he should forsake his folk roots to go electric. He also mulls over which of his love interests—Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) or Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning)—to whom he must say, “It ain’t me, babe.” 

To watch any biopic is to wrestle with the question of how much of what’s unfolding onscreen really happened in real life. In the case of Bob Dylan—who is famous for his self-mythologizing and obfuscation of the truth—the answer is that much harder to come by. In fact, many would even call it a key theme of the movie. 

Thanks to Elijah Wald, who authored Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, on which the film is based, we know that at least some of what went down in Dylan’s professional life in 1965 and years prior is fairly accurate. Yet a triangle is far too simple a shape to represent what went on in Dylan’s personal life at the time.

1. Just Like a Woman (Or Three)
2. Tangled Up in Deadlines
3. Love Minus Zero Meets Some Limits
4. The Stories, They Are A-Changin’

Just Like a Woman (Or Three)

The end of A Complete Unknown finds Dylan jetting off, alone on his motorcycle, having shed not one paramour but both Baez and Russo. Inspiration for the Russo character came from Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s real-life girlfriend in the early 1960s, who appeared alongside Dylan on the cover of his 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Her name was changed in the film to protect her identity as a private figure. However, an alternate ending to the film might have featured both Baez and Russo/Rotolo learning by February 1966, like most of the rest of the world did, that Dylan wasn’t just mysterious—he was also off the market.

The truth is, there was actually a third woman in Dylan’s life around this same time, with whom he kept his relationship secret. So secret, in fact, that the relationship didn’t even make it into A Complete Unknown because it wasn’t public knowledge in the summer of 1965, when the movie wraps up.

But by November 1965, the singer-songwriter had secretly married a different girlfriend, Sara Lownds. And the source of that spilled secret? None other than an intrepid cub reporter for The New York Post, who would eventually go on to become an icon in her own right: Nora Ephron.

Tangled Up in Deadlines

Like Dylan, the future When Harry Met Sally ... writer was still early on her path toward pop culture ubiquity, as she was only a few years into her first major gig at The New York Post. Ephron had been granted a two-week trial after writing a divisive parody of Leonard Lyons’s column during the New York City newspaper strike of 1962–1963.

“Don’t be silly,” the Post’s then-owner Dorothy Schiff famously said in response. “If they can parody the Post, they can write for it. Hire them.”

A young reporter still getting her feet wet, Ephron started out as a general-assignment reporter, “specializing in froth,” as she once put it. Ephron covered everything from the first arrival of The Beatles in New York City in 1964 to Bobby Kennedy’s senate run.

She had actually interviewed Dylan, along with fellow writer Susan Edmiston, following his August 1965 show at Forest Hills Stadium; that interview wasn’t published until years later. But it was her scoop on his secret nuptials—which was entirely separate from that interview—that really helped cement her status as an up-and-coming reporter to watch.

No one had any reason to believe the mysterious troubadour was hitched—until Ephron put it in print. 

Love Minus Zero Meets Some Limits

Albert Grossman might have managed Dylan’s music career, but his wife, Sally Grossman, gave Dylan an assist when it came to his romantic one.

According to Sally Grossman, Dylan met his future wife through her in 1964. A former Playboy bunny, Lownds—who was born Shirley Noznisky—was working as a secretary for Time-Life Films, the film production division at the Time & Life building in New York City. Like Dylan, she had her own romantic baggage—namely in the form of an ex-husband, photographer Hans Lownds, with whom she shared a daughter, Maria. (Some accounts claim they were still married when she met Dylan.)

Although Rotolo was seemingly out of the picture at this point, Baez wasn’t entirely. Baez and Dylan first connected in the New York City folk scene in 1961. Baez had helped boost Dylan’s profile by recording his songs and inviting him to play onstage with her. Still, the tenor of their relationship proved fairly tumultuous, eventually even inspiring songs, including Baez’s 1975 hit “Diamonds & Rust.” A number of Dylan tracks are also believed to be based off their relationship, like “She Belongs to Me” and “Visions of Johanna,” the latter of which appeared on Blonde on Blonde, his seminal 1966 double LP.

Their relationship hit its breaking point when Baez accompanied Dylan on his now-legendary tour of England in 1965. The tour—and the capricious nature of Baez and Dylan’s relationship—was captured by D.A. Pennebaker in his documentary Don’t Look Back, released in 1967.

Somewhat ironically, it was Lownds who actually introduced Dylan to Pennebaker, as she worked with him at Time & Life. In Dylan: A Biography, Bob Spitz writes about the early relationship between Sara and the singer, noting, “Their affair had blossomed right under Joan’s unsuspecting nose. It happened naturally, without any public curiosity to interfere with it. Sensing the speculation it would arouse, Bob kept Sara out of the spotlight and away from the folk scene. Not even his friends were aware that Bob had a new lady love. Sara was special. Besides, he’d be in hot water if Joan ever got wind of her.”

The Stories, They Are A-Changin’

For a rockstar, the wedding was a subdued affair, held in in Mineola, Long Island, in the chambers of Nassau Supreme Court Judge Manuel Levine. Only a few close friends and confidants were present, including Albert Grossman and his lawyer, Saul Pete Pryor.

Dylan initially denied the marriage, both publicly and privately. “I don’t hope to be like anybody. Getting married, having a bunch of kids, I have no hopes for it. If it happens, it happens. Whatever my hopes, it never turns out. I don’t think anybody’s a prophet,” Dylan said in an interview with Chicago Daily News, which ran just a week after the wedding.

And when congratulations were attempted by his friend Ramblin’ Jack Elliot around December 1965, Dylan continued his protestations. “I’m not married, Jack,” Dylan replied. “We’re old buddies. Don’t you think I would’ve told you if I got married?”

Unfortunately for Dylan, his evasions were no match for Ephron’s sharp reporting instincts. On February 9, 1966, the story ran under the headline “Hush! Dylan is Wed.” With her signature wit already on display, Ephron wrote: “Bobby—as his friends call the fuzzy-haired best-selling songwriter and vocalist—does not want anyone to know he is married, nor does he want anyone to know to whom he is married.”

Ephron’s article also speculates as to the reasoning why Dylan might put up such intense guardrails between himself and the public. “Dylan, 24, is reticent about his private life, the friend said, because several years ago he put a photograph of a girl friend on an album cover.”

This was a direct throwback to his experiences with Rotolo—and even depicted in A Complete Unknown when Dylan pulls Russo into the photoshoot for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. “When he arrived with {Rotolo} in Newport for the Folk Festival one summer, there were thousands of little teenage girls dressed exactly like the girl on the cover. This so enraged Dylan, said the friend, that he vowed never again to expose the women in his life to such publicity.”

Ephron’s scoop didn’t tell the whole story, though—Dylan had one secret he managed to keep. In January 1966, Lownds gave birth to their first child together, Jesse Byron Dylan. The fact that Lownds was pregnant at the time of the wedding goes completely unmentioned in the article. (The couple would go on to have three more children together, including Jakob Dylan, the future frontman for The Wallflowers.)

It’s unclear if Ephron’s work ever intersected with Dylan again, but two things can be said for sure: Throughout the rest of his illustrious career, Dylan’s music and lyrics inspired millions worldwide, and he continued to massage his public persona and mythology.

Ephron herself became a household name, too. Her 1983 book, Heartburn, is a semi-autobiographical account of the end of her marriage to famed Washington Post investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, and the 1986 screen adaptation starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. But it was her work as a screenwriter and director, thanks to films like Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, that truly cemented her legacy, even as she continued to tell truths people probably would have preferred she didn’t.

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