Bob Dylan hid one marriage - and a daughter - for 15 years. Could he have concealed TWO more brides and FOUR other children?
Bob Dylan today: The singer reportedly has a large number of 'secret' wives and children whose existence has been kept out of the public eye
The only clue that this 67-year-old man is Bob Dylan, one of music's holy relics, is the small knot of security men who follow behind at six paces distance.
Dylan is known, of course, for being short on charm - as scores of abruptly discarded lovers and musicians will tell you. Ruth Tyrangiel, his common-law wife for 17 years, said that in all their time together his only gifts to her were a tangerine and a rose.
Despite the lapses in charm, his fans are as supportive as ever - his new album Together Through Life has reached No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic, the first time he has topped the charts here in more than 38 years.
But Dylan remains as enigmatic as ever. Despite approaching 70, he is on the road again in a never-ending tour which started almost exactly 21 years ago and - quite extraordinarily - shows no signs of abating.
This weekend, after spending spring in the UK and Europe, he will be on his way home to his beach house in Malibu, California, for a break. Then he will embark on a tour of America with country singer Willie Nelson.
Dylan will travel, as he always does, in a gigantic silver customised Prevost bus, worth around £1.5million. The band will be accommodated in another bus, and he will most likely entirely ignore them for all but the hours which they spend on stage.
Cantankerous and obsessed with security and privacy, Dylan seems to be addicted to life on the road. It's hard to fathom why, as he never shows he has taken an iota of pleasure from his adoring audience - he does not greet them, speak between numbers or even say goodbye.
And while his set list includes many of his most famous songs, he appears to take a perverse pleasure in playing them so they are almost unrecognisable - one recent reviewer said he was almost comically bad.
For all that, Dylan seems to be addicted to the experience of working his way across the globe. There have been more than 2,000 concerts since he began touring in 1988.
Some say Dylan lives like a gypsy because it allows him to escape from any permanent personal commitments - and his personal life is spectacularly complicated.
The first published picture of Dylan's daughter Desiree, now in her 20s
For some time he has had a penchant for voluptuous, maternal women, mostly African-American. 'Bob has a thing for black women,' confirms Howard Sounes, author of the respected Dylan biography Down The Highway.
He has a daughter, Desiree, known as Desi, who is now 23 and is pictured here for the first time. She is his child by Carolyn Dennis, once his backing singer, whom he married in June 1986.
Dylan managed to keep this second marriage and existence of a daughter completely secret for 15 years, setting the loyal Dennis up in a home in a Los Angeles suburb and visiting discreetly. Not even her neighbours noticed.
After six years, they were quietly divorced. Desi is currently a member of The Young Americans, a travelling troupe who take music, theatre, dance and concerts to schools around the world.
Some believe that there are up to four other secret children, also by other black backing singers, which would bring his tally to nine, although Dylan has only ever admitted to fathering four children by his first wife Sara Lowndes. He simply won't discuss Carolyn or Desi.
Carolyn has confirmed the marriage in a statement via a publicist. '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 Dylan has been a good father to the girl and, in private, had very much acknowledged her.
Recently, a rumour was circulating that he had married for a third time - and that his new wife was on the road with him. But if she was, there was no sign of her with Dylan in Dublin, where he played the O2 centre twice this week.
After the final gig, he met local hero Bono backstage for a drink and a chat. There was no girlfriend in tow.
'He did not say much, but was on quite good form,' said a source. 'He chatted for a bit to Bono and then went off to his hotel. I think he may even have walked - he sometimes does, which takes everyone by surprise, as they're so used to stars insisting on chauffeurs.'
This is backed up by Howard Sounes, who says: 'Dylan really does live a most unusual life. Mostly he lives on the road, doing around 100 shows a year, and travels for ten out of 12 months.
Old news: Dylan with former lover Susan Rotolo
'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.'
Dylan's principal home is near Malibu and was built to his specifications in the Seventies. At the centre of the house is a circular room beneath a copper dome.
The house is built on a large plot and, over the years, Dylan has bought up the plots of land around it, which gives him an enormous amount of privacy. He is alone there - aside from his security men - most of the time when he isn't touring.
One lover, Susan Ross, who was with him for a dozen years from the mid-Eighties, asked him why they could not live together. 'Because I can barely live with myself,' he replied.
Earlier this year his neighbours complained about the stench coming from a portable toilet situated on the perimeter, which Dylan insists his guards use. When an official from LA County tried to get on to his property to take a look, he was told that the singer would sue for trespassing.
Visitors to any of his homes are routinely told that they are at the wrong address for him. 'Like all famous people, I would like to be left alone,' he once sighed.
What is the house like inside? The 6,000-square foot property has six bedrooms and seven bathrooms.
Dylan with former lover Joan Baez
Sounes says: 'He has a car suspended from the ceiling in the living room, which was one of his first cars. And although there are 11 rooms, I believe he lives in only one of them.'
Susan Ross, who only got to visit the Malibu house after they had been together for five years, says it is like a ski chalet in decor. When she went for her one and only visit, Dylan would not allow her to sleep in his bedroom and sent her - alone - to a guest room instead.
Sounes says: 'At the last count, he had almost a dozen properties - most recently reported is a mansion in the Scottish Highlands bought for £10million. In each house he employs a caretaker who lives there and keeps the place, but he does not actually live in any of them. He will drop in from time to time instead.'
Dylan is quite deliberately rootless then, in keeping with his fondness for chameleon changes. He was a sensitive poet, a protest singer and, for a time, a heavy drug user (John Lennon spoke of nights out on heroin and amphetamines with Dylan).
He was a country singer, then a born-again Christian and then a devout Jew. Now he is mostly a scrawny figure in scruffy clothes. Paul McCartney once said that he encountered Dylan at Heathrow in the early Nineties. Dylan, hooded, 'was really like a kind of bagman,' said the former Beatle, who did not recognise him for a few seconds.
There has always been mythologising around Dylan, mostly self-perpetuated- - he once said that he was an orphan, did not know his parents and that he had been travelling with a carnival from the age of 13. In 1963, he said he had lost contact with his parents 'for years'. This was far from the truth - in reality they were always close.
Dylan has also been notable for ruthlessness in his love affairs. His on-off relationship with Susan Rotolo, who was famously pictured with Dylan on the cover of his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, ran into trouble when he went to stay at the home of fellow singer Joan Baez in the mid-Sixties.
His first marriage to former Playboy bunny Sara Lowndes came when she was heavily pregnant with their son, Jesse, in 1965. The union seems to have been undermined by Dylan's drug-taking and womanising, which became worse as he toured.
The final straw came one morning in 1977 when Sara went down to breakfast at their New York home and discovered her husband sitting at the table with their children - and a woman called Malka, a poetess who had evidently spent the night with her husband.
In the argument which followed, Sara claimed that Dylan hit her and told her to leave the house. Sara won custody of the children and Dylan hit back by having an affair with Faridi McFree, a therapist whom she hired to help the children cope with the upheaval of the divorce. It was all very nasty.
Even Dylan's conversion to Christianity had its roots in a sexual affair - while romancing backing singer Helena Springs he became infatuated with Mary Alice Artes, a black actress who was involved with a group of religious fundamentalists.
It was one of several times when Dylan indulged in overlapping affairs - seemingly without a heavy conscience.
At the time that he was romancing Carolyn Dennis, later his second wife, he was also seeing Ruth Tyrangiel (their affair ran from 1974 to 1991, and he ended up paying her alimony as she was legally considered his common-law wife).
He also simultaneously romanced Susan Ross, a legal assistant, who later condemned him as emotionally parsimonious, a rotten lover and a recovering alcoholic.
She believed there were many other women in his life - including another secret marriage to another backing singer, named Clydie King. They were certainly close: Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood recalls Dylan sitting on King's knee and nibbling at the edges of a hamburger she was eating.
But Ross believes they were more than close, claiming: 'Clydie was Bob's second wife. She had two of his kids.'
Ross goes on to say that Dylan also had yet another wife, Carol Woods, a backing singer, and also claims Woods 'had one of his children'.
If true, this would, chronologically, make Carolyn Dennis his fourth wife, rather than his second, as is commonly thought. This isn't as ridiculous as you might think - Dylan is, after all, very good at covering his tracks. Don't forget he kept Carolyn Dennis secret for a whole 15 years before anyone noticed their partnership.
His biographer, Sounes, thinks not, though.
'I have looked through all of the records and the marriage to Carolyn Dennis is the only other marriage for him. I find no record of any other births, either.
'He does have a thing about black girls and when you look at his art - which is dreadful, by the way - there are a lot of studies of naked voluptuous black women in various hotel rooms.
'There have been a string of dalliances, for sure. He had affairs with three women pretty much at the same time as Carolyn Dennis. He is a bit of a womaniser.'
Dylan himself says mildly: 'I'm just not the kind of person who seems to be able to settle down.'
As the man himself sings, like a Rolling Stone...
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