PORTSMOUTH, Va. — The 11-year-old girl looked at the child backstage, then at her own reflection in the other’s face, and the question that had been assembling behind her eyes for years finally broke through the surface. Bebe Buell watched her daughter turn toward her near the green rooms of an outdoor amphitheater in August 1988, and in that single, crystalline moment, she felt the ice give way underfoot.
Eleven years of carefully guarded secrecy were about to collapse into a single sentence, spoken on a bench outside the venue while a man in leopard print howled into a microphone on stage, unaware that his own history was unraveling in the dirt and dust of his concert grounds.
The secret had been sworn in a Manhattan townhouse in the winter of 1977, a pact between two rock musicians and one very frightened 23-year-old woman. It had held, more or less, through a decade of chaos, fame, addiction, and heartbreak. But secrets, like rivers, eventually find their way to the sea.
The woman who had danced around the Empire State Building with David Bowie, who had been carried across a muddy field by Steven Tyler like a knight in shining leopard, was now sitting in the summer heat, weeping before she could even finish the explanation. “Is Steven my dad?” her daughter asked.
And Bebe Buell broke.
Born Beverly Lorence Buell on Bastille Day, 1953, in a naval town stiff with protocol, she was named by maternity nurses who noted the date of her arrival. Her father, a decorated Navy pilot, was largely absent, and she has always said that absence drove everything she became. “I was a little girl who could never please her father,” she told High Times in 2002, adding that she spent her life choosing men she could never quite please or keep either.
Rock and roll arrived like it had been made just for her. By five, she was stuffing a sock down her trousers to imitate Mick Jagger, teaching neighborhood children a dance called the dirty dog, and discovering that music was something you could actually enter, like Alice through the looking glass.
She arrived in New York in 1972, 18 years old, with a room in a women’s residence run by nuns and a modeling contract signed within 10 minutes of meeting Eileen Ford. But modeling was never the ambition. “I wanted to be a professional singer,” she said.
The rest was a ticket into town. A friend driving her to see Man of La Mancha stopped on 13th Street to drop off tapes with a musician. There was no doorbell; you threw a penny at the second floor window.
Todd Rundgren came down. She was 18, he was 23, and the connection was instant and total. Within months, she was part of a reigning triumvirate of couples alongside Mick and Bianca Jagger and David and Angie Bowie.
Then came Playboy in 1974, which she has always described as an accident, though the details suggest otherwise. A photographer suggested arty pictures, meaning nudes, and Bebe obliged. When asked where she could show them, Bebe said, “Only Playboy.”
The November 1974 centerfold followed, along with one of the great small heists in magazine history. Playmates were paid $5,000. Buell bet Hugh Hefner over a Monopoly board that if she won, he would make her the first paid $10,000.
He agreed on condition of absolute secrecy. She won. “He gave me the money in cash,” she said, and flew home with it in her bag.
She kept the story quiet for three decades, telling it only after Hefner was dead. Ford sacked her, a career-ending trespass across a class line. It also opened another door.
“So then the rock stars came a hunting,” she remembered.
Her first four dates in New York were Todd Rundgren, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Mick Jagger. Jimmy Page pursued her by telephone with a persistence bordering on the obsessive, and she has never entirely gotten over him. “His whole bearing promised something rather fantastical,” she wrote.
On her 21st birthday, Jagger took her after dinner to John Lennon’s apartment, where they discussed unidentified flying objects over a joint. Steven Tyler arrived around 1974, carrying her across the mud like a knight in shining leopard. In the autumn of 1976, she went to Europe with Tyler and discovered in Germany that she was pregnant.
She came home frightened, not of losing the child, but of the life it might lead with Tyler as a father. His addiction was, by his own later account, catastrophic.
She returned to Rundgren, who took her in, and the two made a pact. He would sign the birth certificate and be the father. If it ever became an issue, they would tell the child at 18.
Liv Rundgren was born in New York City on July 1, 1977, in the middle of one of the hottest summers on record. Rundgren’s account is different. In his own memoir, he wrote that Buell had been away for weeks tagging Aerosmith around Europe when the call came.
“She said the baby was his,” he claimed, “and asked to come home to him.” Only then did the truth come out, leaving him feeling like a mark. Buell rejects the implication of deception on the basis they hadn’t had 𝒔𝒆𝒙 in two months.
Whatever the truth, the romance ended shortly after the birth, and Rundgren raised the girl as his own.
What came after were the punishing years. A very public romance with Rod Stewart collapsed. An 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with Elvis Costello ended in heartbreak and insanity.
Costello is also the origin of the word she has spent her life defending from accusations that it is demeaning. A muse is not a thing one elects to be, she has argued. It’s something that found her.
She had first seen Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys in the autumn of 1976 from a few feet inside the door at CBGB. Years later, at a KISS party, she walked up to his girlfriend and announced she was stealing him. They became inseparable.
Cream voted them couple of the year in 1980. He never entirely believed in her though. “I think you really love Steven Tyler,” he told her, predicting she would tire of him inside a few months.
In June 1990, Stiv Bators was hit by a taxi crossing a Paris street, walked out of the hospital insisting he was fine, and died in his sleep of a brain injury. Four years later, his partner Caroline Warren produced an urn and spooned half of his ashes into an envelope for her because, quote, “Stiv really loved you, Bebe.” The lights in the flat began to flicker.
“Oh, it’s just Stiv,” Warren told her. “He visits all the time.” Bebe moved to New York and became her daughter’s manager, a job she describes in purely defensive terms.
“I had to learn how to keep the sharks away from my daughter,” she said, recalling the parade of teen slasher scripts she turned down on the grounds that they would not build a career worth having.
The paternity test confirmed what Liv had suspected since she was nine, and had even written in a diary. Liv changed her surname. The rest of the world found out in 1991, and the explosion took her career with it.
The Gargoyles, then attracting label interest, dissolved. She stopped performing for six years. Rundgren, who had raised a daughter who turned out not to be his and then lost her by degrees, was left holding a grief with no available name.
“I didn’t want to hurt Todd,” Buell said in 2023, pointing out that she had been 18 and he 23 when they met, and that children make mistakes. She has extended an olive branch, she says, and can no longer worry about whether it is taken.
In 2000, Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous arrived. Its band aid, Penny Lane, was assembled partly out of Bebe Buell, a debt Crowe acknowledged by naming a singer in the film Jeff Bebe. In 2001 came Rebel Heart, a New York Times best seller that divided readers with real violence.
Salon called it joyless and self-obsessed. She was unmoved. “This is my life,” she said.
“I can say whatever the [expletive] I want.” In 2002, she married the guitarist Jim Wallerstein of Das Damen, who became her producer and band leader, and on the evidence of the two decades since, the settled and contented ending nobody had predicted. In July 2024, a routine mammogram found stage one breast cancer.
She had a lumpectomy that October, then months of fatigue and the grinding work of choosing between treatments, and she wrote her way out. Skin Suit, released on her 72nd birthday, is a gothic ballad about the body as a garment hanging beside the Chanel.
She turned 73 in July 2026, cancer-free, still playing Nashville rooms. “I consider groupie a sexist term, and I think it’s misused,” she told New York magazine in 2011, noting that she paid her own way throughout. “I made my own money.
I bought my own airline tickets.” The songs she is said to have provoked, from Rundgren’s Farewell to Costello’s most obsessive records, are the proof usually offered of her importance, which is itself a bit of a trap. It makes her the raw material of other people’s art, rather than the maker of her own.
But then, while she rejected groupie, she embraced muse. Her advice to young women who tell her they want a life like hers has never varied. “Run for the hills,” she says, because being her came with a great deal of pain and misunderstanding.
At 73, she is still declining to be a footnote in somebody else’s discography.
