Fast enough for you

Bebe Buell’s book is an indulgence and a pop-culture education

By Sam Pfeifle

Bebe Buell signs copies of her book ,Rebel Heart,at Borders, at the Maine Mall, September 12, at 7pm.

BEBE BUELL: at home with Chiquita and Pancho.

Bebe Buell dated, or, as she emphasizes, was muse to — some crass folks might say fucked — lots of famous guys, mostly rock stars. It’s really hard to get beyond that when you think about her place in the rock and pop culture pantheon. Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, The Faces’ Rod Stewart — well, maybe he’s just Rod Stewart now. Elvis Costello. Iggy Pop. Jack Nicholson, for Christ’s sake. Most famously, and for the longest time, Todd Rundgren. For a pop cultural follower, it’s something of a fantasy realized, even if few of us want to admit it.

Who wouldn’t want to be privy to the intimate thoughts of the man who was about to star in Chinatown? Or sit around listening while Warren Beatty serenaded you from behind a piano? Women of all ages swoon at the thought. Men certainly perk up at Buell’s mention, even now after she’s well into her 40s. What is it about that woman?

This is the line of thinking that makes it impossible to resist Buell’s autobiography (written with Victor Bockris, who also collaborated with John Cale, Lou Reed, and others), Rebel Heart, to be released this week by St. Martin’s press. Whatever you think of her, and Buell’s been ripped publicly on plenty of occasions, this is some of the best dope pop-culture junkies could shoot into their gossip-ravenous veins. Behind the scenes. In the bedroom. On the set. Backstage.

It would be a shame, however, if that was all a reader came away with after reading what she has to say. Buell has a natural wit, an unassuming honesty, and a straight-forward approach that allows the book to transcend “tell-all” status and attain a tentative foot-hold among the ranks of books that every music fan needs to have, even if only to read the words “Why can’t I date Mick Jagger, Todd Rundgren, Steven Tyler, and David Bowie all at the same time if I please? . . . Doesn’t that mean I have good taste?”

Bebe does have good taste, after all. She was with Rundgren by 1972, when she was all of 18, just as he was gaining success with “I Saw the Light,” off omething/Anything, just his third album. And Rundgren is, in many ways, the thinking girl’s rock star. He was never, as is chronicled in the book, starving for fame, and seems to actually have avoided it with the release that followed, A Wizard, A True Star. If you’re curious as to why his pop success was followed with such a mindfuck of a psychedelic album, Bebe’s got the answer. She gave him acid, of course. That’s the kind of gem that fills virtually every page of this book.

Open it to any page, literally, and you’ll find something worthy of reading out loud to anyone who’ll listen. For example, try to read these without a chuckle.

p. 112: “With my back to Mick, I was snuggling toward Woody, when Mick reached around to touch me and touched Woody’s willy by accident. We all leapt into the air. Woody screamed, “Oh my God, you touched my cock!’ Mick was screaming, ‘Get the Valium!’ ”

p. 174: “Steven and I had a little affair again that fall. It was an intimate oasis in an otherwise-arid time for me. He brought Liv toys and played with her, and we made love.”

p. 64: “ ‘Bebe,’ she exclaimed . . . ‘Playboy is America. It’s like Coca-Cola. It’s like Andy Warhol. It’s like a Campbell’s soup can. It’s Pop Art!’ ”

However, it’s not even half as juicy as it could have been. Buell has chosen to pull some of her punches. “I didn’t write this book to settle any scores,” she emphasizes, at her Portland home, decorated liberally with her trademark leopard-skin print (as is her book). “Even if I don’t always say, ‘Sunshine was coming out of his eardrums,’ that doesn’t mean I don’t respect them.”

The thing is, sunshine is often coming out of their eardrums. These are some pretty spectacular people who come in and out of her life. Take Nicholson as an example. His role in the book consists of taking her back to his hotel room only to drop her for Australian model Rachel Ward, teaching her to fuck up against the side of a car, and having her watch as he cavorts with six models in a hot tub. All after he’s flown her out to LA because he needs her to console him now that he’s broken up with the girl he really loves, Jessica Lange.

Rather than call him out for the philandering, self-centered jackass he would be if he weren’t Jack Nicholson, Bebe seems content to be treated as one of the boys. She delights in eating ribs and drinking beer with him. Her only condemnation of him comes with the line, “There was no way I was going to have sex with him after he had had sex with six women, and I knew he had.”

ýven her ex-husband, Coyote Shivers, a guitarist/songwriter who gained some critical acclaim with a 1996 self-titled release, who comes off as a lazy, adolescent bum, is treated pretty well. Buell makes allowances for him, says that “He was clever, and he seemed to have some talent and a certain savvy.” All the while, he seems to have been leeching off Buell and daughter Liv Tyler’s fame and money. Few would have objected to Buell filling pages with a good Shivers dressing down, but it never really comes. She takes some jabs, but Bebe is simply too nice a person to ever really go on the offensive.

On one hand, this is endearing, as Buell comes off as quite a likable character. And this is necessary for her later battles with depression and single-motherhood to be moving and engaging rather than just desserts. On the other hand, however, it’s sometimes difficult to discern exactly how she feels about a person. Rundgren is alternately “arrogant” and “one of the most important people in my life,” “manipulative” and “a father figure.”

The feeling is that Buell has been tugged at by quite a few powerful people, and it is only recently that she’s found herself.

Now, ensconced with her two toy dogs in the comfortable home daughter Liv has surprised her with — nice, right, having a daughter who makes a few million per picture — Buell comes across as the confident woman she can’t depict herself as until the final pages of her book.

“I wrote this book for women,” she says. “To tell them not to let depression, relationship problems, career mishaps to stop them from pursuing their goals.” This is a lesson she has only recently learned.

After Liv effectively fired her as career manager, Buell went into a tailspin that leads to her claiming false illnesses, gaining a great deal of weight, and visiting a shrink. Again, all of this is told in such matter-of-fact prose, it doesn’t come off as embarrassing or pitiful (this could also be a result of Bockris’s experience with retelling rock stars bottoming out).

As Buell recounts, “My spark plugs were worn out, and my ball bearings needed replacing.” A rather blunt metaphor for a condition that would require medication, yes, but representative of her attitude toward just about everything that happens to her: It happened, here’s how, let’s move on.

She also refrains from becoming overly defensive in the faces of her many detractors. A read of her book is proof enough that she’s no mindless, groupie sex-toy to the stars. Groupies don’t find themselves in Harper’s Queen and Vogue. Groupies aren’t called by Rod Stewart and asked out on a date as a publicity stunt. Groupies don’t have Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty calling their mothers.

It’s unfortunate for Buell that the ’70s were still a quite misogynistic decade, where the double standard of women as whores and men as studs persisted. “Even being a single mother was frowned upon,” Buell notes in conversation. “Times had not caught up yet.

“They made it seem as though I ran around with butterfly nets, catching these poor rock stars,” she says with a laugh. “Believe me, these guys wanted to be caught.”

For some reason, Buell’s career as a Ford Agency model, gracing the covers of fashion magazines like her daughter would after her, was largely ignored in her time, in favor of describing her, as she still is today, as “Todd Rundgren’s former girlfriend,” or “girlfriend to the stars.” These tags don’t seem to be attached to today’s Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, or Tyra Banks, who are now stars in their own right, when it’s news if rock stars are dating them.

And you could even argue that Buell’s talent in the musical arena — putting out the Covers GirlÕEP, and fronting the B-Sides, the Gargoyles, and the band that backs her current solo career — shows a talent none of these models/stars can approach (certainly not with their acting, i.e. Banks’s recent turn on Felicity).

This is not to say that Buell doesn’t revel in her lifestyle, sometimes in lieu of what would have benefited her modeling career. She is convinced into posing for Playboy, a choice she ardently defends but which, in the end, did much to ruin her more respectable gigs. Another time, she goes the entire year of 1974 without any modeling because she is so wrapped up in life with Keith and Rod and Mick and Ron.

Then there is her infatuation with Elvis Costello. Clearly, the two had a relationship — during much of which Costello was married — but Bebe always seems to be trying so hard to prove it. Frequently she recounts that Costello has released an album, and that it’s about her. “He got seven good albums out of me,” she writes at one point.

Sometimes, this feels forced. For instance, she writes that his album Imperial Bedroom:

 

was a critical smash — compared to the Beatles by reviewers. As always, he coded a lot of songs so I’d know that he was singing to me. When I went to the Picasso show at the Museum of Modern Art recently, I saw a lot of the paintings Picasso coded for his lovers Marie-Thérèse and Dora Maar. Elvis is the Picasso of his generation in that respect. We called each other Henry and Jane, because the second time around, our affair was meant to be a secret. His other nickname for me through the years was “Candy.” Even in 1991, six years after we broke up for good, Elvis and Paul McCartney wrote a song together called “So Like Candy.” Maybe he was talking about a box of chocolates, but I don’t think so.

 

It seems as though she’s arguing too fervently. Who’s disagreeing?

Another time, there is debate over whether the line “Baby, you’re much too fast,” from Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” is actually “Bebe, you’re much too fast.”

Costello seemed to think the Corvette symbolized Bebe’s bush from a spread in Oui magazine. Buell’s mother thought the song was about her from the outset. Buell admits she never met Prince at all, but the song “was about my persona.” It’s somewhat confusing. Is that how famous Bebe’s exploits were, or how famous she thought they were? You figure it out.

Of course, anybody with a love of local music should read this just for the local history: gigs at the Tree, the Downtown Lounge, Geno’s; Bebe’s apartments on Park and High streets; her bands and their numerous members: Beth Blood, George Gordon, Donny Crosby, John Rousseau, and others.

Also, the pictures and index are fantastic parts of the book. There are 130 photographs, many of them from Bebe’s private stock; everything from nudes of herself — one pregnant with Liv — to a candid of Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys in sunglasses, in bed, and with a baby Liv. The index is just plain fun; there is, for instance, a listing for “Buell, Bebe (relationships and affairs)” that has as a subset “Elvis Costello, phone sex with,” among others.

That’s just what the book, and, finally Bebe, is: fun. So go get it, but be ready for the stares you’ll get from people around you looking at the back cover. n

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com