Top
Free Shipping On Orders Over $35!
Get Rewarded for Ordering Your Textbooks! Enroll Now
Customer Reviews Read Reviews
Write a Review
| Prologue: A Mother's Nightmare | 1 | (8) | |||
|
9 | (30) | |||
|
39 | (22) | |||
|
61 | (36) | |||
|
97 | (24) | |||
|
121 | (32) | |||
|
153 | (19) | |||
|
172 | (32) | |||
|
204 | (27) | |||
|
231 | (13) | |||
|
244 | (21) | |||
|
265 | (22) | |||
|
287 | (25) | |||
|
312 | (10) | |||
|
322 | (13) | |||
|
335 | (14) | |||
| Epilogue: How I Became Bebe Buell | 349 | (15) | |||
| Acknowledgments | 364 | (3) | |||
| Discography | 367 | (6) | |||
| Index | 373 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Chapter One
The Wild Child
1972-1973
I was raised at CBGB
Cut my teeth at Max's Kansas City
My soul is pure rock
Ain't never gonna stop.
"NORMAL GIRL," LYRICS BY BEBE BUELL
I moved to New York to find the place where I would be happy, where I belonged, where my essence was. It was where I needed to be, where girls and guys like me were. This is where you went. This is where it was. I never had a desire to go to California. That's where the culture girls like the GTOs I'd read about in Rolling Stone went. Girls who wanted to be stars went to New York. I wanted to be a superstar!
In January 1972, I moved to New York City to begin my career as a model. I was five nine. I had been a star forward on my Catholic school's basketball team and I had the athletic, thoroughbred good looks of a Virginia aristocrat. I came from an aristocracy of invention. My mother, whose first husband--my father in name only--divorced Mom when I was two, had remade herself and, in particular, me. I was the perfect candidate for the University of Manhattan, because when I arrived, I was a blank canvas waiting to be painted into a masterpiece. I was under contract to the Eileen Ford Modeling Agency. All the top models of the era--Veronica Hamil, Susie Blakeley, Lauren Hutton--were there. The first person who tried to color me as she saw fit was Eileen Ford. I vividly recall walking into her office on East Fifty-ninth Street with my mother and sitting there full of expectations.
"You're a beautiful girl," Eileen Ford said.
"Thank you," I replied.
"You might have to have the bump in the middle of your nose fixed," she suggested.
"I have a bumpy male side and a smooth female side," I attempted to explain.
She thought that was crazy. I was horrified. She detected that I was not a big-city girl, and she invited me to spend a few days living in her Upper East Side town house with her family. A couple of other models were staying there. She went to the gym with me to see me in a leotard.
"You have a great body!" she enthused. I guess I was Eileen Ford's type, but I didn't like living at her house, because I felt that she was watching everything I did. I lasted five days.
My second week in New York, I moved to St. Mary's Residence, a Catholic Barbizon-type place between Second and Third Avenue on East Seventy-second Street--a residence along the lines of the Barbizon Hotel. The area was known by the local wolves as "the stewardess/model ghetto." The combination of hundreds of perky, naïve girls and their desire to make it drew some of the ooziest creeps in the city to the restaurants and bars that defined the neighborhood. I avoided them like the plague. My mother and Les Johnson paid my rent and gave me an allowance of fifty dollars per week. I had my own room with a bed, a dresser, and a closet. I shared a bathroom. There was no TV, but I had a radio. In the early seventies, my life revolved around the radio. It was God. It wasn't like it is now. The radio played very cool music. You could hear fantastic songs like "Gloria" and "Satisfaction" on the radio--real music . I listened to K-Rock when I woke up, when I was putting on my makeup or getting ready to go out to my appointments. I lived for rock and roll, which I got from the radio and The Ed Sullivan Show . The radio, records, and that TV show were the only ways to get your music when I was a kid.
I was on Eileen Ford's roster as one of her top-ten possible contenders. She was sure I was going to go the same way as Christie Brinkley, and in the beginning, I worked a lot. Being a successful model is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. When you are not working, you take care of yourself: your hair, your nails, your skin, your weight, your posture, what you eat and must not eat, exercise. I loved fashion, but I soon realized modeling was not what I wanted to do. I wanted to express myself, and I couldn't express myself by modeling. I harbored a secret ambition to be a rock star. I was writing song lyrics in a notebook, and I kept reevaluating them. Rock 'n' roll was uppermost in my soul.
On my first assignment, while my mother was still in New York, staying at the Mayflower Hotel, I did a test with a photographer who tried to get me to take off my top. He said, "Oh! Let's take some beauty shots!" A lot of the typical clichés came alive for me when I started out. On a typical day, I would get up at 7:00 A.M., take a shower, have some juice and vitamins, make phone calls, get dressed, then go to the booking. How I was feeling would depend on the job. If I was doing bread-and-butter work like being photographed for a catalog, I'd be unhappy. But if I was doing a glamorous Cosmopolitan booking , I'd be excited, because I could perform for the camera. Then it would depend on the photographer. If I was working with somebody as great as Francesco Scavullo, I would be very inspired.
First, I would do "go-sees." If Vogue wanted me to do ten pages for them, the photographer would need to see me before booking me. If I was going to be meeting Richard Avedon, it was the greatest! I would walk into his studio and his assistant would greet me. There would be other models there. I would take a seat and wait my turn, then go in and show them my portfolio. They would look at it, then ask me a couple of questions. The next day, my booker would give me their response.
Modeling was a conservative business in 1972, but I was not a conservative girl. All the other girls would show up clean-cut and coiffed in chic slacks, sweaters, and loafers. I would arrive in platform shoes and glitter rock clothes with feathers hanging off me, looking like I'd just rolled off the dance floor. I immediately got a reputation as the rock and roll model who didn't take it too seriously. I was the beautiful girl who didn't like to be on time and wouldn't put on an outfit if she didn't like it. This was bad behavior for a model, because you're being hired to model clothes you don't like. But I would cry until they made another model wear the tacky clothes.
When I was a young girl, just seeing my picture in a magazine or catalog was exciting. Being on the cover of a magazine was a real buzz. So I did get some ego satisfaction, because I got to express myself. It's not like it sucked; it just wasn't who I was. I didn't feel like I fit in with the other girls. We never had anything in common. They talked about their stockbroker boyfriends, or what they were reading. We weren't on the same planet. Meanwhile, my career started to take off. I worked mostly for Brides and Cosmopolitan magazines. I was starting to make sixty dollars an hour. The checks went to Eileen; then she'd cut me a check after taking the agency's 10 percent.
One day, I was going to lunch at Sixtieth and Third. Woody Allen was walking down the street. When he saw me, he did a double take. Fifteen minutes later, I was eating in one of those fishbowl restaurants, when he walked past and peered in at me.
"What is it about girls like you?" my girlfriend asked. "Why do famous people notice you?"
"I don't know," I said. "You tell me and we'll both know."
I didn't see anything in Woody Allen, but people constantly told me I looked like the young Mia Farrow, and I saw this karma of bumping into Woody Allen as symbolic of what was to come for me. Woody Allen and New York City were beginning to make perfect sense to me.
I had a similar experience with Salvador Dalí. There was a newsstand that sold international publications in the St. Regis Hotel on Fifty-fifth Street, just off Fifth Avenue. I was leafing through British Vogue one day when this majestic-looking man with a red cape kept looking at me. I realized it was none other than the legendary Dalí. He asked me if I'd like to go upstairs and have tea with him. On that first day, he introduced me to Amanda Lear! And he asked me what I was doing in New York City. When I told him I was a model, he said, "Yes, but you've got something more. Do you want to be an actress?"
"I don't know," I said. "I'm open."
Dalí was surprisingly unkempt. His waxy mustache was dirty and gross and his clothes were tattered, but he was endearing. And I knew he wasn't trying to make a pass at me. That same day, I met Michael J. Pollard, the gnomish actor who had starred so memorably in Bonnie and Clyde . He was a drunken mess, but he was fascinating and articulate. Everyone sat around chatting. We had a beautiful tea.
I ran into Dalí a couple of times after that, and he always made me feel that I had a glow, something that made him want to know me and invite me to tea with his interesting, crazy friends. I kept having these glimpses of my fate, like Alice in Wonderland peeking into different rooms.
My first connection to the nightlife was through an entrepreneur named Richard. He was a polite young man I met through Eileen Ford. Richard smoked pot, but Eileen didn't know that. The worst we did was a little pot and a Quaalude. After I moved to St. Mary's, Richard would call to see if I wanted to go out dancing, and I started to frequent the uptown night spots. I met a lot of people through Richard, like the photographer Eric Bowman and the fashion designers Giorgio Saint Angelo and Halston. He also introduced me to the first gay man with whom I would form a lifelong friendship, the photographer David Croland. I met him backstage at a benefit for children with cancer, where I performed along with Alice Cooper and Shelley Winters. David was body-painting people. I had to stand there stark naked in a G-string while he painted me. He said, "You look like a nurse!" He painted one breast as a black baby and one breast as a white baby, and I vamped onto the stage in high heels with one "baby" in each arm. This marked my first stage appearance in New York and the beginning of a love affair with my gay audience. The situation was even more auspicious for me, since this was the same stage at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street where the Rolling Stones made their American debut in 1964.
One night, I went out with a boy I had met through another model. He was from Long Island and had too much money because his father was a rich doctor. He picked me up in his Cadillac from one of my "go-sees," so I had my portfolio with me. We were going to a party at Francesco Scavullo's house. We were driving along with his friends, who were smoking joints and popping pills. There was so much peer pressure involved with drugs in those days. They gave me a pill and put some amyl nitrate under my nose, and I threw up all over the beautiful interior of his car. When we got to Scavullo's, they all had to go to the kitchen to clean themselves up. They were so angry, they didn't want to have anything to do with me.
I didn't know you weren't supposed to drink on top of the pills. I was just naïve. A whiskey sour was a drink I heard people ordering on television, so I proceeded to drink a whiskey sour. The next thing I knew, my head was spinning out of control and I started to get paranoid and panic. I was sitting on a chair, clutching my portfolio, when somebody asked me perfectly politely if they could see my pictures. I went nuts, saying, " No, no! " I knew that I had to get to a bathroom. I found one off Scavullo's bedroom, locked myself in, and lay down on the cold tiles. I needed to have my face on the floor to stop the dreadful spinning sensation. It was a nice clean bathroom.
The next thing I knew, people were pounding on the door, shouting, "Darling, are you all right? Let us in!" I was so completely out of it, I had no idea that I had been on that floor for two hours. This was my first meeting with Francesco Scavullo, who was the most important fashion photographer in New York other than Richard Avedon.
Francesco and his companion-cum-assistant, Sean, scraped me off the floor and propped me up on his bed with pillows. Francesco asked me what I had taken, and everybody came over, fussing and wanting to know who had given me these drugs, what I had taken, and where I was from.
"I'm from St. Mary's Residence," I heard myself saying. Disembodied voices came at me as if in a dream....
"What? Oh my God, we gotta get this girl outta here! She's jailbait!" Meanwhile Francesco, who was a kind man, got a cold rag for my head, assured me it would pass, and told me not to worry. "Just tell me what kind of pill," he said.
"Red," I said, and once again the voices started. "Oh, they gave her Tuinol!" someone said. "Oh, she took Tuinol and whiskey sours." Francesco held the wet rag on my head, gently scolding me. "Darling, if you continue to do things like this, it could be very bad for your career. How are you going to get up in the morning?"
I knew a lot of models who were far more messed up than I was that night, but it certainly wasn't the norm for me. However, shortly thereafter, it happened again.
On that occasion, it knocked me out for hours. When I woke up, it was 7:00 P.M. the next day, but I looked at the clock and thought it was 7:00 A.M. I got dressed, but when I walked out my door, it was dark. That was the first time in my life that I had no sense of time, and it was scary. This was before answering machines. I could not check my messages and find out who had been looking for me that day. Supposedly, people from the agency had been knocking on my door all day and I had slept through it all! I told Eileen Ford the truth--that somebody had given me a pill.
"What color was it?" she asked.
"Red."
"Oh my God," she said, "a Tuinol!" Then she started to lecture me: I was falling into the wrong crowd! These people were going to ruin my career, and my life! The next thing I knew, these people would be putting needles in my arms! I didn't know what she was talking about.
"I don't want to put needles in my arms!" I said. "I'm not like that!" It was the same battle I had had with my stepfather and my mother when I was in high school. I have never--and I want to put this on record--shot up in my life. I'm just not interested.
This concern about my taking drugs came from the fact that models were notorious for getting messed up on drugs. One of my earliest modeling memories is of this beautiful top model named Pola. One day, I went to a test shoot at Chris Von Wagenheim's studio. Beautiful Pola was almost completely passed out, sprawled on a chair, and people were working on every part of her--her fingernails, her hair, her makeup. There was literally drool running down her chin. I looked at her arms and saw the series of pinpricks made by needles and the makeup sponges trying to cover them. They were catering to her, knowing she was a junkie. Finally, when it was time for her to be photographed, they held amyl nitrate under her nose. I was standing in the middle of the makeup room. As soon as I smelled the amyl, I hurled all over the room. So they all jumped to the conclusion that I was on heroin! I'd arrived on time and was totally straight, but everyone was yelling at me!
A year later, I got a call from a friend who had been at that shoot. He told me Pola had died of a heroin overdose. When she overdosed, she fell onto her wrought-iron water-based heater. Nobody found her for three days. When they did, she had been boiled, and her dog had eaten part of her. Before that, she had been on the cover of Cosmopolitan and Vogue .
My secret desires were locked up inside of me. I didn't dare tell anybody what I really wanted to be. All I knew was that I wanted to be somebody. That somebody resembled Anita Pallenberg, Pattie Boyd, Marianne Faithfull, Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, and Janis Joplin! Or at least resembled their essence. I don't know if the word star was embedded in my mind. I had discussed my desires to be in a band with the girls at St. Mary's Residence, but I might as well have been talking to the Stepford Wives. They knew me as somebody who would get all dressed up, and head downtown on the Second Avenue bus to my doom. I always had fantasies of being some kind of artist. A performer, a "somebody." But I was afraid that people would laugh at me because I wanted to be famous.
Meanwhile, there was a lot of sexual energy crackling around me. People always wanted to have sex with me, instead of wondering what I thought or felt. That was painful. I wanted to be taken seriously as a viable commodity, not a piece of ass. Approval was really important to me. I think when you grow up without a dad, a man's approval is particularly important. I wanted someone to appreciate me for having a vision. I came to New York as a model, but I certainly thought I was going to be a hell of a lot more than that!
My life took a definitive turn when I met the rock 'n' roll singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren. He had started his career in the late sixties as the leader of a great hard-rock band from Philadelphia called Nazz. Now he was approaching the pinnacle of a brilliant solo career with the hit single "I Saw the Light." Richard Postrel introduced us one night when we stopped by Todd's apartment to drop off some tapes.
We pulled up in front of 206 East Thirteenth Street and Third Avenue. It looked like a dangerous neighborhood in 1972: The streets were populated by pimps, hookers, and pool hustlers. "Wait down here," Richard said.
"Right!" I said. "Forget it!" Todd didn't have a doorbell, so Richard threw a coin up at his window. I thought that was cool, but when Todd stuck his head out the window and threw down a key, I almost shouted, "Richard, he has green-and-yellow-and-purple hair!" I'd never seen anything like it! Wow! I couldn't wait to get up those stairs. His building was a landmark brownstone. Inside, we mounted a stately staircase, but when Todd opened his door, I glimpsed the interior of an apartment that was the polar opposite of the building's nineteenth-century opulence. I'd never seen such a mess. It was as if Jackson Pollock had taken the props of a rock star's life--guitars, records, speakers, microphones, wires, wild clothes, rattlesnake-skin shoes, half-empty coffee cups, and takeout food containers--and smeared them around, abstracting the room with Todd's heavy-metal genius.
He looked like a cross between Bugs Bunny and Antonin Artaud. We looked at each other, and I fell madly in love with him; I was just nuts about him. On the way home, I drove Richard crazy, wanting to know everything about Todd, his girlfriends, his past, whom he slept with, whom he didn't sleep with, what he was doing. Richard told me all about Patti Smith and Sam Shepard. Patti had been Todd's girlfriend for a while.
Three days later, I got a call from my booker. There was a strange guy with green-and-yellow-and-purple hair sitting on the steps of the agency, waiting for me. She wanted to let me know in case I didn't want to see him. I zipped over there as fast as I could without killing myself, but when I got there, I acted all cool and spontaneous, like I was all surprised. "Oh, hi, what are you doing here?" I said.
"Oh, uh, actually, I was in the, uh, neighborhood," he replied, acting cool, too, like it was no big thing. "My dog, Puppet, had a little, uh, checkup today, and, you know, I had to wait for her for a couple hours, so I thought well, like I'd stop and hope maybe I ran into you."
We made plans to meet that night. When I got to his apartment, it was my turn to throw the penny up at his window. Being the ex-basketball player I was, I got a hole in one, and Todd was impressed. We went out with a bunch of his friends and ended up at Max's Kansas City, which was the only downtown club of its kind in those days. It was famous largely for its clientele of artists and the Warhol people who populated its notorious back room. We ate dinner in the front room and everybody got drunk. I took a trip to the bathroom and peeked into the back room, which was lighted by a Dan Flavin red light sculpture. I thought, Hmm, this red room looks a lot better than the room we're in. I didn't understand the social structure of Max's at all. I sashayed back there with Paul Fishkin, who was the president of Todd's record label, Bearsville. We went back to our table and I told Todd, "I think we're in the wrong room. I think we're supposed to be back there."
"Well, that's if you want to hang out," he said, "but we're eating."
I could not stop thinking about Max's Kansas City, but nobody from St. Mary's Residence would go with me. My roommates were soap-opera stars and had to be up in the morning. They warned me I'd ruin my career if I went down there. Two nights later, I lied to the nuns, got dressed to the nines in platform shoes and a multicolored dress with a fake fur, and took the bus down Second Avenue to Irving Place. From there, I walked over to Seventeenth and Park and waltzed straight into Max's Kansas City's back room, having no idea of its reputation as a den of iniquity unlike any other restaurant or bar in the world. I was dying to be where I thought I belonged.
The first person I made eye contact with was Andy Warhol. He was stepping out of the men's room, and he immediately asked me, "Oh, who are you? I haven't seen you around before...."
"My name's Bebe Buell, and I'm from Virginia!"
"Oh, are you, uh, a uh ... debutante or something? Well, does your, uh, your mother breed horses or something?"
"No," I said, laughing, "I'm a model with the Ford Agency."
"Well, who knows you yet?"
"I don't know anybody, except I've met this guy Todd Rundgren...."
"Oh, you can do better. Come sit with us! And we'll talk to you about everything."
I went over to his table, and that night I met Lou Reed; the editor of Interview , Bob Colacello; the stars of Trash and Heat , Jane Forth and Eric Emerson; the star of Flesh , Patti D'Arbanville; and the brilliant singer-songwriter and ex-leader of the Velvet Underground, John Cale.
"You look rich," Andy continued, eyes wide. "You look like you come from a really nice family. Where are you from?" I guess I looked a little groomed. Compared to them, I was wholesome. But I didn't know what to say to him, because Andy wasn't exactly vivacious, and he freaked me out by asking if I was a debutante. I think he just cared whether I had money. I couldn't figure out why he didn't just come out and say, Look, are you a rich kid? He'd say, "Oh, so, uh, you know, uh, that's a reeeeaaally nice Georgio Saint Angelo.... Where did you get that?"
"It's funny, because this girl I live with at St. Mary's Residence ... she gets all these samples for free!"
"Ohhh ... fabulous!"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rebel Heart by Bebe Buell. Copyright © 2001 by Bebe Buell. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Need Help? Copyright © 1999-2024