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You almost can't blame Buell for getting sidetracked, considering the number of sizzlingly attractive men who pursued her. "I wanted to be a superstar!" It's not long, though, before she's stroking that old-time victimization violin: "The problem was that everything was too easy - modeling, traveling, partying - and I forgot my original desires and beliefs."īut then, remembering one's goals on the way to superstardom is such a trial. "Girls who wanted to be stars went to New York," Buell writes, capturing some of the dazzling brashness of her youth. Between reminding us how beautiful she was and explaining how hard it was to be so beautiful, it's a wonder Buell has any time left to spill juicy secrets.īuell left home in 1972 to launch a modeling career in New York. And aside from that, it's not just refreshing but necessary for a woman as stunning as Buell to be frank about her looks: To try to downplay them would be disingenuous.īut a beautiful woman - especially a historically beautiful one like Buell - has to decide whether she's going to wield her looks as a powerful attribute or as an excuse: They can't be both. Anyone who writes a memoir has to have a certain degree of narcissism, at least for the span of time it takes to get the book written. Buell does right in acknowledging her beauty upfront. I had acid and a car!" Buell was - and, now nearing 50, still is - a great beauty, a golden-haired vixen-cherub with a cushiony pout and massive blue eyes.

Her parents gave her a Volkswagen convertible for her 17th birthday: "I was dangerous and damn good-looking. Buell's book should be so much more fun than it is - it isn't nearly as exhilarating, as good-natured or, its proto-feminist mutterings to the contrary, as intelligently pro-woman a book as Pamela Des Barres' 1987 memoir "I'm With the Band." (It's telling, too, that Des Barres' book is subtitled "Confessions of a Groupie" for her, there's no shame or embarrassment in the word.)īuell kicks her book off in the right mood, opening her story with a brief account of her teenage years in Virginia, a period when she drove her mother and stepfather nuts and tripped her brains out whenever possible. It makes for a numbing cocktail.Īnd that's a bummer.

We thought opportunities would always exist, that we would be fifteen forever") even as she works overtime to keep those of us who missed out on the era's cultural licentiousness drooling with jealousy. It suffers from one of the major failings of so many memoirs written by "'60s people," especially those who dug their little paws right into the sexual-freedom candy dish: Buell spends plenty of space justifying her behavior and apologizing for it ("I was from a generation that didn't think that far into the future. But "Rebel Heart" is one of those tell-all memoirs that tells you much more about its author's insecurities than it does about her exploits - or even about the personalities of the fabulous men who swarmed around her. You could argue that the whole idea of groupiedom is steeped in retrograde sexual politics, and maybe you'd be right.

"Todd would always be fucking these nondescript road tramps," she writes, "whereas I would be fucking major icons." In the early '70s, while she was living with her then-steady Rundgren (certainly no model of fidelity himself), she would drift into affairs with dashing rock stars partly to get back at him, but mostly because she was madly, and understandably, drawn to them. In "Rebel Heart," her tedious, self-obsessed, almost shockingly joyless autobiography, Bebe Buell, a former model and Playboy centerfold who has been paramour to the likes of Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Todd Rundgren, Steven Tyler and Elvis Costello, asserts with obvious disdain that she has never been a groupie. Groupies - specifically, women who can't resist sleeping with rock stars - have a bad name, but I've always gotten the sense that it's mostly other women who have given it to them.