"Rebel Heart" by Bebe Buell

The beauty who bedded Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Elvis Costello and other rock stars insists that she's no groupie.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sept. 11, 2001 | 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. 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. 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. "Todd would always be fucking these nondescript road tramps," she writes, "whereas I would be fucking major icons."

Sisterhood, as they say, is powerful.

You could argue that the whole idea of groupiedom is steeped in retrograde sexual politics, and maybe you'd be right. 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. 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. 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 makes for a numbing cocktail.

And that's a bummer. 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.)

Buell 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. Her parents gave her a Volkswagen convertible for her 17th birthday: "I was dangerous and damn good-looking. 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. Buell does right in acknowledging her beauty upfront. 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. 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.

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