The Erotic Images of Punk: How Patti Smith convinced Bebe Buell to pose nude for Playboy
In 1972, Bebe Buell moved from the sleepy town of Portsmouth, Virginia and hurled herself headfirst into the wild side of New York. She had been recruited by Eileen Ford on a modelling contract and quickly became a notorious presence in the happening hip scene of the day. She dated Todd Rundgren in an on-off whirlwind, and during those off periods (and possibly the on periods too), she also dated Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Jimmy Page, Paul Cowsills and gave birth to Liv Tyler after a brief encounter with Steven Tyler.
During her early days in New York, under the stewardship of Rundgren – who she calls her favourite performer – Buell set about pursuing a recording career too. It was through this avenue that she met fellow music hopeful Patti Smith. For the most part, the established male patriarchy of rock ‘n’ roll hadn’t taken notice of them yet. Alas, as Buell commented: “I did Playboy [after that] the rock stars came-a-hunting.”
Her friend Patti Smith was instrumental in her taking this leap. As Buell reveals in the punk history report Please Kill Me: “The person that talked me in to posing for Playboy magazine was Patti Smith. At the time I was doing well as a cover-girl model for Revlon, Intimate, and Wella. I had four or five big accounts. But my role models weren’t models. I admired girls like Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, those were the girls I looked up to and aspired to be like.”
So, Buell set her eyes on grabbing attention within the music scene. “When Playboy asked me to pose, Patti said, ‘I wish Playboy would ask me, I’d do it’,” Buell recalled. “Patti had really big boobs, a lot of people don’t realize that. She was extremely well-endowed and she always thought that kind of stuff was really cool. She showed me pictures of Brigitte Bardot, Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch, and all these Playboy pictures. She’d say, ‘Being in Playboy is like Coca-Cola. It’s Andy Warhol. It’s American, you know, it’s part of America, this magazine.’ She said, ‘Do it. It’ll be great. It’ll fuck up that fashion thing’.”
This viewpoint was all part of Smith’s philosophy that the youth of America had to take autonomy over their own futures and strive for liberation rather than letting the shackles of a rock ‘n’ roll’s fading dream set in. “Patti’s idea of feminism seemed to me to be about not being a victim–-that women should make choices in full control of their faculties and make a rebel stand,” Buell added.
“Posing for Playboy was a rebel move,” she continued. “It almost ruined my career as far as legitimate Fashion work went. The only magazines that would book me after that were like Cosmopolitan and stuff. I lost all my bread-and-butter clients. I lost Avon and Butterick. All the straight fashion magazines stopped booking me.” Ultimately asking: “How could I regret it?”
Following that famed shoot in 1974 where she was named November’s ‘Playmate of the Month’, her music career was put on hold as modelling took over, only now she was able to usher it towards the direction she desired. And with the rock star “a-hunting”, she was eventually able to use her prominent position to release her debut four-song EP in 1981.
