Bebe Buell explains why Patti Smith wanted to pose in Playboy
Patti Smith has always been forced to fight against the odds in the music industry and, as a result, has overcome countless obstacles on her journey. Sexism is still rampant in entertainment today, but the difficulties were significantly more extreme when Smith started out.
Smith was a post-war baby, and nobody expected her to become a professional musician. In the early years of her career, Smith needed to work considerably harder than her male peers purely because of her gender, which was enough to make people write her off. Staggeringly, being a woman even proved difficult when recruiting bandmates.
Reflecting on such issues, Smith told The Guardian in 2021: “When I grew up in the early ’60s, girls were supposed to be mothers, secretaries, maybe hairdressers. Even in the early ’70s, when I started playing rock and roll, there weren’t a lot of girls taking an aggressive stance, playing feedback, you know. I had trouble recruiting guitarists to play with me. They’d come in, see it was with a girl, and just leave.”
Therefore, Smith’s approach to feminism has seen her take ownership of her body rather than allowing others to sexualise her. She played an integral role in the decision made by her friend, Bebe Buell, who agreed to take part in a photoshoot with Playboy. Buell later claimed Smith would have also said yes if the magazine asked her to participate.
Similarly to Smith, Buell arrived in New York with a dream of becoming an artist. However, her life took a detour when she became a model, and Buell’s centrefold appearance in Playboy in 1974 sky-rocketed her fame. Initially, she was reluctant to be shot by the magazine, as Buell was accustomed to working with high-fashion publications, but Smith convinced her to accept the offer.
In the book, Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Buell recalled (via DangerousMinds): “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.”
Buell continued: “So when Playboy asked me to pose, Patti said, ‘I wish Playboy would ask me, I’d do it’. Patti had really big boobs, a lot of people don’t realise 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.'”
In the same interview, Buell also detailed Smith’s definition of feminism and explained: “Patty’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.”
Smith was ahead of the times again, and her version of feminism later came to the forefront. In her mind, featuring in Playboy was a clever method of fighting against the system and showing women could be anything they wanted to be.
