Who Is Bebe Buell? Everything to Know About Liv Tyler’s Mom

Bebe Buell is the central figure in one of rock music’s most notorious paternity controversies.

The one-time Playboy Playmate dated Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren in the 1970s, with both men believing they were the father of her daughter Liv Tyler at different points.

Buell kept Liv’s paternity a secret for the first few years of her daughter’s life due to concerns about Steven’s admitted drug use at the time. When the truth was revealed in 1988 that Steven was Liv’s biological father, Rundgren endured a painful disconnection from the surrogate daughter he’d raised.

Aside from her incredible paternity revelation, Buell dated many other iconic rock stars and developed a music career of her own.

Keep scrolling for a look back at Buell’s eventful life, famous romances and the paternity revelation that changed her daughter Liv’s life:

Early Years

Buell was just out of high school when she was discovered by the prestigious Eileen Ford modeling agency and whisked away to New York City. At age 21, she posed for Playboy and was selected as the Playmate of the Month for November 1974.

A few years later, Buell made her music debut with the release of a four-song E.P. called Covers Girl in 1981. The short-form record was produced by the powerhouse duo of The Cars’ Ric Ocasek and “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” singer Rick Derringer. Throughout the ‘80s, Buell was a part of bands B—Sides, from 1980 to 1985, and The Gargoyles, from 1985 to 1991.

Early Dating Life

While Buell’s most notable relationships were with Steven and Rundgren, she was also linked to rock gods Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Elvis Costello, among others.

Buell rejected calling herself a “rock groupie,” instead referring to herself and others with a similar romantic background as “rock girlfriends.”

“My reputation is so overblown. I can count the number of men I’ve been with on two hands; it just seems like a lot because you recognize their names,” she told New York Magazine in 2011. “I consider ‘groupie’ a sexist term, and I think it’s misused. I was a free agent. I was a very independent, successful girl. I made my own money, I bought my own airline tickets. When I got a paycheck, I went to Bergdorf and I bought my own clothes. There were no rock stars buying me my clothes.”

The model confessed that there were downsides to dating some of rock music’s most eligible bachelors during the zenith of their fame.

“I think every little girl would like exclusivity, but that wasn’t how it was. If you had a jealous streak, the ‘70s wasn’t your era,” she said in 2011. “And I figured if he was going to date, I would date, too. I had lovely boyfriends. For your first three boyfriends to be Mick Jagger, Todd Rundgren and David Bowie, I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that.”

Her exploits in the ‘70s rock music scene partially inspired Kate Hudson’s character Penny Lane in the Oscar-winning 2000 movie Almost Famous, according to writer-director Cameron Crowe.

Steven Tyler and Todd Rundgren

Buell was in an on-off romance with Rundgren for most of the 1970s, but they went through periods of estrangement as well. During one such period, Buell had a fling with Aerosmith frontman Tyler.

In a 2018 Rolling Stone interview, Buell opened up about her awkward first meeting with Tyler when Aerosmith were considering working with Rundgren.

“Todd and I were flown up to Boston when Aerosmith were considering Todd as producer,” she explained. “It was around ’74 and they flew us to this outdoor show. It was pouring down rain and mud everywhere and I was dressed in a long white dress and espadrilles and didn’t want to step over the mud.”

She continued, “Todd was going, ‘Bebe, stop it.’ Steven could see what was going on and he comes leaping over, throws his coat over the puddle and picks me up and carries me across. I thought it was hilarious, and very gallant. Like a knight in shining leopard.”

Buell told The Believer in 2017 that it was not unusual for couples in the rock world to have open relationships in that era.

“I was never married [at the time]. That’s not a judgment,” she said. “I just never saw myself as a taken woman very often, even when I was with Todd all those years. We always saw, in private and not-so-private, other people. It was the era. It was the time.”

Buell went on, “Maybe if we had been married, it would have been different. But I find that those kinds of relationships tend to be very damaging to your psyche. I don’t care what anyone says. There’s nothing abnormal about not feeling OK, or feeling jealous, when the person you are with is with another person. It hurts a lot. When you’re a young girl you might act things out in a different way. My way of acting out was, ‘Well, OK, I’ll date Mick Jagger, then.’”

Buell experienced an unplanned pregnancy during her brief time with Steven. The model chose to conceal the truth about daughter Liv’s paternity and asked Rundgren to sign her birth certificate since they’d recently got back together. As such, her daughter was named Liv Rundgren on her birth certificate in 1977.

According to a 2019 interview, Buell felt that it was best to conceal the truth from Steven initially because she was worried about his drug use at the time. Steven has been open about his struggles with addiction, writing in his 2011 memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? about abusing cocaine at the height of his troubles.

“Doctors said [cocaine] was not addictive . . . it was habituating,” Steven wrote. “They didn’t know at the time that the drug would eventually take a sharp turn after a certain day. Blow, once the life of the party, became the stuff of fear and loathing, the source of devious and secretive behavior, and the mother of all lies. ‘What, me? No, I don’t have any!’ ‘Sorry, ran out, bummer, man!’ ‘Nope. Hey, I gotta go to the bathroom.’ And that’s where the rock ‘n’ roll bathroom came from. That’s when people started keeping stuff in two pockets — you had your courtesy bindle you’d share, your sock. And thus sin and doubt entered our happy world.”

Liv went the first 8 or 9 years of her life without suspecting the truth about her father, according to her own estimation in a 2025 appearance on the podcast “Sibling Revelry.” Buell told Rolling Stone in 2018 that Rundgren learned the truth about Liv’s paternity much earlier.

“We made a pact that he would be Liv’s father and if it ever became an issue, we’d tell her at 18,” she said. “But fate had something else up its sleeve and she had a hunch as early as 9 years old, but it wasn’t until August 1988 when she turned 11 that she put it together and confronted me. It’s not like I could lie to her.”

Paternity Revelation

In his memoir, Steven wrote that he first learned about Liv around “Christmas of 1980” when he had an unexpected visit from Buell before an Aerosmith show.

“[Bebe had] gotten pregnant in Germany and we’d somehow broken up after the tour,” he clarified. “I guess I was in denial about it being my child, and she’d had just about enough of me and decided Todd Rundgren would be a better father. Bebe showed me pictures of baby Liv and we both cried before I went on.”

Steven got sober in the mid-1980s and reached out to Buell to make amends. As he started spending time around Buell’s family, Liv noticed her physical similarities with Aerosmith’s frontman.

Liv recalled on The Jonathan Ross Show in 2015 that she finally realized Steven was her father when she met her half-sister, Mia Tyler, at a concert in 1988. Steven had welcomed Mia with his first wife, Cyrinda Foxe, in 1978, just one year after Liv’s birth.

“I kind of figured it out [that Steven is my father] because he looks exactly like me and I have sister, named Mia, who is a year younger than me,” she said. “I saw her, standing on the side of the stage at a concert, and literally, it was like looking at a twin. She looked exactly like me.”

Liv continued, “I looked at my mom and she had tears in her eyes. I kind of put it all together.”

Liv quickly bonded with Steven while simultaneously experiencing a falling out with Rundgren. The “Just One Victory” singer confessed in a 2019 interview that it was very hard for him to see Liv and Steven bond so quickly.

“There is a happy ending there,” Rundgren insisted. “Just talking about the way everything came about, what happened during the relationship. It was always the one subject in my life that I was most sensitive about; my relationship with Bebe, and such. For years, I was very upset about the fact that she essentially forgot that I was her father. Things turned out to be a lot of fun for her. I got completely sidelined for a while, and I got bent out of shape about it. That doesn’t bother me now, but yes, it was tough to write about something that had been bothersome for so long.”

Liv acknowledged on “Sibling Revelry” in 2025 that she regretted the way Rundgren was treated in the aftermath of her paternity discovery.

“I think it’s probably still very hard and painful,” Liv told hosts Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. “I don’t speak to him enough, I love him and I have brothers from him and I had a whole family with them. But I was a kid, so it was really hard because he was mad at my mom and then suddenly Steven was there and we did a paternity test and it was positive and so we moved to New York. I think I was 11 or 12.”

Rundgren has sons Rex, born 1980, and Randy, born 1985, from his relationship with Karen Darvin as well as sons Keoni, born 1991, and Rebop, born 1992, from his marriage to Michele Gray.

Later Years

Buell was married twice following her 1978 split from Rundgren. She wed Canadian musician Coyote Shivers in 1992 and they divorced in 1999. She tied the knot with Jim Wallerstein, vocalist and guitarist of the alternative rock group Das Damen, in 2002.

After launching her own music career in the 1980s, Buell largely stepped back from performing in the 1990s to manage actress Charis Michelsen, who was featured in Martin Scorsese‘s 1999 drama Bringing Out the Dead and the Michael Douglas—starring comedy Wonder Boys.

She returned to music to front the ​​Bebe Buell Band in the 2000s. Buell’s most recent studio album, Baring It All: Greetings from Nashbury Park, was released in 2018.

She spoke to The Believer in 2017 about where she stood with both Steven and Rundgreen 20 years after Liv’s paternity came to light.

“I know now why I didn’t marry Todd Rundgren and I didn’t marry Steven Tylery,” she said. “I know now why they have the roles they have in my life now, as opposed to then. I thought it would be Todd that would be my lifelong friend. That turned out to be Steven, who everybody thought would be the big f**kup. He’s turned out to be the one who’s done the most work on himself and has come the fullest circle and is the best person I know.”