LIV in the Fast Lane
Actress Liv Tyler wraps her inner charm in men’s outerwear
By Rich Cohen
Liv Tyler was right about one thing: Her father was a rock star. She just had the wrong rock star. Until she was 10, Liv thought Todd Rundgren was her old man. When Liv's mother, the former fashion model Bebe Buell, was pregnant, Steven Tyler, on the road with Aerosmith, was lost in a haze of drugs and alcohol, and Buell wanted something better for her little girl. "Steven was using lots of drugs, and that scared her," says Liv, who is now 17. So Buell moved to Maine and raised Liv as the daughter of Rundgren, whom Buell had once dated. "She did all these things to protect me."
Liv, dressed in a T-shirt and blue denim overalls, is sitting on a couch in Manhattan's West Village, discussing the difference between her coming of age and her father's. 'Things were different for him," she says. "When he was my age, it was just the beginning: the beginning of rock & roll, of glamour, of fucking sex. And all I'm left with are the decisions and the consequences. I hope my decisions are better."
Liv, a model turned aspiring actress, is tall and lanky. Her long dark hair is piled in a neat librarian's bun. At times she has the look of somebody's kid sister, but she can also look astonishingly sexy. In her, the almost cruel features of her father have been remade; the angular face is here, only it's softer, even elegant. She has also inherited her father's wide-set eyes and the wide mouth that - when she smiles - threatens to consume her entire face.
When Liv was in fifth grade, she and Buell went to see Rundgren perform. After the concert, Steven Tyler, who happened to be at the show, came backstage. Liv now recalls the special attention Tyler paid her, how he made her feel important. "That's how Steven re-entered our lives," she says. Soon, Tyler began coming around to see Liv, who was puzzled by the attention. And she began to notice things. "Like that we had the same legs," she says. "Then I met his other daughter, my sister, who is about a year younger than me, and we were like identical twins. So I began to know. And I went to Mom and asked her if Steven Tyler was my father."
The following year, Liv and her mother moved to New York, where Liv began her life as the daughter of Steven Tyler - and started staking her own claim to celebrity. When Liv was 14, model Paulina Porizkova took her picture, which wound up as a full-page spread in Interview magazine. It was then a short trip from a private high school, where she was passing adolescence, to Madison Avenue, where she began appearing, scantily clad, in fashion magazines.
"When I began to model, things got weird at school," Liv says. "All of a sudden I wasn't there. I was traveling, and the other kids thought I had these special privileges. But to me, they had the special privileges: They could go to school all day and go home and watch TV and do their thing, while I was all over the place."
Though she is not yet of drinking age (not even close), Liv surrounds herself with the accouterments of adulthood. “I’m running out to get a cappuccino," she says, standing. "Anyone want a cappuccino?" When she has something important to discuss, she pulls on her cigarette, exhales a little, says what's on her mind ("College? What, am I going to go off to a dorm and live on campus? I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer"), then exhales the rest of the smoke, like drawing an exclamation point in the air.
Last spring, Liv teamed up with her father (the real one) to film "Crazy," an Aerosmith video in which she plays a nymphet fleeing Catholic school in a blue convertible - a video that with its sexual content gives new life to the term family values "I understand why people might have a problem with it," says Liv, "but I have no problem with it, and Steven has no problem with it, and if other people have a problem with it, it's their problem."
Most recently, Liv has made the move to Hollywood, appearing opposite Richard Dreyfuss in the psychological thriller Silent Fall; she has also completed a film tentatively titled Upstate Story, in which she is cast as Lemonhead Evan Dando's girlfriend. Despite the distance crossed since her days in Maine, she is still identified on her birth certificate and driver's license as Liv Rundgren.
Today, Liv shares an apartment with her mother and her stepfather, Coyote, in lower Manhattan. "Coyote is amazing," she says, playing with her hair. "He really listens." Coyote is 27, and Liv finds it remarkable that her stepfather is the same age as many of her friends. "It seems like everyone is in their 20s," she says, crossing her legs. Her best friends are Marlon Richards (Keith's son) and Marlon's fiancee, Lucie de la Falaise. According to Liv, since she and Marlon are both spawns of rock, they understand each other the way no one else can.
"We've both seen and experienced things a lot of other people haven't," Liv says, drawing on a cigarette. "Insane parents and drugs and rock & roll." She grimaces and releases the smoke, like something she saw in a movie.
Liv recently quit modeling to concentrate on acting. 'It was just too external for me," she says, waving the cigarette in the air. "And I feel for the young girls who dream of being models. You're a millionaire and have everything, but what do you do with yourself? You try to stay grounded, but it's hard when you're young; everyone wants to be your friend. But why? Because you’re pretty? So you have to keep the radar up.”
Liv's radar told her to leave all that behind, to explore the internal instead, the vagaries of human character. She is now at work on her third film, Empire, by Allan Moyle (Pump Up the Volume). And though she expects to spend the rest of her life acting, who can say for sure? Liv pulls the pins from her hair, and it falls down around her shoulders, framing her face.
"Sometimes - the way they make you up – you feel like a drag queen," Liv says, blowing a cloud of smoke in the air. "Sometimes you feel like you're 80 years old.”
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