Tyler’s identity crisis

Actress Liv Tyler grew up without knowing her father’s identity, says Susan Dominus in the London Daily Telegraph. Her mother, fashion model Bebe Buell, didn’t want her daughter to have any contact with

her real father, the singer Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, who at the time was a serious drug addict. So she let Tyler think her dad was Buell’s then-companion, singer Todd Rundgren. But then, when Tyler was 11, she met her real father after a concert. From just looking at him—his face, his hands, even the way he picked his cuticles—she figured out the truth, which her mother reluctantly confirmed. The revelation deeply shook Tyler. “As a child, I didn’t understand why that would happen—how that could happen,” she says. She was angrier at her mother for deceiving her than with either of the two men. But over the years Tyler, now 30, came to believe her mother meant well but was simply overwhelmed by a difficult personal life. “There she was at 22, not as worldly and experienced as I was at that age. She had no husband. She had two men who didn’t really want her—I don’t mean that in the worst way, but she wasn’t really with them—and a baby. She did the best she could.”

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