"Todd produced that song once by a Canadian band. There is not a day you suddenly decide, I'm an adult now. But people grow and change and learn new things every day. "I don't think anyone is ever a full-grown adult," she says. The only child of model Bebe Buell, a woman infamous in the rock world for loving her share of front men, Tyler for the first few years of her life considered singer-producer Todd Rundgren her father. "I've felt like an adult since the day I was born," Tyler says when I ask her how her unconventional upbringing affected her. "I've never met another teenager that I can say that about." "It's an odd thing to say, but I got the impression that she was a person," says rocker turned actress Deborah Harry, who also co-starred with Tyler in Heavy. "I kept watching her and going, 'Was I like that when I was that young? Was I that assured?' I just hope she doesn't get frightened later on." "Liv has a bit of that." Acclaimed for her co-starring role with Tyler in last year's art-house hit Heavy, Winters got a close-up look at the young woman's instinctive talent. 'George Stevens once told me that acting in films is 'talk soft and think loud,'" says Shelley Winters. "I want to be," she finally says, yawning, "a happy old woman." Her lashes-waiting for the tremor of inspiration-remain as still as a row of commas typed on a wordless page. "So, I guess my first question for you should be: What do you want to be when you grow up?" Satisfied, she plops back down and takes another long, deep drag. Here, let's fix these blinds." She gets up and adjusts the wooden slats of the old Venetians. "Well, this is such a gross light to smoke in," she says. "Have you ever thought about stopping that?" I ask. "A white 50s brassiere under a black 90s T-shirt." "You've just summed up Liv Tyler," I tell her. I'm wearing my white pointy bra from Inventing the Abbotts, actually," she says, invoking director Pat O'Connor's upcoming film based on a Sue Miller short story, in which Tyler plays one of the wealthy Abbott sisters. "What do you mean?" she asks, taken aback. "You do seem to have filled out since Stealing Beauty," I say, referring to her breakthrough performance in that Bernardo Bertolucci film set in Tuscany, in which she and everything around her seemed a bit overripe.
"My major spurt of growth happened the second I stopped modeling," she says, remembering that couple of years between 14 and 16 when she graced many magazine pages. "It certainly hasn't stunted your growth." "I know I shouldn't smoke, but they're so yummy," she confesses. "I just finished reading Other Voices, Other Rooms, by Truman Capote, though." Wearing a black T-shirt, black jeans, and tattered black Converse All Stars, Tyler plops down cross-legged in a velvet wing chair, throws a half-empty pack of Natural American Spirits on the coffee table, and tells me how much she loved the Capote book, about an exotic 13-year-old who discovers his longlost father. "Never have read that," she says, beckoning the yo-yo back. I take it from her, and am startled when a yo-yo, hidden behind the apple and attached to one of her shockingly long fingers, suddenly unspools. Tyler smiles and thrusts the other apple at me.
There's a lovely line in it: 'All orphans were at once wondering and stoic-at one moment loving everything too much, the next folding back from it, tightly as hard green buds growing in the wrong direction, closing as they go.'" There's one called 'Moon Lake,' about a summer camp for orphaned teenage girls. "It's a group of interconnected stories titled The Golden Apples. Tyler silently lifts one of the apples to her famous lips and chomps off almost half of it in one giant bite. "Ever read that book by Eudora Welty?" I ask.
She offers me a choice: in each of her outstretched hands is a crisp golden apple. Tyler walks through the door to my room at the Chateau Marmont and, true to her amazing form, says not a word.
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"There is no act going on with her," he continues, having cast the precocious 19-year-old as the female lead in his feature directorial debut, That Thing You Do! "She is not pulling a sultry power trip with you the way a lot of very beautiful women can-or have learned how to do." Like everybody else in Hollywood, he's talking about Liv Tyler. 'She kind of stuns you when she walks through the door, before she's ever said a word," says Tom Hanks.