Christie Brinkley dances as Billy Joel performs ‘Uptown Girl’
Billy Joel’s muse and original “Uptown Girl” Christie Brinkley, danced as he performed the song he wrote about her.
Though this is not the first book with Christie Brinkley’s name on it, it’s the first one that tells the model’s life story.
Brinkley’s past published work includes guidebooks of beauty and fitness secrets, but in “Uptown Girl” (out now from HarperCollins), she brings readers across a tumultuous early childhood with her biological father, her time in Paris just before she was discovered, her decades-long modeling career and her relationship with Billy Joel.
“Uptown Girl” packs a lot in, recounting the 71-year-olds’ four marriages, including the 1994 helicopter crash that led to her third marriage to Richard Taubman. The memoir also offers a first-person perspective into the notorious “model wars” that shaped modern-day agency practices.
Christie Brinkley divorced Billy Joel after drunken disappearances: ‘Booze was his other woman’
Brinkley and Joel were together for 11 years. They remain friends, and share a daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, 39. Despite tabloid rumors speculating, Brinkley writes she’s “always believed him” when he said he never had an affair. What broke their marriage, was his drinking, which Brinkley refers to as “his other woman.”
In “Uptown Girls,” Brinkley writes that Joel’s drinking got worse as his career accelerated. He would disappear from family dinner outings to drink at nearby bars and sometimes wouldn’t come home for days, she says. In one instance, Joel threw a chaise longue through a patio door after Brinkley locked the doors to the house, she writes. In another, just before Brinkley asked for a divorce, Joel had a “delusional” drunk outburst, accusing his bandmates of eating a pot of pasta that he had just eaten himself, she says.
Brinkley writes that she “suffered through these incidents alone” because she feared calling the police would lead to a media frenzy.
“I did everything for our marriage, constantly working to make myself, our home, and everything around us into whatever he could possibly want or hope for. I continually told him how much I loved him, making sure he always felt adored and appreciated, because he was,” Brinkley writes. “But his drinking was bigger than the both of us – booze was the other woman, and it was beginning to seem that, he preferred to be with ‘her’ rather than with me.”
Christie Brinkley had no idea who Billy Joel was when they met
Brinkley and Joel met at a dive bar in St. Barts. Though she immediately found him charming, she writes that she had never heard of him, even calling him “Billy Joe” to his face. Luckily, he found it funny, and it became Brinkley’s nickname for him over more than a decade together.
While everyone at the bar referred to him as the “Piano Man,” she thought this meant he “must want to play the piano while others sang.” So when he asked for song requests, she offered herself up to sing “Girl from Ipanema,” “indisputably disappointing the crowd” of Joel fans.
Next in line to sing with Billy Joel at this St. Barts bar? A young Whitney Houston, who asked if Joel would play “Respect” by Aretha Franklin.
Dark side of the modeling industry: Diet fads, Frank Stallone comments on her weight
Though Brinkley is heralded as one of the most famous models of the late 20th century, she writes that she “didn’t think I had what it took to be a model” because she’d been made fun of in childhood for being “chubby” and having “chipmunk cheeks.”
She tried diet fad after diet fad, including only eating fish after Ford Model agency founder Eileen Ford told her to, she says. She includes snippets of old journal entries with her meals, saying they read “like a registry of self-imposed starvation.”
In one instance, when she photographed a boxing match ringside, she recalls Frank Stallone telling her, “You could be really cute if you lost a few pounds.”
‘Uptown Girl’ isn’t just about Christie Brinkley (or Elle Macpherson)
Contrary to popular belief – and despite her starring role in the music video – Brinkley isn’t the original “Uptown Girl” Joel wrote the song about. And though many also believe it’s about his ex, model Elle Macpherson, the song isn’t about her either, Brinkley writes in her memoir.
Joel started writing “Uptown Girl” about several fictional, fantasy girls after a mystery woman started calling him (and a handful of other musicians), talking about how as a “poor, imprisoned rich girl,” she lived in an Upper East Side penthouse and was too beautiful to be seen on the streets with common men. Joel shelved the lyrics until he started dating Brinkley, at which point he said he’d found his “real uptown girl.”
“I’m still an uptown girl in many ways,” Brinkley writes in her memoir. “I’m still the woman whom Billy first met at a dive bar in St. Barts, the one who likes sophistication, culture, and art, but who also likes to take risks, try new things, and shake her hair out on the back of a bike every once in a while.”
How local high school father broke news of Peter Cook’s affair
Brinkley and her ex-husband Peter Cook divorced in 2008 after Cook admitted to cheating on her with an 18-year-old, which Brinkley writes she found out about from the girl’s father, a local police officer.
After giving a commencement speech at Southampton High School in 2006, Brinkley writes that a man approached her and said: “That arrogant husband of yours has been having an affair with my teenage daughter, and he won’t knock it off.”
It took four years before Brinkley and Cook concluded their media-frenzied court battle over custody of their kids.
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Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected].
