Christie Brinkley, one of the most recognizable faces in modeling, offers a revealing glimpse into the challenges of being one of the world’s original supermodels in her new memoir, “Uptown Girl.”
Gracing the cover of more than 500 magazines and appearing in memorable movies like the 1983 hit film, “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” Brinkley’s career spans five decades, and she delves into much of it in her new book.
“I just want to tell some stories,” Brinkley tells TODAY.com in a sit-down interview. “I hope it’ll be a nice diversion in a world that can use a good book every now and then, take you away on a little adventure.”
From being discovered at a payphone in Paris to being kicked out of Frank Sinatra’s hotel room, “Uptown Girl” offers insight behind Brinkley’s upbringing in Southern California and her ascent to the top of the modeling world. The book also explores her four marriages (and divorces), including 11 years she spent with Billy Joel.
It’s the music legend who penned “Uptown Girl,” the song that inspired the memoir’s title, which has become Brinkley’s enduring nickname — in spite of the fact that, according to the supermodel, it wasn’t initially written for her.
Brinkley writes in her memoir that it started out as a song for a “mystery girl” Joel had been having phone conversations with, but when his relationship with Brinkley began, he finished it in her honor. Their relationship was then immortalized in the hit song’s iconic music video, in which Brinkley appears in.
‘Dancing in the kitchen’ with Billy Joel
In “Uptown Girl,” Brinkley, 71, opens up about her various heartbreaks, difficult early childhood with an abusive father and the helicopter accident that almost claimed her life in 1994. However, the model says that opening up about her marriage to Joel was the most difficult part of penning the memoir.
“The hardest thing to include was criticism of Billy, because I do care about my friendship with him,” she says of the chapters that reveal Joel’s heavy drinking and suggested affairs, which has been making headlines since her book came out.
“In the book, I feel like I balanced, very much, about how happy we were and how joy-filled our days were,” she says of their marriage. “It was literally dancing in the kitchen as we cooked, singing together, and making each other laugh. It was a beautiful, wonderful relationship.”
According to the memoir, that relationship became strained, in part, after Joel sued Frank Weber, his former manager, for having allegedly siphoned off his profits. It was a betrayal that Brinkley writes left Joel “withdrawn and stressed” as singer-songwriter felt immense pressure to recoup his financial loss.
“He was going through extraordinary circumstances in his life, things most people wouldn’t ever have to deal with,” she describes.
Despite the vulnerable nature of the admissions, Brinkley says they were important to include in the memoir. “I did have to go there because that was the reality.”
Brinkley tells TODAY.com that Joel had given his blessing to talk candidly about the ups and downs of their longtime relationship.
“He said, ‘Just say what you need to say,'” Brinkley recalls. “And I think that’s part of his healing, so I applaud him for all of that. It takes a lot of courage.”
The new memoir reveals some darker times in their relationship, including instances of Brinkley waking up in the middle of the night to discover Joel was missing, then him returning home in the wee hours of the morning after being out drinking all night.
She also writes about the growing distance in their marriage that ultimately left her feeling “lonely, despite the fact that he was right there.” It was a loneliness so pervasive that Brinkley was thinking about Joel as she boarded a helicopter in Colorado, shortly after their separation in 1994, and wondered if the crooner would be worried about her embarking on a trip to go heli-skiing.
“For a moment I thought about my husband, Billy, whom I’d split with again, and hoping this trip to Telluride would wake him up to the reality that he might actually lose me,” she writes.
What she didn’t know was that shortly after, the helicopter would crash into the San Juan mountains, leaving Brinkley and several companions temporarily stranded until they were rescued.
Though Joel ultimately flew to her side and jetted her back to Long Island aboard a private plane, her dream of their reunion was dashed when she overheard him on the phone saying to an unknown caller, ‘No, don’t worry. I’m not going back to her. I just need to see her through this.'”
The revelation brought home the fact that their marriage was over. Two weeks later, they announced their divorce and as she penned in her memoir, “the dream broke apart like debris.”
Despite their divorce, Brinkley tells TODAY.com that they still remain friends.
“He’s a very loyal guy. He’s loyal to his friends, he’s generous. He just had a lot of stresses on him at the point when we were together and it just kind of came crashing down on us.”
‘I was raised to be grateful’
Outside of her marriage, the helicopter crash changed her life in other ways.
“I went through a phase of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she says of the accident that left her clinging to the side of a mountain amid a pile of helicopter wreckage.
“One of the hallmarks is bad decision-making. And I made quite a few, which I lay out in the book and that chapter was hard to write just because I didn’t want to think about any of (the helicopter crash). I didn’t want to go back to that place. At the time when it happened, I actually thought it was so awful, I wanted to purge it from my body and from my memory banks.”
While she’s endured her fair share of trauma, Brinkley remains the eternal optimist, both in love and life.
“I was raised in a very positive household, so I was raised to be grateful and counting my blessings and to know the good things that I have, no matter what,” she says.
Among those blessings are Brinkley’s three children: Alexa Ray Joel, 39, her daughter with Joel, as well as her son, Jack Brinkley-Cook, 29, and other daughter, Sailor Brinkley-Cook, 26, both of whom she shares with her ex-husband Peter Cook.
While appearing on the April 28 episode of TODAY, Brinkley shared that out of her three children, her oldest daughter is the one who’s read most of her memoir and that she loves it.
“She was kind of blown away by it,” said Brinkley.
As for the other two, the model joked that her younger children “skimmed through” it and said, “We know her!” but otherwise, “I don’t think they understand the reason to read it.”
‘This is not a revenge novel’
Though Brinkley has released two other books, including a 1983 fitness book and “Timeless Beauty,” a wellness guide published in 2015, “Uptown Girl” is her first memoir, and she wants readers to take something positive away from her experiences.
“I just really hope people understand that the book is much more than rehashing divorces,” she explains, referring to her other marriages to Jean-Francois Allaux, Richard Taubman and Cook, all of which ended in divorce.
“This is not a revenge novel. It’s filled with joy and when there are bad moments, it’s sort of how to keep going and not let them pull you down,” she says. “And how to stay positive and maybe learn something from it or let it propel you into someplace that you didn’t dare go before.”
