Christie Brinkley has lived through enough for at least two books.
The cover girl and (and iconic Cover Girl model) survived a helicopter crash — and only got back on a chopper to rush to her daughter’s side after a medical emergency. She married four times and has endured heartbreak that left her “crushed.”
Out of all her exes, Brinkley, now 71, remains closest with second husband Billy Joel — and even named her new memoir “Uptown Girl” after the 1983 hit song he famously wrote about her.
The couple were married from 1985 to 1994, and share a daughter, singer Alexa Ray, 39. But, as Brinkley told Page Six, it was the Piano Man’s drinking that ruined their marriage.
“If there wasn’t that issue … ,” she mused. “I do think that we were probably really soulmates, it was an amazing time of my life.
“I had so much fun. We were such nomads, gypsies — just between his job and mine, we were seeing the world … it was wonderful, really wonderful.”
But Brinkley writes that Joel would disappear for days while boozing. He even left Alexa Ray’s fifth birthday party and went missing for two days, prompting the model to have “visions of his car wrapped around a tree” and developing “a panic I couldn’t shake.” (Joel did end up running his Mercedes into a tree in 2003.)
The singer once went missing during their Thanksgiving meal. There was also the time Brinkley locked the singer out of the couple’s hotel suite in Hawaii after a friend told her there were photos of Joel out with an Australian actress.
He returned “visibly and audibly drunk” and, Brinkley writes, picked up a chaise longue and threw it through the patio doors, shattering the glass.
The tipping point, she writes, came when Joel hosted his band at their East Hamptons home for a rehearsal — and drunkenly accused them of eating his pasta, when he had eaten it all himself.
“He was acting delusional in a way I’d never seen before,” Brinkley said, revealing that she asked Joel for a divorce the next day.
“To be clear, I never wanted to end things with Billy,” she said. “I read every self-help book I could find … we went to see a string of psychiatrists, psychologists and other medical doctors.”
But, she writes, “The 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 me.”
Joel, now 75, went to rehab for the first time in 1992 and got sober, then returned to rehab in 2005 after relapsing.
In 2023, he told the Los Angeles Times that he stopped drinking “a couple of years ago.” He’s now married to fourth wife Alexis Roderick, with whom he shares young daughters Della Rose and Remy Anne.
“He’s the father of my firstborn and we spent such great formative years together. And I’ll love him forever,” Brinkley told me. “Things just reached a point where I knew I couldn’t live with him.”
She did speak to him before writing her book.
“Billy said, ‘Go ahead and tell your story… the good, the bad, whatever you need to say,’” Brinkley revealed. “Leaving Billy wasn’t easy for me to do — and it’s not easy to say anything bad about somebody that I hold in such high regard … [although] I don’t think it’s bad.”
In fact, she wants her story to help people dealing with addiction issues.
“When you’re in the throes of a drinking addiction, you don’t remember what you did,” Brinkley explained. “You wake up the next day and It’s the person who is counting on you who knows what happened.”
“And it’s brave of Billy to say to people around him, ‘You can speak freely, tell your story.’ And I think that’s part of his recovery.”
The elegant blonde, who grew up in Los Angeles, found fame after moving to Paris age 18 when her first love cheated on her.
“Heartbreak propelled me and I thought. ‘I’ll show him, I’m off to Paris … California is not big enough for the two of us!’”
Soon after arriving, she fell in love with artist Jean François Allaux and they set up home in a tiny apartment without a shower, before she got discovered as a model. The couple wed in 1975 and divorced in 1981.
Brinkley was then left devastated by the death of boyfriend Olivier Chandon de Brailles, the 27-year-old heir to Moët & Chandon champagne fortune, in a racing accident in 1983.
She met Joel at a dive bar in St. Barts later that same year.
While in the midst of her 1994 breakup with Joel, Brinkley took a trip to Telluride with Alexa Ray and was invited to go heli-skiing by her host, real-estate developer Rick Taubman. Joining her in the helicopter were Sandra Carradine, the ex-wife of actor Keith Carradine, and her son Cade.
The model describes in the book how the helicopter “just fell from the sky,” plunging into freefall from 300 feet — and when it crashed, her ski boot got caught in the wreckage, dragging her down the mountain toward a sheer granite cliff. Miraculously, the chopper was stopped by a wall of snow. Later, it was reported the crash was caused mainly by the helicopter taking a sharp turn at 12,800 feet.
Brinkley told me she had sprinkled “magic dirt” from Chimayo, New Mexico, in the helicopter before takeoff. Later on, rescuers found her charm filled with the dirt among the wreckage.
The model said she still has PTSD, adding: “If somebody says ‘really tell me the story’ and I get into it, I always end up crying, because.the fact that any of us lived through that is such a miracle. And each day is such a gift.” (She only got back on a helicopter, she told me, when Alexa Ray fainted while at college at NYU and hit her head, prompting Brinkley to race to Manhattan from her Hamptons home.)
Though they were split up, Joel came to be with her after the ’94 crash. On the plane home, she was drifting in and out of sleep, when she heard him say on the phone, “No, don’t worry, I’m not going back to her, I just need to see her through this.”
Brinkley writes: “And just like that dream broke apart like debris. I knew then that our separation was real and that while I had wanted to believe he couldn’t live without me, apparently he could. And I was going to have to learn to live without him.”
Less than two weeks later, they announced their split to the press, and Brinkley fell into the arms of Taubman. She married him that December — “I thought I had found my kindred spirit at last.”
In the book, she alleges that as soon as they got engaged, Taubman asked her for $75,000 — and by the end of their seven-month marriage, he had “borrowed” $2 million she would never see again. Taubman also relinquished parental rights to their son Jack, now 29, whose godfather is Joel.
The model says of her third marriage: “It was user-ship, manipulation at its worst, emotional torture.”
Then came marriage number four, to architect Peter Cook, with whom she had daughter Sailor, now 26. They wed in 1996 and were together for a decade. But after Brinkley gave a commencement address at Southampton High School in 2006, a man came up to her and alleged Cook had been having an affair with his 18-year-old daughter.
There followed a messy, very public six-year divorce and custody battle. Having paid for everything in their relationship, Brinkley alleged, she learned that Cook’s nickname for her was “the cash cow.”
Even her divorce lawyer, Bob Cohen, told her she had bad taste in husbands. But, Brinkley said, “I think two of the four ain’t bad!
“It wasn’t how I expected it to be, but I came out of it with these amazing kids.”
Asked if she would ever marry again, Brinkley, who lives in the Hamptons, said, “Never say never … I mean, [dates are] very much fewer and far between nowadays. And I’m very, very content and happy doing my own thing, which I think is also necessary before you have another relationship. But, you know we’ll see, you never know.”
She would love to be a grandma, she admits.
Alexa Ray is engaged to restaurateur Ryan Gleason and, in one emotional passage in the book, Brinkley details how her eldest took an inadvertent overdose of the homeopathic pain medicine Traummel following a breakup from her first boyfriend in December 2009.
“When bad things happen, you always try to put them in perspective. But when it’s your kids, there’s no way to put it in perspective,” Brinkley said.
“But Alexa was there when I was doing that part of the book and she had her input. And I think she welcomed that because it was portrayed [in the press] a little differently than what it actually was — which was a young girl sort of sinking in her depression from her first really, really big heartbreak that had been very encompassing … and she didn’t deal with it in the best way.
“And it scared Billy and me … We were like, boom, you know, heading into that hospital so fast. But she came out of it and she’s continued speaking to young girls about heartbreak.”
A singer herself, Alexa Ray has appeared onstage with her dad many times. Sailor is a model, while Jack has dabbled in acting. But Brinkley tells her kids: “Don’t let anybody nepo baby you!”
And Brinkley — who does not look her age — is still modeling, runs her fashion line TWRHLL, and has her own wine, Bellissima.
“I think there’s some people that live their life like they’re afraid that something bad is gonna happen. But [it’s all] actually part of the adventure,” she said.
“And that’s not to say there haven’t been times where I’ve been, like, crushed. [But] you pick yourself up, you sometimes learn a lesson, and it propels you forward. Sometimes it takes a while, but in retrospect … I realized how great it is to make mistakes.”
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