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Supermodel Christie Brinkley Dishes on How She Became Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl
Supermodel Christie Brinkley will forever be known as the “Uptown Girl” thanks to ex-husband Billy Joel’s iconic music video for his song of the same name. That video owned the airwaves on MTV in the early 80’s and became one of Joel’s biggest hits.
Now Brinkley is dishing on how she and Joel fell in love in her new autobiography by the same name.
But “Uptown Girl” is about more than just that love story. Brinkley takes readers through her entire life, including a difficult childhood and a modeling career that has stretched over five decades.
In a press release, publisher Harper Collins describes the book as, “a bighearted, beautifully crafted memoir of resilience and self-discovery, featuring more than 100 photographs and never-before-seen pieces of Christie’s original artwork, Uptown Girl is the brave account of a life lived at full throttle and on full display.”
How Christie Brinkley Became the ‘Uptown Girl’
Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel were already an item when Christie starred in Joel’s music video.
The pair met at a motel bar in St. Barts in 1983.
In an excerpt of her book published in People, Christie writes, “He definitely didn’t look like a rock star,” of her first impression of the “Piano Man,” who happened to be sitting at a piano at the time.
“The man was sunburned to a crisp, his face the same color as cranberries and unctuous with oil, which he’d undoubtedly slathered on to soothe the burn, topped by what I like to call ‘the Long Island bubble:’ a carapace of curly shellacked hair popular in the 1980s in parts of suburban New York,” writes Brinkley.
In fact, the 71-year-old supermodel admits she didn’t even know the superstar singer’s name, thinking it was either Billy Joel or Billy Joe. “I decided to play it safe,” she writes. “You look like a ‘Joe’ to me,” she said.
It didn’t take long for the pair to begin dating. And at first, everything was great.
“We laughed like you couldn’t believe,” she told People in the accompanying interview. “But also he was so sensitive and he did all the old-fashioned things, the flowers, the notes and the poems and the songs. He was going into the recording studio and he was writing all these songs and saying ‘This one’s for you.’ How could I not fall in love with him?”
And seeing the singer perform live sealed the deal. “When I heard him sing on stage,” she adds, “I found myself undeniably attached to this physically hot and charismatic man.”
The Story Behind the Iconic Music Video
Brinkley says the pair shot the video for “Uptown Girl” on a “hot summer night” in 1983.
“It was just a bunch of friends,” she says with a laugh. “The director kept saying ‘More hoity-toity Christie.’” In fact, Christie was so casual about the shoot that she didn’t tell her agent. She says that video almost got her SAG card revoked!
The laughter on the set was par for the course early in their relationship.
“We called each other Bada Bing and Bada Boom,” she recalls. “Because we were really like teenagers falling in love. We were suddenly fumbling and stuttering and dropping things.”
And the love story wasn’t just for the public eye. “We were the biggest, greatest Italians making Italian food. Si, Christie …. And then we’d start dancing.”
The Uptown Girl and her Downtown Man married on March 23, 1985. Daughter Alexa Ray was born nine months and 6 days later.
But after a few years, cracks in the relationship started to appear.
How It All Fell Apart
Christie Brinkley and her daughter Alexa Ray sat down and went through a lifetime of pictures for People, giving insight into some of their happy times.
But in her book, she’s also forthcoming about how things ended with Billy Joel.
“To be clear,” she writes, ”I never wanted to end things with Billy. But his drinking was bigger than the both of us. In the end, when the relationship isn’t functioning the way you want it to be anymore — that’s the worst kind of loneliness because you just can’t make it work together and that’s painful.”
While both went on to marry other people, today the relationship between Christie and Billy is “great” according to Brinkley.
”He lives mainly in Florida so we don’t see him as much as when he lived in Sag Harbor,” she notes, “but when he comes by to see Alexa, he’ll come in and say hello.”
Christie also turns out to support Joel, attending his last concert of his years-long residency at Madison Square Garden in 2024.
Brinkley says she has no qualms about her ex reading her memoir. “Alexa described it to him,” she says, “and he’s like, ‘Sounds good, no problem.’”
“Uptown Girl” by Christie Brinkley comes out April 29 and is available for preorder now.
