It’s amazing that Christie Brinkley is still friends with Billy Joel, given all he put her through during their nine-year marriage.
It also will be interesting to see if their friendship endures after everything the 71-year-old “Sports Illustrated” supermodel reveals about him in her new memoir, “Uptown Girl.” According to excerpts shared by Vulture, the Los Angeles Times and other publications, Brinkley goes into pretty excruciating detail about the rocker’s wildly excessive drinking and frightening, even psychotic behavior, including his mysterious disappearances, his breaking of windows and his raging denials when confronted about cheating.
“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,” Brinkley writes in one passage, according to Vulture.
Brinkley and Joel, now 75, met in January 1983, when she was on location in St. Barts for a photo shoot. Given Joel’s later issues with drinking, it seemed to foreshadow problems to come that they met at a bar, the Los Angeles Times reported. The “Piano Man” impressed her by playing “The Girl From Ipanema” on the bar piano while she sang along. Incredibly, she didn’t know that the man serenading her was a global pop megastar, according to the Los Angeles Times.
By the summer 1986, Brinkley and Joel were a year into their marriage and she was well aware of his fame and the incredible pressures it brought. While staying at a cottage in the Hamptons, she woke in the early morning hours to discover that Joel had vanished.
NEW YORK – APRIL 25: (L-R) Christie Brinkley, Alexa Ray Joel and Billy Joel attend the premiere of “Last Play At Shea” during the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival at the Tribeca Performing Arts Centre on April 25, 2010 in New York City. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival)
Brinkley said she searched the property — during a rainstorm — but refused to call police for fear that her report would result in “an article in the gossip columns the next day.” She finally tracked him down at a local bar. Shortly before dawn, he returned home, stumbling out of a cab, drunk and ornery.
“I loved him and I wanted to make it work,” Brinkley writes.
But given their high-profile marriage, Brinkley also was afraid to open up to friends about her husband’s addiction — again out of fear that his troubles would leak to the tabloids.
Brinkley also had to deal with suspicions that Joel had cheated on her. When they were in Hawaii in 1990 for his “Storm Front” tour, Brinkley confronted him in their hotel room with reports that he’d had an affair with an Australian actress. He stormed out of the room, then returned later that night, “visibly and audibly drunk,” as well as locked out of the room.
“Billy banged angrily on the front door for some time, then went around to the patio, which was on the ground floor, and banged on the glass doors for a while,” Brinkley writes, according to Vulture. “When I didn’t answer, he did something unimaginable: He picked up a chaise longue and threw it right through the doors of the patio, shattering the glass into a million pieces.”
While Brinkley moved herself and their young daughter, Alexa Ray, to a different suite, she still was in the mode of making excuses for her husband and covering up his behavior. She writes that she still loved him and she was still worried about his behavior becoming a news story.
The next morning, Joel apologized but insisted there was no affair, she writes. Brinkley accepted what he said. “But, then again, incident-and-repair had become our pattern, even if, slowly, things between us were becoming more difficult to mend,” she writes, according to Vulture.
Brinkley realized that their marriage was probably beyond repair following an incident that occurred at their Hamptons home in 1993. About to embark on his “River of Dreams” tour, Joel invited some band members over to their house after they had dined out.
Joel claimed he was still hungry for some pasta. So, Brinkley said she made him a fresh pot, which he quickly devoured. But when Joel looked at the now empty pot, he had forgotten he had just eaten it.
“Who ate all my pasta?” he demanded of everyone in the room. Brinkley laughed, then realized Joel wasn’t kidding. When she told him that he had just eaten the pasta, he “went ballistic” and screamed at everyone to leave his house, all while accusing them of being the ones who had his food.
“Suddenly, he was acting delusional in a way I’d never seen before,” Brinkley writes, according to Vulture. “I was so scared that I couldn’t think, and when one of the guys in the band grabbed my arm, pulling me out of the house with the rest of them.”
One of the bandmates told her, “We’re not leaving you alone with him like this.” But Brinkley didn’t want to leave without her daughter, so she got Joel to calm down by reminding him that she was upstairs and that he wouldn’t want her to see him like this.
Brinkley said she gave Joel one final chance to work on their marriage by the two of them spending the Christmas holidays together with their daughter. But on New Year’s Eve, Joel didn’t return home from a concert, and a member of his road crew called Brinkley to tell her why.
“He was having an affair with a woman who worked as a caterer for the show,” Brinkley writes, according to Vulture. “To this day, Billy continues to deny ever having had affairs, and I’ve always believed him. But on that New Year’s Day in 1994, when he did finally straggle home, I asked him to leave.” They publicly announced their divorce months later.
