Christie Brinkley has lived enough for at least two books.
The cover girl and (and the iconic cover model) survived a helicopter accident, and only returned to a helicopter to hurry next to her daughter after a medical emergency. He married four times and has suffered an anguish that left her “crushed.”
Of all his ex, Brinkley, now 71, is still closer to the second husband Billy Joel, and has just appointed his new memory “Uptown Girl” after the successful 1983 song he wrote about her.
The couple married from 1985 to 1994, and shared a daughter, singer Alexa Ray, 39. But, as Brinkley told Page Six, it was the piano drink that ruined his marriage.
“If there was no problem …” “I think we were probably twin souls, it was an incredible moment of my life.
“I had a lot of fun. We were there nomadic, gypsies, just between their work and mine, we were watching the world … it was wonderful, really wonderful.”
But Brinkley writes that Joel would disappear for days while taking Boz. He just left Alexa Ray’s birthday party and disappeared for two days, which led the model to have “visions of her car wrapped around a tree” and develop “a panic that I could not shake.” (Joel ended up running his Mercedes in a tree in 2003.)
The singer once lost his thanksgiving food. There was also the time when Brinkley locked the singer of the couple’s hotel suite in Hawaii after a friend told her that there were Joel’s photos with an Australian actress.
He returned “visible and audibly drunk” and, writes Brinkley, picked up a Chaise Longue and threw it through the doors of the patio, destroying the glass.
The turning point, he writes, came when Joel was the host of his band at his home in East Hamptons for an essay, and accused them drunk of eating his pasta, when he had eaten everything himself.
“I was acting delusional in a way I had never seen before,” Brinkley said, revealing that he asked Joel to divorce the next day.
“To be clear, I never wanted to finish things with Billy,” he said. “I read all the self -help books that I could find … we got used to seeing a series of psychiatrists, psychologists and other doctors.”
But, he writes, “the drink was bigger than the two. Booze was the other woman and began to seem that I preferred to be with her instead of me.”
Joel, now 75, went to rehabilitation for the first time in 1992 and got sober, then returned to rehabilitation in 2005 after falling.
In 2023, he told Los Angeles Times that he stopped drinking “a couple of years ago.” He is now married to the fourth wife Alexis Roderick, with whom he shares the young daughters, Della Rose and Remy Anne.
“He is my firstborn’s father and we spent such great formative years together. And I will love him forever,” Brinkley told me. “Things reached a point where I knew I couldn’t live with him.”
She spoke with him before writing her book.
“Billy said:” Continue and tell your story … the good, the bad, what I need to say, “Brinkley revealed.” Leaving Billy was not easy for me, and it is not easy to say anything bad about someone I have in such a high esteem … [although] I don’t think it’s a bathroom. “
In fact, she wants her story to help people deal with addiction problems.
“When you are in the middle of an addiction to drink, you don’t remember what you did,” Brinkley explained. “You wake up the next day and he is the person who tells you who knows what happened.”
“And it’s good or Billy tell the people around him,” you can speak freely, tell your story. “And I think that is part of his recovery.”
The elegant blonde, who grew up in Los Angeles, found fame after moving to Paris at age 18 when her first love cheated her.
“The anguish drove me and thought.” I will show you, I’m going to Paris … California is not big enough for both of us! “
Shortly after arriving, he fell in love with the artist Jean François Allaux and settled in a small apartment with a shower, before being discovered as a model. The couple married in 1975 and divorced in 1981.
Brinkley was devastated by the death of the boyfriend Olivier Chandon de Brailles, the 27 -year -old heir of Moët & Chandon Champagne Fortune, in a racing accident in 1983.
She with Joel in a diving bar in St. Barts later that same year.
While he was in the middle of his 1994 break with Joel, Brinkley Tok a trip to Telluride with Alexa Ray and was invited to go to Heli-Eskiing for his host and real estate developer Rick Taubman. They joined her in the helicopter was Sandra Carradine, actor’s ex -wife Keith Carradine and her son Gift.
The model describes in the book how the helicopter “simply fell from heaven”, lunch in free fall from 300 feet, and when it crashed, its skiing boot trapped in the remains, dragging it by the mountain town a granite cliff. Miraculously, the helicopter was arrested for a snow wall. Later, it was reported that the accident was mainly caused by the helicopter that took an abrupt turn to 12,800 feet.
Brinkley told me that I had sprinkle “magical dirt” of Chimayo, New Mexico, in the helicopter before takeoff. Later, rescuers found their charm full of dirt between the remains.
The model said she still has Pep, and added: “If someone says ‘really tell me the story’ and I get into, I always finish crying, the fact that any of us lived that is a miracle.
I thought they were divided, Joel came to be with her after the accident ’94. On the plane home, she was entering and leaving the dream, when Sheed heard Hed say by phone: “No, don’t worry, I will not return to her, I just need to see her through this.”
Brinkley He writes: “And just as that dream broke separately as rubble. He knew that our separation was real and that although he wanted to believe he could be living with me, equipped that he could.
Less than two weeks later, they announced their separation to the press, and Brinkley fell into Taubman’s arms. She married him that December: “I thought I had found my son’s son.”
In the book, he alleges that as soon as they committed, Taubman asked him $ 75,000 and at the end of his seven -month marriage, he had “decelerated” $ 2 million that he would never see again. Taubman also renounced the rights of parents to his son Jack, now 29 years old, whose sponsor is Joel.
The model says of her third marriage: “It was the user ship, the manipulation in its sausage, the emotional torture.”
Then came the number four marriage, with the architect Peter Cook, with whom he had a daughter Sailor, now 26 years old. I bet in 1996 and were together for a decade. But after Brinkley gave a graduation speech at the Southampton High School in 2006, a man approached him and claimed that Cook had one thing that had an adventure with his 18 -year -old daughter.
They followed a messy and very public battle of divorce and custody of six years. Having paid everything in his relationship, Brinkley claimed, he learned that Cook’s nickname for her was “the cash cow.”
Only his divorce lawyer, Bob Cohen, told him that he had a bad taste for husbands. But, Brinkley said: “I think two of the four are not bad!
“It wasn’t how I expected it to be, but I got out of him with these incredible children.”
When asked if he would ever get married again, Brinkley, who lives in the Hamptons, said: “Never say … I mean, [dates are] Much less and far between today. And I am very, very happy and happy doing my own things, which I think is also necessary before you have another relationship. But, you know, we’ll see, you never know. “
He would love to be grandmother, admits.
Alexa Ray is committed to the restorer Ryan Gleason and, in an emotional passage in the book, Brinkley details how his older took an inadvertent overload or the traummel of homeopathic medicine after a break of his first boyfriend in December 2009.
“When bad things happen, you always try to put them in perspective. But when they are your children, there is no way to put it in perspective,” Brinkley said.
“But Alexa was there, she was doing that part of the book and had in contribution. And I think she welcomed her because she was portrayed [in the press] A little different from what was real, that she was a girl who sank in her depression of her first, very large anguish that had a very found bone … and did it in the best way.
“And I was scared of Billy and me … we were like, boom, you know, going to that hospital very fast. But he left that and continued talking to the girls about anguish.”
A singer, Alexa Ray has appeared with his father many times. Sailor is a model, while Jack has ventured into acting. But Brinkley tells his children: “Don’t let anyone be a baby!”
And Brinkley, who doesn’t look at his age, is still modeling, directs his TWRHLL fashion line and has his own wine, Bellissima.
“I think there are some people who live their lives as if they were afraid that something bad will happen. [it’s all] Actually, part of the adventure, “he said.
“And that does not mean that port moments have bone, such as, crushed. [But] You get up, sometimes you learn a lesson and drive you forward. Sometimes it takes time, but in retrospect … I realized how good it is to make mistakes. “
