They met at a dive motel bar in St. Barts in 1983.
“He definitely didn’t look like a rock star,” says Christie Brinkley of her first impression of the guy sitting at the piano, Billy Joel.
She describes their memorable meeting in her exciting new memoir, Uptown Girl, excerpted in this week’s PEOPLE, which details her difficult childhood, five-decade modeling career and tumultuous romantic life — including falling “hopelessly in love” with the piano man.
“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,” Brinkley, 71, writes in the book.
At first, she wasn’t even sure if his name was Billy Joel or Billy Joe. “I decided to play it safe,” she writes. “You look like a ‘Joe’ to me,” she said.
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Before long, they were dating. “We laughed like you couldn’t believe,” she tells PEOPLE. “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?”
“When I heard him sing on stage,” she adds, “I found myself undeniably attached to this physically hot and charismatic man.”
He could also make her laugh like no other. “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.”
Cooking dinner was never just … cooking. “We were the biggest, greatest Italians making Italian food. Si, Christie …. And then we’d start dancing.”
Making the video for his hit song Uptown Girl on a hot summer night in 1983 also took on a life of it’s own. “It was just a bunch of friends,” she says with a laugh. “The director kept saying ‘More hoity-toity Christie.’” And the rest is history.
They married on March 23, 1985, had a daughter Alexa Ray, and began building their dream house in the Hamptons. Within a few years, the intensity and demands of their big lives and careers brought new pressure — and problems for the couple.
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“To be clear,” she writes, ”I never wanted to end things with Billy. But his drinking was bigger than the both of us.”
Today, she reflects, “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.”
They each went on to marry other people. Christie married Colorado real estate developer Ricky Taubman after they survived a harrowing helicopter crash in 1994. They divorced a year later and then she wed architect Peter Cook In 1996 — a marriage that ended in scandal, headlines and a six year divorce and custody battle. “There were some doozies,” she says.
After all these years, she and Billy remain friends and she says their relationship is “great,”
”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.”
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And she’s both eager and anxious for him to read her new book. “Alexa described it to him,” she says, “and he’s like, ‘Sounds good, no problem.’”
Uptown Girl by Christie Brinkley comes out April 29 from Harper Influence and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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