Christie Brinkley Reveals Who the 'Other Woman' Was in Billy Joel Marriage
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Christie Brinkley hasn’t been married to Billy Joel since 1994, but she’s still his “Uptown Girl.”
That’s also the title of her new memoir, out April 29, which dives into her relationship with her now ex-husband. They were married from 1985 until 1994 and share a daughter, Alexa Ray, 39, but there was a very specific issue that got in the way of their marriage. It’s what Brinkley described to Page Six as “the other woman.”
It wasn’t really a person though; it was the 75-year-old singer’s issues with drinking. The 71-year-old supermodel recalled a time when he disappeared from their daughter’s fifth birthday celebration and turned up two days later. The trauma was real for Brinkley, who had “visions of his car wrapped around a tree.”
His alcoholism got to a point where he was “acting delusional” which was the breaking point in their marriage. “To be clear, I never wanted to end things with Billy,” she said while revealing the heartbreaking truth. “…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 has always spoken fondly of Brinkley, and he recalled how he tried to woo her from the very beginning.
“I recognized her immediately,” Joel to Rolling Stone in 1986. “She was more beautiful than she was in her pictures — [I thought], ‘Oh, wow, that’s Christie Brinkley. I wonder if she knows who I am.’ So, I did what I call an album cover — I tried to look like me on an album cover. I gave it every angle I could. She didn’t recognize me from a hole in the wall.”
Brinkley and Joel continue to be great friends despite their divorce, and he even serenaded her at Madison Square Garden in April 2024 with the song that hard-launched their relationship, “Uptown Girl.” Brinkley also received Joel’s blessing to write about her side of the story in their marriage and divorce.
“He’s the father of my firstborn and we spent such great formative years together,” Brinkley told Page Six. “And I’ll love him forever.”
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