Christie Brinkley Gave Billy Joel One Too Many Chances

If the title of Christie Brinkley’s new memoir, Uptown Girl, is any indication, the model managed to stay friends with Billy Joel even after the couple’s marriage ended. She reiterates as much throughout the book, thanking Joel in the acknowledgements section as a “special someone who has been an integral part of my life for decades.” (The duo share one daughter, Alexa Ray Joel.) But Uptown Girl isn’t a peachy read about Brinkley’s CoverGirl exploits or her future cameo in the Pawnee universe. She’s unsparing about the string of events that led to her and Joel’s 1994 separation, which was fueled by the singer’s issues with alcohol, proclivity for disappearing for several days at a time, and, on occasion, alarming behavior that could turn physical. “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,” she writes in one passage. Below are all of the unpleasant stories Brinkley offers about her former husband.

‘I felt abandoned’

The summer of 1986 was the first time Brinkley experienced a new, upsetting dimension to Joel’s behavior. The couple had been married for about a year and were staying in a cottage in Montauk. One night, Brinkley awoke with no one by her side. “Growing frightened, I crept down the stairs toward the kitchen, wondering for a moment if there had been an intruder,” she writes. “But at the bottom of the stairs, I didn’t see or hear anything unusual.” Brinkley searched the entire property, inside and out, during a rainstorm, refusing to call the police for fear it would result in “an article in the gossip columns the next day.” Then she called every local bar. The fourth watering hole that picked up confirmed her husband was there, heavily intoxicated.

“I felt abandoned, which is a horrible feeling,” she explains. “When Billy finally stumbled out of a taxi at 4:30 in the morning, he could barely walk, and when I told him how worried I’d been, he only got angry at me and started yelling. I thought he may have been mortified for me to see him that drunk — it was the first time it had happened in my presence — and wanting to spare him even more embarrassment, I went back to bed and pretended to fall asleep, staying there until he woke up hours later, hungover, bleary-eyed, and contrite.” Joel “seemed horrified” by his behavior the next morning and said he had been “writing hits” for his upcoming album, The Bridge. Brinkley trusted that it was a onetime event, brought on by the stress of working on a new project.

‘I’d never seen him that way on tour before’

In the spring of 1987, Brinkley and Alexa Ray joined Joel for a string of international concerts to promote The Bridge, including a stop in Tokyo. An earthquake occurred during their stay, shaking the hotel room where Brinkley and her then-infant daughter were resting. “What was worse were the aftershocks, which didn’t happen as a result of the earthquake, but when Billy, whom I was desperate to see, came back drunk to the hotel in the early morning,” she recalls. “I’d never seen him that way on tour before. Sure, he always sipped whiskey onstage, but getting drunk was different, and when he tumbled into our room, he couldn’t even speak about the earthquake that had happened earlier.” The next morning, Brinkley says his behavior was “the same as it had been in Montauk,” with Joel apologizing profusely while “making more promises and excuses.”

‘Leaping around like a madman’

That same international tour continued up to Moscow in the summer of 1987, during which, Brinkley says, Joel was beginning to show signs of exhaustion. “No number of Tic Tacs or vodka shots,” she explains, “was helping soothe his throat.” An American film crew was given permission to shoot a documentary during this Soviet tour, and as a cinematic choice, they planned to illuminate certain audience members with bright lights. Joel quickly grew irate at this technique, believing he should be the center of attention. “‘Stop lighting the audience!’ he yelled. ‘Stop it! Let me do my show for Chrissake!’ But the crew didn’t stop, and from the front row, I watched in horror as Billy suddenly lifted his piano and flipped it over on its side, overwhelmed by his own outrage and frustration,” Brinkley writes. “While continuing to sing he then jumped to the front of the stage, ignoring his band as they kept playing, and grabbed a microphone stand and smashed it against the floor.”

It didn’t stop there. “Leaping around like a madman, Billy then snatched another mic stand and, after belting out a line of lyrics and taking a karate-like kick, beat the stand against a different piano, sending chunks of metal flying up into the air and hurtling right past my head in the front row,” Brinkley adds. “I was shocked. Never before had I seen such fury from Billy, who later claimed the outburst was all part of his performance.” This was the first time Brinkley found herself genuinely “scared” at Joel’s behavior.

‘Shattering the glass into a million pieces’

In 1990, while Joel was touring Storm Front in Honolulu, Brinkley confronted him about reports he was having an affair with an Australian actress. “I told him that he should find another place to sleep. He left the room outraged, and when he came back later that night, visibly and audibly drunk, I had already locked the doors to both the suite and the outside patio,” Brinkley writes. “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. 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.”

Brinkley took her daughter to a separate suite where her parents were staying and lied to the hotel manager and staffers about the source of the disruption. “Despite everything I felt in the moment — fear, betrayal, anger — I knew what to do: I told the guards that the broken door had been an accident and that they didn’t need to report it,” she says. “Even though I was emotional, I loved Billy and didn’t want the incident to become a news story.” Joel apologized the next morning and insisted there was no affair, which Brinkley accepted as true: “But, then again, incident-and-repair had become our pattern, even if, slowly, things between us were becoming more difficult to mend.”

‘I was so scared that I couldn’t think’

Brinkley’s breaking point came days before Joel embarked on his 1993 tour for River of Dreams. Joel had invited a few members of his touring band over to the couple’s Hamptons house after enjoying dinner out on the town, when he, for some reason, felt the need to devour even more leftover pasta. When he couldn’t locate it in the refrigerator, Brinkley made him a fresh pot, which he quickly ate. We’ll let Brinkley take it from here:

Then he suddenly looked down at the pot of pasta and realized it was all gone. “Okay,” he barked, as all conversation in the kitchen ground to a halt. “Who ate all my pasta?” Everyone in the room turned to look at him and then at one another, assuming that he was joking. I began to laugh, which prompted a few others to chuckle, too, but that made Billy irate — which was when we realized he wasn’t kidding.

“Billy, you just ate it,” I said as softly as I could.

But Billy went ballistic. “Everyone get the fuck out of my house!” he screamed as he began shoving his bandmates out of the kitchen. “You come here and you eat all my pasta like that? Get out of my house! All of you!” Suddenly, he was acting delusional in a way I’d never seen before. 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, I went along.

“You’re coming with us,” the bandmate said to me. “We’re not leaving you alone with him like this.”

Brinkley refused to leave without Alexa, who was sleeping upstairs in her bedroom. She got to the room before Joel, and by the time he arrived, he pounded on the door demanding to be let in. Speaking quietly, Brinkley urged him to leave for fear of embarrassing himself in front of his young daughter. “Thank goodness Billy, despite how drunk he may have been, knew that I was right: He wouldn’t want his little girl to see him like that. And after I said it, he left, retreating into one of the guest rooms where he could sleep it off,” she writes.

‘I asked him to leave’

Later that year, Brinkley gave Joel another chance to rekindle their relationship by spending Christmas together as a family. On New Year’s Eve, though, Joel failed to return home in the Hamptons after a concert. A member of Joel’s road crew called Brinkley to let her know why. “He hadn’t crashed his car on the Long Island Expressway or wasn’t lying dead somewhere else, the crew member said: He was having an affair with a woman who worked as a caterer for the show,” Brinkley says. “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.

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