Uptown Girl by Christie Brinkley: The incredible life of Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl

Uptown Girl: A Memoir by Christie Brinkley (Harper Influence £25, 416pp)

As the helicopter plummeted towards the mountain in what seemed like slow motion, Christie Brinkley had time for some lucid thoughts. 

One was, ‘If I die like this, my parents will kill me.’ Another: ‘All that matters is love’. 

Then she remembered a remark made by her then husband Billy Joel: ‘I don’t want to know when I’m going to die. I want to know where. And then I’m never going near the f****** place.’

If only she’d known, she’d have steered well clear of Telluride. This was clearly where her life would end: at the age of 40 in 1994, on a heli-skiing expedition.

Then came the crash. The helicopter ‘walloped, whacked, twisted and ricocheted across the mountain’. 

To her astonishment, Brinkley realised she wasn’t dead, and nor was the pilot, or any of her three co-passengers. But her foot was tangled in the seatbelt, which was attached to the helicopter, which was sliding slowly down the mountain towards a cliff edge.

The second miracle was that a wall of snow brought it to a halt just in time.

A few weeks later, she and one of the other passengers, Ricky Taubman, who’d been badly injured, would be making love on his hospital bed, while he was hooked up to machines and tubes – ‘only minor inconveniences compared to the passion we were both feeling’.

If you need an optimism boost and a refresher course in resilience, this roller-coaster of a memoir by the gloriously sunny-natured blonde supermodel Brinkley – Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl – will do the trick.

The book exudes the energy of the immortal music video of that song, filmed in a garage in Lower Manhattan in 1983, in which Brinkley, now 71, steps out of a Rolls-Royce and dances exuberantly with Joel and the other ‘down-town’ garage mechanics in their oily T-shirts.

Christie appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimwear issue three years in a row

Here’s a woman who has relished every bit of luck and fun that life has brought her, ever since the moment in Paris in 1974 when she was ‘discovered’ as a model by a photographer who spotted her queueing at the post office.

Her career took off. No other model had ever been the cover girl for the swimwear issue of Sports Illustrated three years in a row: just one of her many modelling achievements over a long career. The whole world wanted Brinkley on their magazine covers and in their TV ads.

She’s survived savage knocks, too, including, in 1983, the tragic death of her boyfriend in between husbands one and two, racing driver Olivier Chandon de Brailles, whose car flipped over into a canal. His foot was pinned to the metal, so he drowned: a horrible precursor of what would almost happen to Brinkley 11 years later.

Joel was the man who consoled and rescued her at that time of overwhelming grief.

She admits she’s not strictly an Uptown Girl in the Manhattan sense. But she had a far more privileged upbringing than Joel did. ‘To him, I was the epitome of a sophisticated Californian beach girl, while he was a motorcycle-riding, smart-talking punk from a hard-knocks part of New York.’

They met in a ‘threadbare motel’ in St Bart’s shortly after Olivier’s death. Sitting at the piano, Joel played The Girl From Ipanema and Brinkley sang along. 

Then another woman approached, saying she could sing too. It was Whitney Houston. 

Then a 19-year-old model came in: Elle Macpherson. Brinkley and Joel both went off with the ‘wrong’ people that night: Joel dated Macpherson for a while, and Brinkley went off with a sailing captain.

But it wasn’t long before Joel was sending Brinkley bouquets. On Easter Sunday, he turned up at her Manhattan apartment wearing bunny ears, with a bunny tail pinned to the back of his suit, carrying a basket of flowers and chocolates.

They had a blissful decade together, bringing up their daughter, Alexa Jay, before the marriage took a downward lurch when Joel started vanishing without trace in the evenings and coming home drunk.

Fast forward to this roller-coaster event: after the helicopter crash 11 years into their relationship, Joel arrived with a private jet to fly Brinkley home to their luxury house in the Hamptons. How kind! But then she overheard him saying, sotto voce on the phone to someone else, ‘No, don’t worry, I’m not going back to her. I just need to see her through this.’ Two weeks later, they announced their separation.

The Uptown Couple: Christie with Billy Joel in 1983

She would marry the gorgeous Ricky Taubman (husband number three), and have a son, Jack, with him; but Taubman, Brinkley says, turned out to be an emotional manipulator. The marriage lasted for less than a year.

One of the vilest things he said to her was, ‘I’m going to walk away from you and the baby just like Herb Hudson did.’

Herb Hudson was Brinkley’s terrifying, abusive biological father. She tells of how for the first seven years of her life, he used to whip her in the evenings. Her mother escaped and married a wonderful man, Don Brinkley, who adopted her and her brother. Life changed from black and white to Technicolor.

Don’s life advice: ‘Christie, baby, you write your own script.’ It was advice she lived her life by.

In her teens, she begged to be allowed to go to the French lycee in Los Angeles. Her parents said yes. This led to her love affair with Paris, to where she moved after leaving school. 

There she met husband number one, artist Jean-François Allaux. ‘No one ever shocked me with love like Jean-François did.’ They lived in a garret together before moving to New York. But the time came when he ceased to want to share in her career success, so she asked for a divorce.

Marriage number four, after the end of the Joel marriage, and the catastrophe of the Taubman marriage, was to an architect called Peter Cook. They had a daughter, Sailor. 

Proud Parents: Christie and Billy Joel share daughter Alexa

One evening, at a school event, a man told Brinkley that Peter was having an affair with his [the man’s] 18-year-old daughter. Cue end of marriage. The divorce was acrimonious. A brutal custody battle dragged on for six years.

Did Brinkley crumple? Far from it. She accepted the part of Roxie in Chicago on Broadway: a global hit. ‘You’ve just got to figure how to write yourself out of that corner, honey.’ Another morsel of advice from her stepfather. And boy, is Brinkley good at doing that.

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