Christie Brinkley is opening up the impact that Billy Joel’s drinking problem had on their marriage.
“I never wanted to end things with Billy,” Brinkley confesses in her new memoir, Uptown Girl. “I read every self-help book I could find while, together, we went to see a string of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other medical doctors.”
She added that she poured her all into their marriage by “constantly working to make myself, our home, and everything around us into whatever he could possibly want or hope for.”
But in the end, Brinkley wrote that her ex-husband’s drinking problem was “bigger than both of us.”
She continued, “Booze was the other woman, and it was beginning to seem that he preferred to be with ‘her’ rather than with me.”
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Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel circa 1989
Brinkley recalled that the “breaking point” came in 1993, days before Joel was set to embark on his River of Dreams tour. She wrote the “Piano Man” singer was hosting his band for a rehearsal at their home when he suddenly became agitated while searching for leftover pasta.
“He became furious, so I started to search the fridge, too,” Brinkley wrote, sharing that she eventually made him a fresh pot of pasta to ease the tension.
Brinkley claimed that while Joel initially cooled down, eating the pasta over the stove while chatting with his band, he became upset and began “slurring his words” when “someone disagreed” with something he said.
She wrote, “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?'”
Brinkley said she laughed, assuming it was a joke, but when everyone else joined in, “Billy went ballistic” and kicked everyone out.
“Suddenly, he was acting delusional in a way I’d never seen before,” Brinkley wrote. “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.”
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However, she ultimately doubled back to stay with her and Joel’s daughter, Alexa Ray, who was asleep upstairs. Brinkley said she returned to the house, retrieved the sleeping 8-year-old and brought her into the couple’s bedroom. She wrote that Joel must have heard her, claiming that he “rushed over to the bedroom and began pounding on the door, demanding that I let him in.”
When she told him that their daughter was asleep, he stopped.
“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,” she wrote. “The next day, I asked him for a divorce. It wasn’t the first time I had threatened to leave, and even though he was about to go on tour for months, we both knew then that things had reached a breaking point.”
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Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel circa 2011
Brinkley wrote that the couple gave their relationship one more try by planning to celebrate the holidays together — but hit another bump in the road when Joel did not return to their East Hampton home that New Year’s Eve, after playing a sold-out show just an hour away.
She wrote that she was “sick with worry” when a crew member, who didn’t want her to panic, called to let her know that Joel would not be coming home that night.
“He hadn’t crashed his car on the Long Island Expressway or wasn’t lying dead somewhere else,” Brinkley was told. “He was having an affair with a woman who worked as a caterer for the show.”
Related: Billy Joel serenades his ‘Uptown Girl’ Christie Brinkley at Madison Square Garden 30 years after their divorce
She added, “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.”
The couple finalized their divorce later that year. Brinkley went on to briefly marry Richard Taubman and later Peter Cook, with whom she shares two children. The couple split in 2008. Meanwhile, Joel now has two daughters with wife, Alexis Roderick.
In 2023, the singer told the Los Angeles Times that he stopped drinking “a couple of years ago,” explaining that it “created more problems in my life than I needed.”
Uptown Girl is available in bookstores today.
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