Christie Brinkley has lived well for at least two books.
Cover Girl and (and the iconic Cover Girl model) survived the helicopter collision. She married four times and endured the heartbreak she left her “shattered.”
Of all her exes, Brinkley, now 71, remains closest to her second husband, Billy Joel.
The couple were married from 1985 to 1994 and shared their daughter, singer Alexarei (39). But as Brinkley told Page 6, it was the piano man’s drinking that ruined their marriage.
“If that’s not the problem…” she meditated. “I think we were probably really soulmates, and that was a great time in my life.
“I had so much fun. We were such a nomad, gypsy. We were only between his work and my work, we were looking at the world…it was fantastic and really great.”
But Brinkley writes that Joel will disappear for days while drinking. He left Alexa Ray’s 5th birthday party and went missing for two days, urging the model to “the vision of his car was wrapped around a tree,” and developed “a panic that I couldn’t shake.” (Joel is finished Run his Mercedes into the treen2003. )
The singer once went missing during a Thanksgiving meal. There was also a time when Brinkley rocked the singer from the Hawaii couple’s hotel suite after a friend told her there was a picture of the Australian actress and Joel.
He replied “visible and audible drunk,” and Brinkley wrote, picking up a long, long voice, threw it into the patio door, shattering the glass.
The turning point came when Joel hosted his band at the East Hamptons home for rehearsals, she writes.
“He was acting out his fantasies in ways I’d never seen before,” Brinkley said.
“To be clear, I didn’t want to finish things with Billy,” she said. “I read every self-help book I could find… We went to see a series of psychiatrists, psychologists and other doctors.”
However, she writes: “Drinking was greater than both of us. The alcohol was another woman and he was beginning to appear to have preferred to be with her over me.”
Joel, now 75 years old, went to rehabilitation for the first time in 1992, calmed down, and returned to rehabilitation in 2005 after the recurrence.
In 2023, he told the Los Angeles Times he stopped drinking “a few years ago.” He is currently married to his fourth wife, Alexis Roderick, and shares his younger daughters, Della Rose and Remy Anne.
“He was my firstborn father and we spent years together in such a form, and I will love him forever,” Brinkley told me. “Things just reached where I knew I couldn’t live with him.”
She spoke to him before writing the book.
“Billy said, ‘Go ahead and tell me your story…good, bad, whatever you need to say,'” Brinkley revealed. “Leaving Billy was not easy for me. [although] I don’t think it’s bad. ”
In fact, she wants to help people deal with the problems of addiction.
“When you’re in the pain of drinking addiction, you don’t remember what you did,” explained Brinkley. “You wake up the next day and it’s the one who relies on you who knows what happened.”
“And it’s Billy’s brave to tell those around him, ‘You can speak freely and tell your stories.’ ” And I think that’s part of his recovery. ”
The elegant blonde, who grew up in Los Angeles, found fame after moving to Paris, 18, when her first love fooled her.
“Heartbreak pushed me in and said, “I’ll show him, I’ll go out to Paris… California isn’t enough for both of us!”
Shortly after arriving, she fell in love with artist Jean François Araux, who stood home in a small apartment without a shower before they were discovered as models. The couple got married in 1975 and divorced in 1981.
Brinkley was then left in ruins in a 1983 race accident, with the death of boyfriend Olivier Chandon de Bryles, the 27-year-old heir of Moet & Chandon Champagne Fortune.
She met Joel at a diving bar at St. Barts later that same year.
During his farewell with Joel in 1994, Brinkley traveled to Telluride with Alexarei and was invited by host Realtate developer Rick Taubman to go on a heliski. It was Sandra Kaladin, the ex-wife of actor Keith Carardine and his son Kayde who joined her in the helicopter.
This model explains how helicopters plunge from 300 feet into free falls “just falling out of the sky.” And when it crashed, her ski boots got caught up in the wreckage, dragging her out of the mountains onto a thin granite cliff. Miraculously, Chopper was stopped by a wall of snow. It was then reported that the crash was mainly caused by the helicopter’s sudden turn at 12,800 feet.
Brinkley said he sprinkled “magic stains” from Chimayo, New Mexico on a helicopter before takeoff. The rescuer then discovers that her charm is filled with dirt in the wreckage.
The model says she still has PTSD and says, “If someone says, ‘Really tell me the story’ and I go into it, I always cry. Because the fact that all of us survived it is such a miracle. And every day is such a gift.” (She said she only returned to the helicopter, losing consciousness while Alexa Ray was in college at NYU, slamming her head, urging Brinkley to race Manhattan from her Hampton home).
They split, but Joel came with her after the ’94 crash. At the plane house, she was asleep. When she heard him say on the phone, she said, “No, don’t worry, I’m not back to her. I need to see her through this.”
Brinkley “And as that dream broke like shards. Our separation was real and I believed that he could not live without me, but obviously he could not. And I had to learn to live without him.
Less than two weeks later, they announced a split into the press, and Brinkley fell into Taubman’s arm. She married him that December – “I thought I had finally found the spirit of my relatives.”
In the book, she claims that Taubman asked her $75,000 as soon as they were engaged. And by the end of their seven-month marriage, he “borrowed” $2 million, which he would never see again. Taubman also waived his parental rights to son Jack (now 29), whose Godfather is Joel.
The model stated about her third marriage: “It was usership and the worst emotional torture manipulation.”
After that, marriage 4 came. Architect Peter Cook, now 26 years old, had a sailor for his daughter. They married in 1996 and were together for ten years. However, after Brinkley gave a start speech at Southampton High School in 2006, a man approached her, claiming that the cook had an affair with his 18-year-old daughter.
There was a messy and very public six years of divorce and custody battle. Brinkley paid for all of their relationship and she learns that Cook’s nickname is “Cash Cow.”
Even her divorce lawyer, Bob Cohen told her that she had a bad taste for her husband. But Brinkley said, “I don’t think two out of four are bad!
“It wasn’t that I was expecting it, but I came out of it with these amazing kids.”
Asked if she would marry again, Brinkley, who lives in the Hamptons, said, “Never say… I mean, [dates are] It’s far less and far between today. And I am very pleased and happy to do my thing. I think this is necessary before there is another relationship. But you know we see, you never know. ”
She wants to be a grandma, she admits.
Alexa Ray is engaged with restaurateur Ryan Gleason, and in one emotional passage in the book, Brinkley details how her eldest son had an inadvertent overdose of homeopathic pain medicine traummell after a breakup from her first boyfriend in December 2009.
“When something bad happens, you always try to put them in perspective, but when it’s your child, there’s no way to put them in perspective,” Brinkley said.
“But Alexa was there when I was doing that part of the book, and she had her opinion, and I think she welcomed it because it was drawn. [in the press] It was a little different from the actual thing. This was the first, a young girl sunk into depression from a truly big heartbreak, which was very inclusive.
“And that scared Billy and me… We headed to that hospital very quickly, as you know, boom, but she came out of it and she continues to talk to the young girl about her broken heart.”
The singer herself, Alexa Ray, has appeared on stage many times with her father. Sailor is a model, but Jack has dabbled in acting. But Brinkley tells her kids: “Don’t let anyone make you a baby!”
And Brinkley, who doesn’t look her age, is still modelling, runs her fashion line Twrhll and has her own wine, Belissima.
“I think there are people who live their lives like they’re afraid something bad will happen. [it’s all] It’s actually part of the adventure,” she said.
“And that’s not to say where I was or never had it shattered. [But] You pick up yourself and learn lessons from time to time, which will drive you forward. It sometimes takes a while, but looking back, I realized how wonderful it is to make mistakes. ”
