Billy Joel Went MIA For Days, Christie Brinkley Recalls ‘Panic I Couldn’t Shake’

Christie Brinkley has lived a life most individuals may solely think about, and she or he’s lastly telling all of it in her new memoir, “Uptown Lady.”

The 71-year-old supermodel, who has survived heartbreak, tragedy, and even a terrifying helicopter crash, is opening up like by no means earlier than about her wild journey.

In her e-book, Christie Brinkley reveals secrets and techniques about her marriage to Billy Joel, the ache of divorce, and the way she’s discovered happiness once more.

Brinkley, who named her memoir after Joel’s 1983 hit tune impressed by her, revealed that his struggles with ingesting in the end doomed their marriage.

“If there wasn’t that subject…,” she advised Page Six, trailing off. “I do suppose that we have been most likely actually soulmates, it was an incredible time of my life. I had a lot enjoyable. We have been such nomads, gypsies, simply between his job and mine, we have been seeing the world … it was fantastic, actually fantastic.”

However behind the glamorous façade, issues have been crumbling.

Brinkley writes that Joel would vanish for days whereas ingesting, even disappearing throughout their daughter Alexa Ray’s fifth birthday celebration, a terrifying episode that left her with “visions of his automotive wrapped round a tree” and creating “a panic I couldn’t shake.” (Eerily, Joel did crash his Mercedes right into a tree in 2003.)

There have been different blow-ups too, like when Brinkley locked Joel out of their lodge suite after listening to rumors he was partying with an Australian actress, just for him to return “visibly and audibly drunk,” throwing a chaise lounge by means of the patio doorways.

The breaking level? A drunken meltdown over a bowl of pasta along with his band.

“He was appearing delusional in a manner I’d by no means seen earlier than,” Brinkley recalled, revealing she requested for a divorce the very subsequent day. “The ingesting was greater than the each of us,” she mentioned. “Booze was the opposite lady and it was starting to appear that he most popular to be along with her reasonably than me.”

Regardless of the ache, Brinkley mentioned she nonetheless holds deep affection for Joel, who’s now sober and married to Alexis Roderick, with whom he shares two younger daughters.

“He’s the daddy of my firstborn and we spent such nice childhood collectively. And I’ll love him eternally,” she mentioned.

When she advised him concerning the e-book, Joel advised her, “Go forward and inform your story… the great, the unhealthy, no matter it is advisable say.”

Brinkley hopes her story sheds mild on habit and the way it impacts households. “Once you’re within the throes of a ingesting habit, you don’t keep in mind what you probably did,” she mentioned. “It’s the one who is relying on you who is aware of what occurred.”

However Billy wasn’t her solely heartbreak.

The Sports activities Illustrated legend discovered fame after transferring to Paris at 18, heartbroken over a dishonest boyfriend. In Paris, she married artist Jean François Allaux, however the romance resulted in divorce by 1981.

Then got here tragedy. In 1983, her boyfriend, Olivier Chandon de Brailles, inheritor to the Moët & Chandon fortune, was killed in a racing accident. Not lengthy after, Brinkley met Joel at a dive bar in St. Barts.

Her life took one other horrifying flip in 1994 when she survived a helicopter crash whereas heli-skiing in Telluride. Brinkley described how the chopper “simply fell from the sky,” and her ski boot received caught within the wreckage, dragging her towards a sheer cliff, solely to be saved by a wall of snow.

She credit a “magic grime” appeal from Chimayo, New Mexico, for her survival. “The truth that any of us lived by means of that’s such a miracle,” she mentioned. “And every day is such a present.”

Although she and Joel have been separated on the time, he rushed to her facet, however Brinkley overheard him inform somebody on the cellphone, “No, don’t fear, I’m not going again to her, I simply must see her by means of this.”

“It broke my coronary heart,” she confessed.

Brinkley’s third marriage, to real-estate developer Rick Taubman, ended badly, too. She alleges he “borrowed” $2 million from her throughout their seven-month marriage.