Christie Brinkley’s new memoir ‘Uptown Girl’ and a scene from her wedding with Billy Joel. Photo:
Patrick Demarchelier/Trunk Archive
“I still believe in love,” says Christie Brinkley. It’s one of the prevailing themes of her new memoir, Uptown Girl, a book full of surprising revelations and excerpted exclusively in this week’s PEOPLE.
For the first time, the 71-year-old supermodel shares intimate details of her love affairs, some famous and some less well-known. Some disastrous. (“There were a few doozies,” she says) and others dazzling, including her romance with Billy Joel. “I had two great loves, Jean-Francois and Billy,” she says.
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The first, Jean Francois Allaux, was a French illustrator who swept Brinkley off her feet after she moved to Paris at 19 to become an artist. (Fun fact: the book includes many of Brinkley’s illustrations, as well as never-before-seen photos.) Brinkley and Allaux lived together in a small apartment. ”We’d shampoo each other’s hair in our little garret,” she recalls. After her modeling career took off, they eventually moved to New York City and married in 1975. But as her career catapulted her to fame and her life got bigger, they outgrew the relationship and divorced in 1981.
Christie Brinkley and Jean Francois Allaux on their wedding day in 1975. Courtesy Christie Brinkley
Brinkley then fell in love with Olivier Chandon, an heir to the French champagne fortune with a passion for driving race cars — to an extreme. He died in a terrible car accident on March 2, 1983, leaving her with a broken heart.
Then came Billy Joel. “We laughed like you couldn’t believe,” she recalls of the piano man who became her second husband in 1985. “And seeing him in concert,” she says, “I felt like the luckiest girl in the whole arena. I liked to be right in the front row by the piano so he could glance at me and I could look up and see everything.” But In the end, “our relationship wasn’t functioning in the way you want it to anymore and it was painful.” They divorced in 1994.
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That same year, she survived a horrific helicopter crash on a heli-skiing trip with Colorado real estate developer Ricky Taubman, who also nearly died in the accident. He became her third (but short-lived) husband and the father of their son, Jack.
“I definitely had post traumatic stress disorder and I was making some really bad choices,” she says of that time. “I was really lost.”
Richard Taubman and Christie Brinkley in 1994. Vinnie Zuffante/Getty
“I was looking at myself in that chapter, like, what happened to you?” she says, of the memories that flooded back while writing her book. “I think I was reeling from losing Billy and and I was thinking Billy is going to come riding into town any second and go ‘I can’t lose you.’”
But by then, he was moving on and Brinkley went to Telluride to be with Taubman. “I got in deeper,” she says. “I didn’t take time to stop and reflect and learn.”
The marriage ended in 1995 and a year later, she met architect Peter Cook, another relationship that ended in tabloid headlines after she was told he was having an affair with a teenager,
“I didn’t say anything to anybody,” she says of their scandalous split and a drawn-out court battle for the custody of Jack, whom he’d adopted, and their daughter Sailor. “But one day, when I came out of the courtroom I said, ‘Google a narcissist.’ The letters started pouring in and I had so many women saying ‘Thank you … I realize other women are going through it.’”
Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel on their wedding night in 1985. Patrick Demarchelier/Trunk Archive
When asked what she’s learned about love, Brinkley’s response is a thoughtful one. “Love is something that you have to cherish while you have it and nurture it, but you can’t hang onto it and you can’t change it or mold it to your desires.”
“I mention in the book a forensic psychiatrist that I had to see for my last divorce,” she continues. “He said he didn’t think I would ever be able to fall in love again and trust anybody again. Because to go from the experience I’d had with my [biological] father and the other things that had happened in my life, he thought it was just way too much so that’s probably why I’m not with anybody now but that’s not to say there’s not some miracle guy out there – but it’s okay if it doesn’t happen.”
And as she says, “I’m very, very happy and content.”
Uptown Girl by Christie Brinkley comes out April 29 from Harper Influence and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
