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Christie Brinkley is being very open about the feelings and pain caused by her breakup with Billy Joel. She said, “I’ll always love him, but I couldn’t live with his disappearances.” In a wide-ranging talk with Page Six, the former singer talked lovingly of Brinkley and revealed that she was still carrying the torch for their marriage of nearly a decade despite his alcohol consumption and many absences.
Brinkley, 71, talking about her former husband, said, “I’ll love him forever,” but also confessed, “I couldn’t live with him.”
The couple got married in 1985 and parted ways in 1994. The couple only has a daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, who is currently 39 years old.
"We were probably really soulmates"
Brinkley called back to both the good and bad times when they were together.
“If there wasn’t that issue … I do think that we were probably really soulmates, it was an amazing time of my life. I had so much fun. We were such nomads, gypsies — just between his job and mine, we were seeing the world … it was wonderful, really wonderful," she told Page Six.
But beyond the glittering façade, Joel’s alcohol problems and disappearing acts became the flies in the ointment of their marriage and led to Brinkley feeling deserted and scared.
The disappearances that shattered trust
Brinkley's new memoir "Uptown Girl" brings to light the terrifying moments when Joel would go missing for a couple of days. A quite painful memory happened on their little girl's fifth birthday when he didn’t show up for two days.
"I had visions of his car wrapped around a tree," she wrote, describing the fear she felt — a premonition that eerily materialized years later when Joel actually crashed his car into a tree in 2003.
The second case was one of the dinner parties Joel had left in the middle of. Once he was reported to be seen with an Australian actress during a Hawaii trip, Brinkley said she had the hotel suite door locked. Joel, she wrote, "visibly and audibly drunk" and pushed a chaise longue through the glass doors of their patio.
"The drinking was bigger than the both of us"
The trigger was when Joel, while drunk, accused his friends of taking his pasta. "He was acting delusional in a way I’d never seen before," Brinkley said. By the following day, it was clear to her that she could not continue her stay.
“To be clear, I never wanted to end things with Billy,” Brinkley told Page Six. “I read every self-help book I could find … we went to see a string of psychiatrists, psychologists and other medical doctors.”
She, in the end, saw that love alone could not help her win the battle.
“The drinking was bigger than the both of us. Booze was the other woman and it was beginning to seem that he preferred to be with her rather than me.”
Billy Joel’s support for her story
Brinkley assured Joel that she would be featuring the personal details of her life in Uptown Girl before publishing it. She shared that he gave her the green light and boosted her morale:
"Go ahead and tell your story… the good, the bad, whatever you need to say."
"Leaving Billy wasn’t easy for me to do — and it’s not easy to say anything bad about somebody that I hold in such high regard," she added. "[Although] I don’t think it’s bad."
She emphasized that her intention was not to criticize but to uncover the depth of the effect of addiction on the family members.
“When you’re in the throes of a drinking addiction, you don’t remember what you did. You wake up the next day and it’s the person who is counting on you who knows what happened.”
A bond that endures
Brinkley clarified that although the memories were painful, she was not bitter towards Joel at all.
“He’s the father of my firstborn and we spent such great formative years together,” she said. "And I’ll love him forever. Things just reached a point where I knew I couldn’t live with him."
Her latest book, Uptown Girl, reflects powerfully on love, addiction, and the finality of the issues in an open, emotional, and honest way.
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