Christie Brinkley's 'Uptown Girl': 6 things you'll learn about her

Christie Brinkley finally tells her life story in “Uptown Girl" (Harper Influence, $34), a memoir named for the 1983 Billy Joel single that became her unofficial theme song. Written with Sarah Toland, the book chronicles Brinkley’s early childhood under an abusive father, her rise as a world-famous model and her marriage to Joel, which she describes as a tender romance that couldn’t survive the singer’s drinking and volatile behavior.

Brinkley, who has a home in Bridgehampton, will be making two appearances throughout Long Island to promote “Uptown Girl,” which goes on sale Tuesday. She'll be at Barnes & Noble in Carle Place at 6 p.m. Thursday and be interviewed by Newsday's Elisa DiStefano for a Newsday Live! event in Melville, at 7 p.m. May 7. 

Newsday obtained an advance copy of "Uptown Girl." Here are six things we learned about Brinkley:

1. She speaks French. Raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Canoga Park, Brinkley began taking French classes in seventh grade after seeing Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” At 19, she moved to Paris, where she met Jean-François Allaux, her first husband, and caught the eye of Errol Sawyer, the photographer who helped launch her modeling career.

2. She doesn’t diet. After joining the powerhouse agency Ford Models (co-founded by Great Neck’s Eileen Ford), Brinkley was put on a strict regimen of only fish and water. She was later allowed such meager snacks as sunflower seeds and nonfat yogurt, but Brinkley soon decided against self-starvation. “In my mind, when I was in a new city or a foreign country, all bets were off,” she writes. “I figured I might as well enjoy it, with all the piña coladas and banana chips I wanted.”

3. She moonlighted as a sports photographer. According to Brinkley, in August of 1980 she spotted Muhammad Ali outside New York’s Plaza Hotel and finagled a couple of tickets to his upcoming fight against Larry Holmes. After showing up with a camera, Brinkley began shooting for The Ring magazine and even Sports Illustrated. Brinkley guesses she might be the only sports photographer to have a boxer wink at her after he’d been knocked out.

4. Her name for Billy Joel was “Joe.” When the supermodel met the singer on the island of St. Bart’s in 1983, he had scored more than a dozen Top 40 hits, including “Just the Way You Are,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” and “Allentown.” Yet Brinkley had never heard of him. “I wasn’t sure if his name was Billy Joe or Billy Joel,” she admits. She chose Joe, and the name stuck “for the eleven years we dated and were married.”  

5. Joel gave her the lyrics to “The Longest Time” as a gift. During their courtship, Brinkley recalls, Joel presented her with a velvet box containing a diamond bracelet. Also inside: a sheet of lined notebook paper with the handwritten words to a song that would become a Top 20 hit for Joel in 1984. “When he first wrote down these lyrics, he and I were still tentative with each other,” Brinkley observes, “feeling each other out — and, admittedly, liking what we felt.”

6. She’s an eternal optimist. Despite a difficult early childhood, a highly publicized love life (her divorce lawyer called her “a bad picker,” she says) and a helicopter accident that led to years of hip pain, Brinkley remains upbeat at 71. Throughout the book, she frequently cites her adoptive father, television writer Don Brinkley, for his support and encouragement. “Christie, baby, you write your own script,” she recalls him saying, “so go out there and make sure you write a damn good one.”

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com