Christie Brinkley once thought Billy Joel was her soulmate. But in her new book, Uptown Girl, the 71-year-old model reveals how his battles with alcohol ultimately shattered that dream—and their marriage. “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,” she writes in the memoir, named after Joel’s 1983 hit inspired by her, according to Page Six. Brinkley recalls how the singer would disappear on drunken benders during their marriage, which lasted from 1985 to 1994. In one episode, Joel left their daughter Alexa Ray’s fifth birthday party and disappeared for two days, leaving Brinkley with anxious “visions of his car wrapped around a tree” and a “panic I couldn’t shake.” The breaking point came when Joel hosted his band for a rehearsal at their East Hamptons home—then drunkenly accused them of stealing his pasta, even though he had eaten it himself. Brinkley asked Joel for a divorce the next day. “He was acting delusional in a way I’d never seen before,” she said. Despite everything, the exes have stayed friends, and Brinkley said Joel—who has since said he’s stopped drinking—encouraged her to tell her story. “If there wasn’t that issue…” she told Page Six, “I do think that we were probably really soulmates, it was an amazing time of my life.”
