All The Bombshells From Christie Brinkley’s New Memoir ‘Uptown Girl’

The book traces Brinkley’s life and career in her own words, beginning with her childhood and her rough relationship with her biological father to at the start of her famed modeling career, after being discovered outside a phone booth in Paris in 1974.

Later, she goes on to her work in the industry and on screen, in films like 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation — and her relationship with Billy Joel, whose 1983 music video for his hit song “Uptown Girl” famously stars a young Brinkley.

Here are a few of the biggest bombshells from Brinkley’s memoir.

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She was ‘Relieved’ After Her Biological Father Gave Up Parental Rights

In one of the most candid moments in her memoir, Brinkley opens up about her — along with her mother and older brother’s — tumultuous relationship with her biological father, Herb Hudson. She recalled him coming from his job as a milkman and beating her with a belt or washing out her mouth with soap.

“It didn’t matter how good or quiet I was: Herb always seemed to find a reason to punish me,” she writes of her biological father.

“I still have memories of those days with Herb, but they come in fits and starts,” she writes. “And all are in black and white, like the photos in the albums my mom kept from those days, where Herb is cut out of every picture, like a body removed from a crime scene.”

A few years down the line, after her mother, Marge Brinkley, who died in 2012, divorced Hudson and remarried to a man named Don Brinkley. The supermodel recalled her biological father relinquishing his parental rights to her and her brother in a Los Angeles County courtroom — and the feeling overwhelmed her.

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“My heart skipped. Wait, Don wants me?” she writes, recalling the moment Don legally adopted her and her brother. “This nice man actually wants to be my father? A bit of blood returned to my face, and I started to wonder what life would be like with Don as our dad. I suddenly felt a huge sense of relief, realizing that I would never be whipped, spanked, rubbed raw with towels or made to gag on soap again.”

Billy Joel Denied Cheating During Their Marriage And She’s ‘Always Believed Him’  

The 71-year-old also takes time to share several intimate details about her love affairs, some famous and others less well-known. One romance that she takes time to highlight as one of her “two great loves” was Billy Joel (the other, she says, was Jean-Francois Allaux, a French illustrator who swept Brinkley off her feet after she moved to Paris at 19 to become an artist).

After her relationship with Allaux, she 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.

“We laughed like you couldn’t believe,” she wrote of Billy Joel, the “piano man” who would become 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.”

Writing about the end of their relationship, she shared that it “wasn’t functioning in the way you want it to anymore and it was painful.” Brinkley recounts how rumors about Joel having an affair with another woman swirled, and how his drinking became bigger than both of them.

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“To this day, Billy continues to deny ever having had affairs, and I’ve always believed him,” she recalls. “But on that New Year’s Day in 1994, when he did finally straggle home, I asked him to leave.”

Although the couple divorced in 1994, they’ve maintained a good relationship over the years, often reuniting to spend time with their daughter, Alexa Ray Joel.

After Christie Brinkley Began Dating Billy Joel, He Called Elle MacPherson To ‘Let Her Know’

Just as Brinkley and Joel’s relationship was budding after her split from Chandon, the “Longest Time” crooner was dealing with his own recent breakup from Brinkley’s fellow model Elle MacPherson.

According to the star, Joel had insisted on calling MacPherson while Brinkley was in the room to let her know about their relationship — something she felt was “completely unnecessary.”

“Once he and I started seeing each other, he insisted on calling Elle, while I was on the line, to tell her that he was going to be exclusive with me,” she writes. “Still, that didn’t stop rumors from circulating that she was waiting for Billy in his apartment the first time I ever went there, which wasn’t true (the media seemed always to want to pit models against each other, even though there were more friendships in the industry than anything else).”

’Christie Brinkley Feared The Worst In 1994 Helicopter Accident

The mom of three also opened up about the helicopter crash that almost killed her and five others in Telluride, Colorado, reflecting on the terrifying incident and her perspective on life since that day.

In 1994, Brinkley, then 40, embarked on a heli-skiing tour in the San Juan mountain range with five other friends: Ricky Taubman, a Los Angeles real estate developer; Sandra Will Carradine, the founder of Telluride’s Sheridan Arts Foundation; Carradine’s 11-year-old son, Cade; pilot Tom Sharp; and ski guide Mike Friedman.

“The crash was sudden and traumatic, coming out of nowhere,” she writes. “We had already taken two runs and were circling to land for a third, on the saddle of a faraway peak, when the helicopter just fell from the sky, plunging into a freefall from three hundred feet overhead, with no autorotation.”

Though the model was vacationing in Telluride with daughter Alexa Ray Joel, then 8, she was not on the helicopter for the trip. Brinkley’s husband at the time, Billy Joel, was also not present during the incident, as he was away in Chicago on tour.

“Suddenly, it became crystal clear that the only thing that really mattered in life and at death was the same: love. Love,” she says of the traumatic incident. “I focused on Alexa Ray, holding her pure in my thoughts and hoping to project all my heart and soul to her so she would feel it at the very moment of impact.”

When the helicopter struck the side of the mountain, Brinkley recalled the force being so powerful that the cabin was ripped in two. “Through all the noise and the sickening smell of engine fuel and grease, I suddenly realized I was still alive — I hadn’t died on impact — as I kept repeating Alexa Ray’s name like a mantra, praying that I wouldn’t feel the helicopter blades when they sliced through my neck.”

Luckily, no one in the group died, and rescue helicopters arrived within an hour to help, before transporting them to hospitals Telluride Medical Center.

The Real Story Behind Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl Video

A hot topic that has permeated discussions about Brinkley’s relationship with Joel over the years is who, exactly, the song “Uptown Girl” is about — and according to the model, the answer isn’t her.

“Six months into our relationship and one month after An Innocent Man started dominating the airwaves, we did something that would change my life and characterize us as a couple for the rest of our relationship: we made the music video for Billy’s new song ‘Uptown Girl,'” the star recalls.

“Unlike what many people think, Billy didn’t write the hit about me — at least, not initially — nor about Elle MacPherson, but about someone who was as much fantasy as ‘the Girl in the Red Ferrari.'”

Whoever originated it, Uptown Girl soon became Brinkley’s theme song.

“[Until] one day, when we were out in his home on Long Island, which overlooked Oyster Bay Harbor, and he suddenly turned to me with a smile on his face that grew wider as he spoke,” Brinkley recalls.

“‘I just realized something about this song that I started writing a while ago about someone I was imagining,'” she writes. “‘And now I’m looking at you here, and I don’t have to imagine her anymore— you’re right here in front of me, you’re my real uptown girl.'”

Christie Brinkley’s Third Husband Tracked Down Her Birth Father Who Had Abandoned and Abused Her: ‘It Was Such a Betrayal’

Soon after her relationship with Joel ended in 1994, she began dating third husband Richard Taubman, with whom she recalls she was “trauma bonded” after the helicopter crash. The couple married that same year, getting into a relationship that Brinkley called “hypnotizing.”

Despite how quickly and passionately their relationship was moving — as Brinkley also became pregnant with her second child Jack that year — the model writes that their relationship was troubled, and Taubman “[betrayed]” her in an unforgivable way.

One day when they were on the rocks, he flew to New York and convinced Brinkley to meet him for lunch. “He suddenly and casually dropped that he had tracked down my biological father, Herb Hudson, and had even spoken with him by phone,” Brinkley revealed.

Brinkley, who hadn’t had contact with her biological father since she was 8, was “so shocked and outraged” that she began to cry. The pair split up not long after, in New York City, just days after she had given birth to their son.

“‘We’re going to make a deal,'” Brinkley recalls of her breakup from Taubman. “‘I’m going to walk away from you and the baby just like Herb Hudson did.'”

“In that second, the room collapsed around me, as Ricky’s words hung in the air like dark, dirty soot, choking me with so much shock and outrage that I felt breathless,” she says. “Sometimes, history has a horrible way of repeating itself.”

Christie Brinkley Calls Her Strict Diets From Top Model Days ‘Self-Imposed Starvation’

For Uptown Girl, the model digs out 1970s diary entries about her diets at the time that read “like a registry of self- imposed starvation.”

One example of a daily menu for Brinkley from Oct. 14, 1975 involved only a “sugar-free digestive cookie” for breakfast, a 0% fat yogurt cup, an orange and a small serving of brown rice for lunch and finally “one bite Gruyère cheese, one 0% fat yogurt” for dinner.

“I can’t believe that this was my idea of healthy,” she writes of the “fad diets” she suffered through at the time. “But at the time, I was so desperate to fit into designer clothes, which came in only one size when I was a young model: runway size, which was impossibly small.”

“The thinner I was, the more likely I would be able to metamorphose into a dress or pantsuit — and the less embarrassed I would likely feel at work,” she adds. “Even so, I did a lot of modeling with the zippers open in the back and with photographers asking me to turn this way or that so the camera wouldn’t reveal my jerry-rigged outfit.”

Eileen Ford, an executive at Ford Models and a former model in her own right, once instructed Brinkley to eat “only fish” — a difficult instruction for Brinkley, who was a vegetarian.

Uptown Girl by Christie Brinkley is available now, wherever books are sold.