Christie Brinkley Recalls the Day She Decided to Leave Billy Joel: ‘I Was So Scared That I Couldn’t Think’

Christie Brinkley is opening up about the breaking point in her marriage to Billy Joel.

The model, 71, shares just how much of an impact alcohol had on her marriage to the “Piano Man” singer, 75, in her newly-released memoir Uptown Girl.

In her memoir, Brinkley confesses that she “never wanted to end things with Billy” due to his drinking, and that she read “every self-help book [she] could find” while she and Joel “went to see a string of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other medical doctors.”

In the end, however, Brinkley said her ex’s alcohol problem was “bigger than both of us,” writing, “Booze was the other woman, and it was beginning to seem that he preferred to be with ‘her’ rather than with me.”

Brinkley and Joel, who tied the knot in 1985, would eventually divorce in 1994, but the “breaking point” came a year earlier. As the “Movin’ Out” singer prepared to set off on his River of Dreams tour, Brinkley said she hosted his band at their home for a rehearsal.

“He was acting delusional in a way I’d never seen before,” she wrote, recalling that Joel was drunkenly convinced that someone had eaten his pasta and “went ballistic” when his wife and bandmates laughed. “I was so scared that I couldn’t think, and when one of the guys in the band grabbed my arm, pulling me out of the house with the rest of them, I went along,” Brinkley wrote.

Ultimately, Brinkley returned home to stay with her and Joel’s 8-year-old daughter Alexa Ray, who was sleeping upstairs, but when Joel heard her, she claims he “rushed over to the bedroom and began pounding on the door, demanding that I let him in.”

It was only when Brinkley told him their daughter was asleep that she says he stopped. “Thank goodness Billy, despite how drunk he may have been, knew that I was right: he wouldn’t want his little girl to see him like that,” she wrote. “The next day, I asked him for a divorce. It wasn’t the first time I had threatened to leave, and even though he was about to go on tour for months, we both knew then that things had reached a breaking point.”

The couple would go on to try and give their marriage one more shot over the holidays, but when Joel didn’t come home on New Year’s Eve because he was “having an affair with a woman who worked as a caterer for the show,” Brinkley knew it was over.

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

Brinkley would go on to marry Richard Taubman from 1994 to 1995 before going on to marry Peter Cook in 1996. The former couple, who split in 2008, share two children. Joel also would go on to welcome two more children with wife Alexis Roderick, whom he married in 2015.