Told she'd be ‘done by 30', at 71, Christie Brinkley is still going strong

The Age

5 days ago

This story is part of the July 20 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories.
How different might the histories of fashion photography and pop music – never mind Billy Joel's love life – have been if Bianca the dog had not been unwell in the spring of 1974? Bianca belonged to a 20-year-old American woman who had moved to Paris to get over a cheating boyfriend. When the puppy fell ill, the woman left her apartment to phone the vet. She was looking down at Bianca, who was curled up in her bag, and accidentally walked into a tall man wearing a faded green US Army jacket. He had a camera hanging around his neck. He told her he was a photographer who had a client looking for a California girl for a modelling job.
'If you're not a model, you should be,' the man said. 'You could earn a lot of money.'
He asked the woman her name. She told him it was Christie Brinkley.
Fast-forward to today and Brinkley is beaming in from the kitchen in her Hamptons home. In the days leading up to the interview, it was made clear that she would not be turning on her camera during our Zoom call. This made me annoyed with her before we had even started talking, but apparently there had been some misunderstanding because her camera is very much on.
In conversation, Brinkley is, and I cannot stress this enough, a total hoot: funny, unaffected, open and a joy to spend 90 minutes with. We are talking about the publication of her memoir. Somewhat inevitably, it is titled Uptown Girl because if there is anything Christie Brinkley is known for, it is the song her former husband Billy Joel wrote about her and the video in which she makes a small but unforgettable appearance.
'I love the song,' she says. 'I think it's so fun that I get to have a theme song.' It's great, but there is so much more to Brinkley than being a muse. She became the world's first supermodel before the word even existed, appearing on more than 500 magazine covers, and is the only person to appear on three consecutive Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue covers. She had a record 25-year contract with the cosmetics brand CoverGirl – one of the longest modelling contracts in history. She is also a hugely successful businesswoman. As well as her fashion line, TWRHLL, she has an organic wine label called Bellissima.
'I have always wanted to try to do as many things as possible,' she says, 'have all these different experiences and fill up my life with adventures.' It's been an extraordinary journey but, alongside the private jets and exotic locations, there has been heartbreak and pain, stretching all the way back to her childhood.
Brinkley was born in Monroe, Michigan, on February 2, 1954, but moved to Los Angeles when she was a young girl. Her biological father, Herbert Hudson, was, she recalls, 'unhappy, unkind and often cruel'. Hudson, who worked as a milkman, subjected his young daughter to regular whippings with his belt.
Her parents divorced when she was eight and her mother married the TV writer Donald Brinkley. 'My mum just wanted to pretend that whole part of our life didn't exist,' she says. 'We never talked about it.'
Even though she was living in Malibu, Brinkley fell in love with all things French. Her parents sent her to the elite private school Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles and at 18 she moved to Paris to study art. She remembers seeing Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir having dinner in Montparnasse, and she fell in love with Jean-François Allaux, who would soon become the first of her four husbands. When Allaux was drafted into the French military she got herself a dog for company – the same Bianca who would go on to change her life.
After being discovered, Brinkley's life turned into a 'succession of go-sees, shoots, commercials and covers'. She and Allaux moved to New York where she would run into John Lennon and Yoko Ono holding hands in their neighbourhood. 'I made the cover of 11 magazines all published about the same time,' she remembers, 'my face was splashed across the front of Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Vogue France, Vogue Patterns, Italian and American Harper's Bazaar and several different issues of Glamour.'
Alongside the modelling came other opportunities. She missed out on a role in the film Raging Bull but ended up having a side career as a boxing photographer. 'One day I was sitting in the Plaza Hotel's Edwardian Room, which looks over 59th Street and Central Park,' she says. 'I saw Muhammad Ali crossing the street. I shot up from the table and ran through the dining room, through the lobby, to the steps. I said, 'Muhammad Ali, I love you,' and he said, 'Christie Brinkley, I love you, too.' ' Brinkley asked him for ringside tickets for his upcoming fight with Larry Holmes so she could take photographs. She would later cover other boxing fights and her work was published in The Ring and Sports Illustrated magazines.
With Brinkley's career having gone stratospheric – Harper's Bazaar named her one of the most beautiful women in the world – her marriage to Allaux came under strain. 'The more successful I became, the more I understood what I was missing by speeding home to keep him company.' I feel somewhat sorry for Allaux, not least because he seemed pretty much the only person Christie dated or married who did not cheat on her. 'Unfortunately, I think models do attract some of the wrong types,' she says. They divorced in 1981.
Brinkley started seeing the racing driver and French champagne heir Olivier Chandon de Brailles, but she ended the relationship after he admitted cheating on her. She flew to St. Barts to get over the break-up (Chandon would later die in a car crash) and that was where she met Billy Joel. He won her over by accompanying her in a hotel bar as she sang The Girl from Ipanema. (After she had sung, another young guest approached Joel and announced she could also sing. 'I know Billy was thinking, 'Go away, kid. I'm trying to work my magic here,' but he started playing what she wanted him to, which was Respect by Aretha Franklin.' The moment she started singing, the bar fell silent, stunned by her voice. That 19-year-old woman was Whitney Houston. One month later, she would sign a worldwide record deal.)
Joel and Brinkley soon started dating when they both returned to New York. It was pretty obvious what he saw in her, I say, but what did she see in him? 'First and foremost, he was so funny,' she says. 'He made me laugh so hard and it was mixed with this real sweetness, like a vulnerability. He was a very old-fashioned kind of guy – very old school, very New York, which is so different from California.'
The couple were at Joel's home on Long Island when he told her about a song he had been working on. 'He suddenly said, 'I just realised something. You're who I've been writing about,' ' she recalls. 'He said he was writing this song about a fantasy girl. He had called it Uptown Girl and then had stopped working on it because it wasn't going anywhere. He said, 'I'm looking at you and I realise there you are – you're my uptown girl.' ' Joel went away to complete the song and Brinkley was with him in the studio when it was recorded.
Joel and Brinkley married in March 1985 and their daughter, Alexa Ray, was born that December, but the marriage became strained after Joel started drinking heavily. In her book, Brinkley describes one incident where Joel, under the influence, picks up a chaise longue and throws it through the doors of her parents' patio, shattering the glass. 'His 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 with me.'
Brinkley divorced Joel in 1994 but they are now friends again. ('How close we can be depends on who he's married to,' she says.) Then followed two disastrous marriages. She met Richard Taubman while on a trip to Telluride in Colorado in early 1994. They married after they were both in a helicopter crash in the Colorado mountains. In their divorce proceedings just a year later, Brinkley sued him for $US2 million she said he owed her, while he fought for joint custody of their son, Jack.
'I'm not sure what led me into such a whirlwind relationship. A psychologist later diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress disorder, which often causes people to make impulsive, irrational decisions.' But Taubman was a positive catch compared with husband number four, an architect named Peter Cook. They married in autumn 1996 and had a daughter, Sailor, but the marriage unravelled when it emerged that Cook had been having an affair with a teenager he met in a toyshop. 'How did I not see all this? How did I not know?' she says.
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It was later revealed that Cook had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars visiting internet pornography sites. He had also shared explicit videos and images of himself on the internet while searching for more girls. 'How did I ever get involved with this person?' Brinkley says. 'You really feel stupid and then you try to learn from it, so you're not quite as stupid next time.'
Brinkley turned 71 this year. 'When I started out, 30 was a number to fear,' she says. 'They said to me, 'You'll be chewed up and spat out by the time you're 30. It will all be over.'' They were, needless to say, completely wrong.