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Daily Mail
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Christie Brinkley beat off TWO famous beauties for Billy Joel's love - but his cruel betrayal broke her heart
The night Christie Brinkley met Billy Joel, in a dive bar in Barts, is the stuff of rock 'n' roll legend. But what the supermodel has rarely discussed is that as he wooed her from the out-of-tune piano, she had to compete with two other famously beautiful and far younger women for his attention. In her new memoir, Uptown Girl, she reveals she was on the exclusive Caribbean island for a magazine shoot in January 1983 - fresh out of a breakup with uber-wealthy Olivier Chandon de Brailles, heir to the Moët-Chandon Champagne fortune. Despite feeling 'sadder and lonelier than I had in a long time,' the 27-year-old still accepted an invitation to a local bar where Billy Joel was said to be drinking. ''Billy who?' I asked, unfamiliar with the name,' she writes. But, while she was completely unaware of his stardom - Joel already had global hits including Piano Man, New York State of Mind, and Honesty under his belt - she was immediately disarmed by his self-deprecating charm. 'The man was sunburned to a crisp, his face the same color as cranberries and unctuous with oil, which he'd undoubtedly slathered on to sooth the burn,' she writes. In this state, he looked nothing like a rock star - though he hoped to 'work some magic' on her as he walked over to the piano. 'But Billy didn't touch the keys,' she writes. 'Instead, he looked directly at me and patted the bench next to him, suggesting I join him there, which I did, scooching beside him on the narrow seat. ''What do you want to hear?' he asked, flashing me a sly smile. ''The Girl From Ipanema!' I cried, naming my favorite song, which I had just learned to sing in Portuguese - and which surely wasn't what he expected, indisputably disappointing the crowd, too.' She went on to sing the classic, accompanied by Joel on the piano. But she wasn't the only woman vying for the star's attention that night. 'After I finished singing,' continues Brinkley in the book, 'a tall, pretty girl with rich cafe-au-lait skin approached the piano and, looking at Billy, announced that she could sing, too. 'Go away, kid - I'm trying to work my magic here, Billy thought, he told me later, but always the consummate gentleman, he simply nodded and started playing what she asked him to, which was Respect by Aretha Franklin. 'The young woman, it turned out, was Whitney Houston, a 19-year-old model from New Jersey who, in January 1983, was in St Barts for a shoot and, one month later, would sign a worldwide record deal that put her on the path to becoming 'the voice' and one of the greatest singers in music history.' While Houston was belting out the karaoke classic, yet another stunning 19-year-old love rival walked into the bar. 'At first, Elle Macpherson draped her beautiful body over the back of a chair,' writes Brinkley, 'then eventually, right across the piano, making eyes at Billy.' Brinkley soon left the crowded bar, and didn't get together with Joel on that trip - in fact, after they were married two years later, they would joke that they both went home with the wrong people; Joel with Macpherson and Brinkley with a young sailing captain called Clay. But when they did finally start dating, 'he asked me to be on the line when he called Elle Macpherson to tell her that he wanted to be exclusive with me.' The celebrity couple were married for nine years, and had one daughter, Alexa Ray. However, Joel's drinking - and rumors of his affairs (which he has always denied) - took their toll, and they separated in early 1994. That April, still in love and hoping that absence might make the heart grow fonder on her husband's side, Brinkley decided to take a trip heli-skiing in Colorado. It was a decision that almost cost her life: the helicopter she was in crashed at 12,000 feet. 'The helicopter smacked into the granite mountain with such terrible speed and force that it split in two,' she writes in the book. 'Trapped inside the shattered cabin, the six of us began to bounce violently across the saddle, glass, metal, and other debris flying everywhere, as we tumbled like bodies in a washing machine set to the spin cycle, with such centrifugal force that it sucked off my watch.' Miraculously, no one died in the terrifying smash - a fact she puts down to the small vial containing sacred chimayo soil that she'd picked up two weeks before and wore on a necklace. The pueblo Indians believe it protects anyone who touches it - and while the charm flew off in the crash, it was found later among the helicopter wreckage. Lying in a Colorado hospital - covered in painful contusions but, astonishingly, with no broken bones - she was stunned to see Billy Joel come to her rescue, 'just like a knight in shining armor.' 'In that moment I thought my prince had finally come to rescue me, and I waited for Billy to say the words I so badly wanted to hear: 'I almost lost you, I can't live without you, I love you.'' He swept her off on to a private plane, to get her back to Long Island. But, while drifting in and out of drug-induced unconsciousness, she overheard what felt like the ultimate betrayal. 'I think Billy must have thought I was asleep when he made a phone call,' she writes, 'but I was very much awake when I heard him say the words I didn't ever want to hear.' 'No, don't worry, I'm not going back to her,' he allegedly said to the person on the other line. 'I just need to see her through this.' 'And just like that,' she writes, 'the dream broke apart like debris. I knew then that our separation was real and that while I had wanted to believe he couldn't live without me, apparently he could.'
Los Angeles Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Christie Brinkley details turbulent marriage with Billy Joel: ‘I hesitated to put that scene in the book'
To make it as a fashion model is one thing; to endure in such an intensely competitive field, as Christie Brinkley has done, is quite another. It means having to live in constant fear that your job might be snatched by someone younger, or thinner, or whatever the zeitgeist might be hunting for at any given moment. If Brinkley's new memoir, 'Uptown Girl,' has one lesson to impart to its readers, it's that no one, not even the beauty icon, rides through life for free. Brinkley, who grew up in Canoga Park and Malibu, was discovered in 1973 by photographer Errol Sawyer at 19 while waiting for a payphone on a Paris street corner. Things went whoosh! and she signed with legendary agent John Casablancas, then decamped to New York, where she worked for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and virtually every other fashion magazine on the newsstand. In 1974, Brinkley booked her first job for Sports Illustrated, a collaboration that endures today. (Last year Brinkley appeared, along with Tyra Banks, Martha Stewart and other celebrities, on an SI cover celebrating 60 years of the swimsuit issue.) Life was grand for Brinkley. She recalls one lunch in the early 1970s with agent Nina Blanchard at the old Brown Derby in Hollywood, when she booked her first three major TV commercials before coffee was served, just by sitting there. Francesco Scavullo, Patrick Demarchelier and Helmut Newton trained their lenses on her and the rest was history. She bought her first apartment in a prewar building on the Upper West Side soon after. Brinkley bemoans the present colonization of the fashion space by digital media. 'There was a kind of dance between photographer and model,' says Brinkley via Zoom from a hotel suite in midtown Manhattan. 'You felt as if it was a joint creation, but that's been lost. Digital photos can be retouched any which way, so what happens on a shoot becomes an afterthought. And there is also the fact of holding a magazine in your hands without being interrupted by pop-up ads.' In January 1983, while on location in St. Barts for a photo shoot, she met Billy Joel at a motel dive bar. Both were reeling from their previous relationships; Joel had recently divorced his first wife, Elizabeth Weber. Joel played 'The Girl From Ipanema' on the bar piano while Brinkley sang along. Brinkley knew nothing about Joel, let alone that he was a global pop megastar. Two months later, she knew all too well, as Joel wooed Brinkley in grand rock-star fashion. There were thousands of roses, presidential suites in impossibly picturesque hotels, a white horse as a Christmas gift. On her 30th birthday, Joel chartered a Gulfstream III jet to sweep Brinkley from Long Island to his concert in South Bend, Ind., where a grotesquely large cake was rolled onto the stage and 16,000 fans sang 'Happy Birthday' to her. The couple got married on March 23, 1985, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. What happened next was like a Nora Ephron script rewritten by John Cassavetes. In the summer of 1986, the couple and their then-4-year-old daughter, Alexa Ray, were staying in a rented cottage in Montauk while Gate Lodge, Joel's estate on Long Island's North Shore, was being renovated. One rainy night, Brinkley woke up in the early morning hours to discover her husband had vanished. Shortly before dawn, he returned home, stumbling out of a cab, drunk and ornery. It was the first in a series of scary scenes for Brinkley, whose feelings for Joel vacillated between veneration, unconditional love and abject fear. 'I loved him and I wanted to make it work,' she says. 'Drinking is a disease. And I knew that there had to be some way to help him, and not always get to that point where this person who you love is suddenly a stranger to you.' Given the very public nature of their marriage, Brinkley found herself unable to cultivate support for fear that the tabloids would find out about Joel's addiction. 'I was 100% dedicated to Billy, but I never told anyone about our issues, not even my friends,' she says. 'It was very difficult in that way, but we had a child together and I was trying to protect the family.' Then Joel's issues began to shade into psychosis. Brinkley in her book describes one ugly scene when Joel, deep in his cups, ate a heap of spaghetti directly from a large pan on the stove, then vehemently kicked everyone out of the house for eating his pasta. 'I hesitated to put that scene in the book,' she says. 'But at the same time, it demonstrates what I was up against.' Despite the roiling storms she was navigating in her private life, Brinkley's public persona was expanding beyond fashion's gilt frame into the American mainstream. By the early 1980s, she had become synonymous with the massively popular Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, appearing on the cover three years in a row. Then there was the 1983 music video for Joel's hit 'Uptown Girl,' in which Brinkley, wearing a strapless black and white dress, is the unattainable object of desire for the pop star, who plays against type as a working-class car mechanic. 'Suddenly, I had a theme song,' she says. 'That was definitely a gift that Billy gave to me.' Brinkley hacked it for 11 years with Joel, until one final crescendo of boozy madness and a string of well-publicized affairs prompted her to file divorce papers in 1994. As it turned out, this was a mere prelude for a far more traumatic incident in her life. That same year, a helicopter crash on a mountain in Telluride, Colo., nearly killed Brinkley and her five traveling companions. She married crash survivor Richard Taubman, a real estate developer, in the aftermath. The couple had a son and divorced in 1995. Despite the vicissitudes of her life, Brinkley has maintained a vigorous career as a model and entrepreneur, enduring far longer than her contemporaries, readjusting her approach to the marketplace, finding the niche that eludes everyone else. 'In the years after the copter crash, I have maintained an extraordinary sense of gratitude on steroids,' she says. 'We're all so lucky to make it through each day, especially now.' In other words, nobody rides for free.
New York Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Monica Getz, Advocate for Divorce Court Reform, Dies at 90
Monica Getz, whose tempestuous 24-year marriage to the jazz star Stan Getz was whipsawed by his addictions and who, after losing a protracted legal fight to save the marriage, became an advocate for divorce court reform, died on Jan. 5 in Irvington, N.Y. She was 90. Her son Nicolaus Getz said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was bile duct cancer. The Swedish-born Ms. Getz was a student at George Washington University when Mr. Getz, one of the most revered jazz saxophonists of the 20th century, met her backstage at a campus concert and pursued her even though he was married. When they wed in 1956, the actress Donna Reed was the maid of honor at the nuptials in Las Vegas. The Getzes lived in a 27-room mansion called Shadowbrook, overlooking the Hudson River in Tarrytown, N.Y. They bought it in the mid-1960s when Mr. Getz's fame was at an apex as a result of his bossa nova recordings: the album 'Jazz Samba,' with the guitarist Charlie Byrd, and the hit single 'The Girl From Ipanema,' on which his mellifluous tenor sax backed the breathy singing of Astrud Gilberto. Drugs and alcohol, however, created havoc in the Getzes' marriage. Mr. Getz had begun using heroin at 16 and was arrested two years before the marriage for attempting to rob a pharmacy to get narcotics. At the insistence of his wife, a teetotaler, he would seek medical help and enter rehabilitation programs, but relapses invariably followed. At the couple's divorce trial in 1987, Mr. Getz said he often drank to the point of blacking out. 'I have a discography of 2,010 records,' he said, but 'some of them I can't even remember making.' The trial, in civil court in White Plains, N.Y., was a lurid, scorched-earth affair that made headlines, especially because of the accounts of Mr. Getz's violence toward his family. While drinking, he hit his wife repeatedly, according to testimony from Ms. Getz and the couple's two adult children. Their daughter, Pamela Raynor, said he 'would slap, kick and punch' her mother while drunk. Monica Getz recalled her husband once beating her so badly with a telephone that she fell and hit her head, requiring hospitalization. The case reached the courtroom six years after Mr. Getz had moved out of Shadowbrook, decamping for San Francisco, and sued for divorce. Ms. Getz did not want a divorce. She explained both in and out of court that she still loved her husband, despite his battery and a string of mistresses, and despite having obtained an order of protection against him in Family Court in 1980. She made excuses for his violence to the jury, just as she had to her children, blaming his alcoholism. She forgave him, she testified, 'because I know it's a disease, and I'm a forgiving person.' In an interview, Nicolaus Getz said that Ms. Getz 'loved my father so badly that she thought if she could just keep him sober, he wouldn't want to' end the marriage. For years, Ms. Getz had been secretly dosing her husband's food and drink with Antabuse, a medicine that causes nausea and dizziness when combined with alcohol, which kept him mostly sober throughout the 1970s, Nicolaus Getz said: 'He began to tell his friends on the phone, 'I can't drink anymore, I'm allergic to it.'' In court, Mr. Getz accused his wife of trying to poison him with the surreptitious Antabuse. 'I couldn't live with her in a million years,' he told the jurors. Clearly baffled as to why such a marriage should continue, the jurors sided with Mr. Getz. They ruled in May 1987 that his wife had treated him cruelly and inhumanly in dosing his food, and that she had committed adultery (which she denied). In dividing the couple's assets, a judge gave Ms. Getz a half interest in Shadowbrook and half of all future royalties on recordings her husband had made from 1956, the year they married, to 1981, the year he left her. Ms. Getz continued to contest the divorce vigorously, in court and in the public sphere. In 1988, she founded the Coalition for Family Justice, a nonprofit group devoted to reforming divorce laws and supporting divorcing spouses, mainly women. She appealed the divorce verdict and the financial settlement through higher courts for years, even after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear one appeal, in 1990, and Mr. Getz died of liver cancer in 1991. She denied that she wanted to extract more money. As appeals ate up ever-higher lawyers' fees, it became clear that her quest was to erase the blot of being judged as the party at fault, and to secure a moral victory: to be recognized for having saved her husband's life by standing beside him during the worst of his drinking and drug addiction. 'She would like to picture herself as Florence Nightingale and me as a combination of Attila the Hun and Jack the Ripper,' Mr. Getz told The New York Times in 1990, adding: 'She couldn't get it past a jury.' His lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, a veteran of many knockdown celebrity divorces, told The Times that year that Getz v. Getz was 'one of most terrible cases I've ever worked on.' Monica Silfverskiold was born in Sweden on May 19, 1934, to Mary von Rosen, a Swedish countess, and Nils Silfverskiold, a surgeon who had been an Olympic medalist in gymnastics. Seeking an escape from Sweden's cold winters and social formality, Monica came to the U.S. for college and enrolled at Georgetown to study foreign affairs. She was 20 when she met Mr. Getz after a concert he played there. He was seven years older, a former jazz prodigy who had played as a teenager with Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, and was already a major force in jazz. He was also the married father of three young children, and he had recently completed a six-month jail sentence in California on narcotics charges. Mr. Getz was smitten by Monica's beauty. (One of his young sons from his first marriage thought she looked like Grace Kelly.) He married her on Nov. 3, 1956, a few days after obtaining a no-contest Mexican divorce. In addition to her son and daughter from her marriage to Mr. Getz, Ms. Getz is survived by two stepchildren, David Getz and Beverly McGovern, from her husband's first marriage; and six grandchildren. Ms. Getz's Coalition for Family Justice held monthly meetings at Shadowbrook to support and advise women going through divorce. It also ran seminars for judges, aiming to sensitize them to divorce issues that disadvantaged women and children. In the main appeal of her case, she argued that New York divorce law was biased against wives because cases are heard in the state's chief trial court, State Supreme Court, where husbands can fight a war of financial attrition against their spouses. She argued, unsuccessfully, for divorces to be heard in Family Court, where expenses were lower and judges would better protect dependents. She went on to take college courses on alcoholism and addiction, and to speak about recovery at the Betty Ford Center in California and the Hazelden Foundation in Minnesota. In recognition of her efforts to fight addiction, the board of legislators of Westchester County, N.Y., proclaimed June 27, 1991, Monica Getz Day.
