Christie Brinkley opened up about her rocky marriage to Billy Joel in a new documentary about the iconic musician’s life.
The model married Joel in 1985, and the two welcomed their only child, Alexa, later that year.
Brinkley said that she tried to make her relationship with Joel work, but there was one thing that got in the way.
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“I don’t think it’s a secret that his drinking got pretty bad,” Brinkley said in Part 2 of the musician’s new HBO documentary, “Billy Joel: And So It Goes.” She said that the singer “couldn’t really remember what he did when he was drinking, and so he didn’t really know how he could hurt people.”
During a particularly stressful period of financial turmoil and touring for Joel, Brinkley said that “there was too much unraveling in his life.”
She would call bars to find out where Joel was, and would pretend to be sleeping when he would come in some nights, so she could avoid seeing him “in that condition.”
“Our relationship went from lots of fun and really, totally enjoying each other and everything, to his work consuming him,” the model shared. Brinkley said she didn’t know what to do, but she decided she couldn’t “be lonely.”
It was just her “and Alexa in this big old house that was supposed to be so full of life and love and music and laughter and all of that,” Brinkley said as she started to tear up.
The model said that “things were starting to deteriorate” and then one fight sealed the deal.
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“One night, we had an argument and I said, ‘I really can’t take this anymore, and I’m just gonna take Alexa back up to New York and leave,’” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Yeah, fine ― go.’”
The two divorced in 1994, and Joel revealed what he took away from the end of their marriage.
“I realized love is not concrete,” the musician said. “You know, you feel like it is, but there are things eating away at it. And, in the end, it all catches up. And it’s hard. And I was so devastated.”
Brinkley has spoken about Joel’s drinking before in her recently published memoir, “Uptown Girl.”
“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 said.
The 71-year-old told Page Six in April that “leaving Billy wasn’t easy for me to do.”
“He’s the father of my firstborn and we spent such great formative years together. And I’ll love him forever,” Brinkley shared. “Things just reached a point where I knew I couldn’t live with him.”
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