The frog who married a princess

Press, 15 January 1986, Page 13

The frog who married a princess

Billy Joel 36, and Christie Brinkley, 28, became inseparable after he helped her to get over the death of her French multi-million-aire boyfriend, Oliver Chandon, who was killed in a racing car crash two years ago. It was around the same time that Joel’s divorce to his first wife, Elizabeth, became final after nine years of marriage, during which she managed him and helped to take him from struggling anonymity to international success.

Christie Brinkley’s choice of Joel, and his apparent good luck in winning her affections, has baffled many an envious onlooker. What exactly drew her to the man?

It certainly wasn’t his fame or his wealth; Christie Brinkley is well known enough, and a millionairess. Not only can she command $lOOO a day for her services, but she maintains control over all aspects of her career and spin-off businesses.

Assessing his relationship with her in convincing modesty, Joel explains: “It’s good news for the guys. What’s a beautiful woman like Christie doing with me? Well, don’t ask me. I haven’t a clue. I’m not good-looking, and that’s not false modesty, that’s a fact. “That I can attract such a beautiful woman as Christie should give hope to every ugly guy in the world — there’s hope for them all. If I can do it, so can they. It should cheer everybody up.” The pair met in January 1983, when Billy Joel flew to the Caribbean to take his first holiday in five years. One night he went down to the hotel piano and, just as he had done in his early days as a performer, began playing requests for the asssembled guests. Christie Brinkley was among them. According to Billy Joel’s account of their meeting, Christie Brinkley and her friends hung around the piano singing along for a while.

Afterwards, the two began talking to each other. They seemed to be hitting it off, though they didn’t really fall in love until several months later.

Says Joel: “We started out as friends and then fell in love, which is the best way, rather than crashing straight in and then finding out that the romance has burned out after a short while.”

Billy Joel has often spoken about Christie Brinkley’s intellectual abilities, but it is her looks which are more obviously arresting to the public. As he puts it: “There’s something beyond her looks. She is a very sweet person. She hasn’t got that snotty attitude of some models and she’s not skinny.” However, Joel savs she scares the same coipusion

about celebrity that he does, and their mutual discomfort and bewilderment about being constantly in the public eye may well be one of the cementing aspects of their togetherness. For her part, Christie Brinkley describes Billy Joel as “cute.”

Unlike many other superstar partnerships,‘they don’t frequent the top nightspots, attend premiers or other society functions. Instead, they spend a lot of time in Long Island, at Joel’s Oyster Bay home, and when they get away from it all they’re more likely to head for less trendy beach resorts.

But the most important thing for Joel is that Christie Brinkley appears to have changed his mind about love and his ability to love — providing the inspirations for his latest, hugely successful album “An Innocent Man,” which featured his hit singles “Tell Her About It,” “The Longest Time” and “Uptown Girl.”

Billy Joel says: “I realy thought that I was so worldly-wise and experienced that I would never really fall in love again. After my marriage, I did a sort of inventory of myself, and I firmly believed that love wouldn’t happen to me again. That was a phase of my life that has come and gone forever. Fve learned that you’re never too old to fall in love and it can be just as wonderful. I’ve discovered that you can be just as crazy when you’re in love in your 30s as you are when you’re sixteen.

“On every album I adopt a different sort of character. “An Innocent Man” reflected my feelings at. the time. I was sort of a sjveet

person who was in love and feeling good. I wanted to have as much fun as I could have — and I wanted it to sound like I was having fun.”

His career hasn’t always been so joyful. Born in 1949, he was a pretty average kid; a bright boy and a loving son, a snotty-nosed brat and an apprentice hoodlum.

He was fascinated by history and he loved opera, he sniffed glue and fell down drunk in the alley. He’d fret about his masculinity and pull idiotic stunts to impress the girls — he was a mixed-up, allAmerican boy. He began learning to play the piano at an early age and, at the famous Apollo theatre in Harlem, Billy saw live rock music for the first time in 1962. Heading the bill was James Brown and the Fabulous Flames.

Billy was transfixed by Brown: “He’d put his cape on and he’d walk off the stage — and they’d drag

him on again. He did the greatest footwork I ever saw. He’d move all across the stage on one foot — and he’d come back the other way on the other foot — and he’d come back the other way on the other foot. It wasn’t very sophisticated, and the compositions were fairly primitive, but the performance just knocked the hell out of me.” Joel was still more concerned about proving how tough he was than taking music seriously. To that end, he took up boxing when he was 16. “I must have been out of my mind because boxing is very violent and brutal,” he says now. “But I got my whole male identity crisis out of the way in those

three years of boxing.” He was pretty good at it, too, winning 21 bouts out of 25, before he came up against a gorilla. “This guy’s arms were the size of my entire body. He got me with a left hook and, boom, I went down. I could have got up but I decided, to hell with it — who needs this?” In the dressing room after the fight, he glanced in a mirror and was perturbed to see his nose was swollen and resting at a peculiar angle to his face. A helpful fellow boxer came up and pushed the misaligned feature back into position. But his nose was never the same after that. Following his disillusionment with boxing, Joel threw himself into music and joined a succession of groups around New York, among them The Echoes and The Hassles, with whom he made two albums. A drummer called Jon Small was in the band and he and Joel later teamed up as a duo called Attila, producing a further L.P. Through Small, Billy met his first wife, Elizabeth. They married at a time when Joel had decided to become a solo singer. She became very influential in his career and his songwriting. Many unpleasant things have been said and insinuated about her management relationship with Joel — the implication being that she ruthlessly pushed himhim towards superstardom, gleefully counting the money all the while. But Billy Joel has defended her hotly, noting that a great deal of it was the result of male hostility towards strong professional women. “That image comes from the fact that she’s a good business person. She’s very soft and gentle — but when she’s protecting her business interests she can be astough as the next guy.” Joel says Elizabeth was the model for many of his songs. "She represented woman to me. I used her as model like painters use their wives and mistresses. She represents all women.” After several lukewarm projects, it was a a song Billy Joel wrote as a birthday present to Elizabeth — “Just The Way You Are” — which finally began to turn the tide in 1977. When he played her the song she apparently responded: “That’s’ nice. Do I get the publishing rights?” It was the breakthrough Billy had been working for, and from then on his records consistently hit the top. “The Stranger,” the album which contained the song, went on to become the second biggest-selling LP in the history of Columbia Recorf

Christie Brinkley, one of the world’s highest-paid and most indemand models, and Billy Joel, the stumpy, frog-eyed singer behind records which sell by the million; it would appear to be perfect romantic mismatch — beauty and the beast. — Features International.

rm giving new hope to every ugly guy in the world. And that includes me.