Christie Brinkley – Defined by cameras, covers, and captions, she’s telling her story in her voice

Christie Brinkley is chasing a white rabbit.

Not metaphorically—literally. And honestly, of course she is. Her career has always had a touch of Wonderland to it—one part dream logic, one part sheer momentum.

Somewhere between a question on heartbreak and a memory of Paris, she’s up from her chair and out the door of her Hamptons home, guiding her dog Lionel away from a snow-white bunny nibbling grass just beyond the patio. “I saved the bunny,” she says, triumphant, before rejoining the conversation like nothing happened. That’s the thing about Christie Brinkley: Even amid a wildlife interlude, she returns to center with the precision of someone who’s lived a lot of lives—and remembers all of them.

Now 71, technically; ageless, obviously. She’s been part of us for decades—on our screens, in our summers, in the shorthand we use to define a certain kind of American beauty. Not just admired, but ever-present. And that glow? It still enters the room before she does.

Uptown Girl, her memoir, is a New York Times and international bestseller—one that reads like it’s already halfway to a screenplay. It’s cinematic in scope but intimate in style, with scenes that flicker like sun-faded camcorder reels—grainy, golden, and impossible to duplicate—and entries that read like whispered confidences.

In it, Christie gives us a scrapbook set to music—filled with ticket stubs, cheese labels, magic gardens, and memories she glued into journals over decades. It’s romantic and crushing, elegant and intimate, like the woman herself.

Act I: Paris, Manifested

In the beginning, there was Paris.

Before the covers, before the video, before the fame, Christie was just a teenager with $1,000 in her pocket and a Eurail pass. She dreamed of being an artist—specifically, of studying at the École des Beaux-Arts—and romanticized the life of Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. “I manifested it,” she says. “I packed a backpack, got a job, and left. I just lived it.”

She landed in a garret, fell in love with a gorgeous French artist-poet, and lived the kind of romantic youth you’d find in a Sofia Coppola film. “On rainy nights, we’d go to Gare du Nord, where I’d see him off to the army. I’d walk home alone, the lights reflecting off the cobblestones, humming Michel Legrand.”

And then she sings to me—flawlessly, fluently, in French. It’s surreal, not just because it’s unexpected, but because suddenly we’re both there, in the story, in Paris, swept into the memory.

Act II: The Bar in St. Barts

When she met Billy Joel, she didn’t even know who he was. She was in St. Barts, working on a magazine shoot, and someone told her to come to a local bar. The place was tiny—just six stools, cement floors, a piano. “It was like someone’s garage with the door open,” she says.

The bar had only a couple of seats, and tucked into the corner was an upright piano. Billy made his way over and patted the bench. Christie accepted the invitation and sat beside him. “What would you like to hear?” he asked.

“The Girl from Ipanema,” she replied. Billy, likely expecting a request for one of his own songs, began to play. The choice caught him off-guard, but it worked. Instantly, there was a spark. “I had just learned it in Portuguese,” she says. “So I started to sing.” Christie’s voice alone—clear, confident, surprising—was the one that filled the room. The irony sang for itself.

Not long thereafter, a love story unfolded—the kind that became part of our cultural DNA. But as Christie makes clear, it wasn’t a fairy tale. “At some point, the drinking became the other woman. And once you’re the bad cop, they don’t want to be with you anymore.”

Act III: Archive and Ownership

When it came time to write the book, Christie turned to her archive. Her real one. “I’ve got drawers and drawers of tapes—formats I can’t even play anymore. Cassettes the size of a postage stamp. VHS. MiniDV. I had to have them all digitized.”

She hadn’t meant to open them. She was actually digging for footage for a Billy Joel documentary and stumbled into her own treasure trove. “Watching them made me laugh, made me cry. But it also reminded me how much of my life I had documented—me, filming, directing, narrating.”

One clip shows her and Billy, trading the camera back and forth, singing, laughing. It’s a moment of shared joy—spontaneous, full of warmth, and one of her favorites. “That one,” she said. “That’s my opera.”

Act IV: Standing Alone, Again

There’s a scene in the memoir—an arresting one. Christie is at a 2008 graduation, preparing to give a commencement speech. The heat is brutal—thick, relentless, the kind that clings to skin and silences crowds. She’s the first woman invited to speak in the school’s history. Toward the end of the program, the power cuts out mid-speech—an A/C overload. It flickers back, and Christie carries on. The graduates are given their caps. She finishes her remarks.

Christie remains on stage as the final speakers take their turn. A man reaches through the curtain and taps her on the shoulder. He says something that would undo most people: a pointed claim about her then-husband, Peter—something with the weight of a wrecking ball, delivered in barely a whisper.

“I asked him to repeat it,” she recalls. She turned to look at Peter. “And then I looked at Jack.”

Her son, seated next to Peter, was staring at her, then the man, then Peter—trying to read the room. “Jack’s face was frozen in panic,” she says. “He felt it instantly. He knew something was very wrong.” As she looked out into the crowd, she saw mouths agape—frozen, stunned, as if the entire auditorium had been caught mid-gasp. It reminded her of an oil painting: The Scream. They all knew. Maybe some judged. Maybe some didn’t. But in that suspended moment, she felt faint, exposed, collapsed inside an image she couldn’t escape—like the floor might drop beneath her. To steady herself, she bent down to tie the ribbon on her Ralph Lauren espadrille—though it didn’t need tying—just to get the blood back in her head.

She asked if the man had a card. “No,” he replied. “But I’m a cop at the Southampton station.”

After the ceremony, Jack was the first to ask what was happening, his worry visible before the words even came. Christie told him she had just learned about a girl who needed her help and said, simply, “Mommy needs to go to the police station.”

That moment, that day: It nearly broke her.

Christie’s fourth marriage had ended and what followed was, in the words of one outlet, “Beauty and the Beast,” and another, the “XXX Files.” The divorce trial was tabloid catnip and a full-blown media spectacle, but at its core, it was a mother fighting to protect her cubs. As ABC News put it: “Shakespeare warned of the fury of a woman scorned—and he’d never even met Christie Brinkley.” Yet through it all, she remained radiant and unshaken—her courtroom style classic, her composure unwavering. As New York magazine observed at the time, “Brinkley shows no strain. She looks like she slept really well last night, and every night for her entire life…”

Act V: Voice

Recording the audiobook was its own kind of reckoning. “There were parts where I thought, please don’t cry,” she says. “I tried to keep it level, but they let me be me. Let my voice crack. Let it show.”

The moment is small, but the shift is seismic. Christie isn’t handing over her story anymore. She’s writing it—unapologetically, with clarity, control, and memory on her side. Not as a footnote in someone else’s narrative, but as the author of her own. In a world that has often spoken over women like her, she’s raising her voice.

And she’s not asking your permission.

The Next Chapter

Having worked in lockstep with Pamela Anderson—during the planning and release of both her memoir and documentary—I want to mention something that strikes me about Christie. Not that the two were exactly cast alike—Christie, the all-American goddess; Pam, the untamable sex symbol—but because they’ve arrived at a surprisingly similar place. Once flattened into archetypes, both women have stepped forward as authors of their own stories.

For decades, they weren’t just cast in roles; they were confined by them. Joan Rivers quipped to Johnny Carson that Christie was “living proof peroxide causes brain damage.” Pamela, meanwhile, became the go-to setup for late-night’s crudest jokes. Dumb or oversexed—those were the binaries. What passed for humor left no space for truth. And maybe for the first time, the culture is finally ready to hear them—fully, without distortion, and on their own turf.

“I admire Pamela. I think we were both misread,” Christie says. “Different myths were built around each of us, and now we’ve found the freedom to say what was always ours.” She smiles. “We’re not salon blondes. We’re hands-in-the-dirt women. We bloom in the garden.”

She adds, “There was a time when no one wanted to hear women like us talk—really talk. For a long time, it was all punchlines and probably some projections. Now people are listening. That’s new. That’s powerful.”

And today a life of headlines is in Christie’s hands—and in her voice.

Watching her do it—step to the mic, claim the moment, and say it all out loud—you start to imagine what might come next and how powerful it could be if it were truly hers.

There’s something undeniably Nancy Meyers about Christie Brinkley. The Hamptons, the imperfect exes, the linen, the kitchens. She even jokes that her last two marriages would make perfect Meyers movies. But what lingers isn’t fantasy; it’s resilience. Even when she’s funny, she’s fierce.

When I ask her how it felt to see Uptown Girl land on the best-seller list—a rare feat for a celebrity memoir—she doesn’t talk about pride or vindication. “I had thought this book might just sit on shelves,” she says. “I worried it would embarrass my kids. But people bought it. They loved it.”

She pauses.

“I cried.”

There’s no question Uptown Girl deserves the acclaim. But what’s more exciting is what it sets in motion: the promise of a woman reclaiming her archives, her story, her stage. Christie Brinkley isn’t done.

She’s just flipping the tape.

https://www.instagram.com/christiebrinkley/?hl=en

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001973/

Creative Director and Producer: Devorah Rose

Photography: Fadil Berisha 

Fashion Stylist: Margot Zamet

Makeup: Sandy Linter

Hair: Keith Carpenter