On This Day In 1985, Billy Joel Married Christie Brinkley

Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley P 368213 01: UNDATED FILE PHOTO: Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley. (Photo by Diane Freed / Liaison Agency) (Diane Freed/Getty Images)

Even thought Christie Brinkley & Billy Joel are divorced, they’re still couple goals! They haven’t been together since 1994, but they still maintain their holiday traditions of singalongs & caroling as a family, as they share a daughter, Alexa Ray, 33, & that’s so awesome! They wed on March 23, 1985 in New York Harbor while aboard a 147-foot yacht. In true famous people style, they met in St. Bart’s. Both were vacationing on the Caribbean island in early 1983. Joel, in an effort to get Brinkley’s attention, did what he called “an album cover,” “I tried to look like me on an album cover. I gave it every angle I could.” His album cover-ing didn’t work. Still, Joel ran across some luck later on when he began playing piano at a bar on the island (occupied by Brinkley, Whitney Houston, and Elle Macpherson, of course). “The music was the key to the introduction,” Joel told Rolling Stone. “She sat down and started singing, too.” At the time, Brinkley was fresh off a relationship with race car driver and heir to Moët et Chandon, Olivier Chandon de Brailles. Shortly after Joel and Brinkley’s chance meeting, Chandon was killed in a car accident. Joel reached out to Brinkley following the tragic news, establishing a friendship. They began dating soon after. (Note: when Joel reconnected with Brinkley, he was “going out with this girl Elle,” as in Macpherson. While Joel was initially skeptical about involving himself with a supermodel, he was already seeing one when he and Brinkley struck things up. During an appearance on Watch What Happens Live in 2018, Macpherson weighed in on an anecdote from Joel’s memoir. Joel claimed that Macpherson had been waiting for him in his apartment when he came home with Brinkley one night. As Macpherson remembered it, she was living with Joel when he began dating Brinkley — “I got ousted,” she said. Ouch!

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