Christie Brinkley is reflecting on love, loss, and what she’s learned from her headline-making marriages.
In a new interview with The New York Times, the former supermodel opened up about her past relationships and the emotional toll they took. “I’m too trusting,” she said. “I’m a fool for love. That love takes work. Sometimes you need to rely on experts. I wish I could have found ways to save some; I wish I hadn’t married others.”
Brinkley, 70, has been married four times — to artist Jean-François Allaux, musician Billy Joel, developer Richard Taubman, and architect Peter Cook. While some unions ended quietly, others ended in scandal.
“I always believed in soul mates. I thought I had four of them. Now I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe I had my two soul mates with Jean and Billy. Maybe I rushed out of my marriage to Jean. Maybe I should have tried to make it work longer with Billy. I did start to wonder if maybe it’s me – if I was unlovable.”
She continued, “I’m not unlovable, but the relationships I was in made me feel unloved… One loved my money more than me. Another loved his drink more than me. Another loved young women more than me. And in my first one, I loved my freedom more than him.”
Brinkley’s memoir Uptown Girl explores each relationship in more detail — from meeting Allaux in Paris at 19, to her turbulent marriage to Joel, which she says ended when “booze was the other woman.” She also accuses Taubman of marrying her for her money, writing, “It was usership, manipulation, and at its worst, emotional torture.”
Her final marriage to Cook ended in a very public split after she discovered he was having an affair with his teenage assistant. “I was married to a stranger who had other lives,” she said. “The divorce lasted for years. It was agonizing.”
Despite everything, Brinkley says she still believes in love. “Everything I’ve been through, all the pain, the stupidity, I would do it again because I believe in love,” she said. “I don’t need a person to make me happy. I’m happy. But I have so much happiness in me, I would love to share it with someone I love.”
