How ‘Uptown Woman’ Turned Christie Brinkley’s ‘Theme Music’ (Unique)

Christie Brinkley was simply on the lookout for her seat on the U.S. Open again in 2004 when she and her son, Jack, abruptly heard Billy Joel’s Uptown Woman on the loudspeaker.

“I simply thought it was a coincidence,” Brinkley, 71, tells PEOPLE. “However Jack mentioned, “No, Mother, look,’ and there we have been up on the [jumbo] display screen. That was the primary time it actually registered that I had a theme music. Entrance music.”

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Having appeared on over 500 journal covers (together with three in a row for Sports activities Illustrated) the world’s been watching Brinkley for a very long time — ever since her first journal cowl in 1979. 

However as her new memoir, Uptown Woman reveals, there was a lady behind the gorgeous footage the world by no means knew. She shares the actual story for the primary time in her new e-book (excerpted solely on this week’s PEOPLE) together with new particulars about her love affair with Billy Joel and simply precisely how their serendipitous 1983 video happened. 

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They filmed it on a late summer time night time downtown on the Bowery –  it was so sizzling, she remembers, that her excessive heels saved getting caught within the tar. “It was only a group of buddies doing this video,” she recollects. “Somebody mentioned, ‘Let’s use that little gasoline station over by CBGB’ after which someone else mentioned ‘Christie must be the Uptown Woman!’” 

“I did not even inform anyone,” she notes. “Not even my agent! I forgot to do it by way of the Display screen Actors Guild and I nearly acquired kicked out of the union as a result of I didn’t receives a commission. It was simply, ‘Hey this will likely be enjoyable.’”

And the remainder is popular culture historical past.

She final watched a couple of clips of the video this previous Halloween. “There have been a couple of Uptown Woman costumes and other people posted some images on-line and put up snippets of the video,” she remembers. 

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However there’s extra to the story, she teases — together with the very fact the music wasn’t really written about her. “Billy began writing the music a couple of sort of fantasy lady that didn’t actually exist,” she explains.

“It’s a must to learn the e-book to get the total story!” 

Uptown Woman by Christie Brinkley comes out April 29 from Harper Affect and is accessible for preorder now, wherever books are bought.