No sooner had Billy and Elizabeth settled that out of court than Frank sued his sister; he said she was holding a portion of his share from his 15 percent stake in the income from Billy’s music prior to 1981.
Elizabeth turned and sued Frank right back, demanding $7 million for breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract, and self-dealing in their earlier agreements. Brother and sister would settle in 1993, but the 1987 battle between siblings would come too late as a signal to Billy that Frank might be hoodwinking him. In 1982 he was still sure Frank was his savior—and Elizabeth, quite the opposite. “That’s when I said, ‘I give up, I surrender. I have no concept as to how this family works,’ ” remarks Billy. “It was poison from day one. And I really don’t know where the blame lies. I hooked up with the Borgias! What a family to pick.”
As the seventh cut on The Nylon Curtain, “Surprises” helped form the album’s emotionally downbeat closing suite. The slow-march-time, Lennonesque ballad, featuring a baleful, hornlike synth accompaniment, would reverberate with a kind of despair—in effect the tearstained letter marking the end of the marriage:
Break all the records
Burn the cassettes …
Don’t look now but you have changed
Your best friends wouldn’t tell you
Now it’s apparent
Now it’s a fact
So marshal your forces
For another attack.
CHAPTER 9
UPTOWN GIRLS
When Billy wrote a lyric like “I said ‘I love you’ / and that’s forever,” it was not a stretch for listeners to take him at his word. And when he split from the woman whom the lyric was about, it was, again, not a stretch that people could hold that against him. “I understand that,” says Billy. “What I’ve never understood is where the myth that I dumped Elizabeth for Christie Brinkley came from.” The troubled couple had split up long before his chance meeting with Christie in 1983.
The year 1982 had been particularly difficult for Billy. Near the top of the litany of reverses that year was the motorcycle wreck in April, which interrupted the making of The Nylon Curtain. (In contrast to Bob Dylan’s 1966 motorcycle accident, a moment that led to that artist virtually disappearing for four years, Billy had been faced with little choice but to finish his album.) All told, it had been an exhausting, if rewarding, grind of a year.
Billy’s humble beginnings didn’t include a family tradition of jetting off to the Caribbean at Christmas. Although he had the money to afford any jaunt, the idea of taking an ultra-posh vacation on St. Bart’s—the island where, as the humorist Merrill Markoe says, “lunch costs $3,000”—hadn’t occurred to him. It was Paul Simon who put the idea in his head. Paul and Billy had been friends for a few years and shared Phil Ramone as a producer. They even once lived in the same building on Central Park West.
One day at the end of 1982, Billy sat in on one of Paul’s recording sessions and mentioned he was looking for a holiday destination. Paul quickly told him about St. Bart’s.
“I told him, ‘I don’t like going to these privileged enclaves that are beautiful and luxurious but surrounded by rampant poverty and a lot of pissed-off people. I wouldn’t be able to relax in St. Bart’s,’ ” says Billy.
“No,” Paul said, “it’s not a slave-economy island, more like a French settlement. It’s really scenic, and the food is great.”
Billy had to admit that sounded pretty good. Still, he felt strange about the idea. He approached his sound engineer and motorcycling companion, Jim Boyer, and his girlfriend, Jackie, and told them that he felt kind of funny going to St. Bart’s all by himself: “Why don’t you guys come with me?”
Getting to the island means that first you fly to St. Martin and take a puddle jumper from there. While waiting in the St. Martin airport for the hop to St. Bart’s, Billy spotted Christie for the first time: “She was with a couple of friends. And she totally stunned me.
“I’m not exactly a fashion person, but I certainly knew who Christie Brinkley was and what she looked like,” says Billy. She had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue and had just finished making National Lampoon’s Vacation with Chevy Chase. She was the “It Girl” of the moment. “And she was even more of a knockout in person,” Billy remembers.
At the airport, “I was doing my best to get noticed, hoping she might recognize me from my album covers—there’d been nine so far, and a couple of them had gone to number one. But my tactic worked not at all.”
Later, after Billy settled in on the island, he went down to the pool. “After lying by the pool, broiling myself to a kind of lobster-red color, I wandered off on my own.” His wanderings led him to a hotel bar called the PLM Club, in St. Jean Village. He noticed a little upright piano in the corner of the bar. “I was in a melancholy mood over the divorce, feeling lonely in this beautiful place,” he says. “I recall having a couple drinks, and then I got up to play, just goofing around. I remember playing ‘As Time Goes By.’ ”
Little did Billy know, Christie Brinkley was en route to the bar. “This was St. Bart’s back when it was really an untouched little paradise,” says Christie. “And on St. Jean beach there was only one hotel, the PLM, where I was staying. I’d gone into the village with a friend of mine, Maury Hopson—I was there on a job, and he was the hairdresser. And suddenly word spread to the town that Billy Joel was at the PLM. Hops was so excited, ‘Billy Joel’s at the PLM! Let’s go back and get a drink at the bar.’
“I said, ‘Who? What?’ I had missed the Billy Joel thing because I was living in Paris, so I heard the name and thought, I didn’t know Hops was into country music.
“Well, we get to the bar, and there’s this very red man sitting there, and people are maneuvering to be near him but also trying to act casual.”
Says the thin red man who was sitting at the piano, “I was just knocking out some tunes, and after a couple minutes I happen to look up, and there, standing on the other side of it, were Elle Macpherson and Christie Brinkley—looking directly at me.
“So I looked back down at the keys and vibed, silently, to the piano, Thank you. Thank you so much. You did it again. You never let me down.
“The three of us got to chatting, and then this young girl named Whitney—she must have been about sixteen at the time, cute as a button—came up to tell me she was going to be a singer and wanted me to listen to her. Meanwhile, of course, all I wanted to do was to keep talking with Christie and Elle.
“I hope I was polite to this girl, but I’m sure there was just an edge of Go away, kid, you’re bothering me to my attitude. I’ve kicked myself many times since, thinking back to that day on St. Bart’s—when I could’ve discovered Whitney Houston.”
“The thing I first noticed was that Billy was so funny,” says Christie. “He just kept cracking all these jokes and making funny comments. I’m saying, ‘Well, I do sing a little bossa nova,’ and he’s saying, ‘Oh yeah? Let’s give it a try.’ And Whitney says, ‘I can sing!’ Meanwhile, Elle’s draped herself on the piano like Michelle Pfeiffer [in The Fabulous Baker Boys].
“That first night didn’t really work,” Christie recalls. “But let’s face it, he’s got this incredible voice, he’s got endless talent, and his lyrics show real depth and real heart. When you put it all together, you can see why he’s had so many women flock to him.”
As it turned out, Christie was otherwise involved with a guy; Billy would learn more about that later. “So … not that I was settling for Elle. I mean, Elle was six feet tall and absolutely staggeringly beautiful,” says Billy. “Elle and I getting together was just the way things naturally worked out. She also had come to St. Bart’s—in her case, from Australia—to do a shoot.”
“When Billy went to the airport to fly home, Hops and I got these giant palm fronds, and when his plane was taking off, we ran over to the hill where the planes fly out from St. Bart’s and we stood there with our palm fronds, waving goodbye,” says Christie.
&nbs
p; “He and I were really just friends first, and then it sort of progressed. He was really adorable, did really charming, sweet, thoughtful things. He was very modest and a little bit shy. It was so sweet because I came to learn what it really meant that he was ‘Billy Joel.’ I wasn’t sure what to call him, so I just said, ‘You look like a Joe to me. I’m gonna call you Joe.’ So that’s what I did. And I realized that this Joe was really beloved—I mean everywhere we went people were saying, ‘Go, Billy!’ ”
Christie and Billy got to know each other somewhat in St. Bart’s, but back in New York, Billy met up with Elle again. Billy had an enviable penthouse apartment at the St. Moritz Hotel, overlooking Central Park, which he was renting from Allan Carr, the Grease producer. It was opulent even for the neighborhood, with a wraparound balcony and ample outdoor space. Elle stayed there with Billy for a brief time.
“I remember somebody got a shot of us walking down a beach at Coney Island—who needs St. Bart’s when you can take a girl there?—that ran in the Daily News,” says Billy. “Elle was so tall that I looked like Bubbles the Chimp next to her, and I realized this was just not going to work. I never really think about how tall a person is, because when you look at someone, if you look in their eyes, you’re not thinking, Boy, look at how big she is. I’m five seven and never knew I was so height-challenged until I saw those pictures—after that, people just assumed I was a dwarf. Also, it was my first big age-difference relationship. I was in my early thirties, and she was nineteen.”
Still, Billy found Elle to be an exceedingly charming girl, who was also very ambitious. Oddly enough, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get magazine covers, because she had brown eyes. “I told her, ‘You’re going to get a cover very soon.’ There was one shot she did wearing glasses. I’m a sucker for a pretty girl in glasses; there’s something about taking those glasses off—like in old movies where the guy is always going, ‘Why, Miss Jones …’ ”
Once Elle got that first cover, she began to do more modeling in Europe, and Billy thought, Okay, that’s kind of that. Elle was just starting to go places in her career, and Billy didn’t think he’d be seeing much of her anymore. “I actually wrote a song about the experience called ‘And So It Goes,’ ” says Billy. “I did have a strategy for that song—almost every chord had a dissonant note in it, which to me was conveying what’s just beneath the words: a kind of pessimism and resignation, because I knew it really wasn’t going to work out”:
In every heart there is a room
A sanctuary safe and strong
To heal the wounds from lovers past
Until a new one comes along …
And every time I’ve held a rose
It seems I’ve only felt the thorns
And so it goes, and so it goes
And so will you soon I suppose
But if my silence made you leave
Then that would be my worst mistake
So I will share this room with you
And you can have this heart to break.
After Elle went off to Europe, Billy was having an enjoyable time squiring different women. Newly divorced from Elizabeth, he wasn’t, in his words, “a decrepit old rock star at that point, so I had a terrific run.” The St. Moritz had a doorman, Nicky, who wore a French gendarme uniform. He eventually became an actor and was cast on NYPD Blue, but at this point Nick Turturro was just Nicky to Billy. “He was the guy who’d give me scores, ratings on the women I’d bring back to the place—usually he’d hold up eight, nine, ten fingers,” says Billy. Among the women Nick rated was Christie. She got all ten fingers—flashed twice.
“My album An Innocent Man was conceived as a tribute to Christie, and the title track describes the early stages of our courtship”:
I know you’re only protecting yourself
I know you’re thinking of somebody else
Someone who hurt you
But I’m not above
Making up for the love
You’ve been denying you could ever feel.
The lyrics addressed a certain reluctance on her part and Billy’s attempt to show her that he understood what it was all about. Like Billy, Christie had been married and divorced once already, and when they met, she was seriously involved with Olivier Chandon, heir to the Moët et Chandon champagne-producing family’s fortune.
Not long after she returned from St. Bart’s, however, their relationship cooled. In fact, it was seemingly near its end when disaster struck on March 1, 1983. Accounts from that time say that that day Chandon called Christie to arrange for her to meet him in Palm Beach that evening.
Shortly thereafter he hopped in his powerful Ralt race car for a run on the 2.25-mile West Palm Beach, Florida, track that his team had rented for practice runs. He had gone ten laps when the car, either through his error or a stuck throttle, left the road at around 100 mph, smashing a barrier and catapulting, after an explosion, into a shallow canal about forty yards off the track. He was dead when rescuers removed him from the car, not from burns or injury but apparently by drowning in the overturned racer—his feet had been pinned in the wreckage.
Christie, said to be distraught, remained in California. Teammates escorted Chandon’s body home; a service in Paris was followed by burial in a French cemetery in a village near the family holdings.
Christie went into a private period of mourning. As Billy told Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis in a 1986 interview, “I picked up the paper one day, and I saw that Olivier Chandon had been killed. I called her up and said, ‘Look, I know you’re going through a hard time. If you need someone to talk to, I’m here.’
“I felt for her, and whenever we saw each other after that, I just tried to be a good friend and a good listener,” says Billy. He must have succeeded, because she said of Billy later on, “It’s his heart and soul that made me want to marry him.”
“The fact that we were friends first turned out to be a good thing—and, on one particular night of goddess gridlock at the St. Moritz, [it was] the very thing that saved me,” he remembers.
On that particular night, Billy took Christie, still on a just-friends basis, to see the Beach Boys perform. They were old road buddies of Billy’s, so after the concert he and Christie went backstage, and Billy introduced her to the band. It was a fun evening for both, and hoping to continue the night at his place, Billy asked if she wanted to stop by. “It was one of those ‘Come on up and see my etchings’ moments. Very James Bond,” says Billy. “And she actually said, ‘Okay.’ ”
Soon the two were in the lobby of the St. Moritz, waiting for the elevator. “I was trying to act cool,” says Billy, “but somewhere inside me the kid from Hicksville was going, Yesssssss! Meanwhile I could feel Nicky checking us out from his post at the building’s entrance, and I didn’t dare turn around and make eye contact. Finally the elevator arrived, and we rode it up to the penthouse. The doors opened right onto my foyer, and just beyond it, waiting for us, the perfect view of Central Park and the city beyond, all lit up—except that standing in the foyer, blocking that view, was Elle, back in town with all her luggage and apparently planning to stay the night. Even as part of me thought, Oh, God, no, another part of me was going, Holy crap, if my friends could see me now. Christie Brinkley and Elle Macpherson stacked up at the door of my pad!”
After some awkward conversation, Christie—who lived nearby, on Central Park West—politely bowed out, and Elle remained. But she wasn’t back to stay. She just needed a place to crash.
“The next day I woke up wondering what the hell Christie must think of me,” Billy recalls. “When we finally talked a few days later, I said, ‘I hope you don’t think I’m some kind of playboy.’ ”
Christie answered, “No, no. I understand.” She did, of course, understand. Christie and Elle were colleagues; they knew each other. Whatever complicated shuttling was going on in the supermodel universe—at this point Elle was just getting to the level that Christie had defined—the two women were cordial. “In any ev
ent, Christie and I had been seeing each other casually, and she thought there was no harm done,” he says.
“Still, I couldn’t help thinking that Frank Sinatra would somehow have made a threesome out of that night.”
* * *
AS A GUY who’d only recently joined the ranks of the divorced, Billy was dumbstruck to find that there was a world of women out there—even models and actresses—who were actually interested in rock-and-roll guys. And now Billy was swimming in that pool. “But meeting Christie transformed it all from a fun indulgence to wild romance, which is where An Innocent Man came from,” he explains.
If The Nylon Curtain was dark, deep, and deadly serious, Billy now wanted to go 180 degrees in the other direction: “I was feeling like a teenager again, a teenager with a huge happy crush on a girl, so it was only natural to try to capture that feeling with a kind of homage to the music of my teenage years: the Four Seasons, Motown, soul, a cappella, doo-wop, and all those silly, romantic love songs.”
But Billy wasn’t entirely innocent, of course: “I’d already seen too much of life. So in every song on An Innocent Man, there is also that element of anxiety to temper the full-blown, flowers-and-happiness kind of sentimentality. Even in the straight-up doo-wop of ‘The Longest Time’ there was a little dark corner”:
Who knows how much further we’ll go on
Maybe I’ll be sorry when you’re gone
I’ll take my chances
I forgot how nice romance is
I haven’t been there for the longest time.
“Still, it was a gas to be writing this stuff, and it just kept coming; you don’t fight that. I think I wrote the whole album in about eight weeks.”
Says Christie, “When I was dating him, I started listening to all of his music and saying, ‘Oh wow!’ I remember the first time he played ‘The Stranger’ on the piano. I said, ‘I love that song! Who wrote that?’ And he said, ‘I did.’ ”
Billy Joel Page 18
