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

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

“I simply thought it was a coincidence,” Brinkley, 71, tells PEOPLE. “However Jack stated, “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 photos 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 evening downtown on the Bowery –  it was so sizzling, she remembers, that her excessive heels stored getting caught within the tar. “It was only a group of buddies doing this video,” she remembers. “Somebody stated, ‘Let’s use that little gasoline station over by CBGB’ after which someone else stated ‘Christie needs to be the Uptown Woman!’” 

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

And the remaining is popular culture historical past.

She final watched a number of clips of the video this previous Halloween. “There have been a number of Uptown Woman costumes and folks 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 actual fact the music wasn’t really written about her. “Billy began writing the music a couple of form of fantasy woman that didn’t actually exist,” she explains.

“You must 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.