Billy Joel Had Beach Boys Serenade Christie Brinkley on Second Date

When Billy Joel was wooing Christie Brinkley, he gave it all his might.

Brinkley, 71, recounted the couple’s earlier dates in her memoir, Uptown Girl. The couple met in January 1983 in St. Barts, while Brinkley was on a break from her relationship with French race car driver Olivier Chandon de Brailles. As she and Chandon reconciled, he died that March in a car accident.

Joel, 76, and Brinkley became friends after they met and would talk on the phone. After Chandon’s death, Brinkley wrote, “Billy started calling me every day, making it his mission to cheer me up in any way he could, whether it was with a joke, a song, or a funny poem he’d written. While he told me he was perfectly okay with my being as miserable as I wanted to be, he was also perfectly okay with making me laugh and smile as much as he could, which worked.”

Brinkley’s friends and family helped her see that Chandon would want her to still enjoy life, and she decided to go out with Joel. On their first date, they saw Little Shop of Horrors, but Joel had an “even more spectacular” date plan in store for their second one.

He took the supermodel to see the Beach Boys perform in New Jersey, where she “quickly learned that Billy knew almost every famous musician.”

Then, Joel coordinated a particularly moving moment for the model. “When the group opened up with ‘California Girls’ onstage, they pointed to me in the front row as they crooned, ‘I wish they all could be California Girls,’ ” Brinkley wrote.

Brinkley grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood Canoga Park, so the song and the band were especially close to her heart. “Beach Boys songs had blared out of every transistor radio on the beaches where I grew up, overheating car radios up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, and now Billy was bringing all those memories to life for me in a way I could never have imagined,” she recounted.

But “being serenaded” by the group wasn’t the best part of the night, she said. Joel ended up joining the band onstage.

Prior to that, Brinkley had only seen Joel play live “briefly” when they met in St. Barts. So, as she recalled in her memoir, “when I saw his hands float across the keys in front of tens of thousands of shouting fans, then heard him cover ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ and the classic Beatles song ‘Rock and Roll Music’ with the Beach Boys, I felt entranced, not just by his talent . . . but also by his stage presence, which was both confident and extraordinary, with a kind of charisma and charm I had never seen.”

Brinkley admitted, “Billy’s music had a lot to do with my early attraction to him,” explaining that it was “exciting” to listen to his songs while knowing him “intimately.” 

Brinkley starred in the 1983 music video for Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” the title she used for her memoir, though she told PEOPLE, “Billy started writing the song about a kind of fantasy girl that didn’t really exist,” not her.

The couple married in 1985 and welcomed daughter Alexa Ray Joel that year. They split in 1994, but have remained close.

Brinkley wrote in her memoir, that when she met Joel, “I just knew I wanted to be friends with him forever.” The model added, “Forever is a funny word, of course. Some people say it has no meaning, but what I know is that, more than forty years later, I am still friends with Billy, and for that, I’m forever grateful.”

Uptown Girl by Christie Brinkley is available now, wherever books are sold.