Christie Brinkley has been married a few times over the years— four in fact — and she opened up about her past love life in her 2025 memoir, Uptown Girl. Her priority lies with her kids, Alexa Ray, Jack and Sailor, and she once revealed dating isn’t always the easiest at a certain age.
“It’s not that easy to meet people,” she told Us Weekly in 2019. “When you’re younger, you assume nobody’s married yet. But now you assume that everybody is married, so it’s hard to actually meet people.”
Even if Christie were to meet someone special, it sounds like she’s not looking to get hitched any time soon. “I don’t really see a reason for marriage,” she said to the outlet at the time. “Maybe there’s tax advantages or inheritance advantages or hospital advantages. But I always thought of doing it to have kids. And since I’m not having any more kids, why complicate things?”
Of course, this view on marriage comes after Christie said “I do” four times throughout her life. Keep reading to find out what influenced her latest take on marriage, as we meet her former husbands, below.
Jean-François Allaux
Christie was only 19 years old when she headed off to Paris to study art. While there in1973, she met and married French artist Jean-François Allaux. For such a young couple, they defied odds and stayed together for almost 8 years! The artist retired in 2019 from his position as Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, according to the school’s website.
Billy Joel
Far and away, Christie’s most famous marriage was to pop rock icon Billy Joel. The pair had met in 1983 while they were both vacationing in St. Bart’s among the glitterati. With so much star power on the Caribbean island, the “Piano Man” hitmaker had to stand out and so he did by posing like his own album cover. “I tried to look like me on an album cover. I gave it every angle I could,” he told Rolling Stone in 1986. He said he then began to tickle the ivories. “The music was the key to the introduction,” he added. “She sat down and started singing, too.”
In 1985, the couple wed in New York Harbor while aboard a 147-foot yacht, per People. They welcomed daughter Alexa Ray later that year. Billy often shares sweet snaps of Alexa Ray on his Instagram.
By the spring of 1994, Christie and Billy Joel had split. “Just because people can express themselves through their art doesn’t mean they are great communicators in person,” Christie said at the time, in a cryptic statement.
The Grammy winner would go on to marry Katie Lee in 2004, only to divorce six years later. In 2015, he wed equestrian Alexis Roderick, with whom he shares daughters Della, and Remy.
Richard Taubman
Christie and real estate developer Richard Taubman had an eyebrow-raising start to their romance. The pair had survived a helicopter crash together in Telluride in April 1994. By May, Richard proposed. By the way, she was still married to Billy Joel! However, Christie and Billy broke up around that time, allowing her and Richard to skip off into marital bliss and welcome son Jack in 1995. The marriage was quite brief, as they split a year later.
Peter Cook
Only a year after saying “goodbye” to Richard, Christie was engaged to architect Peter Cook, whom she had met when she first started modeling. Peter would go on to adopt Jack, giving him the surname Brinkley-Cook. Jack soon had a half-sister when Christie and Peter welcomed Sailor on July 2, 1998.
However, the couple split after 10 years of marriage in 2006, after Peter engaged in an extramarital affair with an 18-year-old assistant. During the divorce trial, allegations that he was also addicted to porn were also presented. “My hope is that the world will see that I’m not the scumbag pervert that I’ve been painted to be,” he told Barbara Walters in 2008, per NBC Washington. “I was seeking a connection I could not find in my own marriage,” he added.
In her 2025 memoir, Uptown Girl, Christie reflected on the breakdown of her marriage to Peter, calling it the “most tortured relationship I’ve ever had.”
“When your whole world falls apart and you realize in a heartbeat you’ve suddenly become the cliche middle-aged woman whose husband is having an affair with a much (much) younger woman, what do you do?” Christie asks in her book.
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