Christie Brinkley is finally opening up about her fourth marriage.
Brinkley, 71, has long kept details of the end of her relationship with Peter Cook under wraps. But in her new memoir, Uptown Girl, she recalls the moment she learned about Cook’s alleged affair with a much younger woman.
While giving a graduation speech at Long Island’s Southampton High School in 2006, Brinkley was approached by a man she didn’t know.
“Excuse me,” he said, according to Brinkley. "I need to tell you that arrogant husband of yours has been having an affair with my teenage daughter.”
Brinkley recalled being so stunned she froze. She then found Cook’s face in the audience.
“Peter’s eyes were already trained on my face, as he began shaking his head, ‘No,’” she continued. “I knew from Peter’s face that he was guilty, and in that moment, I thought I was going to pass out onstage, in front of hundreds of people,” she recalled. “When I stood back up, I asked the man for his card, but he told me he didn’t have one and that he was a police officer in town, so all I had to do was to go into the station if I wanted the full story.”
“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?” she wrote.
Brinkley continued on about the marriage, calling it “one of the most tormented experiences I’ve ever had.”
The two married in September 1996, just months after they started dating. The couple welcomed daughter Sailor Brinkley Cook in 1998, joining Brinkley’s two other kids — daughter Alexa Ray with second husband Billy Joel and son Jack with third husband Richard Taubman, whom she divorced in 1995 shortly before her relationship with Cook began.
After learning of Cook’s alleged affair with the teen — whose identity hasn’t been verified — Brinkley sent him packing. But it would be six years before their divorce and custody situation were finalized.
Elsewhere in the memoir, Brinkley revealed more about her relationship with crooner Joel, to whom she was married from 1985-1994.
Brinkley said it was Joel’s drinking problem that ultimately resulted in their relationship ending. Brinkley wrote that Joel would disappear for days while in the middle of a drinking binge, on one occasion going missing for two days after leaving Alex’s fifth birthday party.
“The drinking was bigger than the both of us. Booze was the other woman and it was beginning to seem that he preferred to be with her rather than me,” she said.
Uptown Girl is out now.
