Supermodel extraordinaire Christie Brinkley is spilling the tea on her fabulous life in the new memoir Uptown Girl, and she joined Katie for the latest episode of Next Question to dish about all the fascinating stories she shared in it.

The title will obviously make you think of Billy Joel, Brinkley’s famous ex-husband, and there’s plenty about their closely watched relationship in the book. One of our favorite parts of her interview with Katie was hearing the super-sweet story about how the two first met and fell in love.

“It’s funny because the first night I met [Joel], in St. Bart’s, I looked right past him,” Brinkley remembered. “He told me he’d seen me in St. Martin before, and he said he was, like, standing there doing his album-cover poses, hoping to catch my eye, and I looked right past him then, too. He was like, ‘You kept walking right past me, and I was trying to be seen by you.'”

At that time, Brinkley knew so little about the musician — who’d already released “Piano Man” and scored a No. 1 hit with 1980’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” — that she actually thought his name was “Billy Joe” at first. But on that fateful night in St. Bart’s, Brinkley’s group of friends were all buzzing with excitement that Joel had been spotted at a nearby bar.

“So we get there, and I’m like, Where? ‘Cause there’s this sunburned, bright-red guy with his hair kind of frizzing from the humidity or whatever, and kind of a Hawaiian vacation shirt,” Brinkley recalled.

Even though Joel wasn’t exactly what Brinkley expected visually, the duo hit it off and had a blast laughing together. Brinkley told Katie she knew immediately that she hoped to be friends with him forever, but at the time, she was in a relationship with Olivier Chandon de Brailles, the French racecar driver and heir to the Moët et Chandon champagne fortune, who was tragically killed in a March 1983 crash. Brinkley and Joel had stayed in touch as friends, but they connected in a deeper way after she suffered this loss.

“After [Chandon de Brailles] died, [Joel] waited a little bit, and then he called me and said, ‘I know what you’re going through and I just want to be there for you in any way I can. If you need me, or if you want to be distracted in any way, shape, or form, I’m there for you,'” Brinkley said. “And he was really sincere about it.”

But Brinkley still wasn’t totally convinced Joel was the right man for her. After all, she was a world-renowned supermodel, and she’d come to expect a certain type of flair from her partners.

“I remember being bothered by his hair and his shoes,” Brinkley told Katie with a laugh. “I literally said to my mom, ‘I’m seeing this guy and I really like him, he makes me laugh, we have so much fun together, but he’s very different from the guys I’ve been with before — and he wears these little pointy shoes.’ She said, ‘You can change a man’s shoes. You can change a man’s hair. But you can’t do anything about the rest, so if the rest is good for you, go with it.'”

Brinkley, feeling that Joel had “a good heart and a good sense of humor,” did go with it — and the couple married in March 1985. They had one daughter, Alexa, who was born that December.

The pair ultimately divorced in 1994; Brinkley writes in Uptown Girl that the split was largely caused by Joel’s drinking habits. But these days, they maintain a strong friendship as co-parents.

“I’ll always love Billy,” Brinkley said. “We were together in such formative years — years that really shaped both of our futures — and we had some of the best years of my life.”

For more on their relationship and the rest of Brinkley’s unforgettable life, watch her full conversation with Katie in the video above.