Christie Brinkley has Beverly D’Angelo to thank for not going topless in “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”
The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model appeared in the 1983 comedy as the flirty “Girl in the Ferrari” opposite Chevy Chase. Viewers witnessed how Chase’s character, Clark Griswold, struggled to keep his eyes on the road as the blonde bombshell in the sports car beside him zoomed between lanes. Meanwhile, Griswold’s wife Ellen [D’Angelo] was asleep in the passenger seat.
In Brinkley’s new memoir, “Uptown Girl,” the pinup described how the producers of the film asked her to go topless for a scene, but she refused.
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“The most memorable part of filming was the scene where I bump into Chevy’s character at a motel pool and talk him into going skinny-dipping, which we shot at two in the morning,” wrote Brinkley in an excerpt obtained by Fox News Digital.
“That’s when the production team asked me to go topless for the shot, but I wasn’t comfortable with it: I knew very well by then that part of my appeal as a model was that men had to imagine what was underneath my swimsuit, and I wasn’t about to give that away for what I thought would be a small, goofy movie. (None of us at the time ever suspected ‘National Lampoon’s Vacation’ would take off the way it did).”
“When the production team asked again about the possibility of nudity — and I couldn’t blame them for trying — Beverly walked out onto set in the nick of time. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘I’ll be the one to go topless! You’ll get your t—ies.’ I couldn’t have loved her more [at] that moment. And in my opinion, the scene between Chevy and me is funnier and cleverer because I throw my bra and panties at him from off camera, and all that the viewers can see are his oversized facial expressions.”
Brinkley, 71, told Fox News Digital she was thankful to have D’Angelo, 73, step in and save her that day.
“I was so grateful from day one when I got there,” she said. “I arrived at the location, and I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. I was in this motel in the middle of nowhere, and then I got a call from Beverly right away saying, ‘Hey! Welcome. We’re all going to head out and grab a bite to eat. Why don’t you come with us?’ That’s the kind of thing that just puts you at ease and lets you feel like, ‘I can relax. I’ve got a friend.’”
Chase, 81, was just as welcoming, Brinkley revealed in her book.
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“[He asked] me for my ‘beauty secrets’ in his own hilarious way: ‘Christie, you gotta give me tips to make my hair look thicker!’ she wrote. “As funny as he was, he was also shy, a combination I found endearing, and we quickly developed a playful chemistry that translated on-screen.”
Brinkley has been photographed on six continents, in more than 30 countries and has appeared on more than 500 magazine covers worldwide. But in the five decades she’s been modeling, Brinkley has never posed nude.
“I really knew that I wanted to be a mom, and I didn’t want [my children] to go to school and have some kid go, ‘There’s your mom! I see your mom!'” the star told Fox News Digital.
“And so, I just made that decision. And then I think people knew. I think there was something about me that I didn’t attract that kind of… I didn’t have photographers saying or trying to get me to strip down all the time. It just didn’t happen.”
In her memoir, Brinkley emphasized that she never posed in her birthday suit.
“To be clear… if anyone asked me to pose nude, which they eventually did, I said no,” Brinkley wrote. “To this day, I have never done a nude shoot — not because I’m a prude, but because I’ve always wanted to be a mom, and I never wanted my kids to be embarrassed by nude photos of their mother circulating somewhere in the magazine world. Plus, I think it’s much sexier to suggest than to show it all.”
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“I’ve refused to do other things as a model, too, most notably when, a few months into my career, a client asked me to fly to the South of France to accompany a group of men on a yacht in the Mediterranean,” Brinkley wrote.
“The job, they said, would be to be nice to everyone on board, because everyone on board could be beneficial to my career. The trip would include an overnight, but in the morning, I could fly back to Paris — no harm, no foul.”
“I may have been a naïve kid from Malibu, but nothing about the trip sounded right to me,” she shared. “Where, after all, was the modeling part? I heard rumors that other models with more successful careers at the time had taken the same trip and come back with fancy cars, jewelry, and a new magazine cover, but none of that mattered to me. If I was going to get ahead in the industry, I wanted to do it on my own terms, not underneath someone else’s.”
“That proposed trip was the only time in my career I was ever asked, directly or indirectly, for a sexual favor,” Brinkley continued.
“I know that makes me one of the lucky few, and I like to think that once you declare your worth, no one questions it again, but I know that’s not true, either. Instead, you have to declare your worth over and over again, if not in one way, then in another — especially in an industry like modeling, where fame, money, and misconceptions can run wild.
“But as long as you believe in yourself, it doesn’t really matter what other people want or ask you to do. You write your own script… And as long as I’m writing my own script, I’m also going to call my own shots, no matter which side of the camera I’m on.”
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For decades, Brinkley was known as “America’s Sweetheart,” a title that suited her just fine.
“It’s very sweet,” she told Fox News Digital. “I never really took it literally. I just thought that it’s a compliment you take with a grain of salt. But it was very pleasant and sweet that they wanted to say something nice about me.”
Brinkley said she has zero regrets about her stance. Today, she hopes her story will inspire others to live life on their own terms.
“Now I can look back and go, ‘Wow, I did that. Good for me,'” she said.
