For someone who hasn’t really released new music in more than 20 years, Billy Joel is having an epic third act. He has spent much of his life in battle: against his ex-wives, against booze, bad managers and bankruptcy, and against critics who’ve considered him too uncool for rock ’n’ roll. Legendary Village Voice critic Robert Christgau derided him as “a force of nature and bad taste.”
Today, at 65, Billy Joel is in the midst of an unprecedented residency at Madison Square Garden. His monthly shows gross him more than $2 million each. He has sold more than 150 million albums and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2013, he was among the recipients at the Kennedy Center Honors. A Hicksville native, he has been considered the poet laureate of Long Island for decades.
Yet he’s always felt a failure where it most counts: love.
“None of those people in the arena screaming your name really know you,” Joel tells author Fred Schruers in the new book “Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography.” (Joel, who sat for 100 hours of interviews, eventually withdrew from the project over fears it would be too revelatory.)
“You just need one — one person out of millions — to know and accept and love you for being, well, just the way you are . . . I see old folks walking down the street who look like they’ve been together 50 years, and there’s something very touching about it — that they’ve lasted so long. I used to wonder: How come I don’t have that? I can dream about it, think about it, write music and lyrics and sing about it. I can even try to achieve it again, and often have.”
His three tortured marriages — and the music they’ve inspired — are testament to that.
The Shark
Joel met his first wife in 1970, through his friend and bandmate Jon Small. Elizabeth Weber was married to Small, and they had a baby son, Sean — but Joel was knocked out. “She wasn’t like a lot of the other girls I knew at that time who had taken home ec and cooking classes,” he told Schruers. “She was . . . intelligent and not afraid to speak her mind, but could also be seductive. Almost like a European-type — not a typical American girl.”
When Small discovered the affair, Weber left them both, disappearing for weeks. Joel became suicidal. He was 21, broke, friendless, loveless and “crashing at my mom’s place again, which is abject failure.”
Not long after Weber took off, Joel overdosed on Nembutal, then called Small to apologize. Alarmed, Small raced to Joel’s mom’s house in Hicksville and found Joel on the floor. “The next thing I remember, I woke up in the hospital and learned that they had pumped my stomach,” Joel told Schruers. “I thought to myself, ‘Oh, great, I couldn’t even do this right.’ It was another failure.”
A few weeks later, Joel tried again, this time drinking furniture polish. Another family member found him, and this time, Joel checked himself into a mental hospital, where he stayed for three weeks. He had an epiphany: “The people I was locked up with were never going to be able to overcome their problems, whereas mine were all self-made,” he told Schruers. “I can fix this, I thought.”
He began writing again. Never much into drugs, he self-medicated with booze and cigarettes. After much agonizing back-and-forth, he got together with Weber, who had shrewd business sense and agreed to manage him. They married in September 1973. “She’s Got a Way” and “She’s Always a Woman” were inspired by her, but many around Joel were concerned: They found Weber controlling, manipulative, rude and far more enthralled with the rock n’ roll lifestyle than Joel.
He wrote “Just the Way You Are” as her birthday gift, and after he played it for her, she said, “Do I get the publishing, too?”
One year, he wrote “Just the Way You Are” as her birthday gift, and after he played it for her, she said, “Do I get the publishing, too?” She wasn’t kidding.
As his wife, Weber was entitled to 50 percent of Joel’s worth and was also taking a cut of his earnings as manager. She brought her brother, Frank, into the fold, and Joel felt deep unease. His next record — and its eponymous hit single, “The Stranger” — were also inspired by her.
In 1982, they filed for divorce, but Joel hoped to reconcile. He agreed to buy her everything she wanted — a $4 million town house on the Upper East Side, an Alfa Romeo — but then he had a motorcycle accident, smashing both his hands. While in the hospital, doped up on pain pills and contemplating what future he might have as a musician, Weber came to visit, contract in hand. Joel recalls her asking him to sign everything he had over to her.
“I may have acted like an idiot a time or two, but I’m not a complete idiot,” Joel told Schruers. “That really killed it right there and then.”
Frank Weber sided with Joel in the divorce. Years later, Joel would find Frank had siphoned nearly $30 million of his earnings, and in 1989, Joel sued him for that plus $60 million in punitive damages.
Frank outwitted Joel by filing for bankruptcy, and in 1990, Joel settled out of court.
“I hooked up with the Borgias!” Joel told Schruers. “What a family to pick.”
The Supermodel
Following the 1982 split with Elizabeth, Joel went to St. Bart’s for the holidays. He found a piano bar and began playing; a few moments later, to his wonderment, Elle Macpherson, then just 19, and Christie Brinkley, 28, were standing at either side of the 33-year-old — along with an undiscovered Whitney Houston.
They were all vying for Joel’s attention, Brinkley tells Schruers. “Whitney says, ‘I can sing!’ Meanwhile, Elle’s draped herself on the piano like Michelle Pfeiffer [in ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys’].”
Back in New York, Brinkley and Macpherson competed for Joel, who was living in a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park. His doorman, a struggling actor named Nick Turturro, would rank all the women Billy brought home. “Usually, he’d hold up eight, nine, 10 fingers,” Joel told Schruers. Brinkley was the only one to get 10 fingers twice.
The first night Joel got Brinkley to come home with him, “I was trying to act cool, but somewhere inside me the kid from Hicksville was going, ‘Yesssssss!’ ” When the elevator door opened to his apartment, there stood Macpherson. “Even as part of me thought, ‘Oh, God, no,’ another part of me was going, ‘Holy crap, if my friends could see me now.’ ”
Brinkley was unruffled. She left, Macpherson stayed, but Joel was in love with Brinkley. They married in 1985, and the album “An Innocent Man” was a love letter to her. They conceived their daughter, Alexa Ray, on their wedding night.Christie likes to joke that the end of the marriage . . . spelled the end of my songwriting career… At least, I think it’s a joke.
- Billy Joel
Yet Joel’s financial crises meant he had to tour nonstop to recoup his money, and the marriage suffered tremendously. The breaking point came in 1993. After a show at Nassau Coliseum, Joel opted to stay at a nearby hotel rather than make the 90-minute drive home, and Brinkley was told by one of Joel’s band members that he was having an affair. (Joel denies it.) By the end of that year, they knew the marriage was over — and it marked the last year Joel would issue a new album.
“Christie likes to joke that the end of the marriage . . . spelled the end of my songwriting career,” Joel told Schruers. “At least, I think it’s a joke.”
The Social Climber
By 2002, Joel was again deeply depressed and drinking heavily. He was touring with Elton John, and one night had an onstage meltdown at the Garden, randomly shouting out famous battle sites: “Bunker Hill! Antietam!” (In 2011, John publicly castigated Joel on his drinking. Their relationship has never really recovered.)
Between 2002 and 2004, Joel had three car accidents on Long Island, once smashing into a house. He later blamed bad street lighting, local wildlife, his poorly constructed Citroën and 9/11. He checked into rehab but never bought into it. “The fact is, I like to drink,” Joel told Schruers. “Sometimes too much.”
The one bright spot was Katie Lee, a college girl from Ohio whom he had picked up in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. After graduating, she moved into Joel’s house in the Hamptons, and in 2004, they married. Joel was 55, Lee 23 — just four years older than his daughter, Alexa.
They moved into a $4 million loft in Tribeca. Just months into the marriage, Joel was in rehab again.
After a stint at Betty Ford, Lee — herself an aspiring culinary star — encouraged him to get back out on the road, and he began playing live again. In 2008, while touring with Elton John, Joel kept seeing photos of Lee at premieres and gallery openings — and one in particular, of her dancing closely with another man at Art Basel in Miami.
“Those photos looked bad,” Lee told Schruers. She denied an affair.
As the marriage unraveled, Joel held out hope. He told Lee he wanted to go to a therapist. She began talking about furniture. “I realized, ‘It’s not going to happen. We’re over . . . Just don’t send me messages, don’t leave me cute little phone calls, don’t tease me, don’t f- -k with me, just end it. ’Cause I’m an old man now, a vulnerable man. Don’t do that to an old guy.’ ”
They divorced in 2009. Today, Joel lives in Oyster Bay with his girlfriend of five years, a 33-year-old former hedge funder. He is in no rush to marry again, but, ever the romantic, remains on good terms with all his exes, even Weber. His philosophy, say all of them, is to look for the good in people, believe in it, and try again.
“You can have all the money in the world, you can have mansions, you can have properties, you can have yachts, you can have limousines, you can have motorcycles,” he told Schruers. But without love, “it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.”
In the biography, Joel also reveals the inspiration for some of his most famous songs:
“Piano Man” (1973)
In 1972, Joel took off to L.A. — he was trying to extricate himself from a shady management deal, and was advised to go off the grid. He wound up playing piano at The Executive Room on Wilshire Boulevard, and to blunt his misery imagined he was like Steve Martin or Bill Murray on “SNL,” playing the part of a lounge lizard. He performed under the name Bill Martin; the “Bill” in the song is him, and there really was a John the bartender, and tipping patrons would often ask, “What are you doing here?” — knowing this guy was far too talented for that room.
“New York State of Mind” (1976)
Joel had been living in L.A. for three years and was done with it. He recalled a day trip upstate, and being knocked out by the Hudson Valley’s “full-foliage glory.” Joel and his first wife rented a house near West Point, and as soon as he finished touring, he boarded a Greyhound bus and stared out the window. “On that ride, I started writing the song,” he said. “I was so glad to be back home, feeling, ‘This is where I belong.’”
“Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” (1977)
“At the time, I just pictured some lady yelling out of the house, ‘Anthony! Anthony!’ and I was thinking about a kid who’s been living at home and getting a lot of pressure from his family to do what they want him to do, and this is a guy who wants to go his own way,” Joel told Schruers. “He isn’t buying into the upward mobility thing.”
“Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (1977)
Musically inspired by the 16-minute B-side pastiche on the Beatles’ “Abbey Road,” this is Joel’s most narratively dense and detailed song — the prom king and queen’s courtship, marriage, and divorce told in seven minutes and 37 seconds. “I wanted to explore the eternal question about the anointed kids we all knew: Whatever happened to them? If you peak too early, if you’re the hot lick in high school, it’s a good bet you’re gonna bomb out pretty early,” Joel told Schruers. “I had an idea . . . about a couple that meets after a long time — okay, a bottle of red, a bottle of white. That’s it — they’re in their old Italian restaurant. Gradually it all came together.”
“Big Shot” (1979)
Joel told Schruers that the song was about his unease with fame and New York nightlife at the time. “I hated that whole coked-out, disco-drenched New York club scene in the late ’70s . . . it just seemed trashy, the whole Studio 54 schtick of going into the back room and doing coke, or hanging out with Liza Minelli and Halston — that scene had nothing to do with rock and roll.” Joel also told Howard Stern that it was about Bianca Jagger, who he found a total pain in the ass — and imagined that Mick did, too.
“Allentown” (1983)
Joel always writes the melody first, then the lyrics. For this one, he thought of writing about Levittown, where he grew up, but quickly hit a wall. “What was there to write about Levittown?” he asked Schruers. “That the candy store was understocked?” But then he thought of Allentown, and the working-class central Pennsylvanians ravaged by Vietnam and Reaganomics. “I empathize with people who have difficulty finding work or staying in a job,” Joel told Schruers. “I put in time inking typewriter ribbons in a factory, and my God, it’s mind-numbing, a Dickensian existence . . . I remember what it feels like to do a meaningless hard day’s work for a low wage.”
“And So It Goes” (1989)
Inspired by a whirlwind affair with Elle Macpherson in the early ’80s. Joel was a bona fide star in his early 30s; she was a 19-year-old about to become a superstar herself, and Joel knew she’d soon be gone. “Almost every chord has a dissonant note in it,” Joel tells Schruers, “which to me was conveying what’s just beneath the words: a kind of pessimism and resignation, because I knew it wasn’t really going to work out.”