Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  Interviewed by Charlie Rose in December 2013, he would state that he’d been so “stunned by the inhumanity” of the attack that he was down in the dumps for years. The inspiration of the young Pakistani Malala Yousafzai, who defied the Taliban and continued to do so after they failed to kill her with a shot in the head, “lifted me out of it.”

  But the profound despair that settled on him just after 9/11 indeed took its toll, and there was no salvaging the Trish relationship.

  Steve Cohen subscribes to the theory that Trish was Billy’s Ava Gardner, the woman who stayed just out of reach, but a real note of regret sounds in Billy’s reminiscences. Though the roller coaster of the relationship lasted just a couple of years, as opposed to the lengthy, combative Frank-Ava marriage, the analogy is proper in terms of intensity.

  “I suppose I’ve always assumed that if you really want to work things out, you can—because there is nothing like that kind of good when things are going well,” says Billy. “But as with many passionate affairs, the end seemed to come very quickly, and that would trigger some of the deepest melancholy I’d ever known.

  “Trish today is markedly different from the Trish of those days,” says Billy. “She’s married to an environmental lawyer, and they have three kids and, by all accounts, a great life.” When she ran for a Suffolk County district legislative seat in March 2009, Billy was happy to give her a wholehearted endorsement, which began, “I would vote for Trish Bergin in a heartbeat.”

  PER ITS LONG-PLANNED release date, Fantasies & Delusions came out on October 2, 2001. Somewhat to Billy’s amazement, given that it was a somber and stately piece of work that didn’t indulge in orchestral fireworks, it went immediately to the top of the classical chart and remained there for twelve weeks.

  In the usual music press outlets, there is no natural spot for a rock musician’s album of classical music to be reviewed, so it ended up being judged by newspaper critics. In some cases, reviewers found the kinship with Chopin, Schumann, Debussy, and Rachmaninoff to their liking, as in the Boston Herald-American: “What is surprising is the depth of understanding of late Romantic-era piano writing in all its varieties that he so deftly demonstrates in these 10 miniatures. Even when he’s quoting liberally from [the] masters, there’s a sincerity, an underlying devotion to the art that makes Joel’s work more homage than pillage.” In other papers, notably in Philadelphia and Washington, Billy was raked over the coals for those same similarities. “I don’t think the Washington Post was tossing me a bouquet when the reviewer described the album as ‘a garland of homages,’ ” says Billy.

  During a question-and-answer session between Billy and National Public Radio interviewer Susan Stamberg in December, some gentle probing brought out the hard-to-articulate feelings that had gone into composing these wordless keyboard meditations. “Innamorato,” he said, was spurred by the breakup of a love affair. “All my life,” he confessed, “I’ve been writing for women … they like it when you write stuff for them.”

  BILLY WAS STILL getting over the split with Trish when he heard of her engagement. That news and other pressures, including the strains of steady road work, pushed him to an emotional precipice. In mid-March 2002 a Madison Square Garden show with Elton went awry, when a combination of cold medication and the usually mellowing jigger or two in a cup on the piano combined to set off the anger that Billy was still carrying around from 9/11. “That overwhelming tragedy had changed all our lives, and we had an administration that was using it as the proximate cause for what loomed as a long and futile war in Iraq,” says Billy.

  “I think it was in the beginning of ‘River of Dreams,’ ” recalls Tommy Byrnes, “pretty close to the end of the show. I was standing right next to him.” Billy began by rebuking the Garden management. “This is the most expensive room in the world,” he said to the audience. “You paid a lot for your tickets, and that sucks.” With the anger surfacing—Billy had never understood why some of the 9/11 tribute concerts hadn’t featured more of a homegrown lineup—he hollered to his startled audience that he wanted to “throw out a couple things.… Bunker Hill! Antietam! That was a bad one!” He stood for the rest of his recitation, citing the Alamo, San Juan Hill, Argonne Forest, Corregidor, Midway, Guadalcanal, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh, and finally, perhaps fortunately running out of highly memorable armed conflicts, “Desert fucking Storm!”

  He had one question for the loudly murmuring crowd: “Who the hell do they think they’re fucking with?”

  Around that time U2 was doing a concert tour of the States and expressing a lot of anger over what the terrorists had done, and even the pacifist Bono would cap some shows by proclaiming, “Osama bin Laden can kiss my rosy Irish ass!” Billy’s tirade, for all its sincerity, didn’t quite work out. “I remember walking over to him and going, ‘You all right, boss?’ ” says Tommy. “And he was like, ‘I’m really fucking up, aren’t I?’ I go, ‘No, man, you’re fine. Just friggin’ get through this song and we’re out of here.’ ” Billy recalls riding away from the gig in a van with Steve Cohen and the guys and asking how the outburst had gone down on a scale of zero to ten. Steve waited half a beat before saying, “Zero.” “The audience had been warned that he had a cold,” wrote New York Times reviewer Kelefa Sanneh. “But Mr. Joel seemed to have ingested something quite a bit stronger than cough syrup.”

  Shortly after the outburst at the Garden, despite some subtle words of caution from those around him (and the memory of Elton’s disapproving scowl onstage that night), Billy was drinking very heavily again. The planned summer dual tour was postponed to September, and Billy told People magazine that the delay only worsened his mood: “I then began what I ultimately realized was a prolonged period of overindulgence.” And yet in looking back at a disturbing series of events around that time, he says, “I was in a dark place, but in contrast to the rumors and printed speculation at the time, I want to set the record straight about something: none of my infamous traffic accidents were alcohol-related.”

  The police reports of each accident—albeit based on observation at the scene rather than on analysis of his blood alcohol level—back that up. The first accident occurred in East Hampton on June 12, 2002, the result of a simple, well-intentioned act: a deer ran across the road, and Billy swerved to avoid it, sending the car sliding across a grassy area next to the road and smack into a small but well-rooted standpipe. Someone called in the accident, and when the police arrived at the scene, Billy spoke to them and then simply went home, leaving the car to be towed.

  The second accident, six months later, was more serious. It happened on a January night in 2003 as Billy drove home on Route 114 from the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, where he’d had what he recalls as a glass of champagne. He’d entered the bend in the road that some locals call Dead Man’s Curve, because so many drivers are thrown off it, and hit a patch of black ice. Luckily he was seat-belted into a very safe car, a bulky Mercedes, but when the passenger-side door slammed into a tree, the impact knocked him unconscious. The car crumpled against the tree and bounced back onto the roadway. To get him out, rescue workers had to use the Jaws of Life, peeling the Mercedes open like a tin can. Thinking he was in bad shape because of the blood pouring from a small cut on his head, as well as a lot of bruising around his eyes (which actually was the result of sinus surgery a few days earlier), the rescue workers loaded him into a rescue chopper, to be airlifted to the Stony Brook University Medical Center. After a night of observation, the hospital released him, and when the papers ran pictures of the car, the crash looked much worse than it was.

  The worst part for Billy was Christie’s reaction to the news. She was so upset that she made a statement to the press: “The seat Alexa was sitting in only hours before was completely decimated.… I’m worried about Billy, but like any mother would be, I’m alarmed and concerned about my child’s safety by this frightening pattern of events.… I hope Billy will honor his promise to use a professional driver when he’s wit
h Alexa. It eases my concern for the safety and well-being of both of them.”

  “Absurd as it was to think that I would ever compromise my daughter’s safety, I kept my silence,” says Billy.

  Then, at about four P.M. on April 25, 2004, after picking up a pizza from one of the local Oyster Bay joints, Billy got into accident number three. He was driving “a dopey little Citroën, a French character car—I think it’s made out of papier-mâché,” says Billy—and it was raining. When he hit the brakes, the car slipped off the wet road and into a roadside house. It just tapped the foundation, enough to leave a little crack in the facade. Pretty soon the firemen and policemen showed up, but none of them noted any evidence that alcohol had been involved. Someone gave Billy and his cold pizza a ride home from there, and Billy thought that was the end of that.

  Then the woman who owned the home was quoted in the local press saying, “He hit my bushes and the wall. He’d better come fix it. I’m sure he has the money.” Billy subsequently sent her a check to cover the cost of all repairs. Still, the homeowner wasn’t finished: “I’m ninety-four years old and I still drive. I’ve never had an accident.”

  The 1967 vintage Citroën, meanwhile, was completely totaled. Billy wrote it off and presumed it would be headed for the scrap heap, but somebody found the car’s small plastic grille, which some local disc jockeys then auctioned off for charity. Then came the requisite Saturday Night Live skit, in which Horatio Sanz played Billy guzzling out of a bottle while driving some girls around the Hamptons—one of whom was played by Lindsay Lohan. While the sketch didn’t exactly help the Billy Joel driving mythology, he admits that he found it funny. (A minor irony is that in August 2011, during a spate of serial public embarrassments, Lohan revealed a newly tattooed Billy quote on her rib cage: “Clear as a crystal, sharp as a knife / I feel I’m in the prime of my life.”)

  The timing of the next widely publicized event would not help the unwelcome legend, as a couple of days after the first accident, on June 14, 2002, Billy decided to check himself into a rehab center called Silver Hill Hospital, in New Canaan, Connecticut. Although Mariah Carey had been there a year or so before, to little fanfare, Billy’s visit triggered a minor press frenzy. He told People that his talks with Alexa, then sixteen, had much to do with his decision to check in: “I told my daughter that I recognized I was having a problem, and my gift to her for Father’s Day was going to be cleaning up my act.” But all the media attention made the other patients and the staff uncomfortable, even as some of his fellow patients were paying undue attention to the celebrity in their midst, and he left after a few days.

  Over the years, Billy has had a problem with the prevalent cure for substance abuse: the tenet that puts it all in the hands of a “higher power.” “I mean, no disrespect to anybody who finds sobriety through that path, but I’m an atheist,” says Billy. “Also, I’m not one for psychotherapy, and certainly not one for group sessions in which people aim to correct one another’s behavior. If you don’t go for any of those approaches, you start to run out of traditional treatment options pretty quickly.”

  The rehab visit is supposed to be an occupational hazard with rock stars. “I call it mental floss,” explains Billy. However, he did not want his issues with alcohol to be blamed on the supposed pressures of his career: “Believe me, I’m well aware that my life’s a lot easier than most people’s. Making a lot of money—what’s the problem with that? Being able to get a table in a restaurant anytime you want because they recognize you—what’s wrong with that? Being able to meet a beautiful woman and not have to pull out your résumé? I’m not complaining. Anyway, I don’t think the rock star life pushed me into drinking. The fact is, I like to drink—sometimes too much.

  “I know I have a melancholy streak, and, yeah, I can feel alone sometimes. But I don’t mind my own company—I’m comfortable with it. After years of being on the road and living in hotel rooms, you learn to deal with isolation. Sometimes I’ll read a book or watch TV back in my hotel room, and sometimes—well, sometimes I’d rather hang out with the band in a bar.”

  Research proves that alcohol is a depressant and that it aggravates depression. “But if you’re drinking by yourself, it’s not always about drowning your sorrows,” shares Billy. “There have been times in my life when it was just a habit, part of my day. I’d have a glass of wine in the afternoon, and that would lead to another glass of wine later in the day, and by nighttime I’d be in my cups, as the Brits say. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know how to explain what the calculus is there, what triggers having a few too many. But I’m aware of it. And no matter who you are, I think you have to be aware of what drives you to excess.”

  Billy eventually gave up hard liquor but will from time to time have a glass of wine with dinner. “When I know I’m heading into a tailspin or feeling depressed, I watch even how much wine I consume—and at times I stop altogether, until I’ve pulled out of whatever mood I’m in,” he says. “It’s probably fortunate that by now, anything more than a couple glasses of wine tends to make my body rebel, to guard its own gate—I feel physically ill, nauseous, out of sorts. There’s also a psychological component—anything approaching some easy euphoria, and I start to feel dread. So that’s where I stand today.”

  In November, as the troubles of 2002 slowly faded, Billy would have a consoling acquisition. Overlooking the peaceful Oyster Bay Harbor where he once dredged oysters was a fifteen-acre plot of gently sloping land that had been home to various rail and finance barons. In 1996 it was capped by a newly constructed Jacobean-style mansion that was dubbed Middlesea. Billy bought the twenty-thousand-square-foot two-story brick home for $22.5 million. It straddled the world he’d grown up in, sharing a shoreline with humble Oyster Bay’s working fishery docks, and yet, on his peninsular Centre Island enclave, also boasting fat-cat neighbors on the order of (later-arriving) Rupert Murdoch. With two guest cottages, an ample garage for motorcycles, and a tennis court that would be replaced by a helipad, it was baronial but unshrouded by shrubbery, affording causal boaters the chance to troll past, peering through binoculars in the hope of catching a glimpse of the island’s homegrown rock star at leisure.

  ALSO IN THAT early winter of 2002, Billy had what felt like a happy accident: he met Katie Lee. They literally ran into each other in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in New York. She was in town from Ohio with some friends from Miami University of Ohio, and when they came face to face, they each took a step back. “Standing in front of me, I saw a woman who looked like a young Ali MacGraw, with a great smile. Even then, I knew it was a turning-point moment,” says Billy. “I knew there was going to be more to the story than just that collision.”

  “I literally bumped right into him,” Katie concurs. “I was looking for something in my purse as I walked, and we got to chatting. And he invited me and my girlfriend to dinner, this great place where I had my first truffle, and then he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a Broadway show—let’s go over there.’ So we go over, and he jumps onstage, and he sings the last two songs of the show. I thought that that was his job, that he did that every night. I had no idea he was doing it to impress me!

  “Then it turned out that the president’s daughter, Barbara Bush, was in the audience with a friend, and they wanted to come backstage and meet him. So we all went out, and the Secret Service was with us, and I was thinking, God, this morning I was in Ohio, and now I’m out with the Secret Service. This is so weird. Boy, New York’s fun!

  “I went back to college in Ohio thinking, What a great New York experience. I had no idea that I’d ever talk to him again or anything. And he called me about a week later, and we started up a friendship talking over the phone. And I went out and bought the greatest hits album and I was like, Oh, I know “Still Rock and Roll,” I know “My Life”—I love these songs. So it was pretty funny. But then I ended up over the years knowing every word to every song. And I love his music now. I still listen to it when it comes on the radio. I sing right
along.”

  As Katie and Billy were first getting to know each other, he found something jaded northerners might describe as “hillbilly charm” in her youth and innocence, and something classic in her proper southern manners. “Certainly I could do the math and recognize that the thirty-two-year gap in our ages could make for a challenging leap of faith on both our parts,” says Billy.

  Billy didn’t think Katie was really aware of the extent of his career or of the success he’d had. To her, he was just the guy who wrote “Uptown Girl” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire”—those were among a handful of Billy’s songs she knew. She was so far removed from the 1970s and 1980s—and even part of the 1990s—that she had completely missed the heart of his career.

  “I was actually very comfortable with the fact that she didn’t define me at all by my greatest hits,” Billy says. Still, he would later realize that there were a lot of things they just didn’t have in common: “Aside from classical music, there was an obvious disconnect in terms of cultural touchstones such as TV shows, trends, and politics.”

  “As we talked on the phone more and more, a few months later he said, ‘Why don’t you come visit me?’ ” recalls Katie Lee. “It was in January, and I went up to the Hamptons in a huge snowstorm, and we cooked pasta and watched The Godfather and stayed in. And by the end of the weekend, I felt like, you know what, I could really fall in love with this person. And so we started seeing each other more and more.”