Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

  The “meetcha” was of course a reference to the Rolling Stones’ 1978 hit “Miss You” from the Some Girls album, which had some less sanguine lyrics as well:

  Well I’ve been stumbling on my feet

  Shuffling through the street … Lord, I miss you child.

  Billy gave Tommy an even look. “Thanks, man,” he answered. “But you know what? I’m not thinking that way right now. What I’m thinking is, You lost her. Call it what you want, call her what you want, but—you lost her.”

  Billy strove to imagine himself getting back into the game, but he was by now mystified as to what age group might be right for him. “I’ve been a rock-and-roll star all my life, so come on, it’s an immature job that’s kept me immature. I think the optimal age would be anywhere from midthirties to fifty.” Soon afterward he met a charming, intelligent beauty, actress Alex Donnelley, and they were even snapped by the New York Post embracing in his backyard in Sag Harbor. “She was very, very nice. I think it was just too soon, right at the rip, at the tear [of the breakup with Katie], and I was just—whoa, I can’t deal with this.”

  A few days after Chicago, Billy had dates scheduled for Buffalo and Albany, but he hadn’t slept for days and was exhausted. He was disoriented, too, and could barely walk, eat, think straight, or talk. Attempts to touch base went unanswered. The matrix of physical and emotional pain was rendering him mute and remote. A worried round of calls in his inner circle started up: Max to Steve to Brian to Dennis to Noel and back. Brian eventually visited Billy at his house, took one look at him, and said, “You can’t gig, because you can’t even walk.” Billy told Brian that he couldn’t possibly cancel, but Brian answered definitively: “You’re not doing the gig.”

  Billy spent the next couple of days in a local hospital, and then his physicians suggested moving him to a big uptown Manhattan teaching hospital. They knew how torturous the series of his skeletal and muscular ailments had been—his recent history included an operation on two disks in his lower back, as well as the pills and therapies, including a lengthy course of steroids, for the sciatica that was later found to be traceable to congenitally malformed hips, perhaps worsened by his delivery by forceps as a breech baby. Once Billy was in the hospital, they changed his regimen of medication—the steroids weren’t really helping—and then talked about the bigger picture: how the tour was affecting him, aging issues, all the different psychological concerns, and the looming divorce.

  Billy told the doctors that he was just tired, burnt out—he needed time to grieve, to think, to pull it all back together. Says Billy, “You need time to be with you before you can be with somebody else—you can’t just plug in another person. I think after a major jolt, you first need to know who you now are, before you can know what you’re looking for next.”

  Billy decided he wanted to live for a while without being a “rock star” and was finally able to take a few months to rest and recuperate. He got back in steady touch with Alexa and quietly give his counsel on the performing career she’d begun about five years before. Though she had attracted some good notice—“as well she should,” says Billy, “because she’s got the chops and the personality and a real charm and command of the stage”—she felt a bit stalled.

  Compounding that feeling was Alexa’s breakup with her sometime bandmate and producer Jimmy Riot, a guy ten years her senior—“okay, no judgment from me there,” says Billy—and not necessarily thriving in his own career.

  “What could I say to her? Why would you ever hook up with a musician?

  “The worse Alexa felt about her situation in general, the less communication we managed, but as always, Christie and I kept tabs, exchanged our insights, and did our best to be a pair of loving, supportive, if divorced parents.”

  Then one day in mid-December came a disturbing, even heartbreaking call. Alexa, in a search of some sort of refuge—what the cliché typically describes as cry for help—had taken an unlikely but thankfully not life-threatening oversupply of a homeopathic antihistamine called Traumeel. By the time Billy got the call, Christie had already rushed to Alexa’s side in a downtown New York hospital. They quickly decided that Billy would stay away, rather than add to what was already threatening to become a circus atmosphere. Alexa and Billy got on the phone and had a brief, painful conversation. “I don’t think she was in a frame of mind to feel the understanding I so wanted to give her, and in truth, I wasn’t getting much back,” says Billy. “But that will be an ongoing project—and the most important one in my life.”

  Alexa remembers him telling her that he was only a bit younger than she was when he drank the bottle of furniture polish: “I think it’s hard to be in your early twenties and not know what you want and how to feel and who you’re gonna be. I think he was very troubled in those times, and I think after that incident he had some perspective ’cause he said that he had checked into this psych ward and realized, ‘Wow, I’m doing just fine—this is whacked over here. I gotta get out of here and move on with my life and get into music and be positive.’

  “When I was on my first tour, I was a mess. I was saying, What am I doing, this is crazy! waking up in a different city every day,” Alexa recalls. “I had gotten sick before one of the shows, and I was on the phone with him. ‘Dad, what do I do?’ and to kind of calm me down, he played ‘Lullabye’ for me on the piano, over the phone. That is really the song that is closest to my heart.”

  Part of Alexa’s gaining more emotional resolve was embracing the fundamental show business ethic Billy taught her: “As it is with many artists, one of his most meaningful relationships has been with his fans, and I really think his most honest relationship has been with them.

  “I think it’s hard for people who have a job that they love, but it doesn’t define them. With my dad, it defines him; like, he is musician, that’s who he is.”

  Billy quietly traveled to the facility where Alexa had been hidden away from the media attention, in upstate New York, and remained at her side for several days. Then it was time, despite the twin distractions of his daughter’s woes and his own marital ones, to once more address the tour. “The makeup dates we played upstate, for the postponed shows, really brought me around quite a bit,” says Billy. “I have to say, I was enjoying those audiences.” He was going to find some psychic handholds wherever he could: “There’s always a lot of pretty women up front who are having a good time, and they grab at me. Sorry, I like getting felt up onstage. And that’s one of those things I didn’t think was still going to happen.”

  Billy also began planning for the kind of lectures he’d been delivering sporadically over the years: “There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in doing those, usually with a piano ready for a few bits illustrating what I’m discussing, but mostly talking about what I’ve learned from my career and from all the influences and my own musical heroes, the ones who helped make the career what it is.

  “And at least by implication, a lesson I try to bring up is, Don’t be turned around in seeking what you want out of life. Don’t be talked out of what you know is right. Or as I’ve put it on occasion, Don’t take shit from anybody.”

  AS BILLY WAS musing on his career in this fashion in 2009, he could hardly have anticipated the career revival that was about three years around the corner. He had real doubts about being an aging rocker.

  “I’m in my sixties now. I was in a restaurant recently, and I heard ‘It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me,’ and it hit me why people might not like this song. It’s very snotty—‘What’s the matter with’—it’s kind of a nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah song. I think it was Carolyn Beegan who first pointed it out. She said, ‘I don’t like that song … I just don’t like the attitude.’ And then I realized, I get it, it’s kind of snotty. I was trying to be sarcastic. I might have overdone it. You can push that a little too far, making fun of being fashionable and hip and taking the piss out of that.”

  Early in his career, Billy recalls, “I was the struggling indie guy, and they were
calling me a punk with my leather jackets and my cigarettes and my snotty attitude. I thought it was par for the course. I don’t think you’re supposed to be a shy wallflower in rock and roll. You got to get up on stage. You got to have some balls, man.

  “And nowadays when I do the stand-up thing on ‘Rock and Roll’ and throw the mike stand, it feels a little funny. There’s a chagrin aspect to it. What am I doing up here? This should be done, this should be over by now. I should have been put out to—I should have been retired.”

  Certain strategies employed by bands he grew up hearing seemed chancy to Billy. Steely Dan played entire albums, while other contemporaries mixed in a number of “deep cuts” the audience was less familiar with. “Springsteen can go out and do the most obscure song,” Billy says, “or Dylan can do that, and the crowd just eats it up. They know the words even to these album tracks. If I do it, the crowd may just sit there looking like a deer in the headlights. What’s that? Why isn’t he doing his own stuff?”

  More than a few crowds, depending on just how Billy is feeling on any given night, have heard this aside when the spotlight catches him early on, or his image flashes thirty feet high on the video screens behind the stage: “Billy couldn’t be here tonight—I’m Billy’s dad.”

  Of course that’s a typically canny move on his part—name the misgiving that otherwise might haunt the show, and in so doing, make it dissolve in laughter—especially for audiences full of fellow baby boomers. Still, despite his best efforts, “that feeling has only been enforced by moments in recent tours when I’ve been onstage, thinking, I’m just too old for this stuff. No, you can’t do this. Stop it, man.”

  And yet Dennis Arfa continues to come up with ideas. Not all of them draw enthusiasm from Billy: “I’ll hear that my music is very popular in China. That it’s played in every piano bar, and people have the records via bootleg or something. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten like a legitimate offer to go and play a concert tour of China, which I’m not all that thrilled to do at this point. When I was younger, yeah, it would have been a Marco Polo adventure. But stories I hear about being in China for a while, it doesn’t sound all that great. I already did my Russia-Cuba things—I’m not Henry Kissinger.”

  If diplomacy isn’t his aspiration, even his chosen profession has begun showing its limitations: “In a way, I’m starting to kind of burn out on who I’m expected to be as a rock star. It’s ironic, it’s funny, it’s amusing in some ways. But it’s sometimes a pain in the ass, and the celebrity aspect of it horrifies me. Especially nowadays, celebrity is such a ridiculous over-the-top business on its own—look at the Kardashian syndrome—and I don’t like it. I’m supposed to be this [celebrated] person, and when people meet me, they’re so strange—’cause I’m this celebrity, and then I have a hard time breaking through that.”

  Other factors intrude, like Forbes magazine’s 2010 estimate of Billy’s net worth as $160 million. “It’s north of that,” he says without particular relish, and in an era where the money in pop music is at the box office even while his royalty payments pile up alongside, it’s not likely to shrink anytime soon. David Geffen once said that continuing to earn on top of a large fortune isn’t about needing any more, but simply “keeping score,” and in that regard, Billy says, “there’s an element of that. I trust Dennis that we don’t want to fall behind in the box-office-dollar value competition. It’s nice as a great payday. And I appreciate it.

  “But I’m not doing it because I need that.

  “I’m just doing it because—that’s what I do.”

  CHAPTER 18

  CARELESS TALK

  “Some love,” Billy had written in “A Matter of Trust” in the wildly happy days of 1983, “is just a lie of the heart / The cold remains of what began with a passionate start.” “But that won’t happen to us,” he sang to the unnamed loved one, obviously Christie. And yet, the almost inescapable element he calls “the knife” was in there: “So break my heart if you must.”

  By midsummer of 2009, he was living these lyrics again. Katie was on her own, splitting time between the West Village townhouse that would be part of the divorce settlement and, as a kindness from Billy, the $16.5 million Sagaponack beachfront house he had acquired from actor Roy Scheider—as an indulgence for Katie that she protested—during their marriage. She was nominally out of his life and yet curiously in it, as they kept up a difficult postmarital friendship by phone and e-mail.

  One of the worst days of Billy’s early summer had come several weeks before, when, during a lonely, uncommunicative stretch that had caused consternation among his best friends, a small group had sought him out at the Centre Island mansion. Sitting down with long faces and considerable nervousness, they urged him to get some help. The session did not go well.

  “So [they] came into my house, reading me an essay, and expect me to go, ‘Oh, I get it, so I’m going to change my whole way of living.’ I said, ‘Look, my wife and I split up. I had a rough summer. There were a couple of nights I might have gone overboard. When I was in Scotland, I drank scotch. What else you got? ’Cause I went to rehab once, and I’m not going back again. And I’m not going to AA, and I don’t buy into this shit. And I can control my intake, okay? And if I fuck up onstage and I fuck up the show, then you can come to me and tell me, “Look what you did, you fucked up.” But I don’t do that. I’m professional. A complete professional. I keep my shit together.’ And when they buy into an orthodoxy, it bothers the crap out of me.”

  He had a special greeting for a trained counselor who had come along, a stranger: “There was that one guy sitting there in the chair, I was like, ‘Now who the fuck are you? Who the fuck do you think you are?’

  “They picked the wrong time. I said, ‘I’m down, and I have a right to be down. I broke up with my third wife, and if I’m depressed, it has nothing to do with drugs or pills or booze. It just means I’m fuckin’ bummed out. You’re going to have to accept that,’ I said. ‘You would have been better off taking me out to lunch and saying, “Sometimes you’re going over the edge, you got to watch it. Just be cool.” ’ ”

  The entire situation was highly reminiscent of the 1993 B-side of “All About Soul,” “You Picked a Real Bad Time”:

  Tell me why you’re tryin’ to give me aggravation

  You picked a real bad time ’cause this man’s got the blues.

  A bit of a bump in maintaining cordial relations with Katie would occur in July 2011 with the release of Groundswell, a novel she would find herself defending as not being derived from the marriage. While the effort was undercut somewhat by the previous year’s New York Times article “How to Cook Up a Food Celebrity,” in which Katie’s agent called the book “loosely based on her and Bill,” the characters diverged in significant ways.

  Still, the event conjured uncomfortable memories of an appearance she and Billy had made on The Oprah Winfrey Show when her cookbook came out in April 2008. During Billy’s interrogation on the talk show queen’s couch, Oprah grilled him about his car accidents, displaying photos along the way, and he sparred with her before elucidating that he wasn’t such a bad driver; he had simply had bad luck. Winfrey asked him about his rehab visit to Betty Ford, and about relations with Christie, then leaned in on the couple’s age difference. “I would have married her if she was thirty years older,” Billy riposted with growing defensiveness, as Oprah moved on to press Katie on her relationship with Alexa. “I’m always impressed by her,” Katie offered. Meanwhile, Billy would later recount, he was so obviously miserable being ambushed as he sat on Oprah’s couch that Alexa cried watching him.

  That turn in the road endeared Katie to neither husband nor stepdaughter. The 2011 novel would have to make its way without him, albeit with the notoriety the divorce had churned up.

  Forthrightly designed as a “beach read,” it was synopsized by Kirkus Reviews as “a novel whose self-important heroine is a famous actor’s much younger wife who leaves him (with prenup) when he cheats on her,
only to find love true weeks later with her surf instructor.”

  In the opening pages, Emma, a newly celebrated screenwriter working on a script for Harvey Weinstein, has a key revelation, and after the tale is told in flashbacks, she dumps her unfaithful husband. Soon enough she gets the kiss-off note from him: “You will no longer be able to use my name or to use any of my assets as collateral to arrange loans or credit—except, of course, for your half ownership of the apartment.”

  As it happens, life and art shared certain elements, as postdivorce Katie Lee would sell, for $11.65 million in February 2011, the Perry Street townhouse that Billy had bought as their Manhattan pied-à-terre for $5.9 million in 2006 and deeded to her when they broke up. It wasn’t made publicly clear exactly how the couple’s shared assets were divvied up, but insider accounts suggest that she was treated far more generously than the prenup would have mandated.

  During the postbreakup summer, she stayed in Sagaponack as something of a recluse, though she did recount on her Twitter feed her adventure of learning to surf. Friends privately shared the information that she had grown enamored of her surf instructor. This, too, was not made public; it might have undercut the purity of Groundswell’s fiction—by the book’s late innings, with the actor dispatched, it’s Emma’s surf guru who is nibbling her earlobes during a “sex for hours” break from the restorative surf lessons.

  Billy would get a nod in the acknowledgments as “the best ex-husband a girl could ever ask for,” and indeed, the two have remained friendly, despite an early misunderstanding over precisely which artwork and pricey Nate Berkus–chosen furniture would be leaving Billy’s possession. One insider account portrayed an assistant (who entered the property after Katie had made a culling) as calling Billy’s staff in alarm in the belief that a full-scale burglary had occurred—a six-figure estimate of the items’ value was privately tossed about. After a quick redo, the situation was resolved. On September 25, 2009, Katie Lee issued this tweet that was apparently about the scenario: “Drove a 14-foot Uhaul through the Bronx today (don’t ask) … still recovering.”