Billy Joel

by Fred Schruers

Katie’s visits grew more frequent, and Billy was happy to stay off the road. “Touring has its pleasures, but that hour you spend onstage having fun is not always counterbalanced by the other twenty-three spent riding in planes or vans or limos, and staying in places where you bite the wrappers off the soap and order lukewarm pasta,” says Billy. “Instead of that grind, I was once again spending time on Centre Island or in my Sag Harbor place, enjoying the kind of domesticity that feels like a break from the storm.”

  By the end of 2003, Katie had become part of Billy’s life, and part of Alexa’s, too. (They were born just four years apart.) The domesticity was becoming ever more natural-seeming, and not to be discounted was Katie Lee’s superior touch with comfort food. “Thanksgiving and the holiday season rolled around, and it just seemed natural to be hanging out in the kitchen boiling water and chopping garlic,” says Billy. “Katie was starting to feel like family, and I was starting to think we should make that feeling a fact.”

  CHAPTER 15

  A WILD AND RESTLESS MAN

  If Arthur Miller’s account of his introduction to Marilyn Monroe—“The eye sought in vain to find the least fault in the architecture of her form”—reminded Billy of his first meeting with Christie, Miller’s reaction to the news of Monroe’s death could stand in for Billy’s eventual feelings about Katie: “I realized that I still, even then, expected to meet her once more, somewhere, sometime, and talk sensibly about all the foolishness we had been through—in which case I would probably have fallen in love with her again.”

  But back in 2003, Billy’s love for Katie was new and all things seemed possible. Katie herself seemed content that when Billy wasn’t on the road, he was a homebody. “Maybe it was that residual influence of the Godfather saga for me,” says Billy. “I can go to the mattresses, and I don’t need a mob war to justify sticking around the house.

  True to that mafioso ethic of being at least able to cook a decent meal when housebound—or in a homey prison kitchen like the wiseguys in GoodFellas—Billy developed his specialty of pasta with red sauce: “I’ll put mine up against any other amateur’s. But as Katie stocked the pantry and her cooking skills went into full swing, I began to see her great knack for putting a new spin on familiar comfort foods.” Eventually her drive to become a celebrity chef would take its toll on their relationship. Early on, though, it felt very natural to Billy to watch her grow in stature.

  “The early days of our getting to know each other were marked by quiet times at home—our notion of an ideal evening consisted of cooking a feast together, then picking a movie and watching it while sharing some popcorn,” says Billy. “The feeling between us was one of affection and attachment and discovery, something I’d written about nearly twenty years earlier in ‘This Is the Time’ ”:

  You’ve given me the best of you

  But now I need the rest of you.

  “But since I’m hard-wired to inject a little pessimism into every song, no matter how buoyant the overall tone, I’d added back then”:

  This is the time to remember

  ’Cause it will not last forever.

  “At first, when we were dating, my mom was saying, ‘A rock star! Has he been tested for STDs?’ ” jokes Katie.

  “I didn’t tell any of my friends. I was finishing up my senior year of college, and I didn’t want everybody talking about me. I just told my friends I was going home to see my mom every weekend when really I was either going to the Hamptons to see Bill or meeting him out on the road, because he started touring again. And then the weekend before graduation, the National Enquirer did a story on us dating. And I still didn’t tell anyone it was in there. I thought, Nobody reads the Enquirer; it’ll come and go. But the day before it would have gone off the newsstands, somebody saw it, and every convenience store and grocery store in our town in Ohio sold out of that issue. Everybody I knew in school was talking about it. I just couldn’t wait to be out of there and done with it.

  “I tried to blow people off when they’d ask me about it. It was when we had just gone to war, and I would say, ‘Don’t you have anything better to talk about? There’s other things in the paper—we’re at war. Why are you reading that?’

  “And then after I graduated, I moved to the Hamptons, but I told Billy, ‘I’m not moving in with you—I’m only coming to stay for the summer. In the fall I’m moving into the city and going to culinary school. This is only temporary.’ Well, what do you know—I didn’t leave. And we got married about a year and a half later.”

  IN JUNE 2003, Katie and Billy attended the Tony Awards together. Before sitting down to enjoy the show, though, Billy opened the event by doing “New York State of Mind” live from Times Square. During that performance, he had one of those only-in–New York moments when a tour guide, chattering away on a microphone at the front of a double-decker bus that went gliding by, simply incorporated Billy into his routine—“and there’s native New York son Billy Joel, performing his classic ‘New York State of Mind.’ ” “That’s what I call a seasoned carny guy—in a few blocks he’d be giving Macy’s the same treatment,” says Billy.

  Billy’s bit was followed by a medley from Movin’ Out—with Twyla Tharp’s dancers flinging themselves about expertly to “River of Dreams,” “Keepin’ the Faith,” and “Only the Good Die Young.” The potent athleticism of the dancers, the muscular chops of the band, and Tharp’s inventive choreography brought the crowd (including Philip Seymour Hoffman, seen applauding with a lickerish grin of sheer appreciation) to its feet. From among the show’s nine Tony nominations, Tharp’s choreography deservedly won, as did Billy and Stuart Malina’s orchestration. Afterward Billy handed over his statuette to Tommy Byrnes, the guitar player, “who truly deserved the credit for all that arranging,” says Billy. “The players he put together for the show would form the backbone of the reinvigorated band I’d front the next time I went on the road.”

  Because Movin’ Out was heading for a national tour soon and a key venue was the Pantages Theatre, on that famed stretch of Hollywood Boulevard known as the Walk of Fame, Billy was given a star of his own. “It looks like I’m always going to be here,” he admitted to the crowd. “I have to tell you that I had not considered this when I wrote ‘Say Goodbye to Hollywood.’ ”

  Meanwhile, Movin’ Out was still a hit—it ultimately ran about three years on Broadway, through more than thirteen hundred performances. By then Katie finally knew for sure that Billy’s job wasn’t performing those last two songs in the show each night.

  “He’s Billy Joel when he goes onstage,” says Katie, “and when he’s at home, he’s Bill. He’s not the one who’s the life of the party—he’s kind of a little bit more reserved. But put him in front of fifty thousand people, and he just completely comes out of his shell. When he plays in New York, the people go crazy—it’s amazing. At Madison Square Garden you can literally feel the room move, because it’s built on springs and everyone is up out of their seats. I would go backstage, and I would look at the couch, with the dogs sitting on it, and it would be vibrating. Because everybody is going crazy.

  “I don’t think he ever really thought of himself as this big rock star. I think that’s what keeps him grounded and laid back. His attitude is, Man, I’m such a lucky guy. You know, he’s still this kid from Levittown who grew up without any money. He wants the big house because it makes him feel good and he didn’t have that growing up. So he’s thrilled that he is where he is. But I think he pinches himself every day.”

  OVER TIME, BILLY has discovered that even the feeling of fulfillment a celebrated career brings can take one only so far. “Okay, I recognize that the second I walk on that stage and start performing, it becomes for that moment the most important—in fact, the only important—thing in the world,” he says. “And good Lord, in terms of scale, there’s nothing else in my life that compares to the enormity and intensity of being up there—it feels like the epicenter of some history-making spectacle out of ancient Rome. How many people get to
experience that? They can be happily married or otherwise very content with their lives without ever knowing what the roar of the crowd feels like when it’s roaring just for you—but then they won’t know what the letdown feels like, either. Because after a few hours, it’s all over.”

  Once the crowd and their showers of adulation have vanished, once the stage is vacant, reality comes back quickly, says Billy: “The gladiator leaves the arena; he’ll be back to fight and be rewarded another day. But in the meantime, he’ll be just another schmuck on the highway.”

  Sure, there might be a four-motorcycle police escort to lead “the schmuck” down that highway, momentarily preserving the feeling that it’s all so special, but for Billy, this would also deepen his painful awareness of what he didn’t have: “that other person who makes the mansion a home. Because none of those people in that arena screaming your name really know you, and you just need one—one person out of millions—to know and accept and love you for being, well, just the way you are. And when you don’t have it, man, do you miss it.

  “I see old folks walking down the street who look like they’ve been together fifty 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.” After some decades of rebooting his emotional life by plunging fairly quickly into one promising and highly publicized romance after another, says Billy, “At some point I had to say to myself, there you are, already fifty-something and single.

  “And then you have to do something about it.”

  Billy did, proposing to Katie in St. Bart’s—unforgettably the spot where he first met Christie—in the first week of January 2004.

  Katie had some pretty good clues as to what was coming—they had looked at rings in a jewelry store Manhattan some months before that—but Billy was having a hard time working his way up to the proposal.

  “We went to St. Bart’s, and he was kind of making a big deal out of this trip. I had never been there, and I was really excited,” says Katie. “Then one night, it was a full moon, and we went to this restaurant on the water. And he said, ‘Why don’t we go take a walk down by the boats and around the water?’

  “I said, ‘No, I’m tired, I want to go to bed.’

  “So he said, ‘Are you sure?’

  “And I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t feel like it. My feet hurt. I want to go back.’ So we go back to the room. We were staying at a place called the Carl Gustaf, which is a beautiful hotel that overlooks the harbor. We had our dog, Fionula, with us, and he said, ‘Let’s go take Fionula for a walk. It’s such a pretty night, she needs to go out.’

  “And I said, ‘You take her out.’ And he’s like, My God! What do I have to do!

  “I can’t believe he proposed after I was such a pain in the ass. So he takes the dog out. Then he comes back and says, ‘Come sit out on the patio with me; look at the moon.’ But I wanted to watch TV.

  “Finally he says, ‘Will you just come sit outside?’ And I’m like, Well, golly, fine, you know. So I go out there, and I could see he had, like, the chairs set up, and I thought, Oh my God, something’s happening here. Before anything else could come out of my mouth, before I could be a bigger pain in the ass, he got down on one knee and proposed.”

  “Was it some kind of naïveté?” wonders Billy. “Perhaps I was still, unknowingly, coming out of the emotional turmoil that hit so hard in 2001 and for many months after. Maybe it was partly the setting? I mean, there we were in St. Bart’s in a nice hotel on a beautiful moonlit night, and I had the ring on me. I asked her to come out onto the balcony of our room so that I could ask her to marry me, and she said yes. I thought to myself, This is the way it should be, without even thinking deeply about the fact that I was fifty-three and she was twenty-two. Why would I, when everything was going so well and feeling so right?”

  Says Katie, “We were at an event, and we were talking to Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, and a photographer came over and said, ‘Can we take a picture of the four of you?’ ” The quartet grinned for the camera: “And Bill’s like, ‘I can see the caption now—what’s wrong with this picture?’ ”

  Katie and Billy found a loft-style apartment for just under $4 million on Hubert Street in Tribeca in September 2004. The good-sized kitchen was a real selling point, as Katie had embarked on her cooking career in earnest. But first there was the not-so-minor detail of actually getting married, which they did on October 2, on the grounds of Billy’s Centre Island home. Among the 250 people in attendance were Billy’s mom, Christie, Alexa (who served as maid of honor), Jon Small, and some of Billy’s friends from the trade, including Howard Stern and Don Henley. Billy’s half-brother, Alexander, served as best man. They got lucky when the clouds parted just in time for the four P.M. ceremony.

  The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Europe, and for Billy, something about living out of a suitcase for a few days, remote from the routines and duties of a (multiple) householder’s life, helped convince him to think about touring again in the near future.

  When Katie and Billy first met, he had been winding down a fairly lengthy tour with Elton John. After they married, Billy was initially determined to stick around the house: “With a new marriage to focus on and a chance finally to pull back and live a normal life after all those years I’d spent as a habitual road dog, I wanted to be home,” he remembers. “But then I began to wonder if I needed the road to keep me on some sort of even keel. The elephant that is a tour lurches up onto the circus stool gradually.”

  Billy and the band knocked off three dates, including what’s known as a “private,” for a major beer company gathering. A date like that brings in about $1.5 million, and soon afterward Billy was playing shows at several colleges, such as Syracuse University, and at performing arts schools, such as Juilliard.

  Katie Lee saw a noticeable difference in Billy when he was performing and when he wasn’t. Being on the road had served as a kind of gyroscope, providing a center to his life for so many years. Without that routine, some of the bad old habits pushed their way back in. “I felt like he went through a really hard time. We had only been married four months when he went to rehab.”

  One day Katie approached Billy and told him, “You’re drinking a lot, and I don’t think you’re aware of it. I also don’t think you’re aware of how much of a problem this is becoming for our relationship. I love you very much and I hate to see you destroying yourself. And if you love me and you value the relationship, you’ll do something about it.”

  Katie never saw Billy drinking, so when he was sluggish or off a beat, she had thought he was just tired: “I just didn’t put two and two together at all. Maybe I was naïve. But then in January 2005—a couple months into being married—we went back to St. Bart’s, and I started thinking something was wrong with him. I thought maybe he had a neurological problem—because I was with him all the time, and it wasn’t like he was sitting around with a bottle of wine and I was watching it happen.”

  The imbibing wasn’t obvious, but it was quietly happening, unseen. Billy, too, was realizing that there was a problem: “I finally said to myself, You know what, if my drinking doesn’t slow down or these episodes with booze keep happening, I guess I have to consider going to a place like Betty Ford. Because the first time I went to rehab, I didn’t really stick it out. But now I was very much in love with Katie, and I didn’t want to damage the relationship. She was cooking a real healthy diet, and I’d agreed to have a trainer come in regularly to work me out.”

  On the day en route to that difficult moment, he wasn’t in a frame of mind to do a training session—lethargy and the residue of the prolonged binge overruled that. He felt “this whirlpool of—helplessness. And I realized, That’s it. I don’t want to continue like this.”

  That same morning, Katie recalls, “I got on the phone with Billy’s attorney, Lee Eastman [
son of John, and grandson of his family’s lawyer patriarch], and his business manager, Todd Kamelhar, and said, ‘Listen, you better set up something for him because he’s either going to rehab today or I’m moving out—one of the two.’

  “And they called Max Loubiere, his tour director, who came up from New Orleans. Max got a plane for the next day to take Billy to Betty Ford. When Bill woke up that morning, I didn’t want to have to give him an ultimatum like, You go, or it’s me. I wanted it to be his decision. Luckily he woke up and said, ‘I’ve got a problem. I’ve got to go somewhere.’ And [his intimates] said, ‘Well, good thing, because there’s a plane coming tomorrow, and your suitcase is packed.’ So we got on the plane for Betty Ford the next day. We checked him in, and after we dropped him off, I went to a hotel and slept through the night for the first time in months. I felt like I had just died in that bed, I was so tired.”

  Billy remembers, “When I talked to Katie that morning, I just said, ‘Let’s do it.’ I was thinking, I’m going to do it. I’m now going to follow through with the conversations I’ve had with Katie. I love her, and I’m going to do it. And I really didn’t want to do it. But it was important to me to show her that I was finally going to do this the right way.”

  When they arrived, they checked Billy in—he would be there for a month. “The trip out felt all too short, because all of a sudden I was there. I was hoping the plane ride would last a hell of a lot longer,” he says. “I was probably still hungover on the flight. But there I was, filling out fifteen thousand forms and in a line with everybody, to get my detox meds. Boom—there was no turning back now.”

  “We couldn’t talk on the phone while he was there,” Katie recalls. “The only time you could visit was for three hours every Sunday.” Every Saturday night she would fly to L.A. and then drive to Palm Springs for a few hours’ visit. She’d fly back in the evening.