Since, in this added part of the set, Billy would already have a guitar strapped on for “Fallujah,” he would keep it on to wander about riffing and getting a look at the fans behind the stage. (Steve Cohen, in his wisdom, encouraged Billy to leave the piano stool and roam about a bit—a nod to the days when Billy used to do flips off the piano and climb up into the rigging.) Billy is not vain about what he can do with a Gibson Les Paul. “I can hear my guitar in the monitor,” he says, “but I know Brian Ruggles at the sound board doesn’t exactly have me cranked up to eleven in the house mix.”
Like any touring band, Billy’s gang carries something of a lost patrol vibe with them. “Doing those small Aussie cities reacquaints you with the band. I mean, what are you going to do at eleven P.M. in Adelaide?”
But whenever a newer band member gets caught up in what has been a largely self-contained unit—along with Billy and band, the usual core traveling party includes Brian, Steve, Max Loubiere, security man Noel Rush, and valet Mickey Heyes—the new guy doesn’t always know the rules of the road.
For example, in the van to and from the gig, or in the small jets that Billy and his small wolf pack charter to get from city to city, they have what they call the “no-compliment zone.” “We actually talked about getting signs made up to enforce that. It’s somewhat like the rules for Jerry Seinfeld’s show—‘no hugging, no learning,’ ” says Billy.
“They all do their jobs very well; that’s why they’re here. The deal is, just as I don’t walk around and bust people’s chops, I also don’t hand out compliments. It’s just not me.”
One day Billy’s inner circle was on a charter jet with, unusually, a couple of band members crowded in. Midway through the flight, drummer Chuck Burgi, one of the newer players at a mere eight years, said, “Billy, you’re singing like a bird.” The old guard—Billy, Steve, Brian, and Max—looked over at Chuck, and the query came in cross-talked disbelief: “What? What did you say?”
Chuck repeated it: “You’re singing like a bird.”
“Chuck,” Billy replied, eyes widening with intense fake sincerity—though the facts were true enough—“you’re playing like a demon.”
Chuck didn’t miss the attitude coming his way. “What? What did I say?”
“We had to explain it to him,” says Billy, replaying the moment. “As in ‘Don’t you know this is a no-compliment zone? Get your nose out of my ass. Don’t ever compliment me, because it angers the Chinese gods.’ Sure enough, the next day I got a cold.”
For Billy, on the road, the guys, for better or worse, are his family. The road dogs have aged, and the bonding that used to take place in hotel bars and smoky late-night hotel rooms is now about shared if slightly road-weary professionalism, says Billy, “especially these days, when the snacks table in the production office—which used to be topped with a bottle of Scotch and a few packs of smokes and God knows what else that’s bad for you—is now covered in herbal tea and aspirin and glucosamine and saw palmetto and vitamin supplements.” Inevitably, as the entire cadre ages with different degrees of grace, some will fall by the wayside—though they are whistling past that notion with very little discussion.
WITH SOME MISGIVINGS that the topic even comes up, the road dogs dutifully inquire after one another’s health. In contrast to age-old rock tradition, they discourage bad health habits. Thus when Billy visited his swami in Boston a few years back, determined to kick cigarettes for good, he brought a couple of guys from the road gang: Mike Grizel, who is responsible for getting the band and all their road gear from point A to point B on time and in perfect condition, and even Tommy, “who only looks like he’s in perfect condition,” says Billy. One evening while Billy’s long-standing friend, comic Paul Reiser, was backstage before a gig, Tommy, lean and rakishly handsome and looking stylish in leather, walked in. Reiser said, “You look just the same.” Billy, without missing a beat, added emphasis by spitting out a four-letter epithet of the sort only very good friends can use on one another.
The smoking cure actually took for all parties for a while—but by the time of the 2008 Oz tour, not so much. Billy will sporadically state that he plans to go back for a reboot with the swami. Meanwhile, he knows exactly when he fell off the tobacco wagon: “I have to blame Robert Downey, Jr., for that.”
The Downey moment happened when Billy was at a party out in the Hamptons at Ron Perelman’s estate. “Ron always has a good mix of people—writers, actors, musicians, politicians, authors—at his house. I saw Robert, whose acting I had always admired [and whose troubles with substance abuse had been well publicized], and said, ‘How are you, man? How are you doing with everything?’ ”
Robert knew what Billy meant and said, “Great. I feel terrific. The only vice I have left are these.” He took a pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket, shook out a cigarette, and held one out to Billy—a cordial offer. “So, as a joke, after not smoking for seventeen years, I thought, Oh, sure, why not? I’ll show him some solidarity,” says Billy. “He lit it for me, and I got stoned out of my mind from sucking on this Camel. Didn’t really think anything about it. I was a little bit surprised at how I was able to inhale again after seventeen years. I thought I’d be coughing my lungs out.
“The next day I wanted a cigarette, just to get that nicotine thrill again. I forgot that nicotine is a powerful intoxicant. I lit one up on the patio and got stoned again. Went back in the house with my ears ringing and my eyes glazed. Then, later in the day, I had another one. And then I was hooked. Not too long after that I was smoking a few cigarettes every day. I’ve since quit again—and then restarted once again.”
The reformed Downey would prove a less dangerous acquaintance than the great Downey pal, pre-controversy Mel Gibson. According to Billy, “I ran into Mel once in the eighties in some ritzy hotel in Europe, and—as sometimes happens when people accidentally meet and decide to console each other for being rich and famous and all that—we went on a serious bender.” Beyond a certain comradely competition to stay upright and coherent, the precise details have been lost, says Billy: “I just know we crossed paths in the lobby the next day, and a certain look of understanding passed between us, as in Okay, we’re regular guys, but let’s be certain never to sit down at the same table again.”
Billy returned home from Australia in late December, not long before the holidays, and spent a lazy couple of weeks, largely in the warmth of his Miami house, with as few obligations as possible. After greeting 2009, he headed out on the road with Elton in the newest incarnation of the Face to Face tour. Although Billy might not have bet on it when they opened at the Hard Rock in Fort Lauderdale on January 2, they’d be out there for almost all of 2009. They traveled from Florida to Vegas and back, tramping through the South and Southwest, over to Anaheim and then up through the Midwest, over to Canada in late spring, then back down for ballparks like Wrigley Field in Chicago and Nationals Park in D.C. Finally, just before the concluding dates in Albany and Buffalo, Billy went down for the count—exhausted, physically and emotionally. His back was in constant pain, and his gut felt, as he described it, “like a sump of rich road chow and overpriced bottles of red.”
Looking back over his touring schedule in 2009, it was pretty obvious to Billy at what stage his marriage to Katie guttered out: “somewhere in between visits to Chicago in May and July,” he remembers.
Call it the constant road work, call it the age difference, call it the shift in Katie’s aspirations as her career was taking off, call it Billy’s moodiness—whatever the calculus, things weren’t working. Billy was just as likely to see Katie in a paparazzo photo of a gallery opening or at lunch with the girls as he was to see her on the road. “Turning up for the gig in Fargo wasn’t Katie’s idea of a good use of time,” says Billy.
From mid-2008, the tabloids and gossip sheets started running photos of Katie with Israeli fashion designer Yigal Azrouel, who provided some of the outfits she wore out on the town and for the shots in her cookbook, The Comfort Table. A
t first it was generally presumed he was gay, given the usual stereotypes regarding his trade and his habit of inevitably wearing a scarf piled around his neck “just so.” But by the time photos emerged of the two of them dancing at the Delano Hotel in Miami, the leer and the sweat and the one A.M. shadow on his jaw all played into establishing his rep as what one gossip page would describe as a “skirt chaser.”
“Those photos looked bad,” Katie admits, but adds that they were misleading. “I was dancing with this guy that night at Art Basel in Miami. He was part of our circle of friends—and there were probably ten of us who had gone out. We went to a club—I’d probably gone to three clubs in seven years. And it was about two o’clock in the morning. We’re all drinking, having this fun night, and you could have gotten a picture of me with about three other guys, who were gay, doing the same thing. We were all just dancing and having fun. I had my arm around the guy’s neck, but it wasn’t like anything that should have been incriminating—it was innocent dancing.
“Immediately after that, the person who took [the shot] put it on their blog, and Bill called me and goes, ‘Oh, you’re on a blog dancing.’ I was like, ‘Whatever.’ Neither one of us thought anything of it. Then it was April, and I think the National Enquirer bought the pictures, printed them. I was upset about it because I never like anybody to be talking about me. But the important thing to me was that Bill and I were okay. But then, two months later, when we split up, that’s fresh in the press’s mind, like, Oh, wait, there were these pictures of her dancing with this guy, it must be because of that. But that had happened six months prior.”
The scandal hurt all their friendships. Katie had been friendly with Azrouel for a couple of years—indeed, he had helped debut her first cookbook in June that year at his store on a posh shopping strip in Southampton’s Water Mill hamlet. She wore his clothes all the time, and his business partner was one of her best girlfriends—so the controversy made social life difficult for everyone involved.
“If I was having this big affair with him, I probably would have ended up with him.”
“The end of my marriage to Katie wasn’t about that guy,” says Billy. “We just had too many challenges, and maybe she didn’t want to be Penelope waiting for Odysseus to come home and slay the suitors.”
Despite all these problems, Billy was still holding out hope for the marriage in early May 2009, as his sixtieth birthday approached. As planned, between gigs in Madison, Wisconsin, and Omaha, Nebraska, he and his circle were in Chicago. The party took place at the noted steakhouse Gibson’s, where, Billy jokes, “you can wait a long time for a table, unless you’re Michael Jordan, Mayor Daley, or our party of eighty-some with the upstairs rented out.”
Unlike his fiftieth birthday, which had had a Godfather theme—Billy had stood in a chalk-striped suit at the door of a mansion with Carolyn beside him looking like Rita Hayworth—this was an evening of mixed emotions. The afternoon had gone well, as Katie presented him with a hot yellow Ducati 750 Sport motorcycle, a modern take on the low-slung, café-racer style Billy favors. Coming together across the lobby of the Ritz Carlton, Katie stylish as always in a fitted, buttery leather jacket, they looked for a moment like newlyweds who had observed the proper protocols.
Once the celebrants were assembled at Gibson’s, what might have been a night of brief roastlike toasts turned into something a bit more like pussyfooting, with many violations of the no-compliments rule, albeit well marbled with profanities. Billy made the mandatory speech of thanks, complete with a hollered aside that “she’s not doing the designer”—and then he hit the piano for a cathartic session of pounding out Beatles songs.
Call it the last best time, as the next day Katie was back on a plane to New York, and Billy and the guys were nursing hangovers with the Nebraska gig on the near horizon.
THE DENOUEMENT OF Billy’s marriage to Katie would be a scattered and sad one. As the Face to Face tour drifted through the Midwest, bouncing out of Chicago to dutifully play the sometimes-unloved third-tier towns like Fargo, Madison, Omaha, and Indianapolis, Billy took a couple of charter jet flights home for a last try at repairing relations.
He and Katie had talked about taking a trip to Italy when the present tour leg ended. “I wanted to go,” says Billy, “and then she wanted to go ahead and get divorced. And the key question she asked was ‘Are you happy?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not, either. I’m not happy with the way things are. It doesn’t mean I want to cut the cord. I want to work on it. Let’s work on it.’
“I wonder now, should I have just grabbed her hands and said, ‘How can I make you happy? What do you need? What should we do to resolve this?’ Instead of saying, ‘Do you want a divorce?’ Because as a guy, I always feel like I’m holding her against her will, unless I give her the option. ‘Do you want to leave?’ I think it’s a more chivalrous thing to do. ‘Are you so unhappy that you want a divorce?’ ”
The couple were going to speak about reconciling with an intermediary, and Billy remembers, “Katie went off on an [irrelevant tangent] about the furniture. I realized, It’s not going to happen. We’re over. You have to face it.… Just don’t send me messages, don’t leave me cute little phone calls, don’t tease me, don’t fuck with me, just end it. ’Cause I’m an old man now, a vulnerable man, Don’t do that to an old guy. What are my chances of getting somebody in their twenties at this point? I don’t want somebody in their twenties.
“It was then that I realized that the marriage was finally over,” he explains. “The phone calls back and forth with Katie, where we talked, sometimes angrily, sometimes lovingly, about what might be done to keep us together, were yielding no results. It was just about time to hand it over to the lawyers.”
“There were lots of days like that in those last few months where I thought, I can’t do it,” Katie recalls. “And then he’d be okay, and I’d see that great Bill, and I’d be like, Okay then, I love him so much; we can make this work. Finally I just got to the point where it’s like, I just can’t. And it wasn’t even the tougher episodes; it was what comes after that—the mood swings. It affects your character. And finally I just thought, I can’t deal with it.”
There was a prenup in place, as well as a reasonable fund of goodwill, so there would be no hostility, no unseemly wrangling. Instead, what Billy found himself facing was “a mother lode of disappointment and chagrin.”
Billy was almost mournfully fixated on how little consolation is to be found in more material evidence of a life well lived: “None of the rest of it means a goddamn thing. 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. Without the right girl, it doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. You take the whole centrality out of it.”
He continues: “That’s what it’s all aimed at—I want to be your white knight on my white horse, with you riding with your arms around my waist, and I will ride with you into Camelot. That’s what you want. And you’ve felt like that since you were a little boy. And you take the girl out of the mix, and what have you got? A bunch of stuff. And who gives a shit?”
The news came in midsummer:
NEWSDAY - LONG ISLAND, N.Y.
DATE: JUNE 18, 2009
START PAGE: A.12
Billy Joel and wife Katie Lee confirmed yesterday that they are splitting up after nearly five years of marriage.
“This decision is the result of much thought and consideration,” the couple said in a joint statement. “Billy and Katie remain caring friends, with admiration and respect for each other.”
Rumors have been swirling about Joel and Lee’s marriage for months, especially after speculation that Lee had been romantically linked to fashion designer Yigal Azrouel, who had been escorting her to numerous events while Joel was on tour.
Joel’s publicist Claire Mercuri denies the speculation, adding that the decision to split only came in the past two weeks. In that time, Joel has been staying at the co
uple’s home in Sag Harbor, while Lee has been living in their Manhattan town house.
The piece went on to misreport that Katie had failed to attend his birthday and included a sidebar:
THE WOMEN IN HIS LIFE
Married manager Elizabeth Weber in September 1973, divorced in July 1982
Married supermodel Christie Brinkley in March 1985, divorced August 1994; one daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, 23
Married TV entertainment correspondent Katie Lee in October 2004, confirmed split yesterday
If Billy’s agonies were personal, they were once again anything but private. When the numbers were compiled for Nielsen Syndicated TV Show Ratings for the week ending June 21, 2009, the takeaway was that it was a great week for the daily suppertime showbiz newsmagazines: “Extensive coverage of Billy Joel’s divorce from his third wife, Katie Lee, sent ET weekend numbers up 20% to 1.8, tops among first run weekly hours.”
The Chicago gig, scheduled at the height of his personal turmoil, should have been a fun midsummer one for Billy. As a lifelong baseball fan, he knew the lore of Wrigley Field. That ivy-covered bandbox of a ballpark is so tightly wedged into its typical Chicago neighborhood that much of Billy’s usual encampment had to be positioned in the street alongside the stadium.
The crew set Billy up in a camper van under the bleachers. And in those shadowy, unfriendly confines, after hobbling out to the ballpark (accommodating his increasingly sore hips, groin, and back) to do a quick sound check, he sat in the van just letting the despair over his failing marriage have its say. Tommy Byrnes dared to sit in the gloom with Billy, knowing he could be a silent presence and still something of a comforting one. “You know, boss,” he ventured, “when we head back east, there are some cities where some of the guys know some chicks who just, you know, are ‘dying to meetcha.’ ”
Billy Joel Page 32
