Billy Joel attempted suicide twice after affair with his best friend’s wife
Billy Joel has revealed that he attempted to take his own life twice after having an affair with his best friend’s wife.
The singer-songwriter spoke about the ordeal in his new two-part documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, which premiered earlier this week and is set to air on HBO this summer.
As reported by People, the documentary sees Joel recount the fact that in the early 1970s, while he was in the hard rock band Attila alongside his best friend at the time Jon Small, he developed a romantic relationship with Small’s wife Elizabeth Weber.
“I felt very, very guilty about it,” Joel said in the doc. “They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker. I was just in love with a woman, and I got punched in the nose, which I deserved. Jon was very upset. I was very upset.”
Attila soon split up and Joel, who had been living with Small and Weber, found himself homeless. “I had no place to live,” he continued. “I was sleeping in laundromats and I was depressed, I think to the point of almost being psychotic. So I figured, ‘That’s it. I don’t want to live anymore.’ I was just in a lot of pain, and it was sort of like, ‘Why hang out? Tomorrow is going to be just like today is and today sucks.’ So, I just thought I’d end it all.”
He recalled that his sister Judy, a medical worker, had given him pills to help him sleep at the time and one day he “decided that he was going to take them all”.
“He was in a coma for days and days and days,” Judy said in the documentary. “I went to go see him in the hospital, and he was lying there white as a sheet. I thought that I’d killed him.”
Joel said he vowed to do it “right” the second time, revealing that he drank an entire bottle of the cleaning product Lemon Pledge. It was Small that took him to the hospital. “Even though our friendship was blowing up, Jon saved my life,” Joel said.
Small added in the documentary: “He never really said anything to me, the only practical answer I can give as to why Billy took it so hard was because he loved me that much and that it killed him to hurt me that much. Eventually I forgave him.”
Joel said he then entered himself into an observation ward for a number of weeks. “I got out of the observation ward, and I thought to myself, you can utilize all those emotions to channel that stuff into music,” he said.
The documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 4, but Joel was not present due to his current health struggles.
At the end of May, he was diagnosed with the brain disorder normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH). He has subsequently cancelled all of his upcoming tour dates, and his daughter Alexa Ray has shared that he’s “entirely committed to making a full recovery with ongoing physical-therapy treatments as he continues to regain his strength”.
Joel has insisted “I’m not dying”, with his friend Howard Stern recently saying: “He’s doing fine. He does have issues, but he said, ‘Yeah, you can tell people: I’m not dying’. You know, he wants people to know that.”
The post Billy Joel attempted suicide twice after affair with his best friend’s wife appeared first on NME.
Max Pilley
NME
