Billy Joel has opened up about the time he attempted suicide following an affair with his best friend’s wife.
In his new HBO documentary, And So It Goes, the 76-year-old “Piano Man” shared that he attempted suicide twice and fell into a coma as a result of one of them.
As reported by People, Joel talked about being in the band Attila with his good friend Jon Small when he was in his 20s, and how he moved in with him and his wife, Elizabeth Weber, and their son.
“I felt very, very guilty about it. They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker,” he said. “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.”
He said that the physical fight resulted in the end of Attila, but he later reconnected with Weber, marrying her in 1973. The pair split in 1982. Weber also appears in the documentary and describes the affair with Joel as a “slow build.”
“I had no place to live. I was sleeping in laundromats and I was depressed I think to the point of almost being psychotic,” Joel said. “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.”
Joel’s sister Judy Molinari was a medical assistant when he was at his most depressed and gave him sleeping pills to help. “But Billy decided that he was going to take all of them,” Molinari said in the documentary, with tears in her eyes. “He was in a coma for days and days and days. I went to go see him in the hospital, and he was laying there white as a sheet. I thought that I’d killed him.”
After he woke up from his coma, he felt a desire to try and take his life again. He remembered drinking a bottle of “lemon Pledge,” but his former bandmate Jon Small took him to the hospital despite their issues. “Even though our friendship was blowing up, Jon saved my life,” said Joel. In the documentary, Small said that he eventually “forgave” his friend and deduced that he tried to take his life “because he loved me that much and that it killed him to hurt me that much.”
Joel checked himself into a “observation ward” after the experience, from which he was released within a few 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,” Joel added.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, help is available. Call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org.
