Billy Joel Reveals Suicide Attempts Following Affair With Best Friend’s Wife in New Doc

Billy Joel reveals that he twice attempted suicide — sparked by his affair with a band mate’s wife — in his new HBO documentary And So It Goes, and that one of the attempts left him in a coma.

Before he was “The Piano Man,” a twentysomething Joel played in a Long Island hard rock band called Attila alongside his then-best friend Jon Small. At one point, Joel moved in with Small, his wife Elizabeth Weber, and their young son, during which Joel and Weber spent “a lot of time together” and a “slow build” romance developed. Joel eventually admitted to Small, “I’m in love with your wife.” 

“I felt very, very guilty about it. They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker,” Joel said in the documentary, according to People. “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.”

The affair resulted in Attila’s breakup, the (temporary) end of his best friendship, and Joel getting evicted from Small’s house. “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 added. “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, then a medical assistant, had previously prescribed her brother sleeping pills to help him sleep; Joel’s first suicide attempt came when he “decided that he was going to take them all.”

“He was in a coma for days and days and days,” Judy says 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, disappointed that his attempt failed, woke up in the hospital and swore to do it “right” the second time. He said he drank an entire bottle of the cleaning product “lemon Pledge,” after which his ex-best friend, Small, 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.”

Following that attempt, Joel entered himself into an observation ward for a few weeks, a decision that changed the trajectory of his life. “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 said.
Trending Stories
Being Stray Kids Takes a Lot of Work — and Close Friendships
Inside the Billion-Dollar Effort to Make Trump Feel Good About Himself
Talking Heads Celebrate 50th Anniversary With ‘Psycho Killer’ Video Starring Saoirse Ronan
Fletcher Talks About Her Radically Honest New Album and the ‘Magical Feeling’ of New Love

A postscript to the affair: Joel and Weber eventually reunited, and the pair wedded. The marriage lasted from 1973 to 1982.

And So It Goes premiered Wednesday at the Tribeca Film Festival, with Joel unable to attend the screening due to his recent brain disorder diagnosis. The singer, however, did send a message via the filmmakers: “Getting old sucks, but it’s preferable to getting cremated.”