When Billy Joel entered rehab in 2005, it was at the behest of his then-wife Katie Lee.
The legendary musician opens up about his struggles with alcohol abuse in the new HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes — and reveals that Lee, to whom he was married for five years, gave him something of an “ultimatum” to either seek help or end their relationship.
“‘Either you do something about your drinking or this isn’t gonna work out,’” Joel, 76, recalls his then-wife telling him. “At that point, yeah, the relationship wasn’t doing well.”
The “Piano Man” singer ultimately checked into the Betty Ford Center, but admits that it was somewhat against his will.
“With the rehab, you don’t go for somebody else. You have to go for yourself. You have to want to do it,” he says in the film. “I didn’t want to do it.”
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Billy Joel is presented with the Key to the City of New York backstage before the last show of his residency at Madison Square Garden on July 25, 2024 in New York City.
Joel and Lee, 43, married in 2004. At the time, Joel had taken a break from touring, and was living life largely out of the spotlight.
“I felt like he needed to be creating, he needed to be making music, performing, to turn down that anxiety of not having an artistic outlet,” she says in the doc. “And there were struggles with addiction. It was really hard to navigate that, because I had no experience with it.”
The Kitchen host says that when Joel returned from rehab, it was a “fragile time” in their relationship, and she believes that he felt “a little bit of resentment” that she’d pushed him to seek treatment (Joel’s second wife, Christie Brinkley, also notes in the film that his alcohol abuse contributed to the breakdown of their marriage).
“In a lot of ways it was hard to recover from that,” Lee says in the film, adding that they were also on different pages when it came to how often they went out versus how often they stayed in. “I don’t think either of us wanted it to not work out, but it just became obvious that it wasn’t working.”
Lee and Joel divorced in 2009, and the rocker went on to marry Alexis Roderick in 2015. They’re parents to daughters Della, 9, and Remy, 7, while Joel is also dad to Alexa Ray, 39, with Brinkley. Lee, meanwhile, married Ryan Biegel in 2018.
In a 2023 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Joel said he no longer drinks alcohol.
“I stopped a couple of years ago. It wasn’t a big AA kick. I just got a point where I’d had enough,” he said. “I didn’t enjoy being completely inebriated, and it probably created more problems in my life than I needed. I don’t need it now.”
And So It Goes is an intimate peek at Joel’s private life, as told through his prolific song catalog. Joel admitted to PEOPLE in this week’s cover story that he was reluctant to speak so plainly about such personal matters, but ultimately left the project having learned “some self-revelatory stuff.”
He also said that he’s “really enjoying this time in my life” as a husband and father of three.
Dennis Arfa, the star’s longtime booking agent, also told PEOPLE that he’s “so happy” to see Joel “raising his children and being so in love with them and Alexis and his family.”
“It’s quite rewarding,” Arfa said. “I’m always rooting for Billy’s happiness and his success. I’ve seen Billy have a lot of happy times through his life, [but] he’s had to deal with certain adversity. I’m happy for him in this chapter, and I’m looking forward to the next chapter with him.”
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