Billy Joel Details Multiple Suicide Attempts After Affair With Friend’s Wife
Billy Joel may be known as the Piano Man, but he’s really a relationship guy.
Or at least he aspired to be that guy.
“The happiest times in my life were when my relationships were going well—when I was in love with someone, and someone was loving me,” the six-time Grammy winner told the Associated Press in 2002. “But in my whole life, I haven’t met the person I can sustain a relationship with yet. So I’m discontented about that. I’m angry with myself. I have regrets.”
Success was great, Joel noted, but he wanted “what everybody else wants: To love and to be loved, and to have a family. Being in love has always been the most important thing in my life.”
At the time he was divorced from second wife Christie Brinkley, mother of his daughter Alexa Ray Joel, and was two years away from giving marriage another go with cookbook author Katie Lee.
But while the ingredients weren’t there for a forever-match with the Food Network star, the 76-year-old has now been married to Alexis Roderick for 10 years.
And, no need to tell her about it, the fourth time has been the charm.
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“You just need one—one person out of millions,” Joel, who canceled all of his upcoming tour dates after being diagnosed with the brain disorder normal pressure hydrocephalus in May, told Fred Schuers, author of the 2014 biography Billy Joel, “to know and accept and love you for being, well, just the way you are.”
But before he found happiness with the former investment risk analyst, his relationship history—including his formative first marriage to Elizabeth Weber that’s revisited in the new HBO documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes—was what you might call checkered.
Here’s a look at Joel’s romantic stops along the way to lasting love:
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Elizabeth Weber
Billy Joel moved in with his Attila bandmate Jon Small in New York in 1970 and ended up falling for Small’s wife Elizabeth Weber, the inspiration for his 1971 classic “She’s Got a Way” and 1977’s “She’s Always a Woman” and “Just the Way You Are.”
“I felt very, very guilty about it,” Joel reflected in the 2025 HBO documentary Billy Joel: So It Goes. “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.”
They married in a courthouse ceremony in September 1973 and Weber played a major role in the managing and marketing of his career after the release of 1973’s Piano Man. But they were living separate lives by 1980 and divorced in 1982.
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Elle Macpherson
Joel met Elle Macpherson at a bar in St. Barts in 1982 while she was out with Christie Brinkley. However, his future wife was seeing Moët & Chandon champagne heir Olivier Chandon, so Macpherson was the one who first dated Joel when they returned to New York.
That was his “first big age-difference relationship,” Joel told biographer Fred Schruers of dating the 19-year-old Australian model when he was 33. Yet it was the height difference that stood out more, the “staggeringly beautiful” Macpherson a statuesque 6 feet tall to his 5-foot-7. As he put it, “I looked like Bubbles the Chimp next to her.”
Macpherson’s career was just starting to heat up, however, so when she started traveling more, Joel figured that was it. “And So It Goes” came from the experience.
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Christie Brinkley
Joel and Brinkley reunited in 1983 after Chandon was killed in a race car accident.
“I called her up and said, ‘Look, I know you’re going through a hard time,’” he told Schruers. “‘If you need someone to talk to, I’m here.’”
He changed what was “Uptown Girls” to “Uptown Girl” after he started dating Brinkley, who starred in the music video, and the album An Innocent Man is a tribute to their courtship.
Joel and Brinkley wed in March 1985 and their daughter Alexa Ray Joel was born nine months later, her middle name a tribute to Ray Charles.
However, Joel’s volatile behavior—he went to rehab in 2002—hastened their 1994 divorce.
“I did everything for our marriage, constantly working to make myself, our home, and everything around us into whatever he could possibly want or hope for,” Brinkley wrote in her 2025 memoir Uptown Girl. “But his drinking was bigger than both of us. Booze was the other woman.”
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Joel hasn’t said much publicly about his second divorce, but told Oprah Winfrey in 2008, “We made a point of getting along for [Alexa Ray’s] sake.”
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Carolyn Beegan
Joel met Carolyn Beegan when he was still married to Brinkley, but they maintained they were friends until the singer was single again.
He dated the artist for a couple of years before their relationship wound down in 2000.
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Trish Bergin
News anchor Trish Bergin met Joel in 1995 on assignment to interview the Grammy winner, and that’s how they reconnected in 2000.
But Bergin wanted to start a family, and Joel wasn’t on the same page, so they broke up in 2001 after a year together.
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Katie Lee
In 2002, Joel “literally bumped right into” Katie Lee in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, she told Schruers. Joel invited Lee and her friend to dinner and, she said on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2008, “we both love food, so that’s what we bonded over.”
The 21-year-old was only in NYC visiting, however, because she had another year of college left at Miami University of Ohio. But they stayed in touch and Lee moved in with the then-54-year-old in the Hamptons after graduation. After she bonded with Alexa Ray, as Joel remembered it to Schruers, “Katie was starting to feel like family.”
They tied the knot Oct. 2, 2004, at his Centre Island home. Alexa Ray was Lee’s maid of honor and Brinkley was in attendance.
Acknowledging their 32-year age gap, Lee told Winfrey, “He has this job that’s allowed him to be really immature for a long time—rock star. And I happen to be more mature for my age, so we meet somewhere in the middle.”
Joel added, “I would have married her if she was 30 years older than me. When it works and it clicks, you don’t fight it. You go with it.”
But it stopped working and they announced their separation in June 2009.
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Alexis Roderick
Joel met Alexis Roderick, a 29-year-old senior risk analyst for Morgan Stanley, at a restaurant on Long Island in October 2009. He got her number and called her from across the room to ask for a ride home. Even though she declined an invitation for an impromptu piano concert at his house, he played anyway.
They married on July 4, 2015, at his Centre Island estate, and welcomed daughter Della Rose Joel a month later. Her sister Remy Anne Joel was born in October 2017.
In May 2025, Joel, 76, canceled his latest tour after being diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus, which affected his balance, hearing and vision.
“We are always grateful and thankful but this year really reminded us how lucky we are to have you,” Roderick posted on Father’s Day. We are so blessed to have such a strong, determined man in our lives. You are a wonderful support for us and we only hope we can be the same for you. We love you and know you will be rocking out next year.”
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