How Billy Joel Overcame Heartbreak and Found Hope with Alexis Roderick!
Billy Joel is taking stock of the years, both in the spotlight and away from it, in the new documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes. The “Big Shot” frontman candidly revisits the end of his marriage to Katie Lee and the moment he met his present wife, Alexis Roderick Joel, which turned everything around.
“I was facing another divorce. Number three. A three-time loser. The thought of dying alone, the thought of getting old without that one person beside me—it was terrifying. I started drinking again, just to dull the ache. I look back, and I see a lost stretch of time,” he says in the film.
Billy Joel, 76, and Katie Lee, 43, first crossed paths in 2002 by chance at the Peninsula Hotel in Manhattan and married two years later. Prior to that, Joel was married to Elizabeth Weber from ’73 to ’82 and to Christie Brinkley from ’85 to ’94. Joel and Brinkley share daughter Alexa Ray Joel.
“At that moment, yeah, the marriage was already frayed. Katie Lee shifted into her work and a city-life mode—more meetings, more nights out, a whole new circle she loved.”
In the same documentary, he brought up a persistent “theory” that Lee had been seeing another man. “That’s complete garbage,” he said. “We just stopped meeting in the middle.” They separated in 2009.
Billy joel third wife katie Lee, speaking on camera, admitted she still felt a trace of bitterness for having to push BillyJoel into the Betty Ford program. “It was brutal on the two of us. I think we both wanted to make it, yet it quickly became clear we were becoming two different people.”
Lee said, “I remember one night we were having dinner and I told Bill, ‘I’m unhappy.’ He asked, ‘Do you want a divorce?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said ‘OK.’ And that was that.” Joel met Alexis in 2009 when he walked up to her at a restaurant in Huntington, New York, and introduced himself. They began dating a few weeks later.
“When you meet someone who grabs your spirit, everything feels fresh and new. I was sure I was closed to another relationship. I couldn’t face that again. But something just shifted. Something inside me unlocked and I was ready.”
At the time, Alexis headed a whole division at Morgan Stanley. “She was running her own branch of that big firm, and I wasn’t thinking about work at all. I was home a lot, and when she walked in, I was the one at the stove, plating dinner.”
Joel surprised the forty guests at the July Fourth lawn party in 2015 by officiating his own wedding to Alexis, slipping in vows between hot dogs and fireworks. The couple, now parents of Della, nine, and Remy, seven, remember the hush that fell before the cheers.
In the new documentary, Joel admits to having done “a lot of dumb stuff” in his past, but adds, “I learned from it. I still believe in love. I still believe in relationships. I guess I’m basically a romantic under the tattoos.”
After he shared his normal pressure hydrocephalus diagnosis, Alexis posted a grateful note on Instagram: “Thanks for every drop of love. Bill got speedy, brilliant care, and to us he’s still the dad dancing in the living room and the husband who keeps the coffee hot.”
She told followers: “We’re holding tight to the hope of his full recovery. Can’t wait to be back with you.”
In a recent magazine interview, Joel spoke of savoring life at fifty-three, relishing the role of husband and dad to three little girls.
The first and second episodes of Billy Joel: And So It Goes stream now on HBO Max.
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