Billy Joel Ex Wife katie Lee Gave Him Rehab Ultimatum Over His Drinking
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The rock icon, now sober since 2023, recounts his early fight against dependence in the new HBO doc Billy Joel: And So, It Goes.
While still married in 2005,katie Lee told Joel their marriage wouldn’t survive his heavy drinking. “She said, ‘Either you do something about your drinking or this isn’t gonna work out,’” the 76-year-old singer remembers. “At that point, yeah, the relationship wasn’t doing well.
After Lee’s ultimatum, Joel entered the Betty Ford Center. He later admitted that part of him hadn’t wanted to go, but he went—for her, for them. Sobriety, he says now, turned out to be the most enduring gift he ever gave himself.
“In rehab, there’s only one person you can save, and that’s you. You’ve got to care enough to make it work,” he says on camera. “I didn’t care enough, not then.”
Joel and Lee, both 43, told the priest “I do” in 2004. Joel had put the mic down for a while, swirling the years in a quieter, calmer stretch.
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“I thought the quieter he got, the louder his nerves got. He needed the stage, the notes, the crowd, the sweep of the spotlight to quiet the static in his head,” she remembers in the film. “Addiction had a seat at that same table. I had never hosted that dinner. I didn’t know the shape of the forks.”
The Kitchen host says when he came home from his second round at the clinic, the bond felt starched and thin. “He carried a thin little storm of hurt the first week. I think he felt I had funneled him into that door,” she remembers. Even Christie, his first wife, echoes the screen: the bottle was the break in the first marriage’s landscape.
“In a lot of ways, it was hard to recover from that,” Lee says quietly in the film, while explaining the fracture in what had once felt like a shared life. She points to the chasm that opened whenever they disagreed about nights out—how many, and how many were enough. “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. He stood in a chapel years later to marry Alexis Roderick, and in three short years, Della and Remy called that chapel home. Alexa Ray, 39, was already there from Joel’s first marriage to Brinkley.
In a 2023 conversation with the Los Angeles Times, Joel added the line “I don’t drink anymore” to his life story.
“I quit a couple of years back. There wasn’t a big AA moment or anything. I just woke up one day and thought I’d had enough,” he said. “I didn’t like being hammered anymore, and the mess it created just wasn’t worth the buzz. I’m good without it.”
And So, It Goes offers an up-close look at Joel’s off-stage world, shaped by the songs he keeps writing. In the cover interview published this week, he confessed he didn’t want to turn the mic on himself about private stuff, but walked away from the project with “a little more self-knowledge.”
He added he’s “really loving this season” of being a husband and father to three.
Dennis Arfa, his booking agent for decades, said he’s “so glad” to see Joel “pouring love into his kids and into Alexis,” and being present for it all.
“It feels good to watch,” Arfa continued. “I’ve always cheered for Billy’s joy and his hard-earned wins. I’ve seen him surf the highs and I’ve seen the storms. I’m grateful for this peaceful chapter, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.”
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