Who Are Billy Joel Wives? Inside the Piano Man’s Marriages!
From early studio sessions to the Westhampton beachfront, Billy Joel has shared the years with four women, the brightest star being Christie Brinkley, whose high cheekbones framed the cover of “Uptown Girl.” The latest and final Mrs., Alexis Roderick Joel, has been with him since 2015.
The five-time Grammy titan and consummate showman has, over a swirl of melodies and puckish grins, re-written the love song for his own edit button. The age of 76 finds him settled with Alexis, though his romantic record includes three earlier solid.
You probably recall the notes of “Just the Way You Are” and “She’s Always a Woman” curling around a jazz-white microphone while he was, lyrically, flipping through romantic seasons. Here’s the lineup of the lucky few who shared the walking moonlit aisle with the man usually glued to a Steinway.
Elizabeth Weber (1973–1982)
Elizabeth Small was the first. Joel, then a leather-jacket troubadour, spotted her at a Long Island rehearsal hall, and her name then, like her frame, was Small. The echo was not lost: Jon Small, Joel’s buddy, was drumming the same notes. The quick laugh, the pixie haircut, and a timing belt of aspiration made her, in one easy key, the piano man’s first bride.
In the summer of 1970 the Small family—husband, wife, and toddler—offered Joel room on the couch, needing a rhythm guitarist and needing rent money. The arrangement collapsed when Joel and Elizabeth began sleeping together. Once the truth seeped out, she returned to Weber, dropping both men and the small surname without warning.
For a little while. In the weeks that followed, Joel carried the rupture but couldn’t silence the ache.
“She was—different,” he told Fred Schruers years later. “Not the sort of girl who’d learned home ec. She was bright and unashamed of it. That made her rare, almost foreign. She could read a room and the next minute lean in like a siren.”
Joel and Weber slowly found their orbit again, while the Small family—he a license-plate salesman, she a chipper-singing wife—earned back their old inside jokes. By 1973, Weber was Mrs. Joel and the one who booked the dates.
Christi Brinkley (1985–1994)
The hit maker told Schruers that Weber became his muse, giving life to much of the music that gathered around his 1977 album The Stranger. The couple parted ways in 1982. Not long after the last chords faded with Weber, Joel crossed paths with the willowy supermodel. “We were friends first,” he explained to Hank Bordowitz in Billy Joel:
The Life and Times of an Angry Young Man. “I was nuts about her, but it took her a while to reciprocate.” Brinkley, quoted in the same book, confessed it was Joel’s “heart and soul” that finally broke the spell and made her want to say yes. The couple wed in March 1985, and in December of the same year, they opened the door to parenthood with the arrival of daughter Alexa Ray Joel.
According to Yahoo Even after their divorce in ’94, Joel and Brinkley have stayed fast friends. Before diving into some of their tougher memories for the 2025 memoir she’s calling “Uptown Girl,” she checked in with him for advice. “He said, ‘Just say what you need to say,’” Brinkley recalled in a recent interview.
Katie Lee (2004–2009)
The “You May Be Right” singer crossed paths with chef and cookbook author Katie Lee in the summer of 2002, and their connection sparked fast. Lee, who’d first met Joel, quickly decided to catch up on his music. “I went out and bought the greatest hits album, and I was like, ‘Oh, I know ‘Still Rock and Roll,’ I know ‘My Life’—I love these songs,’” she recalled in “Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography.” “By the end, I’d learned the words to every single one.”
The atmosphere buzzed under the falling leaves. Yet by 2009, the two had parted ways.
Accoding to New York Post “After nearly five years of marriage, Billy and Katie have decided to separate,” a statement from Joel’s rep read. “The decision comes after much reflection. Billy and Katie remain caring friends, with admiration and respect for each other.” CNN Reported that.
Alexis Roderick (2015–present)
Later that same year, Joel crossed paths with the woman who would become his lasting partner, Alexis Roderick, or “A-Rod,” as he affectionately calls her. An equestrian and former finance executive, nearly a generation younger, she gave him a ride home after a chance meeting at a restaurant. That ride led to an important piano moment for her alone, and perhaps for him, something deeper.
A few months after that ride, they were officially dating and had already signed a lease together. Yet, unlike previous relationships, the couple didn’t hurry toward the church.
They exchanged vows on July 15, 2015. A month later, their first daughter, Della Rose Joel, arrived, followed two years after by another daughter, Remy Anne Joel.
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