Reading Time: 3 minutes
Billy Joel is opening up for the first time about a very dark chapter in his life.
A new documentary about the rock legend titled Billy Joel: And So It Goes premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week.
And it contains scenes in which Joel admits to nearly taking his own life after having an affair with the wife of his best friend.
A tumultuous time for Billy Joel
In his early 20s, Joel formed a band called Attila with his friend Jon Small. He later moved in with Small, his wife, Elizabeth, and their son.
“Bill and I spent a lot of time together,” Elizabeth said in the documentary, adding that their affection for one another was a “slow build” (per People magazine).
Eventually, Joel came to his friend with the truth: “I’m in love with your wife.”
“I felt very, very guilty about it. They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker,” Joel says in the film. “I was just in love with a woman and I got punched in the nose which I deserved. Jon was very upset. I was very upset.”
Joel says he nearly took his own life amid guilt of affair
Joel, of course, was kicked out of Small’s home, and he says it was then that he entered the lowest point of his life.
“I had no place to live. I was sleeping in laundromats and I was depressed I think to the point of almost being psychotic,” he said in the documentary.
“So I figured, ‘That’s it. I don’t want to live anymore.’ I was just in a lot of pain and it was sort of like why hang out, tomorrow is going to be just like today is and today sucks. So, I just thought I’d end it all.”
At the time, Joel’s sister, Judy Molinari, was working as a medical assistant, and she gave him some sleeping pills for his insomnia.
“But Billy decided that he was going to take all of them… he was in a coma for days and days and days,” she said in the film, adding:
“I went to go see him in the hospital, and he was laying there white as a sheet. I thought that I’d killed him.”
Once he was out of the hospital, the singer drank “a bottle of Lemon Pledge” in a second attempt to take his own life. Joel says it was Small’s forgiveness that eventually pulled him out of his deep depression.
“Even though our friendship was blowing up, Jon saved my life,” Joel said.
“He never really said anything to me, the only practical answer I can give as to why Billy took it so hard was because he loved me that much and that it killed him to hurt me that much. Eventually I forgave him,” Small said.
The hard times weren’t over
Billy and Elizabeth reconnected years later. They married in 1973 but divorced nine years later.
In the decades that followed, Joel battled alcoholism and married three more times.
He was recently forced to cancel his upcoming tour due to a neurological disorder, but the Piano Man remains as popular as ever, and recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in his vast body of work.
“I got out of the observation ward, and I thought to myself, you can utilize all those emotions to channel that stuff into music,” he said of his darkest days.
And Joel has spent the past 50 years transforming his many ups and downs into art that’s delighted millions.
Billy Joel Opens Up About Multiple Suicide Attempts Following Affair With Friend’s … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.