Billy Joel's first wife walked out on him in hospital bed after motorcycle crash that nearly killed him

Fox News

09-06-2025

Billy Joel is reliving some of the most painful moments in his life.
In the upcoming documentary, "Billy Joel: And So It Goes," the "Piano Man" crooner, 76, recalled the moment his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, walked away from their marriage shortly after his near-fatal motorcycle crash.
"I always romanticized motorcycles. There's something about it. I feel like I can be completely disconnected from the world. There's a sense of freedom about that," Joel said in the doc, per People.
Joel said his admiration for motorcycles left Weber "scared all the time."
"I on many occasions said to him, you know, 'You can't do this, this is dangerous,'" she said.
"Elizabeth had warned me, she said, 'Be careful, be careful, 'cause you're going to have an accident,'" the musician recalled.
In 1982, Joel suffered multiple injuries after his bike crashed into a vehicle mid-intersection.
"I was amazed I was still alive. I should have died in that accident," he said. "And I laid there in shock for a couple of minutes and I went to the hospital."
The accident left him with a broken arm, leg and wrist.
While he recovered in the hospital, Weber opted out of the marriage.
"I would've stayed, I would've been able — like so many women before me — to make that accommodation for someone you love ,but there was no way that I could stand by and watch him kill himself," said Weber, who recalled placing the house key onto a tray in his hospital room. "I just didn't have that in me. And I felt very strongly that that's what was going."
When Weber left the hospital, she recalled telling Joel, "You know, someday they may write about us and I hope that they say that we really did something." According to her, Joel responded with, "I hope they could say we went all the way."
She added, "And that was it. That really was the final. That was it."
The couple were married from 1973 until 1982.
"After 'Glass Houses' came out I was always on the road, working, working, I look back on that guy and I don't even know who he was, he had to be so ambitious to work that hard and work that much," Joel said in the documentary. "So, it must have not been easy to be married to me at the time."
"I wasn't asking him to change, but I just did not want to live like that. My response to it was to get a place in New York City where you can enjoy anonymity — so it wasn't so much as we separated, but we started to get a little bit isolated from one another and I also knew that he wasn't in a good place. We were all under a lot of stress," Weber said.
"All of us dealt with our stresses in different ways. And so there was a lot, a lot of alcohol use and eventually a lot of drug use."
Elsewhere in the documentary, Joel also opened up about what led him to attempt suicide twice and fall into a coma.
When the musician was in his early 20s, Joel was part of a band called Attila with his best friend, Jon Small, who was married to Weber at the time. He ended up moving in with Small, Weber, and their son, according to People.
"Bill and I spent a lot of time together," Weber confessed in the documentary, per People. She added that their friendship was gradual and a "slow build." Joel eventually told his best friend, "I'm in love with your wife."
"I felt very, very guilty about it. They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker," Joel admitted in the documentary, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday. "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."
The betrayal not only ended Joel and Small's friendship at the time but also dissolved their band, Attila. Consumed by guilt and depression, Joel's personal and professional life unraveled, as he began to spiral.
"I had no place to live. I was sleeping in laundromats, and I was depressed, I think to the point of almost being psychotic," Joel 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."
Joel's sister shared in the film that she was working as a medical assistant and gave him sleeping pills to help with the restless nights.
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"But Billy decided that he was going to take all of them… he was in a coma for days and days and days," she emotionally said. "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."
While Joel acknowledged that he had been "very selfish" during the tumultuous time, he recalled his first thought when he woke up from his coma was that he wanted to attempt suicide again.
During Joel's second attempt at suicide, he ingested "lemon Pledge," a furniture polish. Miraculously, he survived both attempts, after Small rushed him to the hospital.
"Even though our friendship was blowing up, Jon saved my life," Joel explained in the documentary.
Fox News Digital's Stephanie Giang-Paunon contributed to this post.