In the new two-part documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” the singer revealed that after having an affair with his best friend’s wife, he attempted to k*ll himself twice.
According to People, in the documentary Joel explains that in the 1970s, when he was in the rock band Attila, he developed a romantic relationship with the wife of his friend and bandmate Jon Small.
“I felt very, very guilty about it,” Joel said. “They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker. 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.”
Shortly after, their band Attila broke up, and Joel – who was living with Small and his wife Elizabeth Weber at the time – found himself homeless.
“I had no place to live,” he continued. “I was sleeping in laundromats and I was depressed, I think to the point of almost being psychotic. 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.”
His sister Judy, a medical worker, then explained that she had given him some pills to help him sleep. One day, Joel “decided that he was going to take them all.”
“He was in a coma for days and days and days,” Judy said. “I went to go see him in the hospital, and he was lying there white as a sheet. I thought that I’d k*lled him.”
After the failed attempt, Joel was committed to do it “right” a second time, revealing that he drank an entire bottle of the cleaning product Lemon Pledge.
This time, Small was the one who took him to the hospital.
“Even though our friendship was blowing up, Jon saved my life,” Joel said.
Small added in the documentary: “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 k*lled him to hurt me that much. Eventually I forgave him.”
Following this incident, Joel said he entered himself into an observation ward for several weeks. “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.
