LAST CHANCE

Billy Joel Reveals Ex-Wife’s Startling Ultimatum: ‘I Didn’t Want to Do It’

The legendary “Uptown Girl” hitmaker has opened up about his battle with alcoholism in a documentary for HBO.

Billy Joel has revealed that, when he first checked himself into rehab for alcohol abuse back in 2005, it was the insistence of his first wife, Katie Lee. “I didn’t want to do it,” Joel said in the HBO documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, released Friday. Lee gave the now-76-year-old “Uptown Girl” hitmaker an ultimatum: “Either you do something about your drinking or this isn’t gonna work out.” “At that point, yeah, the relationship wasn’t doing well,” Joel conceded. Lee spoke with filmmakers about how difficult she found that period: “I felt like he needed to be creating, he needed to be making music, performing, to turn down that anxiety of not having an artistic outlet,” she said. “And there were struggles with addiction. It was really hard to navigate that because I had no experience with it.” Lee and Joel divorced in 2009. Joel would go on to marry Alexis Roderick in 2015, with Lee marrying actor Ryan Biegel in 2018.