Billy Joel Recalls Wife Ending Marriage While He Was in Hospital Bed After Crash

Billy Joel is reflecting on a 1982 motorcycle accident that left him with a broken leg, arm and wrist.

In the upcoming documentary about the legendary singer’s life, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Joel, 76, recalls his first wife and former business manager, Elizabeth Weber, ending their marriage while he was in a hospital bed, recovering from a near-fatal motorcycle crash.

Joel and Weber 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 of the 1980 album.

“So, it must have not been easy to be married to me at the time.”

Weber, meanwhile, said that being “firmly planted in the public eye is the antithesis of what I wanted.”

“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,” she added.

“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.”

Weber had joined the band on tour during this time, which Joel said was “uncomfortable for everybody, adding that “the fun was gone.” Joel eventually hired Weber’s brother Frank to take her place on the tour as his business manager.

At the time, Joel was also passionate about motorcycles, despite both the record and the insurance company’s discouragement. “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 recalled.

“But I just remember hearing the insurance company doesn’t want to ride motorcycles and the record company doesn’t want you to ride motorcycles and I was like, ‘F— them.’ ”

Meanwhile, Joel’s affinity 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.

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In the documentary, Joel said that he wrote the opening track for Glass Houses, “You May Be Right,” which was inspired by an incident when he came home from the bar in the rain on his motorcycle with no headlights, no streetlights. He was wearing a suit, and Joel said he “should have been splattered all over the road.’

“Elizabeth had warned me, she said, ‘Be careful, be careful, ’cause you’re going to have an accident,'” the musician recalled. One motorcycle ride in 1982 almost killed him.

He was riding with a couple of other cyclists and was at an intersection. The light turned green for him, but a woman ran a red light and crossed in front of Joel when it was too late for him to stop his bike.

Joel was wearing a helmet at the time and smashed into her car and dislocated his wrist, crushed his thumb and flipped over the car, landing on his back.

“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.

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Columbia Records’ Arlyne Willcox was in the hospital with Joel managing the press each day, and overheard Weber telling him that she would hire private nurses to stay with him when he came home from the hospital. “Well aren’t you gonna be there?” Joel asked, and she responded: “I’m not going back with you; I live in the city.”

“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,” Weber said. “I just didn’t have that in me. And I felt very strongly that that’s what was going.”

Weber put the key from their house onto a tray in the hospital room. “I remember him looking at that key. She was his muse and he made some comment about, ‘She’s not going to be there to hear my music anymore,’ ” Willcox said.

Before Weber left the hospital, she recalled saying, “You know, someday they may write about us and I hope that they say that we really did something,” Joel responded, per Weber: “I hope they could say we went all the way.” “And that was it. That really was the final. That was it,” she added.

Reflecting on their relationship, Weber still has “room in my heart” and “always will” love Joel. “I love the memories of the family life that he and [her son] Sean and I shared and so those memories are personal and they belong to me and to Sean and to Bill but what doesn’t belong to us is the achievement that we had working together.”

“We together were greater than the sum of the parts and I am really proud of that.” The former couple filed for divorce in 1982.

Billy Joel: And So It Goes premiered at Tribeca Festival on Wednesday, June 4.