Billy Joel Page 3

  Beginning in 1960, destined to be known as perhaps the richest Olympic athlete ever, Neckermann began his run of netting six medals as a dressage horseman, in the 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972 games. Yet ultimately, after a rough run spurred by inept price-cutting, he sold the failing company.

  Karl and Meta used the long-awaited settlement to travel the world extensively before returning to New York to shut down their business in 1970. They then repatriated to Germany, where Meta died in Nuremberg in 1971. Karl, alone and still embittered from his troubles, passed away eleven years later in Berlin. He and Meta are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin; in The Joel Files, Alex Joel is seen on the site, using a stiff, soapy brush to clean the mottled headstone above the grave of Karl and Leon’s father, where below the added names of the vanished Leon and Rebecca lie. The subtitles translate the legend beneath the names: “Deported to and died in a concentration camp.”

  Upon Howard’s return from the war in 1946, he and Roz married and moved into an apartment on Strong Street in the Bronx. Howard took jobs first with the Dumont television manufacturing company, then with RCA, and eventually with General Electric. His work for them would, over time, take him more and more frequently out of the country, to Latin America and Europe. But by the late summer of 1948, a child was on the way.

  WILLIAM MARTIN “BILLY” JOEL was born May 9, 1949, in the Bronx. According to Billy, “I don’t have any particular nostalgia for the Bronx. We would move away in 1950, and I never really saw that neighborhood again once we left for Long Island. So my earliest childhood memories are of being a little kid in our house in Hicksville.” Soon after the family moved to Long Island, they were joined there by his cousin Judy, who was two years older and taken in as an act of kindness by his mom when his mother’s older sister Muriel died.

  The two forged a deep bond that would later emerge in “Why Judy Why” from 1971’s Cold Spring Harbor, in which Billy forthrightly sings, “Of all the people in the world that I know / You’re the best place to go when I cry.” Says Billy: “Judy and I have always remained in close touch. She was raised like my sister, and I have always thought of her in that way. Together, back then, she and I were allies in the difficult life we all shared on Meeting Lane.”

  Judy was twelve years old before Roz finally related to her just how dismal the circumstances of her adoption were. The news was delivered on the day Marilyn Monroe died—August 5, 1962—an occasion Billy and Judy perceived as having some odd significance for Roz, who apparently saw in the troubled Hollywood star a kindred spirit.

  The story is grim enough. After Judy’s birth in 1947, Muriel—known to the family as Moochie and described by one relation as “a bookworm … shy, funny, and a good cook”—suffered from crushing postpartum depression. She’d married her husband, Max, an accountant, in the Brooklyn Town Hall when she was nineteen, with the wedding breakfast in Chinatown. Over the next eight years of married life, Max was said by some to lack empathy and already had one foot out the door. One day when Judy was eight weeks old, and her sister, Susie, four, was out with Muriel’s mom, Rebecca, Muriel placed the infant Judy on the bed in a back bedroom of their Flatbush apartment, cracked a window to supply some fresh air, and surrounded Judy with a row of chairs so she wouldn’t roll off the bed. Then she moved to the kitchen, fastened a wool Army blanket across the doorway, opened the oven door, and turned on the gas. According to Rebecca Gehrkin, Judy’s daughter, Muriel placed a note in plain view: “Dear Mom, Pop and Max, I know that I have cancer and I do not want to be a burden to the family so I have taken this way out. Please forgive me. Love, Mooch.”

  Judy recounts what came next: “My grandparents came home to it. She was just lying flat on the ground. A little while later came Roz and my other sister from those biological parents, Susan. Roz jumped on top of Moochie, calling her name, and tried to resuscitate her. It was useless, but she just wouldn’t get off her.”

  The family was so shattered that only Muriel’s husband, Max, attended the funeral. He then went off to his new life, taking Susie with him and remarrying within a year. He left Judy, the infant he barely knew, with Billy’s grandparents Phillip and Rebecca Nyman in Brooklyn. “Eventually,” says Billy, “when Judy was about four, they bundled her out to Hicksville, where I found myself with a new sister I barely knew.” Though Billy will speak fondly of Roz and her efforts at keeping the family fed, clothed, and at last occasionally happy during the coming years, Judy has a different memory and carries considerable bitterness: “Roz would do—not nice things. At one point when we were very young, she left us alone for three days.”

  That episode led to an extended family dispute over the care of the offspring, but as much as Judy tangled with the emotional vagaries exhibited by Roz, she little enjoyed the visits to the Joel side of the family in upper Manhattan: “They were ice cold—what they say, typical Germans.”

  The difficulties between Roz and Judy, who was formally adopted in 1955, continued. “Judy was willing to have only limited contact with our mother in the decades that followed,” says Billy. “There was too much conflict, too many misadventures over the years.

  “It didn’t take me long to realize that my family was noticeably different from those around us. For starters, I don’t recall my father being around our home much. I’d see him, of course, but he was never really a fixture in the house, never a regular part of the household. I remember it being just my mother, my sister, and me. And I remember thinking that we were the family that didn’t have a dad, and were being perceived that way by the neighbors. We weren’t ostracized, but we certainly were looked at somewhat differently. Money was tight, so the small home improvements other families were making weren’t available to us. They were little things, but also conspicuous—we weren’t able to put in a driveway, or install a dormer upstairs, or do all the fixing-up our neighbors appeared to be doing.”

  Then there was the neighbors’ perception of Roz, who Judy says damaged the family bank account with erratic behavior sometimes exacerbated by what Judy recalls as helpings of “brown liquor” and spates of refusing to eat: “One day I walked in and Billy’s sitting on top of her and he’s shoving ice cream down her throat, thinking she’s going to die.”

  The mood inside the compact house was not improved by the social climate just outside the door. On the somewhat windswept stretch that was Meeting Lane (not much shrubbery had yet had the chance to grow in the postwar tract, formerly acres of potato fields), harsh judgments were levied, says Judy: “We were the only Jews, we were the only family without a driveway—we had a carport. People made fun of us.”

  “In the 1950s, an attractive woman in a neighborhood of married people was viewed with a certain amount of suspicion,” says Billy. “Our area was heavily Catholic, which added to the sense that we weren’t like everyone else. The little girl across the street once actually said as much to me, very matter-of-factly, when I was about six years old: ‘You’re going to grow horns because you’re a Jew.’ And I honestly remember going to bed at night feeling my head to see if the horns were coming in. I didn’t understand anything about anti-Semitism. I didn’t even really know what a Jew was, except for the bits and pieces of information I would pick up from other kids. You have to remember, this is long before the era of political correctness. Back then, people would use ugly ethnic and racial slurs such as polack, mick, spic, kike, and especially the N-word—and it was all right out there, in the open. Nobody thought of it as racism; it was just how people talked. If there was any upside to all of this bigotry, it’s that you could see it coming at you from a mile away. Now it’s a lot more subtle, but I still think it’s there.”

  If America was a “melting pot”—the phrase was popularized by a 1906 play portraying a survivor of Russian pogroms trying to assimilate—Meeting Lane was a specimen of the pain that came from the heat beneath. Perhaps Howard Joel’s increasingly frequent absences came in part from questioning what he had fought for in Europe, whom he had lost,
and whether he had escaped the bias that fueled that cataclysm. He seldom missed a chance to scorn the materialist, know-nothing culture he was enmeshed in (“He hated America,” says Billy, who in later years would exasperatedly rebut the tirades), helping to deliver plastic ware to America’s own robust postwar economy. Billy remembers, “In those rare times when my father was around, he was always a dark presence. People later said they believed the war had changed him. Something I’ve never forgotten was when I was about six years old, he said to me, ‘Life is a cesspool.’ I don’t remember him saying much, but I remember that. I didn’t fully understand what he meant at the time. Years later it occurred to me that it was a pretty rough thing to say to a kid.”

  The unforgettable—one might almost say unforgivable—“cesspool” remark, says Billy, “gave me some insight into the darkness my father carried around inside him. He would go into the room where the upright piano was and play Chopin and Beethoven and Debussy. I thought it was pretty great; I would get stoned just from listening to it. But when he finished, he was always in a really bad mood. I guess because it made him feel frustrated and angry that he wasn’t a virtuoso pianist. But what would put him in a bad mood would put me in a great mood. I thought, If I could do that, I’d be a really happy guy. Not my father, though. He was very sad man.”

  What helped make up for Howard’s emotional absence was the presence of Philip Nyman, who, even as he made the rounds of the concert halls with his palmed packs of unfiltered smokes, would deliver disquisitions on the great books and musical works. Closer to home turf, different dodges were needed. “I was always going to the movies at the Hicksville Theater,” says Billy. “In the early sixties the price for adults was a buck and a quarter; kids under a certain age got in for thirty-five cents. I remember one time I went to the movies with my grandfather and I was thirteen. The sign said that children under ten got in at a discounted price. My grandfather walked up to the ticket window and casually told the cashier that I was nine. I was really infuriated, because that’s a time in your life when you want to be older. ‘No, I’m not,’ I started to protest, but by then my grandfather was clasping his hand over my mouth. Years later I came to understand that my mom’s side of my family didn’t have much money, so that’s the way they got along.”

  As his parents grew apart, Billy saw Roz’s helplessness to fix the union: “I know my mother was very sad about it. They were such completely different personalities. She was overly communicative, and my father could barely express his emotions. When they argued, she would yell, and he would just sit there in silence. And of course that would make her even madder. So even as a little kid, I knew that these two people weren’t cut out to be together. I was kind of relieved when they got divorced, actually. I just didn’t know that I wouldn’t see him for many years to come.”

  Rosalind may have realized the finality of the break, but still would come the times around dusk when the Buicks and Chevy Impalas and Plymouth Valiants arrived home from the island’s electronics firms and metal shops and the Hicksville train station, six minutes’ drive north. The dads in their high-waisted slacks would knock the car door shut with their knee and cross the lawn with a hug for the kids and a kiss for the wife—what Billy would later call the “Donna Reed” world. Billy would see his mom staring out the kitchen window and ask what she was looking at. And sometimes, as he told Tim White for Billboard three decades later, she would say—consciously or unconsciously distributing the pain—“Just looking out the window. Maybe your father’s coming home.”

  Asked by White what he got from Howard as a father, Billy responded, effectively, naught: “As a dad, it’s too late. I’m thirty-one. I met him when I was twenty-four … it was too late already, I was already me.” However, characteristically, he was able to find some redemption in the situation: “I knew a lot of kids when I was growing up who were afraid of their fathers, fathers who beat them up, were bastards, creeps. I was brought up by women … a nice upbringing. The worst my mother did was grab hangers off the rack and whip me over the shoulders … which hurts.”

  Minus a father, Billy was also spared some of the patriarchal baggage that others knew. Howard Joel had become an engineering student at his father’s insistence, despite his deep love for music, “because in those days you did what your old man told you to do.” In his son’s case, “I probably would never have been able to consider being a professional musician, certainly a rock musician, if my father had been around when I was growing up. He just wouldn’t have allowed it—too impractical. Whereas my mom said, ‘Go ahead’; she encouraged me. So I was lucky in that way, even though I missed having a father, and as I came of age, I found myself trying to replace him as the provider and head of the family.

  “I became the father, whether I liked it or not, but without my own father around, I was constantly searching for my own identity. Who am I? I don’t know anything about myself because I don’t have a father to let me know what I’m supposed to be like.

  “In some ways, this can free you up—you can be anything you want, go in any direction. But in other ways, you may not feel that you ever have a center.”

  ANOTHER ACCIDENT OF Billy’s upbringing that could have been a pedestrian detail but would prove a major theme in his life was simply being a Long Islander. In late 2008 Bruce Springsteen, no minor local hero himself, and Billy united for their Obama fund-raiser at Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan—where Bruce had good reason to declare the evening “a summit meeting.” As surely as Springsteen was the bard of New Jersey, from the swamps to the northern reaches of Highway 9, Billy has for decades been the poet who punches out insights on and evocations of and ultimately, despite its many complications, the essence of Long Island: “I don’t speak about the Island with the condescension you so often hear even from people raised there. I’m an Islander. No one is prouder to come from Long Island than I am, and I’ve always been a booster for the place. Long Island is separated from Manhattan Island by bridges, but it’s part of an archipelago that includes Manhattan and Staten Island, Fire Island, Shelter Island—dozens of islands floating off the mainland.” Much as Billy’s parents did in their turn, “over the course of the history of New York City, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers have fled the city for those suburbs of Long Island. And of course when you’re a kid, you can’t wait to get back into the city.”

  The man generally credited for speeding this eastern migration of New Yorkers is the legendary urban planner Robert Moses, a civic czar back in the days when a czar could get a lot done. Beginning in the 1930s and all the way into the 1970s, Moses built the parkways and bridges of New York, developed the beaches, and installed infrastructure. He once lobbied for and nearly succeeded in commanding the construction of a bridge from Rye, New York, across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay, which would have flung eight lanes of traffic right through Billy’s charming little adopted hamlet.

  One of the landmark projects that an accessible island permitted was the vision of real estate developer Abraham Levitt and his sons Albert and William Levitt, who created Billy’s boyhood street of Meeting Lane very near the center of Levittown—a sprawling housing development spurred by the demand for housing from the local contingent of some sixteen million veterans returning after the war. The cheaply built homes (the Levitts owned their own forest land to supply timber and made their own nails) demanded minimal down payments. Most of the tracts clustered near the new freeways on Long Island. The $7,000 homes, in five variations of a basic Cape Cod style, sat on sixty-by-one-hundred-foot plots. Hicksville, where the Joels settled, was a pop-up patch of small-town, Main Street America. It was also a rail junction, which brought growth and restless, resettling city dwellers.

  When a blight struck the sprawling acres of potato farms, the farmers started selling off big swaths of land, and Levittown—the name given to these cascades of homes that epitomized the “Little Boxes” of a 1963 folk song—spread out from Hicksville, down to East Meadow and Uniondale and i
nto Westbury. The total area covered half a dozen towns. “I was from Hicksville, the village,” says Billy, “but I was also from Levittown, the area. Still, when you say Levittown, you’re talking about a particular suburban way of life at a particular time.

  “But even though my friends and I were living in the suburbs—that basically became the theme of my Nylon Curtain album—we played city games, stickball and stoopball, Ringolevio and Johnny on the Pony, and plenty of chicken fights. After all, these were New York City people who thought they were in the country. Of course, we kids knew we weren’t really in the country; this was a suburb where every house looked the same, and we were bored out of our skulls. As people my age grew older, we went into the city every chance we got, because that was our Disneyland; that was Oz. We couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the suburbs.”

  Something Billy’s Hicksville neighborhood shared with less sophisticated outposts of small-town America was a lack of diversity in its population. Recalls Billy, “The real estate agents quietly made sure to keep it that way. They didn’t sell to black families.” In fact, Clause 25 of the initial standard lease for Levitt houses read that the home “could not be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.” The clause was scrapped after a Supreme Court decision on a similar case, but the 1990 census still showed the populace as 97.37 percent white. “I don’t remember seeing a black man in our town until I glimpsed some of the migrant workers on the nearby farm in the early fifties. And as we would soon discover—ironically, considering what the world had just gone through to defeat Nazism—the area wasn’t necessarily welcoming to Jews either.” As the New York Times stated in 1997, William J. Levitt, “although he was the grandson of a rabbi … built housing on Long Island that excluded Jews.”

  During Billy’s formative years, the combination of an absent father, a sometimes enveloping if loyal mother, and the blatant biases of the surrounding neighborhood enforced a singularity in the youngster’s developing personality. Colleagues who have been in close contact with him for two, three, four, even five decades are generally eager to attest to his wit, his unsentimental warmth, and an overall considerateness. At the same time, there’s a kind of self-sufficiency to him, a toughness that communicates that—short of the rare special circumstances when he’s had a romantic breakup or has fears that someone in his family, notably daughter Alexa Ray, has been hurt in any way—he’s not looking for a shoulder to cry on.