Elizabeth Weber, Billy Joel’s Ex-Wife and Manager, on the HBO Doc

In agreeing to participate in “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” this year’s acclaimed two-part HBO documentary about the pop superstar, Elizabeth Weber says that she was heartened that “Susan (Lacy, the co-director) really wanted to tell a story about the music. I mean, there’s nothing left to expose about Bill. It’s already been out there, right?”

Well, yes and no. Certainly there were nuggets to pick up about Joel’s life that felt fresh, however much has already been mined. But there was certainly one major revelation to speak of: Weber herself. As his first wife and his manager during his 1970s breakout years, she has certainly loomed large in Joel lore, but not because she was doing anything to add to any of this historical discourses herself. She’d remained pretty much silent for the better part of four and a half decades, since leaving the marriage and eventually her management position. Her inclusion in the “And So It Goes” doc was hardly a minimal one, after she reluctantly agreed. A lot of viewers found her the most captivating presence in Part 1 of the doc, with obvious screen charisma that established her as a leading lady after all these years — playing a character that Hollywood couldn’t have invented better, the manager-muse.

When the movies have given us a wife who becomes a manager, it hasn’t always been flattering; think “This Is Spinal Tap.” But Weber was unquestionably a major factor in Joel making incremental jumps in his early year and then the leap to superstar with his album “The Stranger”… in part because she first inspired what would turn out to be his biggest song, “Just the Way You Are,” and then was part of the team arguing for it to be recorded and issued as a single. Her business acumen was an undertold story, before “So It Goes,” and it’s worth retelling in the history of how women impacted the music biz at a time when it was almost exclusively a boys’ club. Even if that meant being subject to nasty rumors or to having to be a “Houdini,” as she puts it, in escaping from grabby fingers.

Weber sat down with Variety for her first really lengthy conversation about her time with Joel — apart from the documentary itself — at the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel. There was some muscle memory associated with the place, as there would be for many L.A. locales. She parked on a side street, the same side street, it occurred to her, that she and her ex parked when they were arriving to meet Clive Davis about signing to Columbia in the early ’70s, wanting to go unseen as they went to his bungalow because Joel was then still under contract to somebody else.

Weber is sure her moment back in the spotlight is already up, but she shouldn’t be so sure about that, as “And So It Goes” will spend years being watched by anyone with a keen interest in one of rock’s golden ages. For her part, she’s getting back to the non-star-studded rituals of her life in Los Angeles. “I was just another gal in the book group who probably had a little bit more to say than many people. I’m considered to be the Irish literature expert in my book group. I’m culturally Irish,” she says. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

How are you feeling about being a TV star now?

I ignore it. You know, it was a big leap for me (to do the documentary). Not even in faith — just a big leap. I had lived in private. My son and I used to joke that we were in the witness protection program. I’ve been in a book group for 24 years. None of those women knew anything about my past. Because it just doesn’t come up, you know? That was a tranche of my life. I was young; that’s 45 years ago. And I like that, mostly because, in my experience, when people know you have any connection with any kind of stardom, or even if you’ve touched the person who touched the person who touched the star, people are different. Not every person, of course. But I like being liked for myself, whatever that is.

Some people have reached out to me that I never would’ve heard from if they hadn’t seen it on HBO, and that’s been fantastic. But it hasn’t changed my life any. I just live my life the way I’ve been living it. I have a really good family and I’ve put a lot of effort into them. So I think my 15 minutes of fame is over. (Laughs.) I hope, anyhow. I have yet to be recognized in Bristol Farms when I go grocery shopping.

Not by anyone?

No. But also, this is L.A., and Rihanna shops in the Bristol Farms I go to. But I don’t see her anymore because I shop on the most dangerous day to shop at Bristol Farms.

What day is that?

Tuesday, which is the senior discount day. You see the Rolls Royces and the Mercedes up on curbs, and you take your life in your hands to go in that parking lot.

You have not wanted to participate in biographies and things over the years. How much persuading did it take to get you to be in this?

I’ve said no to everything from the day that I left (as Billy Joel’s manager in the early ‘80s) until my first interview (for the documentary). I’ve never, ever talked to anybody about it. And it’s not that they haven’t tried. I’ve spent a significant six figures in stopping projects, because I didn’t feel anyone knew my story and they didn’t have the right to tell it, because I was always a private person. The law is very much on the side of a person who lives a private life. And it’s not just what the law is, it’s what the damages would be. So if I’m a private person that is a chaplain at juvenile hall, and that ruined my opportunity to do the things that I did with that, that’s where people would get very nervous.

I didn’t want to do this project. When I got the first letter from Steve Cohen (a longtime Billy Joel associate who served as executive producer), I shared it with my son, Sean. My granddaughters wanted me, at the very least, to talk to (co-director) Susan Lacy. They were probably 17 and and 14 at the time (Kaye and Ella, now 21 and 17), and they were like, “You really should do this because nobody has any idea what you’ve done.” I said, “I don’t care. You know what I did.” And they said, “Well, why don’t you just talk to Susan?”

What made the difference in getting you to sign on?

When I did speak with Susan, she had a compelling argument, in that she said: “No one will ever tell your story better. Because your story is my story. I was a young woman in the television business, and I’d go to meetings and the next day everybody would have taken my ideas and said they were their own. Then, at the awards dinner, I’d be at the kids’ table.” But she created “American Masters” — I mean, she has hundreds of titles and more hardware than you can have a room to fill. So I started to think about it. Then I spoke with Bill, who said, “This is the only time I’m ever gonna license the music.” So I thought to myself, “Well, at least the music will be good. And if Susan does half the job she purports to be able to do, OK.” And my son negotiated a very good contract that if there was something factually incorrect, that I could either change it or I could remove myself totally. And of course, then they got really freaked out, because I think a condition of HBO financing it was my participation. So all of those things helped me become more and more comfortable.

The first interview I did, I was very tentative. All those ideas and thoughts and details were pretty far in the rear-view mirror. I ended up doing four interviews, and by the final one, I was so fed up with the process, I finally said, “Do you wanna go through a song list?” Susan said, “Yeah, I’d love that.” So they’d shoot some song titles at me and I’d say, “Nah,” or then they’d give me one and I’d say, “Oh, yeah, OK.” I was so relieved it was over that I felt good about it.

There is a funny moment in the doc when the subject comes up of the song “Stiletto,” which it’s suggested was inspired by you, in an unflattering way, and you say, sarcastically, “My favorite song.” That must have been part of this last interview session you’re talking about.

It was. I was with Diane Warren the other night and I said to her, “Nobody has kind of gotten how weird it had to be for me. Nobody told me that my life was gonna be represented in all these songs that would last forever.” She said, “What do you mean? That he shouldn’t have put ‘Just the Way You Are’ on an album?” I said, “No, I’m not saying that. It’s just weird.” Those intimate personal moments between us, from someone giving you a (song as a) birthday gift… and it was mushy. … Back then I didn’t really think about it, and we didn’t talk about it. It was just, every day of our life, we made music. Every single day, that’s all we did. But now, sometimes… I don’t know another word to say, but it’s kind of creepy. Maybe “cringey” is a better word. But not totally cringey. Do you understand what I mean? (Laughs.)

Sure. We can imagine.

Right? I mean, he told me he watched me while I slept one night, and he wrote a song. What do you make of that? In real life, when you’re just being Chaplain Weber, you don’t think about it. And I don’t go home and waltz around the living room to “Just the Way You Are.” It’s out there, and usually, for years, if someone would get up the courage to say, “Did he write this song about you?,” I would say, “Well, yeah. But he’s an artist… And you know, if I want to take credit for ‘Just the Way You Are,’ I also have to take credit for ‘Stiletto.’”

You and Billy haven’t had a conversation about how watching the documentary made either of you feel, have you? It sounds like you have a cordial but not super-close relationship.

I think Sean said it most succinctly in the film: If Bill could talk about his feelings, he couldn’t write those songs. Although he’s not really writing now; he has the other things he has to deal with right now. We’ve been divorced for 40 years. We’re as friendly as we need to be. I know where to find him if I want something. When he wanted to talk to me about making this, he knew how to find me. But also, he’s married to somebody. I mean, how would you like your husband going off to work and singing about his ex-wife? Probably not so much! So, I’m good. I’ve had a lot of love in my life. We’re as friendly as we should be, could be, wanna be. (Laughs.)

In a biography that was written about him, there was a quote where he said something to the effect of, “Yeah,  I guess I should think at some point about where all this shit comes from, but I really don’t.”

Right. I would say that that’s very true. People may think he’s disingenuous in that regard, but I don’t. And I mean, yes, he did give me “You Are My Home” for my Valentine’s present, and it was written out and there were little things he drew around it and it was very sweet. But once he did that, it’s not like we talked about it. It’s not like I went, “Oh, what do you mean by this?”

When we used to work, in the beginning, I would just sit at the end of the piano bench. I was so great at business, and that was a really important contribution. But I think just as much (of a contribution) was being able to create an environment for him to be open and able to create. And every day, that’s what we did. We got up, we had breakfast, I usually drove Sean off to school, I’d come back and we would work all day long. We were in the same room and we’d sing. He’d say, “Does this sound familiar?” And I’d say, “Yeah, I think that sounds like ‘If you want a better deal, go see Cal.’” Do you remember Cal Worthington (the car pitchman famous in L.A. in the 1970s for his jingle-filled TV commercials)?

Of course.

And we’d laugh and then we’d sing commercials. Anyway, it was creating that environment for him to do whatever it is he had to do to be able to write.

How do you look back on being his manager?

I look back on those years and they were fantastic. I loved my job. I was so good at it, it wasn’t even working. It was a young person’s life, though. By that time, I was a mother and I was very clear that if I wasn’t a good mother, if I didn’t do the best for Sean, what good was I? … And it became a time where it was clear that I didn’t want my mother or my son in the same room with most of the people I was working with. When I was really young, I thought they’d get more like me and maybe I’d be modeling better behavior and a strong character. It took a long time, but eventually I realized, no, I was around people who were doing things all the time that I didn’t want to do, whether that means drugs or…

When I got into the music business, it was almost the end of payola, and a man who was one of my mentors, Dick Asher, was the guy who really kind of put the final nails in exposing payola. Not that I would have gotten hookers or cocaine for the promotion men or anything like that. I started taking the promotion guys to New York Rangers games. This was years before “The Stranger.” The promotion guys, especially the ones that lived in close proximity to New York City, didn’t want to hang out with Bruce (Springsteen) or Phoebe (Snow) or Billy. They wanted into the Rangers’ dressing room, and I was able to get them there. Then after a game we’d go up to a bar called Cronies, and it would be me, the record promotion guys, some of the program directors from the New York City radio stations like PLJ and WLIR, and the players from the Rangers. That was how I was able to manage bringing something special to them. Because I didn’t really have anything special except for my belief in Bill and his talent.

What was your original musical connection with Billy like?

I never, ever went in that basement and listened to Attila (the hard-rock band Joel was in before going solo). Never — that was just ridiculous. But when he emerged from that, when I first started getting those (solo demo) tapes… Bill and I have always had classical music in common. I like opera; he doesn’t. But one of our big things was that we loved Julian Bream and we’d listen to lute music. So his musical sensibility was something that I could really relate to, because it was so familiar to me. My mother had six children, and she couldn’t read us all a story at night, so she’d sit down and play Chopin; she’d play “Liebestraum.” He and I shared that sensibility. Because we’re not from New Orleans; there’s no rock in us. Classical music, oh yeah, we have that. That’s a completely different language.

It’s clear the big leap in his career took place was with “The Stranger,” after “Turnstiles” was not the blockbuster everyone hoped for. It seems from the film like a good deal of it was your maneuvering, and that at some point you realized “Turnstiles” wasn’t working, but you knew what you wanted to do with the next album.

That whole transition, that’s when I took all the reins. Because I’d been doing some business management already. I always had to go to lawyers (appointments) because he didn’t drive, so what was I gonna do? Sit in the parking lot? Bill would be sitting there and the lawyer would say, “And we’re going to do this …” and then all of a sudden, his hands would start going (in a piano-playing fashion) and his gaze would go (elsewhere) and he wouldn’t hear anything anyone was saying, because there was some musical thing that was happening in his head. So after “Piano Man,” I started going to all the meetings.

I had another thing going for me in those years. In the hierarchy, up there is like the president of the record company, and then beneath them you have all those other people, and then you have the band below them, and then you’ve got more people, and then you’ve got the roadies — and then waaay down there, you have the artist’s wife. So people didn’t take me all that seriously. I mean, they didn’t slough me off. But they didn’t realize that there wasn’t anything that was going on in Bill’s life that he and I didn’t talk about and weren’t on the same page about, so I had that advantage… I was really smart, and I’d taken a lot of business classes at UCLA when we lived here. I had really great accountants and learned a lot from them. And I knew what I didn’t know, which has always been a strong suit of mine.

I spent a lot of time at Caribou Management, before I fired them. (Laughs.) When I called Columbia and said, “Who do you think is a good manager?” and they said “Caribou,” we signed up, and that was a disaster. … Then I started to realize it would be my job to find and vet a producer. I have a different version of the George Martin story. I met George Martin in Philadelphia when the band was on the road… He said he couldn’t do it for a year and a half, and because he had tax issues, he couldn’t be in America. There was no way he could produce Bill’s record in England. So by the time Bill met him, I already knew, nope, he’s in the rear-view mirror. And so I called up Don DeVito, who was our A&R guy at Columbia Records, and I said, “I’m gonna be at the office at 10 o’clock. Will you be there?” Then we started to plot about everything…

I decided that I loved the sax solo in Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years,” and that’s Phil Woods (who eventually played the solo on “Just the Way You Are”). Then I started to go down to the studio to A&R with Don DeVito at night. And the more time I spent with Phil Ramone (who produced “Still Crazy”), the more I realized Phil was the dude. He was a child prodigy violinist, and he could speak music. Bill would rather sit down and play what he means than make another reference to another record or to another artist, so if someone wants to work with Bill, you have to have a musician there to be on the other side of that. And Phil was that. And I ended up managing Phil, too, which was great. Of course Phil was unmanageable, which I told him to his face, but he was a great guy.

There was a song Bill was unsure about and Phil just said, “Well, you know, Bill, let’s just finish laying this down and we’ll put it away and we’ll see how you feel.” And Bill’s like, “I don’t know.” Phil’s like, “Come on. Let’s just do it. Let’s just do the best we can right here.” And that was “Just the Way You Are,” which Phil, in his quiet way, pushed for. And boy, I’m grateful.

Billy was not the only one who didn’t foresee the potential of “Just the Way You Are.” The documentary makes a big deal out of you pushing for that as the second single off “The Stranger,” after not getting it as the first. But you also admitted that you, yourself, think the song is mushy. So did that give you any pause, as to whether that would be a big hit or soften up his image too much?

No. Because those men that I used to go to the hockey games with, the promotion guys, they taught me everything about how to break a record, over a year and a half or two years. We became such good friends. They’d say to me, “All right, you gotta get me a ballad.” Because in those days, a ballad was basically the advertisement for an LP. And they said, “You just have to do that, because that would sell 30% more albums than an uptempo song.” I also learned from my promotion guys that if you really wanted a monster hit that just puts you into the firmament, it can’t just be a breakout in America, it has to be everywhere. And that’s what gave him that career that he’s living on today, because when you have that rock-solid foundation internationally, that doesn’t go away.

We really thought “The Stranger” was a masterpiece. I mean, I thought that; Bill would never say that about his own work, ever. But I knew that it was some place higher than anybody else really was going. When CBS (Records) said, “We don’t really hear a single,” I was like, “Well, hear one, because we’re not changing one note.” At this point, I was the complete manager of every aspect of his career, and I couldn’t back down. Where would you back down to? I don’t like a fight just for a fight, but I felt very strongly about that record, and I didn’t see how we could deliver anything better. But I wasn’t the only one; Phil knew, Bill knew it. So when they said, “No, no, we want ‘Movin’ Out’” (for the first single), I had my fingers crossed under the table, knowing it was a good enough song, but that it wouldn’t take us to where we wanted to go. Then “Just the Way You Are” came out and it was like holding a tiger by the tail.

Were you being taken seriously by the record company guys? Obviously we have sexism now, so there was sexism then.

Well, the sexists are still sexists. But the guys that I worked with… I worked almost exclusively with men — plus Paula Scher, who worked in the art department and was brilliant, and she’s an internationally known, very successful artist still to this day. But otherwise they were all men. When we moved from California to New York, I met our new product manager, and his name was Bill Freston. And from the day I walked in until the day he died (in Feburary of this year), he never looked at me as anything except for smart. We had fun together. I would say, “I have an idea,” and he’d say, “Okay.” When we first started to work together, we’d walk the halls of Black Rock, and you’d see people start to come out into the hallway and see me and Freston coming, and they’d walk back in and close the door, because they knew we were asking for money for something that they didn’t want to give. Because we had no success. I mean, why should they? The big game changer was “The Stranger.” All of a sudden Billy Freston and I were the toast of the building. We’d walk the halls and people’s doors would be closed, but then they’d come running out: “Hey, you know what? I got $30,000 in my budget. Is there anything we could do with it you might want?”

Don DeVito believed in me from the beginning, and Billy Freston did. Those were the people I was close to all along. Then there were the other people, and some of them were really horrible — I mean, horrible in the sense they try to molest you in the elevator. I was like a Houdini, because you had to get away from that. But they had a budget that was gonna support the next tour, and if I insulted that person… It was tricky. I never used sexuality in any way at all, so it was easier for me in a way. I always was more like the kid sister. And if somebody was weird with me, I would say, “Oh, I saw your wife, and your children have gotten so much bigger.” And what does somebody do with that?

There was a biography of Billy with a section devoted to Walter Yetnikoff, and it mentions inevitable rumors going around that you were doing so well with the record company because you had something going on with the top guy. Everyone quoted in the book ultimately disavows those rumors, including Yetnikoff. But that must have been unpleasant at the time if you were aware of it.

Oh, I know what book this is (“Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography” by Fred Schruers). The horrible book. The only time I ever met Fred was when I told him I would not participate. And I never read the book; I don’t read anything. However, I have some dear, long-time, loyal friends who were outraged by the things that were written in that book, and they were like, “You’ve got to defend yourself.” I said, “No, I don’t.” But there were some things said… I mean, I was in love with my husband. I had no interest in anyone else.

There was a story in there saying that I wanted the royalties to “Just the Way You Are,” which is so crazy and totally, completely false. I was at a party for my birthday and someone else at the party said, “Well, did you give her the royalties?” But that was not me. I would never have asked for that. I could easily could have said, “Oh, I want a hundred thousand dollars,” and he would’ve said, “Sure!” … Another thing in the book was that I tried to get him to sign some papers when he was in the hospital after a motorcycle accident. There is absolutely no truth, whatsoever. If I wanted royalties from “Just the Way You Are” or any other thing, we were married; half of that could have been mine if I wanted it to be. People made up things. I’m not saying Fred did it, but whoever (is quoted in the book) did.

I feel maternalistic about the songs… When Bill and I were together, we accomplished so much in those years, and we were extremely happy and so dedicated to what we were trying to achieve. Most people who are together for 60 or 70 years don’t achieve that. Bill and I just had that je ne sais quoi, that magic something, and when we were together, he wrote almost 100 songs, with eight albums that were award-winning. That is an achievement of a lifetime, not just a decade or 13 years.

The film is so sympathetic toward you. You’re very much a leading character. And then part one sort of has a natural conclusion when you exit the story. Some viewers are disappointed you’re not in part 2.

You know, in real life, I exit the story later than that. We were still inexorably tied. I did not move to California at that exact point. I was still there for “Nylon Curtain” and for “Songs in the Attic.” But it worked in the film, for that dramatic arc, ending it there.

Was there anything with the documentary you were not happy with?

I’m OK with everything. I think there was a very rosy view of what was termed as “our affair.” (Joel and Weber first became involved romantically after she married and had a son with Jon Small, Joel’s partner in the band Attila.) It really wasn’t 100% accurate, but it is what it is. My son’s father and I never had a romance. We had a pregnancy. In those days, if you lived in a small suburban town, you didn’t bring home a baby. But Sean is so fantastic. If I didn’t have Sean…

Some of the stuff in the documentary didn’t happen the way they said it did, but they’re going in the right direction. And I felt that Susan really wanted to tell a story about the music. I mean, there’s nothing left to expose about Bill. It’s already been out there, right? So, even though I think there’s some things that may be misleading, it’s going in the right direction.

Obviously the filmmakers and HBO wanted you in the film.  Did you have a sense of whether Bill really wanted you in it, himself, since there was potential for your side of things to come off sympathetically?

I mean, I had these rights, which he didn’t have. We talked about that, and after I decided that I was gonna at least explore it, I said to him, “Well, I’m just curious as to your agreement with them, because maybe I’ll go for most favored nations and I’ll get the same deal as you have.” He said, “I don’t think I have a deal.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, I do know I licensed the music to them…” And he said, “Oh, did I screw up again?” I was like, “Well, I’m sure they’re gonna be very nice to you.”

There’s a lot of reckoning going on in his life right now. And he had come to understand that me being silent for 43 years was… unnatural. He knew it was coming. Also, it has to be hard… I don’t want to say “Poor Bill,” because I don’t think that. But it has to be weird for him, too, to sing songs night after night about somebody that you loved so much and that chose to leave you.

It sounds like the parting was not an instantaneous decision.

I just told him, “I can’t live like this.” I mean, it’s hard to leave someone you love. It’s very easy to leave somebody that you hate, I think. But if you love somebody… it was very hard. But I knew I could not have my life and Sean’s life too. I knew what was coming, and it came, but thankfully we weren’t there.

You mean the tougher stuff in part two of the documentary, basically.

Basically, yeah. I missed all that… But (prior to that), were therenights that the cops would bring him home and one of them would be driving his motorcycle, and I would say, “Can’t you just let him stay in jail? Maybe he’ll (learn a lesson).” They’d be like, “No, we don’t wanna embarrass him.” I’d been through enough of that. You know that song, “You May Be Right”?… The thing about those songs is that he’s very creative and very talented, and artists take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, they shake it up and then voila. But many, many, many of those songs are directly something that happened in our lives. And “You May Be Right” is exactly ripped from the pages of our lives. By that point, I didn’t fight with him. Why would you argue with a drunk? You can’t. And I was literally frightened all the time (of what might happen next). What kind of life is that? You’re living in the nicest house, and everybody thinks you have the greatest life in the world, and you don’t. You’re constantly afraid. And I didn’t want to live like that.

The guys in the band would come over, and I’d very often make dinner, and then they’d hang out with Sean. They’d go downstairs and play pinball, and Doug (Stegmeyer) and Sean would draw cars and they’d laugh, then tell him to go do his homework and go to bed, and then they would all stay up all night and get drunk and do things that those boys did. And I’d outgrown it.

I introduced Bill to Stephen Sondheim. I started meeting with Neil Simon. Bill and I met with Stella Adler. Because I thought if I could have situations where he could just write the music, that would be less stressful for him. “Songs in the Attic” was all about how he felt the pressure of having to deliver another record, yet he was absolutely incapable of writing, because he was exhausted. I was like, “Well, how about if we took songs from each of those albums, and that would still count as a delivery, and some of them might have to be re-recorded?” That’s how that came about. But I was trying to figure out ways that he could maybe act, or maybe if he wrote music for a play and Sondheim wrote the lyrics. I even got Sondheim to try and talk to Bill more about what the business of writing is about. I mean, Sondheim got up in the morning, had thesauruses and dictionaries that he used as reference, and worked like it was his job, almost as if he had coveralls on. But I never could get Bill to think about that. And the way he perceived the pressure, that was very, very dangerous. Very.

When the marriage came to an end, you had been having such a good time managing — which you kept doing a bit longer, as you say. When that ended, too, did you feel any kind of withdrawal, like, “I wish I could still keep just on the managing side of things”?

Yeah, I mean, I loved it. But when somebody you love wants something, you move heaven and earth to get it for them. He wanted creative success, and I thought, “How hard could that be? Let’s figure this out.” And I did. But doing that for someone else wouldn’t have done it for me.

So you weren’t thrilled with management for management’s sake.

No, no. I was thrilled with it because of my little gang, my ruffians, my hooligans (in the band). I was so pleased because this is what they all wanted, and mostly what Bill wanted. I also always thought that he was misunderstood. But I also knew why people misunderstood him, because he could take things farther than they should be taken — I mean, cursing out journalists on stage or things like that. That was such a journey from the kind, quiet, history-loving buff that I met when we were young, and that journey that he took. And that journey, I think there was a lot to do with substance abuse that brought some of that stuff out.

The week I left, or maybe it was the week before, Naomi Saltzman came to me; she was managing Bob Dylan and wanted to know if I was interested in working with them. And I also met with the Talking Heads. It really cemented it, for me, that my heart wasn’t in it. My heart was in it with the (Billy Joel band), because I just love them. I love what they do and I love them as people. But I always like to do things that I have passion for. I’d hate to have to go to work in the morning just to go. I’m very blessed that I haven’t had to make those kinds of choices.

I felt when I left that there were a lot of things I wanted to do. My life had become very tiny, in a certain sense. I wanted to take the train; I wanted to walk down the street. I didn’t want to be in a limo. I also knew that I could do a lot of other things. Bill did what he did brilliantly. But when we first got together, we were rather like two birds. Each of us had a wing, and we tied ourselves together and we could fly. … But I was very independent. I could take care of myself, and very much wanted to. I wanted to be able to go on an adventure, go climb the Matterhorn, take Sean fly fishing, and I felt that my life had gotten to a place where a lot of those things were not as possible as I wanted them to be.

So when we came to California, I thought, well, Billy should keep all our friends. He should keep the business. And then I could go and do what I wanted to do. And in all the time we were together, I never recall him ever asking me what I wanted to do. I had a lot of things I wanted to do. And I’ve done a lot of them, but there’s always more. There’s always something you can do tomorrow.

You did red carpet interviews for the documentary premiere at Tribeca, and you said that if knowing about your management success was inspiring to any young women, you would feel gratified by that.

Oh, yeah. That was the greatest thing about going to Tribeca, because that’s who got online to talk to me. I was on my feed until 2 in the morning because people were bringing their daughters to meet me, their sons to meet me; young women came and said, “My mother got a job at Columbia Records because of you.” That means something to me, just like it means something to me that I could be with the kids in juvenile hall. I’ve spent most of my life trying to spend time with people where it means something to ‘em, and it means something to me. I can spend time with young women and even young boys, getting them to realize that maybe you can’t carry a tune, but you can go into the music business and be an agent or a manager.

To catch up a bit on the intervening years for you… How did you come to be a chaplain? Not a lot of people know about that.

I don’t think anybody really knows much about my life, and I wanted it that way, so it doesn’t surprise me. But I’ve been a children’s advocate my whole life. Even when I was in the rock ‘n’ roll business in New York, I was on the board of, and did research for, Citizens Committee for Children. When I came out to Los Angeles again, I wanted to stop dealing with children on that upper level of creating policy, and start doing hands-on work, so I started to volunteer at a juvenile detention facility. I found a program that I could volunteer with under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, a restorative justice program. I wasn’t part of the God squad, but I was there for so long, somebody left and they said, “Oh, let’s make Elizabeth chaplain.”

You did get back into management for a while in the 2000s and 2010s, working with the classical duo Igudesman and Joo.

When Igudesman and Joo called me up and said, “Would you manage us?” I said, “No, I’m not managing anybody ever again. I’ll help you find somebody.” But I started to work with them, and that was really one of the great accomplishments of my life, because it’s harder to get two classical musicians (established). They’re approaching classical music with humor and trying to broaden the audience… They had four and a half million on a video, and that catapulted us over time to the top rung of earners in the classical music business. (Igudesman and Joo now have three videos with more than 5 million YouTube views each.) We had a little more than 10 years together, traveling all over the world, and they were absolutely the greatest professional years of my life.

I recently produced a play that, unfortunately, died of COVID. It was “Sisters in Law,” sstory about two extremely different people that had to work together for the common good, and those people were Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I produced it a number of times; my out-of-town production was in Phoenix, and we sold out months in advance and got great reviews, and then we did it here at the Annenberg, the same thing. Then we were going to New York and it just didn’t happen. But I like theatrical production because it’s taken all the skills it’s taken me a lifetime to master and to hone. Basically your job is you’re a conductor, or you are someone who is making sure that everybody is comfortable and all moving in the same direction. That’s what I’m good at, I’ve been told. I feel it too.

When you did the red carpet at the documentary’s Tribeca premiere, it was really your first time saying anything to the press since the early ‘80s. You knew Billy would not be there, because of his health issues, right?

No one else knew Bill wasn’t gonna go until a couple of days before. I mean, we knew. But when you cancel a tour, as he was having to, there’s a lot more going on … His tour was certainly worth more than a hundred million dollars, and that all had to be unwound, and there’s insurance and all the contracts have been signed and money had transacted. So until every single one of those unwinding deals had been made, they weren’t gonna announce that he wasn’t coming. As a result of that, nobody prepared anyone, least of all me, that I would be the only public-facing person that anyone could interview. They said “No no, it’ll just be photos, don’t worry.” So I ended up being the first through that line and I did 25 interviews before the movie started. But since that’s what I used to teach my clients to do, it wasn’t as if it was hard. Susan and Jessica (Levin, the co-director) and Steve had worked so hard to make this come to pass, the least that I could do was to show up and to represent them

Billy wasn’t there, because of his health issues, but you had camaraderie with the band members that came.

Yeah, but I’m in touch with all the band. I’m close to Libby (DeVitto) and Richie (Cannata) and Russell (Javors), and I was close to Doug until he died. I know their families, and they all knew Sean from when he was very little. It wasn’t like that was our job back then; it was an absolute crusade. Maybe it would be irresponsible to say that it’s like being in war with your buddies in the foxhole, but we are inexorably tied for the rest of our lives, and when we’re together again, we’re right back there, with the same kind of jokes and camaraderie. The guys are the same, and I probably am pretty much the same —reminding them, “Please get your hair cut before you go to Tribeca!” and “What are you gonna wear?” They’re like, “What do you mean, what am I gonna wear? I’m gonna wear a T-shirt.” I say, “Well, could you wear a nice T-shirt?”

You sound contented with your life.

I’ve spent a lot of my life with my granddaughters — or a lot of their lives with them —and I take them traveling, and that’s another great gift I’ve had, that my son and my daughter-in-law have been so generous. My sister-in-law has also been very generous; I have three nephews that are like my other children. I have a big life, but it’s not a sexy life, to somebody looking on.

If you’re lucky, life is long, and there’s so many more interesting things, I think, in my life than (what is included in the documentary). But I also understand people’s interest in that. I mean, it’s not as if I’ve done anything that great. Just living a good life is great enough. But of course, a good life is very subjective, isn’t it?