By admin 
Introduction
In 1965, a young Barry Manilow committed what he viewed as a cardinal sin of the heart: he walked out on his high school sweetheart, Susan Deixler, not because he stopped loving her, but because he loved the music more. It was a brutal, self-inflicted amputation of his personal life in service of a dream that hadn’t yet materialized. He was twenty-one, starving for applause, and utterly incapable of balancing a domestic existence with the voracious hunger of ambition. That failure—the dissolution of his first marriage after just one year—left a scar on his psyche deeper than any critic’s review. It taught him a terrifying lesson: Fame is a predator that eats intimacy alive.
When Garry Kief entered his life in 1978, the ghosts of that first failure were screaming. Barry was no longer the struggling pianist; he was a global phenomenon, a deity to millions of adoring women. He knew, with chilling certainty, that if he exposed this new, fragile love to the blinding radiation of the public eye, it would wither and die just as his first marriage had. But this time, the threat wasn’t his own ambition—it was the world’s possession of him. He realized that to keep Garry, he had to erase him.
Thus began one of the most disciplined deceptions in Hollywood history. For nearly four decades, Manilow applied the brutal lesson learned from Susan: You cannot share your heart with the world and keep it beating for one person at the same time. He constructed a fortress of silence. To the public, he was the eternal bachelor, the lonely crooner waiting for the right girl. To Garry, he was a devoted partner. This wasn’t a lie born of shame; it was a strategy born of trauma. He believed that the moment the “fans”—the very people who gave him his life—discovered the truth, the spell would break, and the relationship would be torn apart by the tabloids.
The “lesson” from his first divorce was that a relationship cannot survive if it is secondary to the career. But since the career was now a juggernaut, the only way to make the relationship primary was to hide it in a bunker. He sacrificed his truth to save his heart. It was a high-wire act of anxiety, fearing that one slip-up, one photo, one leak would destroy the sanctuary he had built with Kief. While the world saw a superstar basking in the limelight, the real Barry Manilow was frantically guarding the backstage door, ensuring that the toxic glare of fame never touched the one thing he refused to lose again. He didn’t just learn to be a better partner; he learned to become a master illusionist, proving that sometimes, the only way to keep a love story alive is to never tell it.