By admin 
Introduction
Long before the world knew the name Barry Manilow, before the sold-out residency at the International Hotel, and before the “Fanilow” phenomenon took over the globe, there was a dusty marriage certificate in Brooklyn that the music industry spent decades trying to incinerate. The date was June 1964. The groom was a skinny, ambitious musician with dreams too big for his zip code. The bride? Susan Deixler, his high school sweetheart—a girl who believed she was embarking on a lifetime of shared dreams, only to find herself airbrushed out of a superstar’s biography like a shameful mistake.
The scandal isn’t just that Barry Manilow was married; it’s the cold, surgical precision with which Susan Deixler was systematically removed from his public narrative. While Barry was climbing the charts with songs about heartbreak and eternal devotion, the woman who actually shared his first home was living in the shadows of a profound betrayal. Just one year after saying “I do,” the man who “wrote the songs” simply walked out. He didn’t just leave the apartment; he left the version of himself that belonged to her. He chose the sirens of the music industry over the quiet life of a Brooklyn husband, seeking an annulment that would effectively treat their union as if it had never happened.
Why did it take fifty years for the world to truly acknowledge her? Because the “Manilow Brand” required a specific kind of idol—a romantic, unattached, or safely “vague” figure that could be projected upon by millions of female fans. Susan was a threat to that illusion. She was the inconvenient truth that Barry was a man capable of walking away from his first great love for the sake of a spotlight. For decades, Susan maintained a dignified silence, even as her former husband became one of the wealthiest entertainers in history. She watched from a distance as he built a life with Garry Kief, while her own role in his foundation was reduced to a whispered rumor or a skipped chapter in authorized books.
This is the harrowing “What” of the story: the psychological cost of being the “forgotten wife.” Imagine the emotional violence of hearing your husband’s voice on every radio station, singing about “Mandy” or “Lola,” while you are legally bound to act as if you never existed. Susan Deixler wasn’t just a divorcee; she was a ghost haunting the perimeter of a billion-dollar career. This introduction peels back the sequins to reveal the raw, human wreckage left behind in the 1960s—a teenage bride who became the first casualty of Barry Manilow’s relentless pursuit of the summit.