By admin 
Introduction
Brooklyn, 1964. The air tasted like saltwater and ambition. In the narrow, sun-drenched hallways of Eastern District High School, two teenagers were rewriting the stars. Barry Manilow—then a lanky, nervous musical prodigy named Barry Pincus—and Susan Deixler, the girl with the kind eyes who believed in his magic before the rest of the world even knew his name. This wasn’t a celebrity romance manufactured by a PR firm; this was raw, unfiltered, and dangerously innocent love. They were the “it” couple of their neighborhood, a pair of dreamers who thought a marriage license was a shield against the cruelties of the real world.
But here is the chilling truth: the very innocence that fueled their romance became the first casualty of Barry’s ascent to the summit.
While other couples were planning furniture layouts, Barry was already hearing a different siren song—the deafening roar of a future audience. The “When” of this story is a tragic pivot point in 1965. Just months after their “happily ever after” began, the walls of their modest apartment started to close in. To Barry, Susan represented the life he was supposed to want—a stable, quiet, Brooklyn existence. But to the artist emerging inside him, she was an anchor holding back a ship that desperately wanted to sail into the unknown. The scandal lies in the brutal suddenness of the fracture. One day they were high school sweethearts sharing a soda; the next, he was walking out the door, effectively murdering their shared future to birth a persona that would eventually conquer the charts.
Why did this “innocent” love have to die so violently? Because the industry Barry was about to enter in the mid-sixties had no room for a married man with a past. They wanted a blank slate. They wanted a romantic fantasy. Susan Deixler became a “complication” to be solved with an annulment paper. As Barry traded the streets of Brooklyn for the bright lights of Manhattan, he didn’t just leave a wife; he left the only person who loved the man before the myth.
This introduction strips away the 50 years of sequins to reveal the ghost of a 19-year-old boy who was terrified that he couldn’t be both a husband and a star. The emotional stakes are staggering: how many hits is a soul worth? As we look back at their “innocent” beginning, we see the blueprint of a tragedy. It was a love story that didn’t end in a fight, but in a disappearance—a teenage girl left holding the wreckage of a dream while the boy she loved transformed into a global icon who would spend the next five decades pretending she never existed.