By admin 
Introduction
For millions of fans, Barry Manilow is the man who could turn heartbreak into melody, the soft-spoken superstar whose voice shaped the emotional landscape of the 1970s. But long before the world knew his name, before the standing ovations and the shimmering lights of Las Vegas, there was a small, fragile piece of his past that he never fully outran: his marriage to Susan Deixler—and the stunning moment she chose to wipe that marriage off the record in 1966.
To understand the impact of that decision, you have to picture Barry not as the legend he would become, but as a 20-something kid in Brooklyn, bursting with musical ambition yet paralyzed by a love he couldn’t manage. He met Susan in high school. She was still in her first year; he was preparing to leave. He should’ve been focused on the future, but he fell for her with a kind of reckless intensity that even he later admitted derailed him from music. His friends warned him. He ignored them. By 1964, the young couple had eloped—two teenagers clinging to a love they believed could survive the gravity of ambition.
But ambition, especially Barry’s, had other plans.
Barely one year later, Barry confessed what he could no longer hide: he needed to chase music, no matter the cost. He needed freedom—creative, geographic, emotional. Susan wanted stability. He wanted destiny. Their worlds did not collide; they separated. And in 1966, after two silent, painful years of watching her husband disappear into his artistic awakening, Susan took the one step that shocked everyone who knew them. She didn’t simply divorce him. She annulled the marriage—legally erasing its existence, declaring it void, as if the vows, the promises, and the young love that once felt unbreakable had never happened at all.
For Barry, the moment lingered. He would later call her the “perfect wife,” a powerful confession from a man who rarely exposed the private fractures behind his public persona. For Susan, it was closure. Final. Non-negotiable. A door sealed shut long before Barry ever became the man the world adored.
What remains is a story suspended in emotional amber: a young love that burned too quickly, a decision made in the shadow of heartbreak, and the haunting weight of a marriage struck from the record at the exact moment Barry’s destiny began to rise.
Today, almost sixty years later, that annulment still fascinates fans. Why did she erase him so completely? What did Barry lose? And what did Susan gain by letting go so early—and so definitively?
The answers reveal far more than a failed marriage. They reveal the one truth Barry himself never sang about: that sometimes the past doesn’t fade. It gets deleted.