By admin 
Introduction
If you peel back the layers of hairspray, the rhinestones, and the blinding lights of the Las Vegas strip, you will find a faded black-and-white photograph that Barry Manilow cannot look at without flinching. It is a picture of two kids in Brooklyn, standing at an altar, promising to love each other until death do them part.
This is the story of Susan Deixler, the girl who had him first.
Long before he was the “King of the Fanilows,” Barry was just Barry Pincus, a skinny, awkward kid at Eastern District High School in Williamsburg. In the chaotic noise of New York, he found a quiet harbor in Susan. Their love story wasn’t a Hollywood script; it was painfully, beautifully real. They were the couple everyone rooted for—the shy piano player and the “perfect” girl next door. It was a romance built on malt shop dates, subway rides, and the innocent belief that love was enough to conquer the world. In 1964, at just 21 years old, they married. It should have been the beginning of a happily-ever-after.
Instead, it was the beginning of the end.
The tragedy of Barry and Susan isn’t that they fell out of love. It’s that Barry fell in love with something else: The Music.
In a confession that remains one of the most brutally honest in celebrity history, Manilow later admitted that he was not ready to be a husband because his mistress—the piano—was too demanding. He described his ambition during that time as a “monster.” He would come home to Susan, the perfect wife who was waiting with dinner and unconditional support, and he would feel suffocated by his own inability to be present. His mind was always on the next chord, the next arrangement, the next step up the ladder.
One year. That is all it took for the dream to die.
Barry walked away from the marriage not because Susan did anything wrong, but because he knew he was going to destroy her if he stayed. He chose the lonely road of ambition, leaving the girl who loved him for him, not for his fame. Susan Deixler wasn’t a groupie; she was the only person who knew the boy behind the mask. For decades, Manilow kept this “starter marriage” hidden, a secret chapter of innocence that didn’t fit his bachelor superstar persona. But looking back now, that high school romance stands as the last moment Barry Manilow was truly human, before he became an icon. It asks the haunting question: Does the applause of millions really make up for the silence of the one person who truly knew your heart?