Susan Deixler is widely recognized as the first wife of legendary singer and songwriter Barry Manilow. Although her marriage to Manilow was brief, her connection to one of the music industry’s most celebrated performers has continued to generate public interest for decades. Susan and Barry were high school sweethearts who married in 1964, long before Manilow achieved international fame. Their relationship ended after a short period, and Susan chose to live a private life away from the spotlight. Despite limited public information about her personal and professional journey, many people remain curious about her background, marriage, family life, and where she is today.
Susan Deixler’s Early Life in Brooklyn
Susan Deixler was born in Brooklyn, New York, in the mid-1940s, the daughter of Al and Nettie Deixler. She grew up in a Jewish family and attended Eastern District High School in Brooklyn, the same school as a shy, awkward teenager named Barry Manilow, a boy who, by his own later account, was fairly certain he didn’t stand a chance with her.
According to Manilow’s autobiography, Sweet Life, Susan was the kind of high schooler everyone knew. She was popular, involved in student clubs, always in motion, and surrounded by friends. Manilow has described her warmly over the years, remembering her as lively, musical, and easy to be drawn to. She played piano, which turned out to matter a great deal: the two of them reportedly spent long evenings together at the keyboard, with Manilow accompanying her while she sang. Music, more than anything else, is what pulled two very different Brooklyn teenagers together.
They started dating as young teens, somewhere around fourteen or fifteen years old, and stayed together through the rest of high school, graduating in 1961. For a couple of kids who met in a hallway, the relationship had real staying power, enough that, three years after graduation, they decided to get married.
Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow: A Short Marriage, a Fast Ending
Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow married in 1964, when she was 19, and he was 20. Because their families were observant, they reportedly held two ceremonies, a civil one, and a second held on Long Island so the marriage would be recognized by a rabbi, before settling into an apartment in Greenwich Village.
At the time, Manilow was not yet Barry Manilow, the recording artist. He was a young musician trying to break in, arranging songs for Broadway productions and picking up work wherever he could, including a stretch playing piano at New York’s Continental Baths. The marriage, by most accounts, was a genuinely happy one in its early months. But Manilow’s career started moving quickly, and with it came late nights, constant work, and long stretches away from home. He has said plainly, in multiple interviews over the decades, that he simply wasn’t ready to be a husband, that he was, in his own words, more interested in a wondrous musical adventure than in settling down.
The marriage lasted a little over a year. It was formally ended in early 1966, reported by some outlets as an annulment and by others as a finalized divorce, after less than eight months of actual married life. Manilow has never placed any blame on Susan for the split. If anything, he’s gone out of his way to do the opposite, repeatedly calling her the perfect wife in interviews and in his memoir, and insisting the marriage failed because of his own immaturity and single-minded focus on his career, not because anything was wrong between them.
It’s worth pausing on that detail, because it says something about how the two of them have handled the decades since. There’s no public record of bitterness on either side. When Manilow married his longtime partner and former manager, Garry Kief, in 2014 and came out publicly a few years later, Susan responded with what by all accounts was simple goodwill. Asked about it by a reporter, she reportedly said she wished him well, and made clear that her own life, her children, her work, her privacy, was what actually mattered to her, not her connection to a famous ex-husband from half a century earlier.
How Susan Deixler Chose a Life Away From the Spotlight
This is the part of Susan Deixler’s story that’s easy to skip past, because it’s less dramatic than a Brooklyn romance or a young marriage falling apart. But it’s arguably the more interesting part: after 1966, she made a clear and consistent choice to step out of public life entirely, and she has kept that choice for close to sixty years.
She relocated to California, eventually settling in West Marin, a rural stretch of Marin County known for small towns, ranchland, and a slower pace of life than anything resembling Hollywood or the music industry. Some accounts describe her going on to work as a holistic healer, offering therapies in the area. Other reporting ties her to decades of work in senior services in the same region, including a long tenure managing services for older adults in West Marin and helping establish community programs like a senior swim program and a food pantry aimed at making sure local seniors had access to fresh food. The exact shape of her career is described a little differently depending on the source, and there isn’t a single authoritative account that reconciles every detail, but the throughline across all of them is the same: a life oriented around community and caretaking, built far from any stage or spotlight.
Susan Deixler never remarried. She had two children, a daughter named Pauline and a son named Danny, and by her own account has spent most of her adult life focused on them rather than on her brief, decades-old marriage to a man who went on to become one of the best-selling recording artists in American history.
Susan Deixler is now in her late seventies, still living in the same small Northern California community she settled into long ago, reportedly a town with only a few hundred residents. She has given very few interviews over the years, and the ones she has given are notably brief and matter-of-fact. Her general message, when asked about Barry Manilow, tends to boil down to something like: that was a long time ago, I have my own life, and I’m happy for him. It’s a remarkably consistent stance for someone who could, at almost any point over the last six decades, have chosen to cash in on the connection.
Why Susan Deixler’s Story Keeps Resurfacing?
Susan Deixler’s name tends to reappear in the press at predictable moments, usually whenever something happens in Barry Manilow’s life. That’s exactly what happened in December 2025, when Manilow, then 82, announced he’d been diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer after a spot was found on his left lung during an unrelated medical scan. The diagnosis, caught early and classified as Stage 1, led him to postpone a run of arena concerts that had been scheduled for January 2026 so he could undergo surgery. As is often the case with Manilow news, outlets revisiting his life story used the moment to also revisit his first marriage, which is how Susan Deixler’s name ended up back in headlines nearly sixty years after her divorce.
It’s a pattern worth naming, because it’s a little unfair to her. Susan Deixler didn’t ask to be a recurring footnote in someone else’s biography. She built an entire life, decades of community work, raising two children, a home in a place she clearly chose deliberately, that has essentially nothing to do with Barry Manilow. The fact that journalists keep circling back to a 19-year-old’s marriage from 1964 says more about how celebrity coverage works than it does about who Susan Deixler actually is.
What We Don’t Know About Susan Deixler (And Shouldn’t Guess At)
Because Susan Deixler has spent so long avoiding public attention, a lot of what circulates about her online is thin, contradictory, or comes from sources of questionable reliability, old tabloid pieces, secondhand fan forum posts, and aggregator articles that repeat each other without much original reporting. A few things are worth flagging plainly:
- Sources disagree on whether her marriage ended in a legal annulment or a finalized divorce. Both appear in reputable-seeming coverage, and there’s no definitive public record settling it.
- Details about her career path, holistic healer versus senior-services administrator, or possibly both at different points in her life, vary across sources and may reflect different chapters of a life that spanned many decades, rather than a factual error in any one account.
- Some older tabloid writing about her home and daily life leans into unflattering, voyeuristic detail that reads more like an invasion of a private citizen’s life than journalism. She was never a public figure by choice, and there’s a good case for treating that kind of material skeptically rather than repeating it.
That last point matters. Susan Deixler is, by any reasonable definition, a private individual. She became briefly notable because of who she married at 19, not because of anything she has done since to seek attention. The respectful way to tell her story is to focus on what she’s actually chosen to share and what’s well-corroborated, and to leave the rest alone.
The Bigger Picture on Susan Deixler
There’s a version of this story that’s easy to write: young sweethearts marry, fame gets in the way, marriage ends, man becomes a superstar, woman fades into obscurity. It’s a tidy narrative, and it’s not wrong exactly, but it flattens Susan Deixler into a supporting character in someone else’s success story.
The more accurate version is a little less tidy and a lot more interesting. Susan Deixler had a short marriage in her late teens to a musician who wasn’t ready to be a husband. She didn’t spend the next sixty years defined by that. She moved across the country, built a career centered on caring for other people, raised two children on her own terms, and settled into a small community where, by every account, she’s genuinely known and respected, not for anything to do with Barry Manilow, but for the work she actually did there.
Barry Manilow, for his part, has never had anything but kind things to say about Susan Deixler. That mutual lack of bitterness, sustained across nearly six decades and a very public second act to his own life, is its own kind of quiet remarkable thing. It suggests two people who simply grew into very different lives at nineteen and twenty years old, and who were mature enough, eventually, at least, to let each other go without resentment.
Conclusion
Susan Deixler never asked to be a headline, and she has spent nearly sixty years proving she doesn’t need to be one. The most honest way to sum up her story is also the simplest: she built the private, ordinary, meaningful life she wanted, far from the industry that made her teenage sweetheart famous, and she’s held onto that life for a very long time.
Reduce her to a single Wikipedia-style fact, and you’d write: Susan Deixler was briefly married to Barry Manilow in the 1960s. That’s accurate, but it’s not really who she is. Who she is, based on everything that’s actually known about her, is a woman who chose community work over celebrity, privacy over publicity, and a small California town over anywhere the spotlight might have followed her. The next time her name resurfaces in a headline about Barry Manilow’s career or health, it’s worth remembering that Susan Deixler already answered the only question that matters about her own life a long time ago, and the answer was simply to live it, quietly, on her own terms.
FAQs
1. Who is Susan Deixler?
Susan Deixler is best known as the first wife and high school sweetheart of Barry Manilow. She gained public attention due to her brief marriage to the singer before his rise to fame.
2. When did Susan Deixler marry Barry Manilow?
Susan Deixler married Barry Manilow in 1964 when both were young and still at the beginning of their adult lives.
3. How long did Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow stay married?
Their marriage lasted for about two years before it was annulled. Barry Manilow later spoke publicly about the challenges of marrying at a young age.
4. Did Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow have any children?
No, Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow did not have any children during their marriage.
5. What is Susan Deixler doing now?
Susan Deixler has maintained a private life and has stayed away from the public spotlight. There is very little publicly available information about her current personal or professional activities.
