Susan Deixler: The Story of Barry Manilow’s First Wife

Susan Deixler occupies a small but enduring corner of pop music history as the first wife of Barry Manilow, one of the best-selling recording artists of all time. Long before Manilow became known for hits like Mandy and Copacabana, he was a teenager in Brooklyn falling for a classmate named Susan Deixler. Their brief marriage ended decades before he found lasting love with his longtime manager, Garry Kief, but Susan Deixler has remained a quiet point of curiosity for fans who want to understand the singer’s early life. This piece pulls together what is publicly known about Susan Deixler, from her Brooklyn upbringing to her decades spent as a community fixture in Northern California.

Susan Deixler’s Early Life in Brooklyn

Susan Deixler was born to Nettie and Al Deixler and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she attended Eastern District High School in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was there that she met a bespectacled, musically inclined underclassman named Barry Manilow. According to accounts from former classmates, Susan Deixler was a popular, well-rounded student who packed her senior year with activity: she served as student government president, sang in the chorus, took part in the Chemistry Squad and Bowling Club, competed as a swimmer, and sat on both the Orientation Committee and the City and Boro Council. One classmate later described her as a bubbly presence at Eastern District, someone who practically nobody disliked.

Susan Deixler was a year behind Barry Manilow in school, and the two began dating during her junior year. She had studied piano herself, and by most accounts, she was genuinely supportive of Manilow’s early musical ambitions at a time when his path toward a music career was far from guaranteed. Her senior yearbook reportedly listed an intention to study nursing at Miami University, suggesting that music stardom was never part of her own plan, even as she encouraged it in the young man she was dating.

The Marriage of Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow

The relationship between Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow deepened through their teenage years, and the couple eventually decided to marry. Their families, however, did not make it simple. The Deixlers wanted an elaborate wedding for their daughter, while Manilow’s mother, Edna, and stepfather, Willie Murphy, resisted the expense. Rather than continue navigating the tension, the couple, then 21 and 20 years old, chose to elope. During a lunch break in 1964, Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow were married in a judge’s chambers at New York City Hall.

That civil ceremony did not satisfy the Deixler family, who declined to recognize it and would not allow the newlyweds to live together until a rabbi formally solemnized the marriage. A second ceremony followed in a rabbi’s office with both sets of parents present. The following week, the Deixlers hosted a lavish wedding reception for the couple, though Manilow’s side of the family was largely left off the guest list, and his parents chose to skip the event in protest. Not long after, the Murphys held their own reception, this time excluding Susan Deixler’s side of the family, effectively giving the young couple a fourth version of a wedding celebration within a matter of weeks.

Despite the eventful start, the marriage between Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow did not last. Reports indicate the union fell apart within roughly a year and a half, and it was ultimately annulled around 1966, with Susan Deixler citing fraud on Manilow’s part in her filing. The two never had children together, and Susan Deixler chose not to remarry in the years that followed. Manilow has spoken in later interviews about how consumed he was by his budding music career during that period, admitting that he was out working every night as a young musician and was not, in his own words, ready to settle down. He has also called Susan Deixler the perfect wife, while acknowledging that his absorption in his craft made the marriage difficult to sustain.

Life After Barry Manilow

Following the end of her marriage, Susan Deixler moved away from the spotlight and eventually settled in Point Reyes Station, a small community in Marin County, California. It was there that she built a second identity entirely apart from her connection to Manilow, one rooted in community service rather than celebrity. Susan Deixler became known locally as a devoted advocate for the region’s older residents, spending more than three decades as the Senior Services Manager for West Marin Senior Services. In that role, she is credited with helping to establish a senior swim program at Heart’s Desire Beach and launching a community food pantry aimed at giving local seniors reliable access to fresh, high-protein food.

Over the years, Susan Deixler earned a reputation as what locals have called a West Marin Original, recognized repeatedly for her sustained commitment to elder care in the region. She also worked for a time as a holistic healer, offering therapies such as acupressure, and became a familiar face around Point Reyes Station, often described by neighbors as someone who could be spotted browsing local charity shops or driving through town in her well-worn car. Unlike her former husband, Susan Deixler largely avoided public life, choosing instead to build a modest, service-oriented existence far from the entertainment industry that shaped her teenage years.

It’s worth noting that some of the more colorful descriptions of Susan Deixler’s home and daily routine circulating online originate from secondhand fan accounts rather than verified reporting, and readers should treat those specific details with some caution, even as the broader outline of her life in Point Reyes is well documented.

Susan Deixler’s Rare Public Statement

Susan Deixler kept a notably low profile for decades, declining to discuss her brief marriage to Barry Manilow even as his career soared and his personal life became a subject of public fascination. That changed in 2015, when Manilow, who had kept his relationship with Garry Kief private for more than three decades, publicly confirmed that the two had quietly married in April 2014. The news made headlines around the world, in part because Manilow had spent years navigating fears that revealing his sexuality might alienate the devoted fan base he’d built.

Amid the coverage of Manilow and Kief’s marriage, reporters sought out Susan Deixler for comment, and she broke her long-held silence with a brief but warm statement. She said she wished her former husband well and was happy for him, adding that she was glad he had found love and happiness. When pressed further about their shared past, Susan Deixler kept her remarks measured, describing the relationship as ancient history that she had little interest in revisiting. It was one of the only times Susan Deixler has spoken publicly about her connection to Manilow, and it offered fans a small but telling glimpse into how she has viewed their teenage marriage in hindsight: not with bitterness, but with the kind of distance that comes from having built an entirely separate life.

The Continued Public Interest in Susan Deixler

Public curiosity about Susan Deixler has never fully faded, and it tends to spike each time Barry Manilow’s name returns to the news cycle, whether through a tour announcement, an award, or a harder story like his 2025 disclosure that he was being treated for early-stage lung cancer. For longtime fans trying to trace the full timeline of Manilow’s life, Susan Deixler marks the starting point, the era before the capes, the chart-topping ballads, and the Las Vegas residencies, when he was still an unassuming Brooklyn kid whose earliest champion was the girl he was dating in high school.

Part of what sustains that curiosity is the sharp contrast between how Susan Deixler and Barry Manilow each handled the decades after their divorce. While Manilow spent a career in the public eye, Susan Deixler moved in the opposite direction entirely, settling into a small coastal town and dedicating herself to work that had nothing to do with celebrity. That trajectory, a quiet return to public service rather than an attempt to capitalize on a famous former marriage, is unusual enough that it continues to draw attention on its own. For many readers, Susan Deixler has become less a footnote in someone else’s biography and more a small case study in choosing privacy over visibility, even when visibility was readily available to her.

A Life Defined on Her Own Terms

Ultimately, Susan Deixler’s story is less about Barry Manilow than it is about the choices she made after their marriage ended. She could have leaned into the attention that comes with having once been married to one of music’s most recognizable performers. Instead, Susan Deixler built a life defined by steady, largely anonymous service to her community, first as a holistic healer and later as a longtime advocate for the seniors of West Marin. Her one significant public comment about Manilow, offered with grace and without resentment when he finally married the man he had loved in secret for years, suggests a woman who made peace with her past long before the world came asking about it.

For fans piecing together the full picture of Barry Manilow’s life, Susan Deixler remains an essential, if understated, part of the story. She was there at the beginning, before the fame, the hits, or the persona, and she has spent the decades since quietly proving that a life outside the spotlight can be just as meaningful as one lived within it.

Conclusion

Susan Deixler’s connection to Barry Manilow lasted only a few years of a life that has now spanned more than eight decades, yet it remains the detail most people associate with her name. What distinguishes Susan Deixler from many former spouses of famous performers is what she did with the decades that followed: she moved away from New York, built a career centered on caring for others, and became a genuine fixture of her Northern California community rather than a footnote defined solely by an early marriage. Her brief, gracious comment about Manilow’s marriage to Garry Kief remains one of the only times she has addressed their shared history publicly, and it reflects the same quiet dignity that has marked the rest of her post-Brooklyn life. Susan Deixler’s story is a reminder that the people who appear briefly in a celebrity’s biography often go on to write far richer chapters of their own.

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