For years, Getty Images rarely photographed Susan Crow without a man’s name landing next to hers in the caption, whether it was backstage at a Billy Joel show in Madison Square Garden or leaving Radio City Music Hall together on the night of his final performance. Bennett died in July 2023, and the pairing did not stop, it just changed who filled the second name. His son Dae appeared beside her at an Alzheimer’s Association event that October. His son Danny stood in for him at the Grammys the following February. The pairing continued for the better part of two years.
A few facts worth knowing up front:
- Susan Crow was born in San Francisco in September 1966
- Tony Bennett, born in 1926, was forty years older than her
- They married in 2007, after twenty three years together
- Bennett died on 21 July 2023, at ninety six, after several years living with Alzheimer’s disease
- She now goes by Susan Benedetto and still leads Exploring the Arts, the nonprofit the couple founded in 1999
Table of Contents
Running his fan club before the two of them had properly met
Susan Crow’s connection to Tony Bennett began before she was born. In 1966, while her mother Marion was pregnant with her, Marion and her husband Dayl went to see Bennett perform in New York. When a cigar seller working the room offered to take their photograph, Marion joked that she would only pose for one with Bennett himself. Ten minutes later, the same woman came back and said, “He’ll see you in his dressing room.” Bennett posed with the couple, not knowing the baby Marion was carrying would grow up to become his wife. Susan grew up hearing the story from her mother, who had loved Bennett’s music long before Susan existed.
She was twelve when she started running his fan club out of San Francisco, phoning local radio stations to request his records and using the position to get backstage a handful of times. At seventeen, she finally met him properly and asked him to sign that old photograph of her pregnant mother. The year she turned eighteen, she heard that Bennett, then in his late fifties, was booked for a private show at the Fairmont Hotel. She rang the hotel directly and reached him. “Sure, come up and be my date,” he told her. She went, without quite realising he meant it literally. He rang her again two weeks later.
They built something together long before they married
By 1999, Crow and Bennett founded Exploring the Arts, a nonprofit supporting arts education in public schools. Two years later they opened the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, a public high school in Bennett’s old Queens neighbourhood. Crow taught social studies there and later became assistant principal, on top of running the charity that helped pay for the building.
They did not marry until 2007, twenty three years after that phone call to the Fairmont. “We just decided to do it,” she told People shortly after the wedding. “It was just one of those things.” What did change was her name. She took Bennett’s real surname, Benedetto, one he once told her means “the blessed one.”
When he began forgetting the names of his own musicians
Bennett was in his late eighties when he started forgetting the names of players he had worked with for years. Benedetto’s response was practical. She had their names written out and placed on the piano so he would not forget them. When the forgetting did not ease, he was the one who asked to see a doctor, something she later told the Alzheimer’s Association was unlike him.
A neurologist, Dr Gayatri Devi, diagnosed him with Alzheimer’s disease in 2016. Because the family wanted Bennett to keep performing without an audience watching for signs of decline, they kept the diagnosis private for five years. When Devi eventually asked whether he should stop, Benedetto answered on his behalf. “He wants to keep singing,” she told the doctor, recalling the exchange years later. Devi’s response, in Benedetto’s telling, was to let him.
The diagnosis became public in February 2021, through an interview with AARP The Magazine. That August, Bennett gave his final two shows, on the third and the fifth, at Radio City Music Hall in New York, singing alongside Lady Gaga both nights. For the next two years, Benedetto handled nearly all of his daily care herself, bringing in professional help only in his final months, once she could no longer lift him on her own.
Because of You, first and last
Bennett died on 21 July 2023, in New York, at ninety six. His family gave no official cause of death, only noting that he had lived with Alzheimer’s for years. In his final days, Benedetto told TODAY, he asked her what he should sing that day, the way he always had. She suggested “Because of You,” the song that had given him his first number one hit back in 1951, more than seventy years earlier. Near the end, he told her the same thing most mornings: “Susan, you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Her name still tied to the charity, and briefly to a lawsuit
Photographs of Benedetto in public kept pairing her with a Bennett name. She appeared with his son Dae at an Alzheimer’s Association event in October 2023, and with his son Danny at the Grammy Awards the following February. Through it all, she stayed on as President of Exploring the Arts, still attending the charity’s annual events, still tied publicly to the school she and her husband had built together.
She has also turned up, briefly, in a family matter unconnected to any of that. Two of Bennett’s daughters from an earlier marriage sued their brother Danny in 2024 over how he has managed their father’s trust. Benedetto is named in the case only because she is listed as one of the trust’s beneficiaries, not because either side has accused her of anything. The dispute was still unresolved in early 2026.
Not until April 2025 did a Getty caption finally read that she had attended an event on her own, with no other name beside hers.
A walk in San Francisco, in his memory
In 2025, Benedetto returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had grown up, and connected with the Alzheimer’s Association’s Northern California and Nevada chapter. That October she walked in the group’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s at Bay Front Park in San Francisco, leading a team named after Bennett’s own lyric, I Left My Heart in San Francisco. In a post on her late husband’s Instagram account beforehand, she wrote that she could not imagine ever living without the grief of missing him, but that she was becoming more able to live with it each day. She called the walk “my first real steps since Tony’s passing,” something she was doing in his honour.
It was the most independent thing she had done publicly since his death. It was also, by her own description, still entirely about him.
Whether that adds up to devotion completed or a life that never quite made room for a separate chapter isn’t something Benedetto has addressed head on. Across nine years of interviews about her husband, nobody has really asked her that question directly, and she has not raised it herself.
