She was two years into that marriage before she understood who was actually running her household. Her mother in law had picked the apartment and planned the honeymoon. She had also been managing her son’s money, with help from a boyfriend who sold air conditioners for a living, since before the wedding took place.
Leba Strassberg found out how far that arrangement went at her own wedding reception, when her new mother in law stood up and announced that the couple’s weekly allowance was going from $200 to $225.
Her husband was Neil Sedaka, who wrote and recorded “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Laughter in the Rain” across a career that spanned two very different eras of pop music. He died on February 27, 2026, at 86, after 63 years of marriage to Leba.
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The hotel where she met Neil Sedaka
Leba grew up at Esther Manor, a kosher resort her mother ran in New York’s Catskill Mountains with her sister. Esther Goldstein Strassberg and Irene Goldstein Asman were part of a generation of Jewish hoteliers who built what became known as the Borscht Belt, catering to New York City families who came north every summer for decades.
In the summer of 1958, when Leba was around 16, a band from Brooklyn arrived to play the resort for the season. Its piano player, 19 year old Neil Sedaka, later said he knew he would marry her before the two of them had spoken. They dated for four years and married on September 11, 1962, in a ceremony at Esther Manor. The reception, though, was held down the road at the Concord Hotel, a much larger property, so that Leba’s mother could sit as a guest instead of working the event. A syndicated columnist, Earl Wilson, wrote about the wedding the next day under the headline “Neil Sedaka Marries Catskill Mountain Heiress.”
What the headline did not mention was who was actually paying for any of it. Neil’s mother, Eleanor, had eased her son’s original managers out sometime before the wedding and installed her boyfriend, Ben Sutter, in their place, despite his having no experience in the music business. It was Sutter and Eleanor, not Neil or Leba, who had already decided where the newlyweds would live and where they would go on their honeymoon, and who went on controlling the couple’s money for roughly the next two years.
Leba later described her mother in law to Neil Sedaka’s biographer, Rich Podolsky, this way:
“She may have been little, but she was mighty.”
The arrangement ended in 1964, when Neil discovered how much of his earnings Eleanor and Sutter had spent and fired them both. His career slowed anyway over the next several years, as the British Invasion pushed American pop singers off the charts, before a deal with Elton John’s new label, Rocket Records, brought him back in the mid 1970s.
Her children and grandchildren
Leba and Neil had two children. Dara Sedaka became a recording artist, and in 1980 she and her father had a Top 20 hit together, a duet called “Should’ve Never Let You Go.” Marc Sedaka became a screenwriter in Los Angeles and had three children of his own, including twin daughters, Amanda and Charlotte, who sang backup vocals at age five on their grandfather’s 2009 children’s album, Waking Up Is Hard to Do. Their younger brother, Michael, came after.
Unlike Leba, who spent decades declining the public role that came with being Neil Sedaka’s wife, two of her grandchildren appeared on one of his records before they had lost their baby teeth.
One more family connection rarely comes up alongside Neil Sedaka’s name. Leba’s sister is the mother of Harry Enten, the CNN data journalist known for his election night analysis. That makes Neil his uncle by marriage, something Enten has mentioned in his own writing.
What happened after Neil Sedaka’s death
Neil Sedaka’s last public appearance came on February 25, 2026, two days before he was hospitalized in Los Angeles after a sudden medical emergency and died the same day. A death certificate, reported weeks afterward by Fox News, Billboard and Rolling Stone, listed the cause as atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with kidney failure as a contributing factor. He was buried at Beth Olam Cemetery on March 3.
His family released a joint statement calling him “an incredible human being who will be deeply missed.” Leba was not quoted on her own, and she has given no interviews since, the same way she gave almost none during the 63 years before it.
The clearest public account of Leba’s place in Neil Sedaka’s life never came from her. It came from him. On one of his last albums of new material, released in 2010, he dedicated a song to her and credited her in the liner notes as his career guide of more than 50 years. It was the closest he ever came, in public, to saying who had really guided his career, decades after his mother made sure the answer was never up to Leba.
