Pat Benatar was born in Brooklyn, and given the decidedly un-rocking name Patricia Mae Andrzejewski. According to a CBS Sunday Morning profile on Benatar and Neil Giraldo, her future as a music superstar was almost derailed early when she married her high school sweetheart Dennis, after he was drafted into the army to go to Vietnam. Benatar was afraid, she explained, that he wouldn't make it home — so, "like an idiot," she married him at age 19, basically as a show of support. But, "He didn't die," she said, "and I became a bank teller."
Fate intervened, though, when Benatar's friends dragged her to a Liza Minnelli concert, exposing her to a bombastic, showy style of performing that she, having been dabbling in singing all of her young life, felt suited her. She began picking up gigs in clubs, and one Halloween night in 1977, she blew the crowd away while dressed in a Spandex catsuit inspired by the B-movie "Cat Women of the Moon." In the audience that night (via Benatar and Neil Giraldo's official website) was her future manager Rick Newman, and within a couple of years, Benatar was signed to Chrysalis Records.
In 1979, just as her star was beginning to rise, she and Dennis divorced, but she took with her one important souvenir from the marriage: His much-more-rocking surname, Benatar.
