It was a terrible marriage, says Jerry Samuels. Loveless, passionless. For 13 years, he and Bobbie were partners only on paper.

They kept separate bedrooms, separate bank accounts. They shopped alone, cooked alone, ate apart.

"A disaster," she says, "from the beginning."

Their cruise to Bermuda in September 1996 was no honeymoon, either. "He slept during the day and then spent the nights in the lounge at the piano," Bobbie says. "I stayed by the pool."

They'd known each other for a dozen years when they decided to marry, having been introduced by a mutual friend, a singer known as "Cookie, the Last of the Red Hot Mamas."

Jerry represented Cookie. Since 1984, Jerry had run a talent agency out of his Oxford Circle rowhouse, handling jugglers, clowns, accordionists, magicians, and one-man bands.

He performed from time to time as well, but always other people's songs, and never the one that made him famous - notorious, actually.

In 1966, under the name Napoleon XIV, he had an instant smash in the novelty tune "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" The song shot up the charts, then disappeared just as quickly. Mental-health groups had found his act insulting.

Bobbie had been an entertainer herself, singing and dancing as a preteen on a Philadelphia TV show called The Children's Hour.

In 1996, Rhino records asked Jerry to make a sequel to his hit for a 30th-anniversary edition of his album, and Bobbie was in the studio, slapping her thighs to the beat.

Upon the CD's release, Jerry tracked her down to give her a copy. They started seeing each other and within months got married.

Sitting together at China Gourmet, a restaurant near their home, they disagree whether there had ever been a spark. She says yes; he says no.

They spent their marriage in opposite ends of the house, sometimes not speaking for months.

"I couldn't stand to be in the same room with him," she said. She was angry - angry over the way he had her running errands for the wedding, angry over the way her first marriage had left her in financial trouble, angry over the death in short succession of her mother, sister, and brother-in law. She never opened up to Jerry, she says.

They tried therapy once. It didn't work. Why did they stay together?

"I was waiting," Jerry says. "I loved her."

A few months ago she thought of packing. She looked at other places to live, lined up where she would place her nine cats.

Then, on Oct. 3, a Saturday, Bobbie was driving to afternoon Mass. Suddenly she felt as if someone were standing on her chest. She drove home and collapsed at the door.

In 2006, doctors had found a defect in her aortic valve, and she spent several days in the hospital. Jerry never visited her. "I didn't think she wanted me to," he says. And he was right. She didn't.

This time, Jerry responded. He followed her in the ambulance to Aria Health and stuck by her side. And in the emergency room, she turned to him and said words that changed everything:

"I am sorry for anything I ever did."

At first Jerry thought her warmth would pass; after all, people say things when they think they're dying.

But when it turned out she hadn't suffered a heart attack after all, she still felt for him.

"He was just so beautiful to me," she says. "I asked again for his forgiveness."

"Don't be sorry," he told her. "Just be Bobbie."

And they have barely left each other's side since.

This is why they've invited me to their favorite restaurant, because they say stories like theirs need telling. They are an unlikely-looking couple, he in tie-dye, she in horned rims. They can't stop touching each other's arms as they talk.

Since the scare, they wake up each morning, together, and he makes her coffee and an Egg Beaters omelet as she dresses for work at Comcast, where she's an administrative assistant.

They talk on the phone throughout the day. He shops for dinner. Takes care of her cats.

"We are as sure as we can be that this is the beginning of the rest of our lives," says Jerry, who is 71 and madly in love.

Says Bobbie, 66 and finding that life is beautiful all the time, "I have never been so happy."

Contact Daniel Rubin at 215-854-5917 or drubin@phillynews.com.