Carly is the daughter of Richard Simon, who owned part of the publishing company Simon and Schuster. When she shopped her demo tape, Clive Davis at Columbia Records turned her down, so she went to Elektra. She understands how Davis could miss this one, as her father turned down publishing the book Gone With The Wind.
She started dating
James Taylor in November 1971 and married him a year later. They had two children together (Sally in 1974 and Ben in 1977) but she filed for divorce in 1981 - it was finalized in 1983. Simon recalls her early years with Taylor as some of her happiest. They made music together as well, including a hit duet of "
Mockingbird" in 1974.
She won the Grammy for Best New Artist of 1971, beating out Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Bill Withers.
When Simon was in Los Angeles recording her 1974 album Hotcakes, she and James Taylor lived in the house that was later owned by OJ Simpson. She has commented that seeing it on TV during all of the coverage was quite surreal. The house has since been demolished and a new home built in its place.
In 1987 Simon married an insurance broker named Jim Hart after they had been dating just six months. They got divorced in 2006; Hart later published a memoir called Lucky Jim where he came out as gay.
Simon suffers crippling stage fright and rarely performs. When she does, it's usually at small venues.
This makes it hard to promote her albums, but she sometimes gets around it by recording performances. In 1976 she became the first musical guest to appear on Saturday Night Live pre-recorded; in 1987 she did an HBO special that was filmed at two Martha's Vineyard concerts to small groups of invited guests.
In 1964, seven years before she charted as a solo artist, Simon made #73 US with "
Winkin', Blinkin' And Nod" with her older sister Lucy, credited to The Simon Sisters.
Carly Simon's birthdate was usually listed as June 25, 1945, but birth records show that she was born two years earlier. Most major publications started listing June 25, 1943 as her date of birth in the 2010s when these records became widely available.
She went to Sarah Lawrence college, and during this time performed with her sister as The Simon Sisters.
Simon's sisters Joanna and Lucy died a day apart, Joanna on October 19, 2022 at 85 and Lucy the next day at 82. Joanna was a renown opera singer and Lucy wrote music for Broadway musicals, earning a Tony nomination for The Secret Garden in 1991. Both died of cancer, a disease that also claimed the life of their brother Peter, who died in 2018 at 71.
Folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger was a music teacher at Carly Simon's kindergarten in Greenwich Village. He gave her some guitar lessons when she was 3 or 4 years old. "He would bring his banjo and start teaching us these little communist-era songs," she recalled to Mojo magazine. "I remember there was a whole kind of a panic about the material he was feeding to the kids in the school."
While leafing through Rolling Stone magazine, Simon spotted a photograph of James Taylor holding hands with Joni Mitchell, and she felt an unexpected pang of jealousy - despite not knowing him at all. Later, she saw him on the cover of Time magazine and casually declared to her sister, "I'm going to marry him." They started dating about nine months later.
Carly Simon didn't realize her father was a well-known figure until a classmate pointed out his name in a book at the school library. Until then, she thought he owned a shoe store, misinterpreting the name "Simon & Schuster."
Carly Simon's childhood home was a hub for musical legends and intellectuals, but as a young girl she was largely unaware of their significance. Benny Goodman was a regular at her house, playing bridge with her father. Even Albert Einstein was among their guests, but young Carly had no idea who he was. Instead of being starstruck, she was more preoccupied with the dramatic storylines she created for her dolls.
Simon was extremely anxious when she was a little girl. "My fourth-grade teacher said that I was the most sensitive child he'd ever seen,"
she recalled. Simon would stand outside her classroom, physically unable to enter, gagging from nerves, a condition her mother affectionately called being a "worry lump."
Simon said she's lived with an "overdeveloped nervous system" throughout her life. That same hyper-sensitivity would eventually become the engine behind her most intimate songs.
Simon's last public appearance was in October 2019. In July 2026,
she revealed that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and also underwent surgery for skin cancer, which explains her absence. Simon, 83 at the time, said that mobility issues made it hard for her to walk without help, but she had "not stopped living." She also announced a new album,
Comes In Waves, her first with original songs since 2008.
