Entertainment

Carly Simon Reveals Sexual Molestation And Information Behind ‘You’re So Vain’

Published on: November 19, 2015 at 5:25 PM
By Amy Feinstein

Carly Simon, who wrote and sang the songs of a generation, is finally coming clean on a variety of issues, including the subject of the song “You’re So Vain.” For years, Simon has been giving hints, but now she has come out to say that at least one verse is about former lover Warren Beatty,

Billboard Magazine says that Carly Simon revealed that the person in question is definitely Warren Beatty.

“For years Simon has been teasing the public with clues about the song’s subject, including in 2004 when she told Regis Philbin that the man’s name contained the letters ‘A,’ ‘E’ and ‘R.’ That left Beatty, but also some of Simon’s other exes like Mick Jagger and James Taylor, to whom she was married for 11 years.”

It was difficult to believe that James Taylor had ever donned an apricot scarf.

“Proving her point, Beatty has long maintained that the song is definitely about him. Simon tells People , ‘I have confirmed that the second verse is Warren,’ adding, ‘Warren thinks the whole thing is about him!’”

Simon said that she will not be naming who other verses might be about, at least not until the exes figure it out themselves.

So why is all of this coming out now? According to People magazine, Carly Simon is about to release a memoir about her life, loves, and sexual abuse, Boys In The Trees. In the new book, Simon reveals that she had her first sexual encounter, with a teenage boy in her neighborhood, when she was just 7 years old.

“Simon, now 70, says she told her older sisters what was happening at the time, but they didn’t believe her – until more than 60 years later when Simon showed them an advance copy of her new memoir, Boys in the Trees , which will be released next week.”

She had told her sisters, but they didn’t believe her. But her mother must have sensed something was off because she banned the teen from the house.

“I was devastated because I thought I was in a romance. Which I think happens to a lot of girls,” she says. “Your libido overpowers everything! You’re so libidinous even at the age of nine and ten. And sometimes there’s an outlet there. I bet in many more cases than we know about there is.”

Simon admits now that she took her time revealing details to anyone, even the child psychologist that her parents sent her to for treatment.

“I knew I had to keep it quiet. I wanted to keep it quiet because I wanted to keep it going,” she says. “And even when Dr. Frunzhaufer thought that he could get to the bottom of it with ‘Twinkle twinkle little star,’ I didn’t want to tell him. I said, ‘Yes he touched me on the chair. I was happy!’”

Rolling Stone spoke to Simon, who is now 70 and a grandmother , about the molestation, and why she protected the boy for so long. She said that at the time she enjoyed the attention and wanted to keep it quiet.

“Looking back on the incident in her People interview, though, she felt disgusted. ‘It was heinous,’ she said. ‘It changed my view about sex for a long time.’”

Simon has used her music and her writings to vent about relationships for most of her career.

Do you have any guesses about the other men in Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”?

[Photo by Joe Corrigan/Getty Images]

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