Judy Collins - Personal Life

Personal Life

Judy Collins contracted polio at the age of eleven and spent two months in hospital in isolation.

Collins has been married twice. Her first marriage in 1958 to Peter Taylor produced her only child, Clark C. Taylor. The marriage ended in divorce in 1965.

In 1962, shortly after her debut at Carnegie Hall, Collins was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent six months recuperating in a sanitorium.

Collins later admitted suffering from bulimia after she had quit smoking in the 1970s. "I went straight from the cigarettes into an eating disorder," she told People magazine in 1992. "I started throwing up. I didn't know anything about bulimia, certainly not that it is an addiction or that it would get worse. My feelings about myself, even though I had been able to give up smoking and lose 20 lbs., were of increasing despair." She also talks at length, in Singing Lessons (pp. 172–190, 238–240) about her years of addiction to alcohol, the damage it did to her personal and musical life, and how it contributed to her feelings of depression. She says that, although she tried other drugs in the 1960s, alcohol was always her primary drug of choice, just as it had been for her father. She entered a rehabilitation program in Pennsylvania in 1978, and she has maintained her sobriety ever since, even through such traumatic events as the suicide of her only child, Clark. In 1992, he committed suicide at age 33 after a long bout with clinical depression and substance abuse. Since his death, she has also become a strong advocate of suicide prevention.

In April 1996, she married designer and fellow activist Louis Nelson, whom she had been seeing since 1979. They live together in New York City.

Her sister, Holly, was married to actor James Keach and they have a son, Kalen.