Carey was a piano prodigy who won a national contest at the Chicago Music Festival at age 13, and performed with the Rochester Symphony Orchestra.

[3][4] After graduating from high school, she was signed by the John Robert Powers Agency and moved to Los Angeles in 1964 with her son to pursue a modeling career.

The following year, she did more television work, had a small part in the classic beach party film How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965), and acted in her first major film, the 1966 Western El Dorado, produced and directed by Howard Hawks, as high-spirited troublemaker Josephine "Joey" MacDonald, acting alongside John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Caan.

Carey went on to co-star in films such as the Elvis Presley vehicle Live a Little, Love a Little (1968), The Sweet Ride (1968), Dirty Dingus Magee (1970), starring Frank Sinatra (in which she played an anachronistically miniskirted Indian girl), and the offbeat Disney dramedy Scandalous John (1971) with Brian Keith.

Carey played the title role in the 1972 Gunsmoke episode "Tara", appeared in the second The Six Million Dollar Man pilot film (1973), and co-starred with Angie Dickinson and Roy Thinnes in the Dan Curtis TV movie The Norliss Tapes that same year.