Bonnie Raitt Ain’t Gonna be Your Sugar Mama No More
But Bonnie liked the feeling of being somewhat different. “I always looked down on those kids in L.A.,” she said. “If I hadn’t gone away in the summer, I would have become a real cheerleader, L.A. Westwood kind of kid, gone to UCLA and majored in Spanish. That kind of stuff.”
The camp was run by friends of her parents, fellow Quakers, and the counselors were college students from Swarthmore, Antioch and Reed, many of them into the peace movement, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. Bonnie found herself itching to be older than she was.
“I took to wearing a peace symbol around my neck when I was 11, around 1961. It represented my whole belief! And I used to wear olive green tights and black turtlenecks and I had a pair of earrings — my mother wouldn’t let me pierce my ears, but I had a pair of hoop earrings. I’d grow my hair real long so I looked like a beatnik.”
But Bonnie wasn’t just playing make-believe. “Being a Quaker, Ban the Bomb was a reality since I was six. I mean, at Quaker meetings at Christmas time we’d decorate trees with ornaments and dollar bills. We were getting money for Algerian refugees. And the whole thing was to learn about Christmas in other countries. I was real aware of the Third World getting ripped off, that kind of thing.”
John Raitt was a member of Fellowship of Reconciliation and SANE, and he made films for the American Friends Service Committee. But he and Marge were more Quakers than radicals and they didn’t encourage Bonnie in her pursuit of life as a beatnik-come-lately.
“To do what my dad did, you had to live in a house and drive a Lincoln. I always was very embarrassed when we came to Quaker meetings in a nice car ’cause my parents both look larger than life. They’re both really ridiculously good looking. I wanted my parents to drive a VW and my mother to not set her hair. But she had to. I remember my mother explaining to me that it was very important, especially since my dad wasn’t exactly on the top rung as a major star, to drive a car that made it look like you still were.”
When Bonnie talks about the post-Broadway career of John Raitt, her tone assumes a loving defensiveness, a loyal daughter’s bitterness. And she learned from his mistakes. “I could never let anybody control my life like he did.”
After Raitt’s Broadway run ended in 1956, he traveled with stock companies. “He wasn’t washed up; he made more money off Broadway,” said Bonnie, “but it seemed like the circuit was somehow not as glamorous as Broadway.” Raitt now takes his own troupe around the country, performing Kiss Me Kate, Camelot and the like.
“He does what I do,” said Bonnie, “travels around in buses and does shows. In fact, just the other week we passed each other on a highway and waved to each other. Then, when we got to our hotel, I found out he’d stayed there, and he sent me a message: ‘Don’t eat the fried chicken!’
“I thought he was great,” said Bonnie, “and I watched him not get a show. He didn’t really make mistakes. He just seemed to be at the mercy of his agents. He had to wait for someone to write a show and then be in the show and maybe one reviewer would kill it. And it made me mad that he wasn’t on Broadway and all these punk imitators, Robert Goulet and all….”
John Raitt is currently back on Broadway with a revue called A Musical Jubilee. He saw Bonnie perform at Avery Fisher Hall, then attended a party for her at Sardi’s.
“She watched me struggle for years,” he said. “I’d like to think that she learned something about dignity and integrity.”
In her early teens, Bonnie’s music got folky. “I was like Miss Protest,” she said, “the fat Joan Baez for sure.” At 15, she and a friend named Daphne played at a Troubadour hoot night. “We sang combination Scottish and Israeli songs. We were like a female Joe and Eddie. I thought Joe and Eddie were hot stuff.”
Bonnie went to University High School in Hollywood, also home away from home for a few years to Randy Newman and the kids of numerous stars. Bonnie went steady with one of Jerry Lewis’s sons. A semester before she planned to go to Poughkeepsie, New York, to attend a progressive, Quaker-run high school there, she ran for the position of mascot for the Uni Warriors.
“It was a complete joke,” she said, since she’d never attended a football game and didn’t plan to. “I remember telling the guy I was running against, ‘Listen, it’s in the bag. I’m leaving but don’t tell anybody. I just want to see if I can win.’ “
She ran “because no girl had ever run before,” she said. Also, “You had to run for a student body office to have that on your college application to get into a good college.” She won, went to Poughkeepsie, then chose Radcliffe from among seven universities that accepted her.
“Harvard had a ratio of guys to girls that was four to one…they didn’t have a phys. ed. requirement, and they didn’t make you come in at night.” But she was “serious” academically; she was planning to go into African studies.
“I didn’t want to work in America,” she said. “I thought it was kind of hopeless. I didn’t like growing up wealthy and watching all this waste — too many cars, too many pretty people, too many manicured lawns. I lived in the privileged section of Los Angeles. It’s just ironic about having been raised to understand what’s wrong with this country, to want to work with civil rights and yet live in this fantasy world where there’s barely any black people or barely any discrimination.”
