‘Carousel’ Star Raitt Circles Back to Fullerton

John Raitt first sang at Plummer Auditorium in December 1932--as one of the three wise men in the Fullerton Union High School Christmas pageant.

Last week on the same stage, he was the wise man again--not playing, just being. At 84, he had returned to share knowledge gained in a long career as one of the leading men of Broadway musicals. His audience: about 50 kids from today’s crop of aspiring performers at his alma mater.

Raitt, the tall, now slightly stooped elder statesman, sat on a high wooden stool in front of them, his back to the filigreed gothic hall and its sea of red-upholstered seats. With his full, white head of tousled hair and his chiseled features, Raitt resembled Andrew Jackson gazing from a $20 bill.

The teens and a few younger kids sat rapt on risers. They were a week into rehearsals for the annual school musical, “Carousel.” And where “Carousel” is concerned, Raitt is practically Moses. In April 1945, he began a two-year run on Broadway in the lead role of Billy Bigelow, the conflicted, doomed antihero of the Rodgers and Hammerstein show. “Carousel” became a part of Broadway history, and so did Raitt, who swept three best-actor awards.

“I believe a lot in circles in life,” Raitt told the kids.

And then he told them about the most remarkable circle of all. How he, a college student, and Rosemary Kraemer, who had been a few years behind him at Fullerton High, fell in love, decided to marry, and were split apart by her wealthy parents. How her folks weren’t keen on their only daughter marrying a prospective track and football coach. How the fact that they were Catholic and he was Presbyterian was given as the reason the marriage couldn’t be. And how, after meeting just once more during the intervening 41 years, they found each other and started the love story all over again.

Raitt had begun his two hours with the cast of “Carousel” talking about his upbringing in Fullerton. He made his first mark not as a singer, but as an athlete. As a senior in 1935, he won the state championship in the shot put and in the long-distance football throw--a 220-foot heave that, he quipped, has never been bested. The event was discontinued a few years after he set the record.

He talked about developing a love of singing at the YMCA camp run by his father, Arch, a founder and longtime director of the North Orange County YMCA. About how, as a high school senior, he sang in the chorus for his first musical at Plummer, “Desert Song.”

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Then it was on to the essence of his visit: imparting something to these youngsters that would help them through “Carousel,” and maybe stick with them for as long as they perform.

“Singing is telling the story,” Raitt said. It’s not about who can belt out a song the hardest, sustain a note the longest, sing the note the purest. It is, he said, about capturing the hearts and minds of people by making the characters seem alive and real.

In turn, four of the lead actors sang under Raitt’s inspection.

Jamie Hutchison went first. Standing by the piano, she fixed a smiling, winsome gaze on Raitt and sang “If I Loved You.” Then the elder statesman moved to her side and reprised the number as a duet, ending with a hug.

To Jamie, Raitt was only an august name on the Fullerton High roll of distinguished alumni and the voice of Billy Bigelow on her original-cast CD of “Carousel,” which she had brought for him to sign. Until that moment, which came to mean everything to her. “He just hugged me and said, ‘You did a beautiful job.’ Nothing can replace the hug he gave me.”

Raitt has been teaching master classes for the last 18 years as a fixture of the American Center for Music Theater. He and his teaching partner, director-choreographer Paul Gleason, give lessons at USC and other campuses. He still performs, sometimes at the small John Raitt Theater he and Gleason established in Hollywood, and sometimes in concerts and benefit shows.

At Plummer, he ended the evening by doffing his houndstooth jacket and singing “Soliloquy,” carnival scamp Billy’s show-stopping, nearly seven-minute dramatic monologue from “Carousel” about his hopes and fears as a father-to-be.

The kids smiled and their faces shone as Raitt gestured with his hands and pivoted on his feet, letting emotions shift and build as he illustrated what he had been telling them.

“I must confess, it was a lot easier to do 56 years ago,” he said after long applause had died down.

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Maybe hearing love songs sung by 17-year-olds carried Raitt back to his own love story in Fullerton. Rosemary was 17 when her parents ordered them apart.

“In those days, you listened” Raitt told the high school kids.

He and Rosemary saw each other once more, eight years later. Raitt, then a leading singer for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, sang for a Kiwanis Club function in Fullerton. Both of them had married.

“I just saw him in the reception line,” Rosemary Raitt recalled in an interview from their home beside a golf course in Pacific Palisades. “I just kind of closed myself off. I didn’t want to dwell too much on it.” She was angry and mortified when her mother, standing next to her, grabbed the now-prominent singer and told him, “You were our favorite. We made a mistake.”

Rosemary, a descendant of the Yorba family, 18th-century Spanish settlers and huge landowners after whom Yorba Linda is named, did not pay attention to John Raitt’s career. She was busy bringing up two families in two marriages--one to a politically active lawyer and state Assembly member, the other to the founder of Host International, a company that ran restaurants and gift shops at airports.

She and her second husband, Hulsey Lokey, lived in Malibu and became major benefactors of Pepperdine University. In 1981, Wesley Kewish, the old high school buddy who had set Raitt up with his first blind date with Rosemary, called him after attending his son’s law school graduation at Pepperdine.

“Wes said, ‘I ran into Rosemary. She’s a widow now, and she looks pretty good,’ ” Raitt recalled. The musical star, who has two sons and rock-star daughter Bonnie Raitt from his first marriage, had recently been divorced for the second time. He called his old flame.

“It was fast and furious and it’s been wonderful,” Rosemary Raitt said of their eight-month courtship and a marriage now in its 20th year.

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When they married, Raitt gave her 41 hand-carved wooden Santas to hang on their Christmas tree. He has added another each Christmas since, and their friends and family have contributed lots of other St. Nicks to trim the Santa Claus tree, which they set up each year in Rosemary’s study.

After “Carousel,” Raitt went on to star in “The Pajama Game,” (both the 1954 Broadway musical and the 1957 film, which featured Doris Day as his love interest). He has been a touring warhorse for most of his career, starring on the road in “Zorba,” “Camelot,” “Man of La Mancha,” “South Pacific” and others.

Billy Bigelow is the best part he ever had, he told the teens, whom he plans to see again when he catches their opening night March 23. But the best line of his career, he told them, was the one he came up with when he approached Rosemary’s door for the first time since their young love was wrecked.

“She said, ‘What do you see?’ And I said, ‘The same eyes I saw 41 years ago.’ ”