Summary

Chet Baker was a talented musician with a soulful voice and leading-actor looks, but he turned down Hollywood stardom for a life of playing jazz. Despite struggling with drug addiction and personal demons, Baker’s music continues to have a lasting impact and is still used in films today. His tragic life and wasted potential parallels that of James Dean, embodying the self-destruction often associated with talented artists.

Once called the “Prince of Cool” and “the James Dean of Jazz,” musician Chet Baker was not only a singer with leading-actor looks but blessed with a soulful, vulnerable voice. The trumpet prodigy would skyrocket to fame in the early fifties, then slowly fade away. With a delicate, almost child-like voice, he gathered some detractors, probably some who were annoyed by a jazz singer who looked like a model named the world’s greatest trumpeter before he hit 25. He got the last laugh, his voice haunting jazz fans for the better part of seventy years, his original versions of “Let’s Get Lost” and “My Funny Valentine” are the standards to this day.

Behind that pretty-boy image was an impenetrable, dark personality. Look closely when he sings, and you can see a guy hiding a mouth full of punched-out teeth. His main hobbies included chess, skiing, and opiates. It’s the last one that would define his life. His legacy is memorialized in spotty concert films and occasional albums as he worked odd jobs in between jail stints for the next three decades. By age 26, he had everything a performer could want: respect, sex appeal, charting albums, and a budding film career.

Although a larger-than-life superstar among jazz fans, to larger audiences, he remained essentially an extra rather than the classic brooding matinée hunk. Baker squandered his big break, only fulfilling the first part of the mandatory checklist: “Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.”

Why Chet Baker Rejected Hollywood
Little Bear Productions

After popularizing a subset of the genre known as West Coast jazz, Baker almost immediately found work in films after a hugely successful debut album in 1954. A year later, he snagged a speaking role in Hell’s Horizon, generously granted a special shout-out in the opening credits: “and Introducing Chet Baker and his Trumpet.” Baker was in line for a career not unlike Elvis Presley, at least a three or four-film deal if he stuck around. Using the same lingo to describe a Hollywood shooting schedule as his military service, he summed up his acting debut as an unfulfilling bore. “After three months, I decided that it was time to leave. So, I went AWOL.”

Unfazed by his brush with fame, he once said — looking back on what could have been a great film career in a parallel universe — that what he remembered most fondly was how cheap the marijuana used to be. Fame meant nothing to him. Offered Hollywood stardom on a silver platter, he turned it down to go back on the road to play for sloshed West Germans in dive bars. Not everyone wanted to be James Dean, Baker least of all.

Film producers came knocking still, offering him multiple studio contracts, eager to cash in on his international celebrity status. For unclear reasons, Baker balked at the fame and money, devoting his life to a dying art form instead. The idea of being forced to dry out and straighten out, sitting patiently for days at a time at the whim of directors was torture, which explains why all his later roles were tiny, insignificant cameos.

The jazz lifestyle was taking its toll. As his friends died or were locked up, Baker also slid into a narcotics-induced downward spiral. After a whirlwind trip to Europe, the off-kilter Oklahoman ended up with several arrests due to his drug addiction, being barred entry to Italy, and earning a three-week tour of a German mental health center. While being evaluated, he’d write several songs, showing what he was capable of when he wasn’t strung out. He’d tour and continue to produce new work for years after that, but you could probably call the late fifties his career peak.

A Dwindling Career
Zeitgeist Films

By 1960, he was still getting roles based on what goodwill he hadn’t burnt up based solely on his name in Europe, singing the ballad “Arrivederci” in the Italian teen musical Howlers in the Dock. Yet despite all this instability and illogical life choices — legend goes he pawned his horn to buy drugs when in a pinch and in need of quick cash — he still managed to keep up enough enthusiasm to get work in Hollywood in bit parts, usually as jazz musicians, such as in Stolen Hours in 1963.

He was severely beaten in a drug deal gone awry around 1969 while in San Francisco, the specifics of which were never fully determined. Even the date of the beating is in dispute, some claiming the assault actually occurred at some point in 1966, and still more placing that fateful night in San Fransisco in 1968. Although it would be quite plausible that Baker had suffered numerous attacks in his journey down the gutter, misremembering the precise date or conflating several brawls into one single event in his mind. Leave it to the contrarian Baker to expose the vacuousness and shady side of the hippie, utopian counter-culture. San Fransisco was no refuge for those dealing with addiction; it was more like hell.

Related: 15 Movies That Accurately Portray Drug Addiction

Eventually losing his front teeth in one or several of these misadventures, he had no choice but to alter his career path or starve. Missing teeth turns out to be a huge disadvantage when it comes to playing the trumpet, the deformities forcing him to change instruments. Forging a false prescription for opiates and being arrested for drunk driving, Baker had somehow managed to find a deeper rock bottom.

Chet Baker’s Legacy

Thanks to a methadone prescription, he took a second shot at a career resurgence in the seventies, with fragments of his genius shining through. However, his demons caught up with him in Amsterdam, and he slipped off the ledge of his hotel room window while high on heroin and cocaine. Authorities ruled it an accidental death, though, like everything in his life, this is similarly shrouded in mystery. Rumors insinuate he might have made new enemies across the Atlantic, unrelated to the ones that beat him in California. The final video recordings of him show Baker as remarkably sharp-witted and in good spirits all the same, fueling those rumors.

Although his most famous album was selected by the Grammy’s to enter their posthumous Hall of Fame for its historical significance, Baker’s celebrity is lost on anyone under sixty. Despite that, his music is still stubbornly popping in films decades after his mysterious death in 1988, including the L.A. Confidential soundtrack, and in time-appropriate scenes of Matt Damon doing a very intentional imitation of Baker in his turn as Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley. He was done with the movies, but they weren’t done with him, harvesting his legacy.

In time, he got his own biopic starring Ethan Hawke called Born to Be Blue. There’s certainly a lot of material for biopic fodder. Baker, against the odds, lived to be 57 unlike fellow sports car enthusiast James Dean, yet, in a weird way, he embodies the same tragic self-destruction and wasted potential that Dean did. It just took Baker thirty extra years to reach the same inevitable end. Stream Born to Be Blue on AMC+.