The Price of Being Cool: Chet Baker in Let's Get Lost, directed by Bruce Weber (1988)

 

Poster for the documentary about Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost, directed by Bruce Weber, 1988.

Chet Baker in Let's Get Lost, filmed 1987.

Chet Baker in the 1950's.

The jazz trumpeter Chet Baker had one of the most colorful and tragic life stories in the genre. With all the tragedies and early deaths jazz has seen, that’s really saying something. Briefly, Baker was a heroin addict for the better chunk of 30 years, served 4 months in Rikers Island prison in 1959 on drug charges, served 18 months in an Italian prison for drugs in 1960-61, was deported from almost every country in Europe, lost his teeth, either through a beating or decay due to drug use, had to re-learn how to play the trumpet, and died by falling out of his hotel window in Amsterdam in 1988. Or was he pushed?

Okay, so now add to the equation the fact that Baker was super handsome in his younger days, and sang ballads in a high, aching tenor voice, and you’ll understand why he’s often called “the James Dean of jazz,” and is regarded as an icon of coolness. (Ironically, Baker recorded an album of music from the 1957 documentary The James Dean Story.)

Baker is certainly presented as an icon of 1950’s West Coast cool in photographer Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary Let’s Get Lost. Filmed in glorious black and white, all the better to match up with the photos of young Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost is perhaps too precious and stylized. It’s an entertaining movie to watch, but everything feels very staged.

At the beginning of the movie, we see Baker riding in the backseat of a 1959 Cadillac convertible, with his arms around two girls. Dig, man! What kinda groovy, swingin’ hepcat is this old man? And then you focus on Baker’s face. His eyes, always deeply set even in his youth, now recede even further back in his skull. The rest of his face has sunken around his high cheekbones. His face is crisscrossed with lines and wrinkles, a testament to a life full of hard living. He has an awful, wispy mustache. His full head of dark hair is the one remaining connection to his youth and beauty. If you saw Chet Baker walking down the street in 1987, you’d assume he was a bum who was about to ask you for a dollar or two for bus fare.

The scene is somewhat ridiculous, as Weber is intent on freezing Baker in the 1950’s. It’s not like Chet Baker had a rider in his contracts stipulating that he be provided at all times with a vintage convertible and two gorgeous women to accompany him in the backseat. Weber staged it to make Baker fit his idea of cool.

There’s a recording session, at which Baker is accompanied, for no obvious reason, by Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and retro rockabilly crooner Chris Isaak. It appears the objective was, “Let’s get Chris Isaak, who looks like young Chet Baker, in the same shot as old Chet Baker!”

Baker shot to fame in the mid-1950’s as the trumpet player in Gerry Mulligan’s quartet. Out of nowhere, Baker started winning jazz magazine polls as the best trumpeter. The photographer William Claxton, who took many of the most famous photos of Baker, talks in the movie about how the camera was just drawn to Chet, and how unpretentious Chet was. Baker was a natural. This fits perfectly with his musical style—Chet didn’t read music; he played and sang by ear.  

Baker’s trumpet playing and singing styles fit together very well—both were romantic, deeply felt, and unostentatious. At a time when the model for most trumpet players was the rapid-fire virtuosity of Dizzy Gillespie, Baker’s style stood out because he didn’t go on flashy runs or use much of the upper register of his instrument. But Baker was good enough to have impressed Charlie Parker when he played with Parker in 1952. Baker’s trumpet style had a great deal in common with Miles Davis. Their tone on the horn is quite different, but the effect they were going after was the same: how can I get across the emotional message of this song in as few notes as possible? Like Baker, Davis wasn’t regarded as a virtuoso along the lines of Gillespie or Louis Armstrong, but Davis knew how to get the feeling of the song across. Davis wasn’t going to hit 50 high C’s in a row the way Armstrong supposedly could. It’s a testament to Baker and Davis’ shared romanticism that both men could claim “My Funny Valentine” as a signature song.

Baker’s singing style is an acquired taste: after listening to him you could very well ask, is he a great singer or a terrible singer? Baker sang in a remarkably high tenor—high enough that at first you might not be able to discern if it was a male or female singing. Baker also had a very pure tone with almost no vibrato. Amazingly enough, despite all the ways he abused his body, Baker’s voice remained much the same—even in the late 1980’s, he still sounded just like he did in the mid-1950’s. Baker’s vocals varied a lot in quality. After listening to his 1958 version of “Everything Happens to Me,” found on the Riverside album It Could Happen to You, I was convinced that it was a poor match of singer and song. Then I heard a version of “Everything Happens to Me” that Baker had recorded in Europe in 1955-56, and I thought it was fantastic. The song suddenly fit him. (Baker’s European material from that time has been re-issued many times by many different labels.) The conclusion I’ve come to is that Baker was capable as a vocalist of giving excellent performances. Baker’s no match for Frank Sinatra (who is?) but given the right song and setting, he’s a remarkably effective vocalist. At the end of Let’s Get Lost Baker sings Elvis Costello’s song “Almost Blue,” and it’s a beautiful moment.

During the first half of Let’s Get Lost, Weber has convinced us that Chet Baker is the coolest, most handsome guy around. During the second half of the movie, Weber pulls the rug out from under our feet and shows us the real price of being as cool as Chet Baker. Through interviews with Baker’s wives and girlfriends, we see that Baker has isolated himself from other people. I’ve read that for the last decade or so of Chet Baker’s life he didn’t have a checking account, or a permanent address. He was on the move, always looking for the next gig, the next score. I suspect that the only two things in life that Chet Baker really cared about were drugs and music. Everything else was superfluous to him, and so, everything else fell by the wayside.

Diane Vavra, Baker’s then-current girlfriend, doesn’t really have any illusions left about Chet, but she loves him all the same. She says, “He looked like a Greek God to me.” Well, okay, maybe when he was 25, but you met him when he was 50-whatever. More like a ruin of a Greek God. Diane later says, “You really can’t rely on Chet.” Good to know.

There’s a very funny and awkward moment where Diane is looking at photos of young Chet from the 1950’s and she says, “Who is this woman you’re with? She looks Black.” Chet replies, “That was my second wife.” Ah, that old dilemma when your current girlfriend doesn’t know what your ex-wives looked like.

We also meet Carol Baker, an English actress who met Chet in Italy. They had three children together, and we see them hanging out with Chet’s mom in Oklahoma. Notably, we don’t see Chet interact with his kids at all. We meet Ruth Young, a singer who had a relationship with Chet. When recalling what a possible relationship with Chet would be like, she says, “It would be like living with Picasso.” Well, if you’ve got ladies who think you’re Picasso, even when you’re a middle-aged heroin-addicted trumpet player with a new set of dentures who’s trying to get his embouchure back, it’s not my place to tell you to hold off of the crazy ladies who put you on a pedestal.

This is the contradiction of Chet Baker: that someone could lead such a messy shambles of a life, and yet still produce art of great beauty. It’s a paradox, it makes no sense. But despite Weber pulling down the façade of cool around Chet Baker, his music still draws us in. There’s a kind of fragile, emotional honesty in Baker’s singing and playing that speaks to the listener. Baker may have conned the people around him in his personal life, but on record he’s incapable of conning the listener. He doesn’t hide his playing or his singing behind any ironic detachment—in this way, Chet Baker is not cool. His art was a raw nerve, naked and exposed for all to see, the same way that his face became not a mask to hide behind, but a visible road map of all those years spent chasing his obsessions.

Hey, Chet, man, good to see you, Daddy-o! Cool, man, you just keep going where the jazz takes you, you dig, man? All the way out to Edge City, chasing one more high, one more perfect, glorious run of achingly beautiful trumpet notes to wrap that song up in. And you keep it up for so long, until late one night, your foot slips. You catch yourself, exhale deeply, maybe even chuckle at your good luck. But then your foot slips a second time, and this time you can’t catch yourself, and you hurtle towards the ground, the paved bricks of the Amsterdam street suddenly rushing up to meet you…when the police found Chet Baker’s body, they incongruously report that it was the body of a 28-year-old man, rather than a 58-year-old man, as though in death all of those lines suddenly vanished from his face and left him the beautiful, handsome youth he once was, forever cool, even in death.

Movie Review: Lonely Boy, a documentary about Paul Anka, directed by Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig (1962)

Paul Anka in the documentary Lonely Boy, 1962.

Paul Anka with his adoring female fans.

Paul Anka after his nose job, 1961.

Lonely Boy is a 1962 documentary about the career of teen idol Paul Anka, produced by the National Film Board of Canada and directed by Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig. Lonely Boy is only 26 minutes long, but it’s a fascinating glimpse of pop stardom at a very specific and brief moment in history, just after the first wave of rock and roll and before the British Invasion.

Paul Anka had become a pop star from out of nowhere, rising to fame at the age of 16 in 1957 with his first hit, the self-penned “Diana,” which hit number 2 on the Billboard chart. By 1961, when Lonely Boy was filmed, Anka had scored 7 Top Ten singles in the United States. As the documentary and Anka’s manager Irvin Feld make clear, the goal now was to turn Anka into an “all around entertainer.” The thought was that rock and roll wouldn’t last, that it was still just a passing fad, and pop stars needed to branch out and find an older audience if they were to succeed long term in the field of entertainment. Of course, that sounds silly now. But it was the thought behind booking teen idols like Bobby Darin and Anka into the Copacabana nightclub. The models for these young pop stars were Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, singers who had appealed to swooning teenagers, but had found stable careers and wide audiences. The thought was that you had to “mature” along with your audience. It’s the reason why Elvis Presley started a concerted move towards the middle of the road after he returned home from the Army in 1960. Gone was the dangerous rebel Elvis of movies like Jailhouse Rock and King Creole, replaced by the bland, safe, wholesome Elvis of G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii. Bobby Darin and Paul Anka both released live albums recorded at the Copacabana nightclub in 1960, and Anka’s album featured standards like “You Made Me Love You,” “Swanee,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” and “Hello, Young Lovers.” Darin had started recording standards with his 1959 album That’s All, which featured his versions of “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea.” Darin’s Darin at the Copa album also included his own version of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” Darin’s move towards standards was more motivated by his own eclectic tastes than by pure commercialism, but it was similar to what many other teen idols of the time were doing. The idea of trying to be an “all around entertainer” was one that didn’t have much influence on the British Invasion generation of rock stars. No one could imagine Mick Jagger cutting his own “Jagger at the Copa” album. 

While the teen idols of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s are often lumped together as a talentless bunch of manufactured heartthrobs who could barely sing on key, Anka was a truly talented musician who played piano and wrote nearly all of his own hits. Anka also wrote many hits for other people, he penned “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” which was Buddy Holly’s last hit, as well as “She’s a Lady” for Tom Jones, and the English language lyrics to the French song “Comme d’habitude,” which became “My Way.” Anka also wrote the theme song for Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” Anka’s career closely mirrors that of Neil Sedaka, another piano-playing singer and songwriter who scored pop hits in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Both Anka and Sedaka saw their careers as hit makers wiped out by the British Invasion, but they would both mount successful comebacks in the mid-1970’s, as they each scored several more Top Ten singles. 

Lonely Boy follows Anka on several live performances, from the Copacabana to Freedomland, the amusement park in the Bronx. What’s amazing to see in Lonely Boy is the adulation that Anka inspired in his fans. While we’re used to seeing footage of female fans going nuts over Elvis Presley or the Beatles, it’s really interesting to see the same thing happen with Paul Anka, whose fame has not lasted in the same way as Elvis or the Beatles. The first time we see Paul Anka offstage in Lonely Boy, he is signing autographs and kissing the cheeks of his female fans. Anka’s fans are just beside themselves when they see him. It is like a kind of religious experience, as they are literally beyond words when they meet him. To his credit, Anka comes off as a really nice guy in the movie, as he treats all of his fans with kindness, even when they cannot form a sentence in his presence. 

The other theme in Lonely Boy, besides the abiding love that teenage girls harbored for Paul Anka in 1961, is the manufacture of Paul Anka as a pop star. Anka’s manager Irvin Feld, and Anka himself, are very candid about this. Anka says that he was a fat kid as a young teenager, and when he decided to pursue show business as a career, he lost weight and grew his hair out. Feld speaks quite openly about Anka’s nose job, an attempt to perfect Anka’s teen idol looks. 

Feld is open about his unstinting admiration for his client, as he says that he told Paul, “God gave you something that I don’t think he’s given anyone in the past 500 years.” A master of hyperbole, just a moment later Feld says, “I truthfully believe that Paul will be the biggest star, with an overall career, that this world has ever known.” Of course, now both of those quotes sound rather humorous, as no one, probably not even Paul Anka himself, would claim that either of those statements is true. But to be fair to Feld, he’s Paul Anka’s manager, so he’d better think Paul Anka is pretty amazing, right? And since viewers in 2016 know the future-that the Beatles and the other British Invasion groups will sweep Anka off the charts for the rest of the 1960’s, it’s easy to laugh at Feld’s long-range planning. Personally, I thought the funniest thing in the movie is to hear Anka’s Canadian accent suddenly appear when he says “out.”

Lonely Boy is an interesting look at a very talented young man, as we see how hard he has worked to become a star, and imagine how hard he will have to work in the future to remain one in the fickle world of pop music. You can watch Lonely Boy for free here, at the National Film Board of Canada’s website.

Movie Review: Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, directed by Alex Gibney (2015)

Poster for Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, directed by Alex Gibney, 2015. I love that photo of Frank.

Frank Sinatra, circa 1961. Frank wore hats better than anyone.

An intense Frank Sinatra in the studio.

Frank Sinatra, 1970's. Note his trademark orange pocket square-orange was his favorite color.

Frank Sinatra is one of the major figures in 20^th century American entertainment. Few figures before or since have held the public’s imagination for as long as Sinatra did. Sinatra was a cultural touchstone for multiple generations, from the time he emerged as a singer with the Tommy Dorsey band in the early 1940’s until his death in 1998. 2015 is the centennial of Sinatra’s birth, and nearly twenty years after his death Sinatra remains firmly entrenched in American pop culture. 

The 2015 HBO documentary Frank Sinatra: All or Nothing at All offers a four-hour glimpse into Sinatra’s life. The documentary takes its structure from the set list of Sinatra’s 1971 retirement concert. (Sinatra came out of retirement in 1973.) The film’s premise is that the songs Sinatra chose for his retirement concert reflected an overview of his career. I agree with that premise, and the idea behind that premise makes the documentary more than just a “and then he did this” film. 

I’ve written about Frank Sinatra before, covering his years on the Columbia Records label from 1943-1952, my 10 favorite Sinatra albums, and a piece covering the best Sinatra compilation albums. I’m a huge admirer of Sinatra’s amazing talent. 

All or Nothing at All is directed by Alex Gibney, who also directed the superb documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief for HBO. All or Nothing at All is wonderfully made; it’s a great example of documentary making at its finest. The research into Sinatra’s life is deep, and Gibney and his team have unearthed superb video and audio recordings of Sinatra talking candidly about his life and career. There’s a lot of wonderful material on Sinatra’s early life in Hoboken, and his rise to fame signing with the Tommy Dorsey band. Early film clips show how revolutionary Sinatra’s singing style was. Sinatra’s voice was extremely intimate, as he seduces the listener through his ballad singing. It’s easy to see why women went nuts for him. 

The first two hours of All or Nothing at All take us through Sinatra’s rise in the 1940’s to his decline in the early 1950’s, when he was battling vocal problems, more competition from singers like Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Vic Damone, Johnnie Ray, and Eddie Fisher, and a relationship with Ava Gardner best described as tempestuous and doomed. By the end of 1952 Sinatra had been dumped by his record label and MGM had dropped his movie contract. It seemed as though he was headed for the has-been pile. 

The second part of the documentary covers Sinatra’s career from his remarkable comeback in 1953 to his retirement concert in 1971. 1953 was a pivotal year for Sinatra, as he signed a contract with Capitol Records, where he met the arranger Nelson Riddle and created the classic songs and albums that have made him a legend. 1953 was also the year that Sinatra played the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity, one of his finest acting performances, which deservedly won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. I wish that All or Nothing at All focused a little more on Sinatra’s films. Sinatra was a truly talented actor who delivered a number of excellent performances in films like From Here to Eternity, Suddenly, The Man with the Golden Arm, Guys and Dolls, Pal Joey, Some Came Running, and The Manchurian Candidate. But that’s a small quibble.

All or Nothing at All focuses on many of Sinatra’s personal relationships, and there are excellent interviews with Frank’s first wife Nancy, the mother of his three children. The treatment of Sinatra’s other wives was a little more problematic for me. I found Gina Gershon’s voiceover narration of Ava Gardner’s writings to be terribly overdone, and there was just way too much about Mia Farrow, which got boring for me pretty quickly. There’s also just one cursory mention of Sinatra’s fourth wife, Barbara Marx, whose marriage to Frank lasted longer than his other three marriages combined. 

The documentary doesn’t shy away from controversy, covering Sinatra’s famous feud with gossip columnist Lee Mortimer, whom Sinatra knocked out in 1947, after Mortimer had called Sinatra a Communist in his column. Sinatra’s dislike of columnist Dorothy Kilgallen isn’t mentioned, but you can hear him express his feelings towards her in live recordings in the 1950’s and 1960’s. (He was fond of calling her “The Chinless Wonder.”) The film also covers Sinatra’s associations with the Mafia, and his acquaintance with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Sinatra’s children say point blank that Giancana and the Mob tipped the 1960 election to John F. Kennedy by making sure that Illinois ended up in the Kennedy column. What no one ever mentions about the 1960 election is that Kennedy had enough electoral votes to win the election even if he had lost Illinois. Sinatra was very close to JFK, and organized his official Inaugural gala. Eventually Sinatra fell out with JFK after Bobby Kennedy warned his brother to steer clear of Sinatra due to his Mob connections. JFK then canceled a planned trip to stay with Sinatra in Palm Springs, and stayed with Bing Crosby (a Republican!) instead. 

All or Nothing at All does a superb job of focusing on Sinatra’s politics, and his personal beliefs. Sinatra was a staunch Democrat in the 1940’s, who campaigned tirelessly for FDR’s fourth term in 1944, and was an unstinting champion of civil rights for African-Americans long before it was fashionable. The FBI investigated Sinatra for decades, not only because of his Mafia connections, but also because he was regarded as a liberal who might be a Communist. Sinatra gradually grew more conservative, eventually supporting Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. The movie makes a little too much of Sinatra’s political switch, hinting that his support of Republican candidates was linked to his rejection by the Kennedys. I disagree with that. Sinatra worked very hard for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, appearing at a rally at the Houston Astrodome with Humphrey just two days before the election, and filming a TV ad in support of Humphrey. Sinatra endorsed his friend Ronald Reagan in 1970 when Reagan was running for re-election as Governor of California. In the documentary, Sinatra says that he has been friends with Reagan since 1943. Sinatra was no fan of the hippie culture, and that combined with his personal friendship with Reagan likely started his drift rightward. Sinatra endorsed Richard Nixon’s re-election bid in 1972, but due to Democratic nominee George McGovern’s unpopularity, there was a very large “Democrats for Nixon” group that year, so Sinatra’s support of Nixon wasn’t that unusual. I think Sinatra did get more conservative as he got older, but I also think his shift to the right was greatly influenced by his friendship with Ronald Reagan. 

What amazes me about the richness of Frank Sinatra’s life is that All or Nothing at All is a four hour documentary, and yet there’s still so much more of his life that could be covered. Granted, I’m a huge Sinatraphile, and I understand that four hours might be plenty for most people. But there are gaps, as All or Nothing at All offers only a cursory glance at Sinatra’s career post-1971. That isn’t the biggest loss, since Sinatra’s cultural impact was greatest during the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s, but still, Sinatra lived for another 27 years. 

I think that the people interviewed for All or Nothing at All did an excellent job of articulating Sinatra’s importance, but there were three Sinatra experts I wish had been a part of the project. I’m a huge fan of Michael Feinstein’s singing and his tireless advocacy for the music of the Great American Songbook. There’s no one who knows more about the songs of that era that Michael Feinstein, and he was a terrific commentator on this year’s American Masters documentary on Bing Crosby. I think Feinstein would have been a great addition to All or Nothing at All. I was also annoyed that two of the best authors about Sinatra’s music weren’t interviewed. Will Friedwald, who wrote the excellent book Sinatra! The Song is You: A Singer’s Art, and Charles Granata, who wrote the superb Sessions with Sinatra: Frank Sinatra and the Art of Recording, were nowhere to be found in the documentary. Who knows, maybe Granata and Friedwald didn’t want to be part of All or Nothing at All, but I would have enjoyed a little bit more content about Sinatra’s singing style and his phrasing. 

Something that struck me while watching film clips of Sinatra sing is how much charisma the man had. You simply cannot take your eyes off of him. It’s only in film clips that you can really see how strikingly blue his eyes were, photos don’t seem to quite capture the color. Even as he aged, Sinatra remained an extremely handsome man, always dapper, with his usual orange pocket square. (Orange was Sinatra’s favorite color.)

Quibbles aside, All or Nothing at All is a fascinating look at one of the most interesting artists of the 20^th century, and a man whose contribution to singing will be deeply felt in centuries to come.