Movie Review: Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker in Born to be Blue (2015)

The 2015 film Born to be Blue starred Ethan Hawke as the talented, troubled trumpet player Chet Baker. How do you make another movie about a self-destructive musician with addiction issues? Good question. Born to be Blue changed things up by starting off with Baker playing himself in a biopic, circa 1966. The movie also stars Carmen Ejogo as Jane, an actress who is playing Baker's girlfriend in the biopic. Of course, she ends up falling for Baker off-screen as well. 

Born to be Blue shows Baker's attempt to come back from a brutal assault by drug dealers, who smashed his teeth. Now fitted with dentures, Baker has to learn how to play the trumpet again. Dick Bock visits Baker in the hospital. Bock is the President of Pacific Jazz Records, where Baker made many of his most famous records during the 1950's. He asks Jane if anyone has come to visit or called on the telephone. The answer is no, and he explains to Jane that Baker has ruined every relationship in his life, and he cautions her about remaining in a relationship with Baker.

I appreciated Bock's speech to Jane. I've read a biography of Chet Baker; I've watched the great documentary Let's Get Lost. Chet Baker was a terrible human being. The only redeeming quality Chet Baker possessed was the ability to play the trumpet beautifully. Baker is the perfect poster child for separating the artist from the art. Baker's art was amazing: he created beautiful, haunting music. Yet the person who created this beauty was a dark, twisted soul: a sociopath who was addicted to heroin for the better part of thirty years and only cared about getting high. That such beauty could come out of such a damaged person is a mystery I can't explain. 

Hawke perfectly portrays Baker's odd combination of dopey naivete and cold-blooded calculation. It's an excellent performance, and Hawke has the right look for Baker, whose high cheekbones and angelic face gave him the nickname "the James Dean of jazz." 

To Baker's credit, he was able to make a comeback in the late 1960's. Maybe that was the finest thing he ever did, his shining hour. As the movie shows, Baker was off drugs as he learned the trumpet again. But he was never fully able to kick his heroin addiction, and we know all too well what happens after his successful comeback at Birdland in the movie: two more decades of drugs, nonstop gigging, with death coming from a fall out of an Amsterdam hotel window. 

I enjoyed Born to be Blue, and the excellent performances from Hawke and Ejogo. But my problem with the movie is that the trumpet playing in the movie was performed by Kevin Turcotte, not Chet Baker. I'm not trying to slam Kevin Turcotte; his trumpet playing is great. But Chet Baker had a specific tone and sound, and I knew from hearing five notes in the movie that the trumpet playing wasn't Chet Baker. I don't know if it was simply too expensive for the filmmakers to license Baker's performances, or if Baker's estate didn't allow his recordings to be used. But the impact of the music is lessened because we don't get to hear Chet Baker's playing. So it goes.  

Born to be Blue is still well worth checking out for fans of jazz and Chet Baker. 

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Saint Paul Plays 1911-1914, Edited by Alan Margolies (1978)

F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novels and short stories, but playwriting was a recurring interest of his. When he was a teenager, Fitzgerald wrote four plays over four summers from 1911-1914, from the ages of 14 to 17. At Princeton, Fitzgerald wrote the material for several shows performed by the Triangle Club. (He was always on academic probation, so he wasn't able to perform in any of the Triangle Club shows.) His project just before writing The Great Gatsby was a play called The Vegetable, which was a disaster. When he was at the end of his rope in 1937, Hollywood offered a reprieve—he got a job working as a screenwriter for MGM. Fitzgerald worked for MGM for 18 months and then freelanced as a screenwriter until his death in December 1940. 

His early plays were collected in 1978 and published as F. Scott Fitzgerald's St. Paul Plays, 1911-1914. Fitzgerald would surely blush at the thought of readers perusing his juvenilia, but it's a sign of the long fascination with all things Fitzgerald that these plays were published. As a Fitzgerald scholar who gives tours of the neighborhood in Saint Paul where he grew up and went to school, it was a gap in my knowledge that I had not read these plays until now. I always mention Fitzgerald's plays on my tours, since one of the stops is the former site of Mrs. Backus' School for Girls, where his play The Captured Shadow was performed in 1912. 

The four plays that Fitzgerald wrote over those four summers are The Girl from Lazy J, hardly more than a sketch at just 5 pages long, The Captured Shadow, a sophisticated tale of a gentleman burglar, Coward, set in the South during the Civil War, and Assorted Spirits, Fitzgerald's attempt at a farce. The plays were performed at the end of the summer, with the proceeds being donated to local charities. 

What does one make of these four plays? They are definitely juvenilia, and these plays would never have seen the light of day save for the fact that their author went on to write some of the greatest fiction of the 20th century. There's nothing in these plays that clearly points to Fitzgerald's later brilliance. But that being said, these plays are also fun and easy to read, with the occasional really good line appearing. They are solid work considering the young age of the author. I certainly wasn't turning out hour-long plays that I could convince people to perform in public when I was 16 years old. 

In addition to writing these plays, Fitzgerald also acted in them. It's interesting to see which parts he gave himself. In The Captured Shadow he is the title character, a refined gentleman burglar. I can understand why Fitzgerald wanted to play this role: who wouldn't want to be Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, David Niven in The Pink Panther, or George Clooney in the Ocean's 11 movies? In Coward Fitzgerald is not the leading role, but he gets to play a dashing Confederate raider. In Assorted Spirits, Fitzgerald gave himself more of a character role, as he plays the father of two of the main characters. He's not dashing, but he does get to deliver some witty lines. 

The Captured Shadow is my favorite of the four plays. It's noteworthy because Fitzgerald wrote a short story in 1928, also called "The Captured Shadow," that fictionalized the writing and performing of the play. The short story was one of a series of nine short stories that Fitzgerald wrote about a character named Basil Duke Lee. The stories follow Basil during his adolescence, and if you want to know what teenage F. Scott Fitzgerald was like, read the Basil stories. The stories are humorous, insightful, and full of the navel-gazing solipsism that often typifies the teenage years. 

Coward is fine, but the lines about the Confederate "lost cause" are super cringy now. But it's a reminder of how effective and prevalent the "lost cause" mythology was at the time that a Northern boy growing up in Saint Paul would include it in a play.

Assorted Spirits felt like a step backwards from the suave sophistication of The Captured Shadow. The play is slightly overstuffed with too many character and too many crazy coincidences. Fitzgerald was obviously reading Oscar Wilde, thanks to witty epigrams like this one:

"What is your idea of a brilliant woman? Every widow between thirty-five and forty-five who has no children and doesn't wear glasses." (p.93) 

Assorted Spirits was very successful; it raised $500 over two performances in 1914. That would be $16,900 in 2026 dollars. The amount of money Assorted Spirits raised gives you an idea of what a feather in the cap these plays were for Fitzgerald. Imagine a teenager writing a play today and raising almost $17,000 for charity from just two performances. That's impressive. 

These plays survived because the scripts were kept by Elizabeth Magoffin, a teacher who helped organize and guide the plays for all four summers. Her family donated her copies of the scripts to Princeton University, where they joined Fitzgerald's papers. Magoffin was twenty years old in 1911, just five years older than Scott, and that year she inscribed a photo: "To Scott—'He had that spark-magnetic mark' with the best love of the one who thinks so." That's an interesting inscription to write to a fifteen-year-old boy. Did Elizabeth have feelings for Scott? There's no evidence I'm aware of except for this warm inscription to suggest there was anything romantic between Magoffin and Fitzgerald. But she may have fallen under the magic spell that Fitzgerald seemed to weave wherever he went. Or she may have recognized his talent and realized that he was someone special. Clearly, she thought highly of Fitzgerald to preserve these scripts for so many years. 

Fitzgerald's Saint Paul plays are more for the dedicated scholar than the casual Fitzgerald fan. But they do offer us a fascinating glimpse into this talented writer during his youth, before fame and fortune came calling. 

Book Review: Ghosts, short stories by Edith Wharton (1937)

Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors. She was one of those authors I had heard about for years before I finally started reading her books. It's been richly rewarding to discover her writing. Wharton was an insightful critic of high society, which she chronicled in her classic novels The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Ghosts is a collection of short stories by Wharton that all deal with the supernatural in one way or another. Ghosts was first published in 1937, the year of Wharton's death, and was the last collection of her writing to be published during her lifetime. There are 11 short stories included in Ghosts, which was republished by New York Review Books in 2021. Since it's spooky season, I thought it was a perfect time to read Ghosts.

Edith Wharton was by no means a horror or thriller writer, but she had a good sense of what made something creepy. That being said, reading all of her ghost stories one after another robbed the stories of some of their power. I saw the repetitiveness of the stories: a creepy old isolated mansion, weird servants, a vague unsettling feeling. When I got to the ninth story in the collection, "Mr. Jones" I knew pretty quickly that Mr. Jones was actually dead, but it took the heroine twenty pages to figure it out. In this collection, you're also expecting the stories to be creepy and weird, whereas if you're just reading a regular collection of Edith Wharton's short stories and you randomly come upon a ghost story, you're caught off guard it comes as more of a surprise. But it makes sense to have all of these stories collected together, and the fact that they are sometimes similar is a small quibble when you're talking about a writer as gifted as Edith Wharton. 

Two of the finest short stories in Ghosts are "All Souls'" the very last story that Wharton wrote, and "Pomegranate Seed" from 1931. I had already read these stories in the excellent 1988 collection The Stories of Edith Wharton, but it was a pleasure to revisit them. In these two stories, Wharton conjures up truly creepy emotions. "All Souls'" describes the unsettling scene of an abandoned mansion during a snowstorm. "Pomegranate Seed" follows Charlotte Ashby, who is married to Kenneth, whose first wife died some years before. Kenneth keeps getting strange letters from an unknown person that he refuses to discuss with Charlotte. I had to Google the title to figure out how it pertained to the story. Without spoiling too much, it's a reference to the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter. "Pomegranate Seed" is truly creepy and unsettling. It reminded me a bit of "The Turn of the Screw" by Wharton's friend Henry James and "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, stories where you acutely feel the terror of the main character. 

Because Edith Wharton was a great writer, and an astute chronicler of the human condition, there are many fantastic quotes to be found throughout Ghosts. One of my favorites is from "The Eyes," where one character is describing a younger man's reaction to literature: "It was always—punctually, inevitably, with the inexorableness of a mechanical law—it was always the wrong thing that struck him." (p.36) We've all known someone like that.  

Another line that made me chuckle was this one: "Well, it was all rather puzzling, or would have been if it had been interesting enough to be worth puzzling over. But it was not." (p.150) Here's one of Wharton's characters describing life at a desert compound in Egypt: "Life had the light monotonous smoothness of eternity." (p.255) What a beautiful sentence. 

These stories are also fascinating because of the glimpse they give the reader of upper-class society during Wharton's lifetime. There are lots of people who are just wandering around Europe, trying to find themselves. Or living the good life on a newly inherited country estate. And there are servants. So many servants! So many people to attend to your needs and whims, make food for you and keep the fires burning at night. Sounds pretty good, except for the fact that your servant might actually be a ghost. 

If you're looking for some spooky tales by a great writer, pick up Edith Wharton's Ghosts.