Chet
Baker's daughter Melissa
lays a rose on his coffin at
his funeral in 1988.
Even
a hardened Tinsel Towner might have been forgiven for
feeling a gladdened heart on a pretty Saturday late in May, sitting
amid the wised-up revelers on the open-air cocktail deck at the
Ports O' Call restaurant in San Pedro, California, which is south
of Los Angeles overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
This was true, in a way, even for the hearts of
the Chet Baker family of Oklahoma, who had come there from
Inglewood Park cemetery in Los Angeles after attending the funeral
of the great jazz trumpeter and singer, a sad occasion that the
afternoon was doing its best to blot out.
Although the man they mourned was born at Yale,
Okla., he grew up in Los Angeles, a place where it is excessively
sweet and summery at all times, and they had just buried him beside
his father, Chesney Baker Sr., who died when the family was still
living there in 1967.
Baker,
the lyrical pop hero of the 1950s and 1960s who was
often compared to Jimmy Dean, would have been 59 that December, and
he had, as his piano playing buddy Frank Strazzeri said at the
cemetery, ''one helluva career.'' He died in Amsterdam on May 13,
1988.
Baker's mother, Vera; his wife, Carol; and their
children, Dean, 25; Paul, 22; and Melissa, 21, had brought with
them a single white rose to give to the man leading the band that
was entertaining the drinkers there on the cocktail deck. That
would be Chet's old friend and fellow trumpeter, Jack Sheldon.
The family had laid their own white roses one by
one on the casket, but Jack was playing this gig and couldn't make
it to join in the farewell ritual.
As the family listened at a table, the other
patrons were mainly oblivious to the tribute Sheldon played on his
trumpet, ''My Funny Valentine,'' Baker's signature tune. He piled
on the pathos, as only Sheldon can, but he was no match for the
scene: the glinting sea, the passing cruise ships with passengers
lining the rails and the plump Malibu-bred seagulls coasting above.
Not even Chet, who made this song his own with an unforgettable
recording, could have gotten it to sound sad out here.
Be
that as it may, Sheldon played it tenderly and
beautifully, and at the end Chet's widow came to the bandstand to
bring Sheldon the rose, a momento mori from the family of his old
running buddy of the postwar L.A. years. It must have taken Sheldon
aback to see how much Chet's oldest son, Dean, seated at a table,
resembled his father.
''We'd go down and climb the cliffs at Palos
Verdes,'' Sheldon told the assembled dancers and drinkers, in the
course of a sunny eulogy, an impromptu memoir of boyhood summer
days the two young musicians spent together.
''He'd do it and I'd follow. Chetty taught me how
to play the trumpet, he taught me how to sing -- he taught me
everything I know about playing and singing."
Jack shook his head as though there were quite a
few other things he learned from Baker. "I could never catch
up with him.''
No doubt these seaside forays were the beginning
of Baker's legendary ability to render himself off the scene. He'd
duck out from wherever he was, hitch a ride as one could do in
those days, and wind up someplace far away like San Francisco. That
was where he got his teeth knocked out late in the 1960s, in an
attack by street hoodlums.
His
career, which had been damaged by his drug taking
after he first got famous as a member of Gerry Mulligan's
soft-spoken piano-free quartet in 1952 and 1953, now went on hold
for two years as the dental damage was repaired. Baker managed to
control his addiction with methadone treatment, and by the
mid-1970s he was playing and singing again, with a little airplay
here and there in the states and a thriving popularity in Europe,
where he lived much of the time.
Chet Baker outside Hop
Singh's in the mid-1980s
But he slipped up now and again, and it didn't
surprise his European road manager, Peter Huyts, when he didn't
show up for a gig in Amsterdam on the night he died. The fact that
it was a Friday the 13th, gave Huyts a twinge of alarm, though.
''He was supposed to play someplace, but he
didn't show up there, and he moved to a different hotel,'' Huyts
said. ''I couldn't reach him. So I called the police. I asked them
if they had found a man with a trumpet, a man about 58 years old.
''They said no, but they had an unidentified dead
man with a trumpet in his hotel room, a man about 30. I thought
someone must have stolen Chet's trumpet. I drove in, and when I saw
Chet's glasses, I knew it was him.
''The police say it was an accident. He fell from
the third story window of his hotel. It was a hot night. He could
have been sitting on the window seat and fallen asleep, but of
course that's only speculation on my part. It was a tragic
accident.''
Doubly
tragic, in the sense that work had just been
completed on a full-fledged film biography of Baker, released as
''Let's Get Lost,'' after the title of one of Baker's ballads.
Bruce Weber, the fashion photographer, produced it, and Baker
played himself. It opened later that summer at the Venice Film
Festival.
One of the people in the movie was Strazzeri, who
had told mourners at the cemetery how he had played piano behind
Baker off and on for 30 years. ''And when I heard him play for the
last time last year,'' Strazzeri said, ''he was the same guy as
when I first knew him. He never deviated from what he was.''
Sheldon hadn't been there to hear that or the
other tributes to Baker by Russ Freeman, the pianist; Hersh Hamel,
the bassist; Bernie Fleischer, Baker's schoolmate from Glendale
Junior High School and El Camino College; and Emie Amemiya, the
executive producer on ''Let's Get Lost.''
Now, seated on his stool on stage in the spring
sunshine, his trumpet in one hand, Sheldon took a deep sniff of his
rose.
Then, in a bright and sunny tempo, he began to
sing again. One particular couplet in the song he chose knifed
home, there amid the salt breezes and the healthy suntans, not the
least of which was Jack's:
Makes no difference how I carry
on, oh baby, please don't talk about me when
I'm gone.
Baker at Hop Singh's with Alan
Broadbent, piano; Mike Fahn, trombone;
and Charlie Haden, bass.
