Poisoned Valentine

Someone there is that doesn’t like Chet Baker. Exactly why did David Thomson, now 80, well-known and respected film critic, go so far out of his way on at least three occasions – in the LA Times, Salon Magazine, and The New Republic – to personally attack jazz trumpet player Chet Baker? 

Thomson has committed plenty of howlers as a so-called critic over the years. In my review of his Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in Senses of Cinema in 2003, I wrote: “[he is one of] the hangers-on of the medium, who are in it for ephemeral fame or simply the vicarious thrill of rubbing up against, even in effigy, the likes of Jack Nicholson and Nicole Kidman.” Thomson is more of a fan than a real critic. He wrote a whole book – 332 pages long – about Nicole Kidman, for crissake. 

But why did he turn – and return – to an attack on Chet Baker? Baker (1929-1988) was a jazz musician who attained popularity in the early 1950s. He was different, and not just because he was white and had movie star looks (see above). He and his fellow musicians, which included the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, were practitioners of the "West Coast Cool" bebop sound. Baker had earned chops of his own playing with Charlie Parker in some of Parker's west coast gigs. And Baker could sing, sort of. He landed Downbeat Magazine’s Trumpeter of the Year award in 1953 and ’54. Then, like so many other jazz musicians of the era, he discovered heroin and his addiction destroyed his career. Eventually, if he could've pawned his soul for some heroin, as he often did with his trumpets at his lowest point (he started using in 1957, served time in jail in Europe for drug offenses, and, in 1966, got his teeth knocked out in a drug-related altercation), he would have without a moment's thought. After slowly cleaning himself up and after he got new dentures and regained his embouchure, he got back to performing and recording in the mid-1970s. In 1978 he returned to Europe and he remained there for the rest of his life. He died in a fall from a balcony in Amsterdam in 1988. 

Ten years after his death, in the LA Times, David Thomson began his bizarre crusade against Baker in an article called “Musical Interlude”: 

Chet Baker was a soft white kid who loved black music and wanted to imitate it but who never had the depth or energy to keep up... Baker had a forlorn, uneducated face, insecure, unreliable, indolent and selfindulgent. He had a white-trash Dorian Gray air to him... And Baker’s music, long before heroin or the loss of his teeth, was restricted, plodding, slow and like the last gasp of a consumptive. Still, the playing was dainty, terse and lyrical next to his stunned singing. There, above all, you heard his empty mind. 

It’s worth interjecting that Thomson never actually met Baker. He never wrote about jazz either, but he is clearly anxious to drop as many names of other jazz greats as he can in his article. 

In 2000, another Thomson piece appeared in Salon titled “A Funny Valentine: Chet Baker and Dickie Greenleaf make Tom Ripley fall in love.” It’s an otherwise discursive, pointless meditation on Anthony Minghella's movie The Talented Mr. Ripley. Thomson mentions how 'You hear Baker's muted, exhausted trumpet over a few "happy" scenes,' describes Tom’s (Matt Damon’s) own rendition of the song, and abruptly ends the short piece with the line, “That was the other thing about Chet Baker -- who knew whether he was dead or alive?” 

But in 2002 Thomson reviewed a book about Baker, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker by James Gavin. Thomson’s review, which he called “My Unfunny Valentine,” is a deeply personal and quite outrageous hatchet job of a defenselessly dead jazz artist. Thomson writes: 

Had the man fallen or jumped, or had someone even pushed him? I am inclined to confess that I think it may have been me - I don't want to be unkind, and in this case it was surely mercy if some angel gave the man's frail back a tender, guiding push. 

Jazz musicians, like blues musicians, often die suddenly or accidentally, and often far too soon. The talent they possess seems to be purchased at the expense of their souls, and a jealous death is always shadowing them, ready to press them for payment. Baker was just 58, but judging from the photograph below, taken two years before his death, he was a great deal older than his years. 

The thesis of Thomson’s review of the Baker biography is that Baker was a bad jazz musician because he was white and because he was strikingly good-looking (which seems to be the only reason why Thomson was attracted by the subject in the first place). He opened his review with the following warning: 

If you treasure Chet Baker, if you have all his recordings of "My Funny Valentine" and "Let's Get Lost," and if you revere the desperate effort to hit flat notes, to stretch more paining pauses, to disappear into the ether, then buy this diligent book, but do not read what I have to say about its subject.

Holding all of his advantages against Baker is as unfair as the system that made him popular. For Thomson, Baker's life story after discovering heroin is so monotonously depressing that he feels sorry for his biographer: 

Baker was out to bring everyone down. It would not surprise me if - just to get through the labor--Gavin needed an hour or so every night listening to something as cleansing, explosive, and hopeful as Louis Armstrong, Lee Morgan, or Clifford Brown, or anyone who knew how to pick up a trumpet and blow, as opposed to using the instrument to enlarge an exquisite, maudlin, and grisly sigh. No, I do not like Chet Baker. 

Ultimately, Thomson claims, “his plaintive look and his whiteness brought him sympathy and praise beyond his due. Truly I think that the Chet Baker story was, from start to finish, based on his appearance. He was pretty, he was handsome, he was cute." It's possible, all these years since, to separate Chet Baker's trumpet playing from his face - especially since, by the time he was 40, he had entirely lost his looks. And it was his later recordings in the 1980s that critics recognize as examples of his best playing, when he looked like death warmed over, as my father used to say. 

I think Thomson’s obsession with Baker was based on jealousy and sexual frustration for a beautiful man who so steadfastly threw away his looks and his talent. He "squandered his talents", as they say. But, as George Orwell wrote about H.G. Wells, "But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander." (1) 

Whether or not his death was suicide, whatever was responsible for Chet Baker's success, it's silly to blame him for it. Was John Coltrane responsible for his early death from cancer? If being a gifted jazz musician carried a curse, how was Baker to blame if his curse came ready-made, as it did for anyone who picked up an instrument and made something out of nothing for whomever was lucky enough to be listening? 

“Musical Interlude,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1998. “A Funny Valentine: Chet Baker and Dickie Greenleaf make Tom Ripley fall in love,” Salon Magazine, July 20, 2000. "My Unfunny Valentine," The New Republic, June 17, 2002. 

(1) George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and the World State", Horizon, August 1941.