Chet Baker: My druggy valentine

Chet Baker was the gifted jazz musician with the James Dean looks and impossibly cool lifestyle to match, wasn't he? Phil Johnson discovers a new biography that is about to shatter several myths

Rock'n'roll reprobates from Keef to Kurt and beyond pale into pasty-faced insignificance when compared with the James Dean of jazz, the trumpeter Chet Baker. As a new biography published next week makes clear, Chesney Henry Baker Jnr – who died in 1988 aged 58 when he fell or was pushed through an Amsterdam hotel window – had a monkey on his back of gorilla-like proportions.

According to the author James Gavin in Deep in a Dream: the long night of Chet Baker, the trumpeter was on 6g of heroin a day by the time he died. And that's not counting the cocaine, codeine, barbiturates, alcohol and hash Baker used as a regular top-up; he injected the former every five minutes or so if he was taking it on its own, less often if mixed with heroin in his favourite cocktail, the speedball. As a cautionary tale, Gavin's book is remarkably effective. Who needs to be told "Just say No" when you've just read of the malodorous Chet scratching a needle around in his scrotum?

It's also a corrective to the myth of Chet Baker as the golden boy fallen from grace, an ultimate cool-school hipster on whom one could project the most vainglorious of male fantasies. Oh to be Chet Baker now that spring is here, one thought, imagining driving an Alfa Romeo ridiculously fast down Tuscan lanes en route to a smoky nightclub in Lucca; after taking shed-loads of drugs, you could croon "My Funny Valentine" to an adoring audience amazed at the depth of your sensitivity, before taking a model or two back to the hotel. According to Gavin, the real Baker was a serial wife-beater and a stool-pigeon. His personal hygiene wasn't up to much either. Oh well, that's that one out the window, then.

In later life, Chesney Jnr even seemed to be turning into Chesney Sr, an embittered old Okie and failed musician whose liking for smoking grass was cited by Baker – probably facetiously – as starting off his own love affair with drugs. And it was a love affair. In 1986, he undertook a second tour of Japan, whose drug laws were so strict that Baker had to make do with a regimen of methadone and cognac. Perhaps as a result, he played and sang superbly and even enjoyed socialising after the shows. At the airport on the way home, one of his band tried to get him to see how great life could be without heroin. "Yeah", he replied. "I can't wait to get to Paris and get fucked up."

Unforgiveably, Chet was also rather dumb. "Gee, it's a drag about your dad", he's alleged to have said to the jazz pianist Romano Mussolini, son of the dictator, although Gavin can't confirm it. "You gotta realise, Chet was not that intelligent", says one of his former girlfriends, Ruth Young. "He did not know what he was doing...He just did it." His old employer from the famous piano-less quartet of the early Fifties, Gerry Mulligan, speaks of Chet as "a kind of freak talent. I've never been around anybody who had a quicker relationship between his ears and his fingers." Perhaps as a consequence, Mulligan hated him with a vengeance.

As Baker's musical gifts were almost entirely intuitive, they didn't really develop; his lyrical style was out of date while he was still in his twenties and remained intact for the rest of his career, preserved like a tincture. A musical decline was matched by a personal one, already in train when Baker's pianist Dick Twardzik was found dead from a heroin overdose in a Paris hotel room in 1955, while the rest of the band waited for him in a recording studio. One theory has it that Baker was so upset that it led to his addiction; another that he may have been shooting up himself and left Twardzik to die. "He started out as James Dean and ended up as Charles Manson", says an old friend, just in case we're missing the point.

The biography has been lambasted in a New York Times review for its supposed prurience. "Instead of shedding light on the reasons for Baker's addiction, Mr Gavin contents himself with a humungously long inventory of his failings and betrayals", writes Michiko Kakutani of what she calls "this sad, sodden book". You might as well complain that the story lacks a feelgood ending too, but her assertion that "It becomes clear early on that the author has conceived an intense dislike for his subject", is hard to argue with.

Gavin writes that he took as his model Patricia Morrisroe's biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, but even Bob comes out smelling of roses compared to poor old Chettie, and look what he got up to. At least we can take comfort from the fact that the Hollywood biopic, when it inevitably comes, will now provide a more challenging role for its star. After the posthumous publication in 1997 of a very unreliable memoir by Baker himself, As Though I Had Wings, it was reported that Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and Leonardo Di Caprio were vying for the role in a film adaptation. Since then Matt Damon has become another contender, after impersonating Baker in The Talented Mr Ripley. Will they all be so keen when they find out what a complete shit he was, one wonders? And will a scrotum double be required?

It's a good job we have the music to console us. Handily, the publication of the book is also the cue for a new compilation album whose tracks have been chosen by Gavin himself. It serves to remind you just how wonderful the best of Chet Baker is, both early and late (and Gavin makes a strong case for the later work). Deep In A Dream contains a number of memorable performances, but the most affecting has to be a previously unavailable a capella version of Chet singing "Blue Room' , in a vocal dub from one of his early Pacific Jazz label sessions. He sounds impossibly young and romantic as he croons the corny words in that inimitable, emotionally deadened, high tenor voice, and you can't help but read into it all the pain that was to follow. Now we know the pain was mostly felt by other people. Chet Baker may have been abject, but he liked it that way.

'Deep in a Dream: the long night of Chet Baker', by James Gavin, is published by Chatto & Windus on 30 May. The album 'Deep in a Dream' is out on Monday on Blue Note