Finding the Legendary Chet Baker

Photographer Bruce Weber won’t be made to feel guilty about those controversial, blatantly sexual ads for Ralph Lauren and Obsession from Calvin Klein. “I’m not tired at all of doing fashion. People always ask me,” he says with a laugh, although there was his recent non-fashion show of human figures at New York’s Robert Miller Gallery.

But lately, too, he’s stretched out a bit by becoming a movie maker. His 1987 feature documentary, “Broken Noses,” celebrating an up-and-coming boxer, lightweight Andy Minsker, toured the film festival and museum circuit. “Let’s Get Lost,” which won the Critics Prize at last summer’s Venice Film Festival, documents the last days of West Coast jazz musician Chet Baker, the most legendary white trumpeter since Bix Beiderbecke.

A jazz album made especially for the film, “Chet Sings and Plays From ‘Let’s Get Lost,’ ” will be released by RCA/Novus in February, anticipating the film’s release.

“Chet had an incredibly individual style of trumpet,” said Weber, a longtime admirer of Baker’s music. “Herb Alpert always wanted to play like him. As for Chet’s singing, it greatly influenced the Brazilian style.” He recalled a birthday party he attended, where Baker sat in on trumpet behind an awed, suddenly timid Astrid Gilberto.

As much as with the music, Weber was fascinated by Baker, the romantic, self-destructive chance-taker who, Weber said, could prefer doing drugs and snoozing in the back seat of a car to residing in the finest hotel.

“Chet was incredibly reckless with money, never paid taxes, often didn’t have a home for months at a time, but managed to survive.” An Oklahoma-born Odysseus, Baker wandered everywhere, often aimlessly. He had three wives, three children and girlfriends around the globe. Two of the wives, three girlfriends, and all three children, the last grown up in Stillwater, Okla., put in appearances in “Let’s Get Lost.”

Weber, 42, a genial, roly-poly man wearing a Gypsy bandanna, showed up at the Toronto Festival of Festivals in September with his cameraman, Jeff Preiss, a merry entourage of producers, publicists, editors, and several quasi-actors from the surreal, fiction interludes of “Let’s Get Lost.” All that was missing was Baker himself, who, at 58, fell out of an Amsterdam hotel window. Or did he jump? Or was he pushed to his death?

“It is typical of Chet to leave in this cloudy situation,” Weber said. “But it wasn’t really Chet’s style to jump. He was always getting into trouble with drug dealers. He called me a month-and-a-half before his death and said, ‘Something might happen. This cocaine dealer is after me,’ But I don’t know, because Chet sometimes was hallucinating.

“People always ask me about the drugs. At this time in his life, Chet took drugs to be normal. He was a rugged Oklahoma boy and had a great tolerance for them.”

Baker spent much of his time before Weber’s camera--blowing trumpet, singing, doing soliloquies--in an unmistakably drug-induced state. Those who find fault with “Let’s Get Lost” accuse Weber of exploitation, of using Baker’s deteriorating mind and health to the film maker’s voyeuristic advantage.

“I don’t think it’s a sadistic situation,” Weber said. “I have a responsibility to the person I’m making a film about, when he trusts you. Chet was proud of his knowledge about drugs, and found that very attractive. He once said he would not have changed the way he did things. I don’t think we were ever in a judgmental view about him. How can you say if something is killing somebody?”

“I never felt that Chet was pathetic. He was very aware even in his worst state, without socks in the middle of the winter.”

Teamed with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan in a revolutionary piano-less quintet, Baker in the early 1950s was as handsome as they come. Baker, whose family had resettled in Glendale, was a righteous Tom Joad of the trumpet, with a James Dean hairdo, a Brando T-shirt and a patented soft purr of a singing voice. Sexy. The Chet Baker of “Let’s Get Lost,” after decades of hard drugs and tough European self-exile, is severely wrinkled, toothless, cadaverous. But, as Bruce Weber discovered, he remained, on the eve of his death, as startlingly photogenic as ever.

“I think sometimes he looked beautiful so ravaged,” Weber said. “He had a Dorian Gray thing. One time, he looked like he’d crawled out from under a rock. We’d have to comb his hair. The next time he’d take three hours to get ready.”

In fact, Weber thought that Baker sometimes controlled the filming as much as he. “We couldn’t say to Chet that we’re going to make a serious work about him. Then he never would have shown up! Instead we’d say, ‘Why don’t you come out to California?’ ” What began as a planned three-minute film expanded to a feature, following Baker through Europe and America, from Cannes to Venice Beach.

Some of the interviewing was filmed in short bursts, and over several days, because Baker lost patience while being photographed. Other times, the camera would run on before a hazy Baker slowly found his tempo. “Even when he was really stoned, Chet would get you into his rhythm. He had a tendency to be very vague, but gradually he got less vague. And he wasn’t a very reactive person. He didn’t react to normal things like other people. I once said, ‘Oh, it’s a nice day out.’ He replied, ‘Yeah, if you’re a kite.’ ”

But, Weber insisted, Baker was quite proud that a film was being made about his life. “He acted like he didn’t care, but he did. He’d always show up, and always be on time. At Cannes last year, he’d say, ‘I have this film coming out,’ but then get the title wrong.”

Unfortunately, Baker died several months before “Let’s Get Lost” premiered at Venice. “Couples all over were necking,” Weber said. “Chet would have liked that, the romance while listening to his music. A real compliment.”

Bruce Weber’s next film? “Fiction. Maybe after Chet Baker, I’d like to make a children’s film,” he joked. “I need some time to recover.”