The Making of Chet Baker Sings | Page 21

Frank Sinatra , who plays the part of Private Angelo Maggio , a tempestuous Italian-American who uses his fists in place of reason . Sinatra , of course , also established a certain norm for male singing , based partly on jazz and partly on bel canto , from which Chet clearly departed .
Prewitt stands for many things in the book , but for our purposes he stands most strongly for the solitary creative artist in an unfeeling and unappreciative society , the young man with a horn . “ And the only way he had ever found , the only code , the only language by which he could speak and be heard by other men , could communicate himself , was with a bugle ”. Substitute trumpet , substitute any name , but especially Chet ’ s , and this seems like the forlorn cry of the artist , articulate in one medium only . Prewitt loves the old songs , because they offer him the promise that pain might not be irreducible after all , might even be transformable into something new and life-affirming . We ’ re told right at the beginning that Prew is a “ thirty year man ”, in other words , a career soldier . In that sense , he is different to Chet , who was closer to Edgar Allan Poe ( the comparison isn ’ t absurd ; both espoused an exquisite and haunted lyricism ) in seeking a military career as a means of putting some order and purpose into life . Prew is cut down long before he fulfils his compact with the Army . It was Chet Baker who became the thirty year man , a wounded soldier of the road who kept campaigning to the very last , his service musical rather than military .
Another line from James Jones ’ s great book might arrest us here : “ Love either starves to death and becomes a shadow , or else it dies young and remains a dream ”. Unlike James Dean , who he was briefly groomed to replace on the American screen , unlike Booker Little and Clifford Brown , Chet obstinately refused to die
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