This first major biography of the most romanticized icon in jazz thrillingly recounts his wild ride. From his emergence in the 1950s—when an uncannily beautiful young man from Oklahoma appeard on the West Coast to become, seemingly overnight, the prince of "cool" jazz—until his violent, drug-related death in Amsterdam in 1988, Chet Baker lived a life that has become an American myth. Here, drawing on hundreds of interviews and previously untapped sources, James Gavin gives a hair-raising account of the trumpeter's dark journey.