The Sunday Telegraph, 02-28-1999.
Jazz star's diaries reveal society doctor who kept him high
HE was a hot American trumpet player, full of drop-dead cool, "the James Dean of jazz". She was a white-haired, elderly London doctor. Heroin brought them together.
Chet Baker and Isabella Frankau, even by the standards of the crazy circles they moved in, were an odd alliance.
While Baker was jamming around the Algerian quarter of Paris in cellars reeking of sweat and Gauloises, Lady Frankau would spend weekends at Ickleton Grange, her Essex country home near Saffron Walden, preparing Sunday lunch for her husband Sir Claude, a consulting surgeon at St George's Hospital.
Back in London during the week she would prescribe to a Bohemian circle of poets, writers, actors and jazzmen.
Baker's addiction to heroin and cocaine is well known, but that his trusted supplier was Isabella at her elegant consulting rooms at 32 Wimpole Street, is only now revealed with the publication of Baker' s lost diaries.
Her role in his addiction arose from her fame among North American users. Lady Frankau specialised in treating addiction, first alcohol then heroin. Only 12 doctors were allowed to prescribe the drug in the Fifties all with private practices in London. In the United States and Canada prescribing heroin was banned so when Lady Frankau went on a lecture tour, outlining her sympathetic treatment of addicts, a fan club of admiring users followed her back across the Atlantic for "treatment". Lots of it.
Her manner was brusque, but trusting and straightforward.
"She was a doctor pure and simple," says Joan Frankau, her daughter- in-law. "She laid down the law and managed to wean quite a few off heroin, and there was no such thing as methadone in those days."
Mrs Frankau said that unlike some of her more unscrupulous colleagues who made a brisk trade out of prescriptions, she genuinely cared for those who saw her. Addicts who visited her surgery recall that she was uninterested in making money from her work and would often let patients off the consultation fee if they were short of money. Baker wasn't in that category but paid her a visit in 1962 while filming The Stolen Hours with Susan Hayward.
Lady Frankau, he wrote, ". . . was about 75 years old . . . and very businesslike. She simply asked my name, my address and how much cocaine and heroin I wanted per day".
For the equivalent of pounds 1.80she wrote him a "script" - prescription - for cocaine which would have cost him pounds 312 in New York, and another for 10g of heroin.
"After that first day my scripts were all for 20g each and I was off and running," he wrote. After he finished filming and his work permit expired, Lady Frankau lied, claiming he was too sick to travel, to allow him to stay in England, he said. Baker was eventually arrested on drug charges. After a month in jail he was deported with his wife and baby son to France, where he began singing and playing at the Le Chat Qui Peche. In the diaries he describes how he and other musicians, including Stan Getz and Anita O'Day, hung out at Chez Ali in the Algerian quarter: "I sent a couple of people to see Lady Frankau. They all came back with heroin and coke."
Lady Frankau's life spanned an era of changing attitudes towards drug use. When she was a young girl Harrods sold laudanum, but towards the end of her career it was heroin that had become more widespread and the system of allowing private doctors to prescribe began to be seen as part of the problem.
In 1967, the year Lady Frankau died, the right to prescribe heroin liberally was restricted to psychiatrists working in drying-out clinics, and a chapter in the history of British drug treatment was closed. The Baker diaries came to light when editors at Spin, a US music magazine, sent them to Baker's widow, Carol, to authenticate.
"I could see straightaway it was Chet's writing," she said. "He was writing about things only he and I would know about. Drugs were his lifelong problem."
Baker died in a mysterious fall from an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988 aged 58. His diaries, which he began writing in the early Seventies, disappeared and were found only last year.
They have now been published in As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir. The
rights have been sold and the life of an addicted musician is to be filmed with
Leonardo DiCaprio playing Baker.
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