Ghost of a Chance

Peter Duchin has been America's top society bandleader for over thirty years. He has played at the White House, at a bar mitzvah on the QE II, at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, and at thousands of other private and public events. He has observed shifts in social customs from close up, and his account of them is fascinating. But his memoirs are not simply a riveting look at society and show business. They are also the poignant story of a complicated family and a boy who grew up as an outsider in a world of privilege. "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You" was a hit song in the thirties and forties, played on the radio and in clubs all over the country by the wildly popular orchestra led by Peter's father, Eddy Duchin. In an era when big-band leaders were like today's rock stars, Eddy Duchin was one of the most famous. But behind the glamour and the celebrity was the tragic tale of a beautiful wife who died in childbirth, and a baby who didn't seem to have a ghost of a chance: young Peter. The frail baby was whisked away to the enchanted kingdom of Arden, the vast New York estate of his godparents, Averell Harriman and his wife, where he grew up straddling the world of his father, which was peopled by Toots Shor and Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra, and the world of the Whitneys and the Vanderbilts. He inherited the insouciance of his parents and acquired the aristocratic manners of his adopted family. In the fifties he ran off to Paris, lived on a barge, and hung out with showgirls at the Crazy Horse Saloon; he club-hopped with Ava Gardner in Madrid; he became a man-about-town in New York. And he followed in his father's footsteps, opening with his own band at the Maisonette in the St. Regis Hotel in 1962. Ghost of a Chance is the story of his adventures.