17

VIEW FROM THE BANDSTAND

Since that first road trip in 1964, I’ve traveled a lot. In the sixties and seventies, I played about 150 gigs a year. Nowadays, I try to keep it down to about 100 a year. We have to say no to 500 to 600 jobs every year, because I’m busy, I don’t want to play them, or the price isn’t right.

We’ve played for the victory parties of presidents, governors, senators, congressmen, and mayors. We’ve played for senior proms, marriages, wedding anniversaries, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, high school and college graduations, movie premieres, play openings, book publications, and art exhibitions. We’ve celebrated the openings of airports, performing arts centers, private clubs, hospitals, museums, banks, shopping malls, and auto showrooms. We’ve played for New Year’s Eve parties, Easter parties, Fourth of July parties, Columbus Day parties, Christmas parties, and ego-trip parties of every variety. We’ve played for more than a thousand charity balls and helped raise millions of dollars for every conceivable cause and disease. We’ve given concerts in symphony halls, parks, gardens, sports arenas, libraries, and Macy’s lingerie department. We’ve played on cruises from Australia to Bali, Hong Kong to Singapore, Fort Lauderdale to Peru, New York to Bermuda. We’ve played in forty-six states—never in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, or South Dakota. Foreign countries? Austria, France, Great Britain, Mexico, South Africa, Panama, Colombia, Canada, Monaco, Italy, Germany, India, the Bahamas, and Bermuda.

My most arduous stretch of traveling was a couple of years ago, when I played a dance in New York on a Thursday night, flew to Paris on Friday night, played a party that began at nine on Saturday night and ended at five in the morning, flew that morning to Frankfurt, where I changed planes and flew to Vancouver, British Columbia, where I hopped on a private plane that took me to an island ninety miles north for a party on Sunday night.

We’ve played one funeral—for my old friend Gubby Glover, out in Moline.

I keep about fifteen operable tuxedos in my closet, which are replaced by visits to my designer friends Bill Blass and Oleg Cassini. The rest of my rig consists of patent leather Belgian shoes that fit like slippers; black bow ties from Turnbull & Asser that take a long time to fray; pleated white Brooks Brothers shirts that leave a lot of sweat room; suspenders of all patterns provided by my wife or daughter. I hate men’s jewelry. I keep my cuffs fastened with those little elasticized twist knots you get at Paul Stuart or Brooks Brothers. I never travel without miniature bottles of Tabasco sauce, which makes airplane food somewhat edible.

Since the Peter Duchin Orchestra changes in size to fit the needs of each job, it’s not a fixed aggregate like the groups that played under my father, Glenn Miller, Ellington, or Basie. I draw on a pool of fifty-some musicians, out of which my office forms groups of various sizes that we send out under my name. There’s a smaller core of twelve players and two singers whom I consider a family. Finally, there’s the hard core—eight of us: a trumpeter, a reed player, a trombonist, a bass player—vocalist, a guitarist-vocalist, a drummer, a synthesizer player, and me.

By now, our musical communication is subliminal and our friendship tight. Besides affection, it’s based on countless shared mishaps, which range from late flights and missed connections to lost baggage and lost instruments, screwed-up hotel bookings, unforeseen hurricanes and blizzards, and dealings with service people (as well as occasional clients) who are subhuman. Whenever anything on the road goes perfectly right, my trumpet player and road manager, Tone Kwas, always says, “That’s one out of one.”

I could write a book on the decline of the travel experience in America. I’ve joined it a bit myself. When we started out, I insisted that every member of the band wear a jacket and tie on planes. Now I insist only that they look presentable.

Service? I can get teary-eyed thinking about those old Pan Am stewardesses and how much pride they took in their jobs. Nowadays when you step into an airport, you’re usually greeted by petulance, arrogance, and indifference to your very existence. Travel used to be a treat. Now it’s an ordeal—by far the most difficult part of what I do.

Still, after thirty-odd years of being on the road, I usually have a ball. My audience is there to have fun, too, and it’s up to me to help them have it.

My father once told Rocky Cooper that he’d seen “more than one marriage break up on the dance floor.” I must be a chip off the old block, because I’ve never ceased being fascinated by what happens out there. Since I’m always positioned in the middle of the band, right up front, I’ve got a ringside seat. I’ve been told that I almost never look at the keyboard. Another thing I unconsciously do when I play is rock back and forth, as though I’m riding a horse. My ear is tuned to the band. My fingers work by second nature, constantly improvising. And always, I’m scanning the crowd. What’s the age span out there? The predominant generation? Economic level? Ethnic background? Where am I? Every region—New England, the South, the Midwest, the border states, the mountain states, the West Coast—has surprisingly different musical tastes. American party manners are amazingly diverse, too. They range from blasé (Manhattan) to uptight (Boston), wild (New Orleans), sedate (St. Louis), loud (Texas), and narcissistic (Los Angeles). My sense of all this informs what we play, the order we play it, the tempos.

At every job I get dozens of requests, which I’m usually able and happy to fill. I invariably get requests that clash with my sense of the mood. I play them either later or not at all. When someone wants to know why I haven’t played his favorite song, I reply, “You mean you didn’t hear it? I just played it five minutes ago.” Generally he nods dimly and says, “Thank you.”

Watching the dance floor, I’ve seen people fall in love, come to blows, nearly copulate, die. They used to do this in nightclubs, in front of live musicians. Since the sixties, however, the scene has changed greatly. Nightclubs have by and large disappeared. There are very few places anymore where one can go dancing to live music. My band plays mostly at big events now—fund-raisers or private parties.

The behavior of partygoers has changed. People don’t dress up as much. They rarely wear their best jewelry. And they have agendas. Thirty years ago, when people arrived at a party, they left their troubles at home. They came in with a certain lightness, a look of expectancy. Today, I see people entering beautifully set rooms looking as grim and self-absorbed as if they were beginning another day at the office. It’s not as bad in Europe. There, partygoers still put on something of an air. That amused-looking Italian who has just arrived and is murmuring something in the hostess’s ear to make her giggle might have gone bankrupt that morning, but you’d never know it.

In America, parties used to be occasions for pure, innocent fun: five or six hours of release from daily life during which people could be a little more handsome, a little more beautiful, a little more witty, even a little more dangerous with one another. I think of the marvelous costume parties that Joan Payson, Jock Whitney’s sister, used to give in Manhasset. The idea of anyone talking business under her tent was anathema.

Thirty years ago, it wasn’t unusual for a party to last until three or four in the morning. Arriving at a deb ball, I’d be told by the host to play “until it becomes light”—lovely phrase—“so the kids can see their way to drive home.” Nowadays, parties that last beyond one thirty are virtually unheard-of, except in Europe. (At the 1993 ball thrown by my pal Giovanni Volpi for a goddaughter at his palazzo on the Grand Canal, his only instructions were “Don’t stop until you can hear the opening of the fish market in the Rialto.”)

The music we used to play was much more homogeneous—mostly fox-trots and the occasional waltz or lindy. Today it’s mandatory to play in every style, especially rock and roll, which would have been unthinkable at a fancy party before the mid-sixties. From the musicians’ standpoint, that’s a big improvement.

Many jazz musicians like to play rock because of the rhythm, but most of them have not taken rock seriously enough to learn how to play it properly. They incorporate its rhythm into their jazz style, which is not really the point. It’s very hard for a jazz-oriented musician to learn how to play true rock and roll. Rock and roll is squarely on the beat or slightly ahead of it, whereas jazz tends to lag slightly behind the beat. Roberta Fabiano, my lead guitarist and singer, always chides me for trying to interpret rock and roll in a jazz way. She’s right. I guess I can’t completely lose the jazz feeling. There are very few people who can play both styles authentically. Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and others have made notable efforts to fuse the two, but I’ve never found it convincing. They end up with a hybrid without the urgency of rock or the irony of jazz.

I love rock and roll. When it’s good, it’s great popular music, as terrific as big-band swing was in its day. I like the energy, the irreverence. And for filling up the dance floor it’s foolproof. Everybody gets out there. Rock is almost the only music the under-forty generation knows how to dance to. Generally, the first dance we play at weddings is still a traditional song like “Embraceable You” or “Isn’t It Romantic?” But the bride and groom often have a difficult time doing a slow fox-trot. Thanks to reruns of movies on TV and to video rentals, however, “close dancing” may be coming back in vogue. The other night, I played for the senior prom at the St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, and six or seven couples came up and asked for “Cheek to Cheek,” “Isn’t It a Lovely Day?” and “I’m Old-Fashioned.” They danced beautifully to these wonderful old Astaire songs. I’ve had the same requests from kids in San Antonio.

I’m often asked two questions: What was the best party you ever played for? And, What was the worst party?

What’s the point in dwelling on the bad parties? Thank God there haven’t been too many of them. On the rare occasions when I’ve felt a malaise in the air (even then, there’s always one couple who seem to be having a great time), the band and I have given our all to rev things up, right up to the last minute. When it just doesn’t work, we take it personally.

I’ve seen people fall in love, come to blows, nearly copulate, and die on the dance floor.

My list of reasons for bad parties isn’t surprising. But here are a few of them:

The best parties?

The most outrageous affair I’ve ever played for was the quintessential party of the eighties. To celebrate his son’s bar mitzvah and his daughter’s bat mitzvah, an extremely, newly rich man in the New York real-estate business hired the Cunard Lines’ flagship, the Queen Elizabeth II, from six in the evening until eight the following morning. For fourteen hours, 600 guests—including everyone the host had ever done a deal with, as well as his children’s entire school classes—had the run of the QE II as it sailed out of New York Harbor. There was enough food and drink to last a month, including buckets of beluga and Roederer Cristal. There were all-night movies; an all-night beauty salon that was heavily patronized; and all-night gambling tables that opened for business the moment we got beyond the offshore limit. We were one of three full-size bands hired to play in three different lounges. I brought along fourteen musicians. There was also a discotheque. Out-of-work actors wandered around in masks and white makeup, encouraging everyone to have a good time. Everyone did.

For me, the highlight was when the ship stopped as we were pulling out of the harbor so that a helicopter could land. Out stepped Ivan Boesky, king of the shady Wall Street arbitrageurs, in a shimmering white suit and a vulpine smile. He melted into the crowd, and I didn’t see him again until the next morning, when the QE II docked at a pier in lower Manhattan so that the guests could go off to Wall Street.

Postscript: Not long afterward, Boesky was thrown in jail. The man who had hired the QE II for the night—at what must have cost well over a million dollars—lost everything, including his collection of old master Dutch paintings, his fortune, and his wife. The other day I was told by one of the guests that under his white suit Boesky had been wired by government investigators who were trying to get the goods on other Wall Street scoundrels by bugging the kids’ celebration.

The most historic parties I ever played had to be the White House weddings in 1966 and 1967 for the daughters of Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Lynda Byrd and Luci. Although the guests included an eye-popping array of America’s most powerful, both weddings had the informality and warmth of Texas-style family affairs. At Luct’s wedding, we were the first band ever to play rock and roll in the White House; LBJ danced to it as energetically as he did to everything else. (His favorite song was “Hello, Dolly!”) Lady Bird Johnson was one of the most gracious, meticulous hostesses I’ve ever worked with. I was amused that the band was paid by checks from her personal bank account, not her husband’s.

Toward the end of Luct’s reception, LBJ came over behind the bandstand to say thank you and tapped the leg of the nearest trumpet player. We were in the middle of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Without looking to see who it was, the trumpeter turned and blasted a high A right into the face of the president. The A instantly became a squawk.

The most civilized party: In 1980 the South African diamond king Harry Oppenheimer threw a dinner dance for the birthday of his wife, Bridget, at the home of one of their children in Johannesburg. I’ve never met a host with more exquisite manners, nor have I ever played a party that was so gracefully integrated among the black and white guests as was this one in what was then still the land of apartheid.

The most musically astute party: In 1992, while my wife and I were traveling in India, our Sikh friend Patwant Singh, a political writer in New Delhi, invited about thirty Indian friends over to his Lutyens-designed house in the Lodi Gardens and asked me to play an old upright he’d borrowed at great effort for the evening. I did two hours of Broadway show tunes—some familiar, many not—and I was amazed that every Indian knew the words to every song, including the verses.

The best after-party party: In the summer of 1974, during Race Week, Cheray and I went up to Saratoga Springs, where I had been hired to play a benefit for the opening of the new Saratoga Performing Arts Center. The following evening we went to Jock Whitney’s house for dinner. Betsey Whitney was away, and Cheray and I were greeted by Jock, his crony Shipwreck Kelly, and Fred Astaire. After dinner we all went over to the yearling sales, where Fred, a racing enthusiast, was as entranced by the elegance of the young horses as we were entranced by his elegance in tweed jacket and ascot as he stroked their manes.

Back at the house, we followed Shipwreck into the bar, where Jock poured us snifters of brandy. Fred was reminiscing about my parents, whom he had known casually, when Shipwreck bellowed: “Enough of this crap. Astaire, you gotta helluva pianist here. Sing us a song, goddamnit!”

Fred merely smiled, looked at me, and said, “How about it?”

“Sure,” I said nervously. We went over to Jock’s piano in the front hall, a big, square room with a wide-planked floor and no rug.

“ ‘Top Hat’?” suggested Fred. He started snapping his fingers.

From ten until three in the morning, Fred Astaire sang and danced his way through nearly every song from his movies in Jock’s front hall. He used Cheray—a terrific dancer—as his Ginger and me as his backup. Before each song, he explained its context in the film, as well as how he and the choreographer had put the number together.

His last song was “One for My Baby.” “This is the way Frank sang it,” he said—meaning Sinatra, of course—setting a medium swing tempo. He stopped after one chorus and said, “This is the way I liked to do it.” He put an elbow on the piano and rested his head in his hands. He slowed the tempo way down. With just a couple of gestures and the flicker of his eyes, he conjured up a man who had plummeted from the heights of success to the depths.

Before it was over, Jock, brandy snifter in hand, was crying. Even Shipwreck’s eyes were wet. Over his shoulder, I spotted Jock’s valet, Eric, and some of the kitchen help, peeking out of the doorway that led up the back stairs.

The best guest list: Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, held in honor of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham in the Plaza Hotel in 1966, closed an era of elegant exclusiveness and ushered in another of media madness—the one in which we still live. As Marie Harriman and her pals had done back in the thirties and forties, Capote merged the worlds of old money, literature, show business, Washington, and just plain folks with such diabolical shrewdness that his 500-name guest list instantly became the index of who was in and, by omission, out.

The masked ball was preceded by small dinners orchestrated by Truman’s puckish sense of name power (the Henry Fords with the Henry Fondas, the Irving Berlins with the Isaiah Berlins). It began at ten in the Grand Ballroom, paused for a supper of chicken hash and scrambled eggs at midnight, and became one of those very rare New York parties where the dancing is as good as the conversation. The two most memorable moments were Lauren Bacall doing a Fred Astaire number with Jerome Robbins, and Kay Graham being twirled around by a Plaza doorman. At three in the morning, the joint was still jumping.

The Black and White Ball inspired more ink than a British coronation, which was just what Truman had hoped for. With his genius for publicity, he decreed that TV cameras, photographers, and reporters be confined to the lobby. By ten fifteen there were more media out there than guests. Truman had cautioned me not to allow any “professional snoops” to sneak in via the band. On the morning of the ball, I got a call from Earl Wilson, the New York Post gossip columnist, asking if I would smuggle him in as one of the musicians. “Meyer Davis once got me into the White House as a trombonist,” said Earl. “How ’bout it, Pete? Ill love you forever.” I was sorely tempted, but I kept my word to Truman.

Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball at the Plaza in 1966 had the best guest list of any party I’ve ever played for. Truman arrived with the guest of honor (above), Kay Graham. Ave and Marie, below, were among the glittering five hundred invitees.

The most touching party: In the late eighties, I got a letter from a man named Bill Graves in Cincinnati asking me to play for a regatta party that he and his wife were giving at their house near the Ohio River. He said he’d been a great fan of the big bands in the thirties, especially my father’s. An amateur pianist himself, he had emulated my father’s style and had even made it the subject of his senior thesis in college.

Five of us flew out to Cincinnati, wearing blue blazers and white ducks, and were greeted by our host and hostess. To our surprise, both of them were confined to wheelchairs. Their son, Harry, took me aside and explained that his parents had multiple sclerosis. His father’s condition was very precarious, he said, but one of the things that had kept him alive was the prospect of hearing me play in his living room.

During the party, Mr. Graves wheeled himself over to the piano, a pampered old Steinway, as we played the list of classic show tunes he’d requested—Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, and so on. Toward the end of the evening, I asked if he’d like to play a duet with me. His face lit up, and he wheeled himself around to my left and played “Cheek to Cheek” while I improvised in the upper register. Everybody cheered when it was over. Mr. Graves literally wept with joy. We made him an honorary band member, and in the last letter he wrote me before he died, he said that playing Irving Berlin with me that night had made him feel like “a giant.”

The best down-home parties: In the early seventies, I was hired to play at a farewell party in San Antonio at which the host and hostess were saying good-bye to their house. Since they didn’t believe in taxes, they had given the mansion to the University of Texas and were moving to Uruguay. The centerpiece on each of the hundred tables was a five-pound tin of beluga nesting in a bowl of shaved ice. That night I met two people who would become close friends, Illa and Jim Clement. Illa’s uncle was Bob Kleberg, who ran the legendary King Ranch.

Through Illa, I was hired to play at a half dozen family affairs at the ranch, including a wedding, a birthday, and the cattle sales. The atmosphere was old Texas, relaxed and boisterous. The food was laid out on long tables: shellfish from the Gulf, great haunches of beef roasted in open pits, mountains of every conceivable Mexican dish, prepared by the help, who had lived in their own village on the ranch for generations.

The musicians were made to feel not like servants (as they frequently are in New York City) but like guests at the party. From the bandstand, we had an endless view of the Old West. Under the big sky were paddocks with cutting horses, pastures with the ranch’s specially bred Santa Gertrudis cattle, and birds—from wild turkeys, swirling hawks, and sandhill cranes flying to roost to peacocks who strutted among the guests, occasionally punctuating the music with outraged honks.

My favorite party? In 1983, my booking manager got a call from a Mrs. Blum in Chicago, who wanted to hire me and a twelve-piece orchestra to play at the Palmer House hotel for her and her husband’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. Given the size of the band, I expected the party to be held in the grand ballroom. Instead, we were led into a smaller private room, with a capacity for about forty guests. There we were surprised to find one table, set for two.

“It must be for the hors d’oeuvres,” I said to the guys as we were setting up on the far side of a small dance floor. “They’re probably bringing in the other tables for dinner.”

At 7:30, Mr. and Mrs. Blum arrived—two dignified, beautifully dressed people in their late seventies or early eighties. Mrs. Blum took me aside. “I hope you won’t mind, Mr. Duchin,” she said, “but it’s just my husband and myself. During dinner we’d like the piano alone. Could you play ‘The Anniversary Waltz’ after the first course? After dessert we’d like the whole orchestra to join you for the rest of the evening.”

I was worried that the band might fall asleep playing for only two elderly people, but we never sounded better. From 9:00 until 10:30, Mr. and Mrs. Blum danced every dance without a break. At 10:31, they came over to the bandstand. “Thank you, Mr. Duchin,” said Mr. Blum. “You’ve given us the happiest night of our life.”