Eddy Duchin - Legacy

Legacy

By the mid 1950s, Columbia Pictures, having enjoyed success with musical biographies, mounted a feature film based on the bandleader's life. The Eddy Duchin Story (1956) is a fictionalized tearjerker, with Tyrone Power in the title role. The film did well in theaters, and was well enough known to be referenced in one of Columbia's Three Stooges shorts: the Stooges' spaceship is about to crash when Joe Besser yelps, "I don't want to die! I can't die! I haven't seen The Eddy Duchin Story yet!"

An anthology of some of Duchin's best recordings, Dancing with Duchin, was released in 2002.

Duchin had one child, Peter Duchin (b. 1937), with his first wife, Marjorie Oelrichs. Peter had begun a musical education with his father and eventually later studied formally at Yale. In time, he became an orchestra-leading pianist in his own right, as well as the author of a series of mystery novels, a presence in high society (into which his mother had been born), and a frequent entertainer (as well as musical director for U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson's inauguration) at the White House and on television. In his 1996 memoir Ghost of a Chance, Peter Duchin wrote about the wholesale fictionalization in The Eddy Duchin Story. Peter Duchin for two decades was married to actress/writer Brooke Hayward (daughter of agent and theatrical producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan), since 1985. He now lives alone.