March 30, 2009 on this site, I told you this story that you won't believe. It was not long after my amazing friend Kristine passed away…and one of the amazing things about Kristine was that when you were around her, amazing things happened — things like this…
Okay, I'm going to tell you a story here that will cause some of you to think my brain has gone condo and I'm suffering from severe delusions. The following, however, actually occurred. If you're skeptical, drop an e-mail to anyone who knows me well. They'll tell you these kinds of things always happen to me. I don't know why but they do. This involves my friend Kristine Greco, a lovely lady who passed away last week at a way-too-early age.
I have a mammoth collection of comedy records. Always have. Some time in the sixties, I began actively collecting the work of the great bandleader, Spike Jones. I've amassed just about everything he ever recorded — that's a lot of 78s and 45s and LPs — and the stuff I don't have on original discs, I have on tapes or (more recently) MP3s. If you're familiar with his wonderful, wacky work, no explanation is necessary as to why I was drawn to it.I never met Mr. Jones (he died in 1965) but in the seventies, I found myself working with a number of his former associates. Lennie Weinrib and Billy Barty were on several of the shows I wrote for Sid and Marty Krofft. A couple of his former musicians had become film editors and were working down in the basement at Hanna-Barbera. One of his former writers, Eddie Brandt, had worked at H-B before I got there but left to open a nostalgia store, selling old books and old records, and I sometimes shopped there and chatted with him. There were a few others. At the time, no one had done a book about Spike Jones and I started to think I might be in a good position to write one. I put the notion to a friend who was an editor at the kind of publishing house that might handle such a thing.
He promptly threw chilly water on the idea. Said he, "A couple of people have thought of writing a book on Spike Jones but they all gave it up. They couldn't find enough material. Now, if you could approach his family and they'd agree to cooperate, maybe…"
That kind of discouraged me. I didn't know any relatives of Spike Jones. Or so I thought.
As I mentioned here a few days ago when I was saying goodbye to her, I met this wonderful lady named Kristine Greco when we were both working on Welcome Back, Kotter — she as an actress, me as a story editor. A year or two after that, we were going back to her place after a movie…and for some reason, I still remember what it was. It was Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. We were walking into her apartment and I was somehow talking about things I was working on. I said, "I've been thinking of doing a book about a man named Spike Jones. He was a great bandleader back in the —"Kristine interrupted me and asked, "You mean, Uncle Spike?"
That's what she said. That's what the lady said: Uncle Spike. I gasped, "What do you mean, 'Uncle Spike?'"
She said, "Spike Jones was my uncle. I thought you knew that."
"I didn't know that," I replied. His name had never come up in our conversations and I wasn't in the habit of asking women if they were Spike Jones's niece. (I should have started. I later found out that another actress I worked with, Judy Strangis, was also a niece of Spike's. In fact, Judy's the one who called me the other day to tell me about Kristine.)
It turned out Kristine not only was a niece of Spike Jones but when she was around six, she'd even sung on one of his records. Spike was married to a singer named Helen Grayco. Helen Grayco was born Helen Greco and she "Americanized" her surname early in her career.
Standing there in Kristine Greco's apartment that night, I felt like I'd made a wrong turn at the Twilight Zone and wandered into a Hitchcock flick…but it got weirder. I asked her, "Where are all of Spike Jones's personal papers and such?"
She said, "Well, a lot of them are in my garage. Remember those boxes you just parked your car next to?"
I'd been parking next to those boxes for a year or so when I visited her. We went out to the garage, opened up the top box and right there we found a bunch of animation-style storyboard drawings. Back when he was doing one of his TV shows in the fifties, Jones sometimes employed cartoonists to create visual gags which he and his band used. There were about two dozen of these drawings and many were by the great cartoon director, Tex Avery, some of them even signed. Here's one from a series of gags which had Spike sitting on a piano playing the trombone while his "feet" (actually someone else's hands) played the piano…
The others weren't signed but appeared to be by two other artists. Both had familiar styles and one looked like it just might be the legendary magazine cartoonist, Virgil "VIP" Partch.
"You can have them if you like," she said…and she also loaded me down with old sheet music and programs and Spike souvenirs. One treasure I keep on my desk here looks like a gold-plated railroad spike but it's also a can opener…and it says "Spike Jones" on the side of it.
At the time, I was working at Hanna-Barbera. The following Monday, I took the storyboard drawings in and showed them to my office roommate. My office roommate at the time was Tex Avery.
He was sitting there with an older gent…a visitor I didn't recognize. When I showed Tex the drawings, he did one of those "takes" that the Wolf in his cartoons did when he found Droopy where he didn't expect him. "My God," he gasped. "We were just talking about Spike. I loved writing gags for him."
I asked him if he could identify the drawings done by others. He said most of them were by Roy Williams. Roy was the Disney storyman who appeared on The Mickey Mouse Club as the Big Mooseketeer. "What about this one?" I asked, showing him the one I thought might be by Virgil Partch.
"Oh, that's one of his," Tex said, pointing to the gentleman in his guest chair. "This is Virgil Partch."
That, fortunately, is about where the incredible coincidences end. I wound up going to lunch that day with Tex and Vip — they drank and talked, I ate and listened — and we had a very nice time. Kristine soon introduced me to Spike's son, Spike Jr., who was (and still is) a very successful producer. We lunched and talked about me writing a book and also about other projects, but nothing ever came of any of it. I was too busy to tackle the book or anything else just then. A few years later, I heard that a fine historian-author named Jordan Young was doing a Spike Jones bio so I gave him all the material I'd amassed and he produced a much better book than I would have. You can order a copy of it here.
That's the story. I told you you wouldn't believe it.