DIE FRAULEIN’S FATE
Big band-era singer and actress Helen Grayco has died aged 97. Active as a singer from the age of four, a radio performance aged eight caught the eye (well, ear) of Bing Crosby and Der Bingle secured her Hollywood work that included a bit part in Marx Brothers classic A Night at the Opera. She toured with various bandleaders throughout the 1940s before beginning her most fruitful partnership with Spike Jones and His City Slickers.
Jones and Grayco seemed an odd dynamic – she was a conventional pop singer, while he did madcap pisstakes of classical and contemporary records laden with cartoony sound effects, such as a raspberry-heavy version of Donald Duck anti-Hitler theme “Der Fuehrer’s Face”. However she largely didn’t participate in the zany antics and mainly served a counterweight intermission to Jones’s shows after he figured his audience would be a bit worn out by an hour of nonstop hiccups and gunshots. The two married in 1949 (TV writer Mark Evanier notes that Grayco “had the kind of sense of humor that was probably mandatory to be married to Spike Jones”) and remained so until Jones’s 1965 death. Grayco subsequently married a restauranteur and largely retired from showbiz. Obituarynotice heils *raspberry*, heils *raspberry* right in the Reaper’s face.
Helen Grayco
20 September 1924 – 20 August 2022, aged 97
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