Search Results for: allan sherman

Sorry to have to report the passing of author-historian Allan Asherman. He was 76 and the cause of death is being reported as related to a recent fall. Allan was a very smart guy — a respected author among comic book fans, film buffs and lovers of Star Trek. Among his many books were The Star Trek Compendium, The Star Trek Interview Book and The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But Allan was an expert on all sorts of things.

I knew him when he worked for DC Comics, sometimes as an editor and sometimes as their in-house librarian. He started there almost five decades ago as one of the "Junior Woodchucks," which was kind of an intern/assistant program. Paul Levitz, who was also part of that group, wrote on Facebook and will not mind me stealing his words and posting them here…

Allan was a good soul, a historian of much of what had gone on in comics and science fiction, a teacher, a writer, and a part of DC for many years in many guises. His first tour of duty was an assistant editor, working with Joe Kubert, Bob Kanigher and Joe Simon, and that was his role in Woodchuck days, cut short in one of the mid-70s layoffs that swept through. He returned again and again (I lost track along the way, but I think he may have been the "most hired" person at DC), including tours in the department that stored our film negatives for reprinting and international use, and a very long and vital tour as the company librarian, ending only when the company moved to Burbank. In all of these roles, he was one of the people who would be turned to with an "Allan might know…" question and often he did.

Allan did so many things that it's hard to list them all. He wrote articles and books, mostly about his favorite movies and TV shows, he helped program film festivals, he contributed supplementary material to DVDs and Blu-rays, he was just one of those walking encyclopedias. We often consulted each other about comic book history and he was a fine gentleman. Our sympathies go out to his friends and especially his wife Arlene Lo, who was a proofreader at DC Comics.

I've been talking here about the new 6-CD Allan Sherman collection — My Son, the Box — and about how interesting it is for me to re-visit these songs I loved so in my teen years. Not only am I hearing lyrics I'd never understood before but I'm noting things that bother me now that didn't bother me then. As I've become a connoisseur of the great lyric writers, I've come to wince at near-rhymes, like when someone thinks "moon" rhymes with "room" or "unsatisfactory" with "factory." Sherman has some nice joke rhymes in his writing, coupling "home in" with "abdomen" and "belt, sir" with "seltzer" but he also has a lot more of those awkward near-rhymes than I'd remembered. The two I cited are both on his albums. They didn't bother me then but they bother me (a little) now.

It's also struck me, listening to his work in roughly chronological work, that Sherman ran out of steam on his later albums. Every one has some gems but the last few records have a quite a few tunes that suggest a certain paucity of ideas, especially when he gets into the "laundry list" songs that just itemize food items or states or parts of the body. Even some of these are rather pleasant because the arrangements are good and Sherman sings with great enthusiasm and warmth, but he sure seems to run out of creative steam here and there. Once upon a time, the notion of a new Allan Sherman record was such a happy thing that the drop-off in quality didn't bother me a lot. Again, it does now…though not so much that I won't be playing all six CDs over and over for quite a while.

The boxed set contains excellent liner notes by Mark Cohen and they deserve better presentation (like, a larger font) than they get here. Cohen wrote me that he is considering a full-scale biography of the man and I hope he goes ahead with it. It's way overdue and it should be done before any more Sherman associates pass away, uninterviewed.

The set also includes Sherman's previously-unreleased parody of My Fair Lady. At the time Lerner and Loewe refused him permission to spoof their classic Broadway show, he probably thought it was a bad break but it was the best thing that ever happened to Allan Sherman's career. For one thing, it isn't all that wonderful. For another, it has those kind of "inside" Jewish references that would have gotten him typed as a comedian catering mainly to the Catskills crowd, a la the kind of material Myron Cohen did when he wasn't on The Ed Sullivan Show. One of the selling points of Sherman's breakthrough album, My Son, the Folk Singer, was that it was Jewish but not too Jewish. You could laugh at it without knowing what a pupik was, and Warner Brothers Records managed to get it into stores in non-Jewish neighborhoods, which didn't happen much with Mickey Katz records.

Someone at the company was also smart enough to lead off Side One with "The Ballad of Harry Lewis" and not "The Streets of Miami," which was the first number Sherman performed at the recording session/party. They also wisely put "Sarah Jackman" as the first song on Side Two. Back in the days of vinyl albums, the first song on each side was all some buyers and radio people played. Both songs were funny. Neither played mainly to the Jews in the audience.

It probably also helped that Allan Sherman's name wasn't Izzy Schwartz or something of the sort; not that Anti-Semitism per se would have been a factor but some people would have figured, "Oh, that'll be full of Jewish references I won't get." I'm Jewish and even I could never understand a couple of Jackie Mason's early bits. I remember once having to ask my Aunt what a shidach was. (It's an arranged marriage, and Mason was catering to people who knew that. By the way, pupik is Yiddish for navel.) Sherman made Jewish humor accessible to folks who lived in…I don't know. Name some state without a lot of Jews at the time. His records sold there, too. That was why he was able to move so many of them.

One other thing that occurred to me about Allan Sherman: In 1965, he wrote a very funny autobiography called A Gift of Laughter, which is long outta-print but which I highly recommend as a joy to read. You'd especially love the last chapter, which is about a show he did with Harpo Marx which turned out to be Harpo's final performance. (Here's an online scan of an abridged version that ran in Reader's Digest. It's better in the actual book.)

I don't necessarily recommend the book as actual history, however. You may have seen me mention my high school buddy, Bruce Reznick, who occasionally sends in items I post on this weblog. Bruce's father is the great comedy writer, Sidney Reznick, and he was a featured player in one anecdote in A Gift of Laughter. Sidney says it ain't so. A number of other Sherman friends and co-workers I've encountered have suggested that what he wrote is not exactly what they remembered…and notably, Sherman omits one key verifiable fact from his life story. He tells the rags-to-riches tale of how he went from unemployed, unemployable TV producer to Big Comedy Star practically overnight…but fails to mention that My Son, the Folk Singer was his second record. He had previously done a much less successful — perhaps because it was "too Jewish" — single of "Jake's Song" and "A Satchel and a Seck." I guess it would have cluttered his life story and made it seem less exciting to know that he wasn't a smash hit with his first attempt at a comedy record.

This is not uncommon in autobiographies. When Moss Hart wrote Act One, he told the tale of his maiden success as a playwright, making Once in a Lifetime sound like his first work to make it to Broadway. It wasn't. His friend, Alan Jay Lerner, also left some early failures out of his autobiography, The Street Where I Live. There are many other examples. What's odd (and oddly endearing) about Sherman's book is that it's filled with flops and humiliations as a comedy writer and producer. He owns up to an awful lot of them but pretends like when he finally tried recording song parodies, he struck gold his first time out. I don't fault him for that. I just think it's…well, kind of strange. It doesn't make me love his work any less, though.

My, a lot of Petula Clark fans read this blog. A number of you wrote to tell me that Ms. Clark had recorded a new version of "Downtown" in 2019 with a group called the Saw Doctors. I not only knew about it, I put it up on this site at the time.

And a lot of you wrote to remind me that Allan Sherman once recorded a parody of "Downtown" and that while in junior high school, I wrote my own parody of it and he threatened to take legal action over it. Believe me — I could never forget that but I've told that story three times on this blog. Here was its most recent appearance.

And a couple of you wrote to tell me — and this, I didn't know — that in 2013, Petula recorded a new, slower and sadder version of the song. I don't care for it as much, perhaps because I'm so used to the original tempo…but if you want to hear it, here it is…

After I listened to that, I had an urgent need to listen to the song the way I always heard it except when Allan Sherman was singing it. Fortunately, a few of you told me that two years ago, a new "mix" of the original song was released. That, I didn't know and here it is. This one, I like…

It's stunning that a simple song like this has had such a long life. It doesn't even really convey a message of any import and even when it first came out, downtown in most cities was the last place you'd go if you were alone and life was making you lonely. Downtown in most cities is not the best place to be. Still, there was something about the song…and the arrangement…and the way she sang it that made this record an all-time classic.

A few years ago, as I mentioned, Shelly Goldstein and I went to see Ms. Clark perform. She sang all her hits and she had a lot of them…but it was an especially thrilling moment for everyone present when she got to this one. My hands still hurt from applauding.

The Colgate Comedy Hour ran on TV from 1950 to 1955, back in the era when the sponsor could control a program up to and including its name. Every big comedian — and a lot of lesser ones — appeared on it and it is most often remembered today, when it's remembered at all, because it was the TV home of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis who hosted often.

In 1967, George Schlatter produced a special reviving the name and it had some pretty good people on it including Bob Newhart, Dick Shawn, Nipsey Russell, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, Allan Sherman, Nanette Fabray, Kaye Ballard, Edie Adams, Phyllis Diller, Bob Hope…well, you get the idea. Here is that special. There's some real good material in there…

My old pal Pat O'Neill took exception to my belief that in the movie of Guys and Dolls, Frank Sinatra should have played Sky Masterson. Here's what he sent me…

Why do so many people think this? Sky Masterson has to be big and imposing, so that his threats have weight behind them. At this stage of his life, Sinatra was still a skinny little runt. Sure, he had the voice for the role (maybe — it's written for a belting baritone and Sinatra was a tenor), but not the look.

Who should have played Sky? Well, why not the guy who originated the role on Broadway — Robert Alda?

Why not Ethel Merman in the movie of Gypsy, Carol Channing in the movie of Hello Dolly, Stephen Douglass in the movie of Damn Yankees…or a dozen others that readers of this blog could name? (I started to type in "Zero Mostel in the movie of Fiddler on the Roof" but I think that was just a matter of Zero wanting too much money, not someone's idea of a more marketable lead. How about Julie Andrews in the movie of My Fair Lady?)

Hollywood has rarely operated that way and Samuel Goldwyn wanted movie stars in his movie. And here's an interesting consideration: Do we think that if Sinatra or Brando had wanted to play Sky Masterson on Broadway in the original production and had been willing to work for the same money Robert Alda got, that Alan Alda's daddy would have gotten the part?

If you want to argue that the person who originated the role on Broadway should always get the movie…or that the best person actor-wise should always get the movie regardless of star power…okay. We can have that discussion. I'd be on your side in many cases. But like I said, Hollywood has rarely operated that way.

I think Sinatra should have played Sky Masterson. No, he was not as physically intimidating as Brando but I think he was a good enough actor to pull it off. More importantly, he was a singer — one of the most popular singers ever. And they put him in a role that was tailored for the non-singing Sam Levene and instead put the non-singing Marlon Brando in the singing part.

Which of course led to someone there saying, "Sinatra fans will be really disappointed if they buy tickets to this movie and he doesn't sing" so they added in the wholly-expendable, not-up-to-Frank-Loesser-standards song "Adelaide" and stuck Nathan in the title number where he really didn't belong. (You know who I think should have played Nathan Detroit in the movie? Phil Silvers. A fast-talking gambler who tries to weasel out on deals and not even commit to his longtime fiancée? Tell me that isn't a Phil Silvers role.)

A lot of folks don't know this but years later when Sinatra had his own record label — Reprise — and could do anything he wanted, he recorded a studio cast album of Guys and Dolls, recruiting Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore and others. Debbie Reynolds did the Adelaide songs and Allan Sherman sang (opposite her) the one song Nathan Detroit had in the stage version, "Sue Me." Frank, of course, sang all the Sky Masterson songs and he was great. (Oh — and Sammy Davis Jr. sang "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat.")

There's a long story that I'm not sure I know well enough to relate here about the original soundtrack recording of the movie. It was a small record with just a few songs and it wasn't until years later that there was an LP with all the songs from the movie on it. If someone who knows more about this can explain it, I'll run the explanation here. I just kinda think the movie was disappointing in a musical sense — it also dropped some great songs from Broadway — and it wouldn't have been if Frank had been Sky. And Phil had been Nathan.

I guess I knew about this somewhere in the rarely-visited recesses of my mind but the Library of Congress has this thing called the National Recording Registry which — well, it'll be simpler if I just steal a description off its website…

Each year, the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress chooses 25 recordings showcasing the range and diversity of American recorded sound heritage in order to increase preservation awareness. The diversity of nominations received highlights the richness of the nation's audio legacy and underscores the importance of assuring the long-term preservation of that legacy for future generations. Currently, there are 600 works/titles on the National Recording Registry.

I'm not sure if some of the million-selling records in it are in any danger of not being available for future generations but I guess it's a noble program. Today, they added another batch of records to the list and one of them is This is a Recording, Lily Tomlin's first record. It's the thirteenth comedy album to be inducted (I guess that's the right word) and the first one by a female.

There are 650 records in the National Recording Registry and it strikes me that there oughta be more than 13 comedy records in there but the other twelve aren't bad choices. There are records by Tom Lehrer, Mort Sahl, Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks, Bob Newhart, Stan Freberg, Vaughn Meader, Bill Cosby, The Firesign Theater, George Carlin, Groucho Marx, Richard Pryor and Steve Martin. If it were up to me, I'd add in records by Robert Klein, Mike Nichols & Elaine May, Jonathan Winters, Shelley Berman, Allan Sherman, Monty Python and about forty others.

But if I had to pick just thirteen, it's not a bad thirteen…though I don't think Groucho's record is there because it's a great record but because it's Groucho. The whole list of 13 is here for your inspection and the link above will show you all 650 honored records.

I first posted this here in August of 2009 and gave it its first encore in 2014…so it's time for another reprise of the tale of how one of my idols sorta threatened to sue me when I was barely in my teens. But first, let's kick things off with a video of that idol performing the song in question…

And now, here's the story…

This took place in 1965. I was 13 years old and attending Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School in West Los Angeles. Allan Sherman had a hit record out called "Crazy Downtown," which was a parody of the Petula Clark mega-hit, "Downtown."

Like Stan Freberg, MAD Magazine, Soupy Sales, Laurel and Hardy and a few others I could name, Allan Sherman was a huge influence on me. Even at that age, I was writing a lot of silly poems and song parodies…and I guess he was my second-favorite writer of the latter. (My fave was Frank Jacobs in MAD. Mr. Jacobs is the gent to whom we gave the Bill Finger Award this year at the Comic-Con International…and I'm currently lobbying to get someone to publish a book collecting Frank's fine work for that publication and to include a CD of gifted folks singing some of his better efforts.)

Anyway, what you need to know is that I was in Junior High and that Allan Sherman was kind of a hero. His son Robert was a classmate and while we weren't close friends, every now and then Robbie would tell me how his dad was going to be on some TV show or had a new album in the works. I couldn't believe that I was even that close to the guy who wrote and sang those funny records I played over and over and over.

So one month, a campus group called the Girls League decided to stage a talent show/benefit with various students and teachers performing to raise money for I-don't-recall-what-cause. The festivities were to commence with an elaborately-staged (elaborate for a show with zero budget) dance number to "Crazy Downtown." The school orchestra knew the tune and some male student who, sad to say, looked a lot like Allan Sherman would be singing the lyrics while everyone did the frug and the pony around him.

That was the plan until two days before the event. That was when Mr. Campbell, who was the school principal, received a call either from Allan Sherman or Allan Sherman's lawyer vowing to sue if Mr. Sherman's lyrics were used. The obvious assumption was that Robbie had told his father about it. Mr. Campbell explained that this was a pretty low-profile event; that the number was to be performed but twice (two shows) in a Junior High School auditorium before, collectively, less than a thousand people, and that the money was going to a worthy charity. This made no difference to the caller.

With a deep sigh, Mr. Campbell called in the organizers of the benefit and told them to drop the number. They said they couldn't drop the number. It was the opening of the show and there was no time to write and stage something else. "Well," Mr. Campbell suggested, "How about dropping the Allan Sherman lyrics and just singing the real lyrics of "Downtown?" The students argued that, creatively, the number they'd staged really cried out for silly lyrics. Mr. Campbell said, "I'm sorry but this is final. You can't use Allan Sherman's lyrics."

The students behind the show didn't want to use the real "Downtown" lyrics so one of them — a way-too-cute girl named Cady — came to me at lunchtime and said, "Hey, you're always writing funny poems and things and reading them in class. Can you write us a new set of funny lyrics to 'Downtown?'" If Cady had asked me to trisect angles, I probably would have been motivated to learn how but this request was in that small subset of things in this world that I think I can actually do. She took me over to a rehearsal for the show and I watched the number. Then the next morning, I handed her a set of parody lyrics to "Downtown" that used none of Allan Sherman's jokes or even rhymes. I no longer have a copy of what I wrote but I can recall the opening. It went…

I'm feeling low
'Cause every radio show
Keeps telling me to go…Downtown.
All of my friends
Say it's the newest of trends
The party never ends…Downtown.

And from there on, it was all about how the singer was such a terrible dancer that he didn't dare go downtown and attempt to join in the fun. I do remember being pretty proud that I rhymed "fugue" with "frug" and that I got in a reference to Mr. Campbell, whose name I happily decided rhymed with "gamble." But what I really remember were a couple of big tingles 'n' thrills, first when I heard my lyrics being sung on a stage in what seemed almost a semi-professional fashion (a first for me) and then getting some decent laughs at the actual performances (another first).

And then I remember the summons, a few days later, to the office of Mr. Campbell. I didn't know what it was about but I knew I couldn't possibly be in any real trouble. My entire time in school, I never got in any real trouble. This was about as close as I ever came.

Mr. Campbell had someone on the phone when I walked in. My memory is that it was Allan Sherman himself but as I think back, I'm wondering if it wasn't Sherman's attorney who, in turn, had his client in his office or on another line. In any case, Mr. Sherman had heard that most or all of his lyrics had been performed at the benefit and he was going to sue Emerson Junior High, win, tear the school down and put up a Von's Market on the site…or something like that. He was also going to sue all the students involved, including whoever it was who, he insisted, had just "changed a few words" of what he'd written, hoping he [Sherman] wouldn't catch on that his lyrics had been used. I guess that meant me.

Cady and some other Girls League officers were in the office already and they'd explained eleven times that I had written completely different lyrics that had not employed a syllable of Mr. Sherman's work. The person on the other end of the phone refused to believe that.

So it came down to me reciting my lyrics — which I remembered in full then even if I can't today — and Mr. Campbell repeating them, line by line to either Allan Sherman or to a lawyer who was, in turn, repeating them to Allan Sherman. They didn't sound particularly clever that way but eventually, my hero was convinced and he agreed to withdraw his threat. I wish I could report that he also said, "Hey, whoever wrote those may have a future in this business" but no such compliment was voiced.

That was pretty much the end of the story except that it took a while before I could listen to Allan Sherman without getting a tight feeling in my tummy. Years later, I met some of Sherman's associates and learned that I was in good company; that though generally a decent guy, Allan was known to threaten to sue waiters if his soup was lukewarm. Despite that, I still love his work and can probably sing 90% of everything he wrote from memory. That's right. I can remember his lyrics but not my own.

Incidentally: A few years later at University High School, I was called upon again to write last-minute lyrics for a talent show. Students in this one were performing a number of recent hits. The faculty advisor decided that some of the lyrics of these songs, which were played non-stop on the radio, were too "suggestive" to be sung by high school students. I had to "clean up" the lyrics to a number of tunes, including "Never My Love" (a hit of the day for The Association), "Young Girl" (Gary Puckett and the Union Gap) and even the Doors' immortal "Light My Fire." In the last of these, I had to take out the part about lighting the guy's fire.

I did, and the revised lyrics passed inspection by the faculty advisor so the show could go on. But during the actual performance, as all the singers had agreed among themselves, they abandoned my laundered versions and sang the real lyrics. This struck me as the proper thing to do.

We all kept waiting for the faculty advisor to stop the proceedings or haul all the singers out to be shot…but if she noticed, she decided to pretend she didn't. In later years, writing for TV shows, I often employed the same trick of feigned compliance…and you'd be amazed how often it worked. The things you learn in junior high school…

New to our countdown this year is Allan Sherman and his version from 1963 of "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas." There have been dozens of record albums and CDs that collect comedic Christmas recordings and this selection is on about two-thirds of them, often called "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

By any name, I loved this song since I was eleven. Many years later when I was writing Garfield and Friends, I subconsciously stuck in a joke about an "indoor plastic birdbath" without realizing where I'd gotten that phrase. Several folks who saw the cartoon wrote to inform me but they were all nice enough to refer to it as an "hommage" instead of a "plagiarism."

This video may seem like Mr. Sherman and his singers are doing a clumsy job of lip-syncing to a pre-recorded track but I don't think so. As I recall, this was a number that he wrote and performed on some TV show taped several weeks before Christmas. Someone — Sherman or his record company — got the idea that it should be a record and they quickly rushed it out as a 45 RPM release using the music and vocals from the show. It was later included on one of his albums.

So why is it outta sync here? I can think of several possibilities, one being that whoever assembled this video for YouTube laid the stereo rendition from the record over mono (or silent) footage from the TV show and they didn't quite match up. Or maybe the record was made from an alternate take of the number from the show. Or something. Anyway, I think the audio you're hearing was recorded at the same time with the same singers but maybe not the exact same time. It's still a great song…

In 1959, Peter Sellers starred in The Mouse That Roared, a pretty good (I thought) little comedy film based on the novel of the same name by Leonard Wibberley. Mr. Sellers, as was his wont, played three roles.

Then in 1966, the novel was adapted as a potential TV series with Sid Caesar, who also often played multiple roles. In this case, he played the same three roles as Sellers. In support, Mr. Caesar had Joyce Jameson, Richard Deacon and several other faces (like that of Peter Leeds) that were quite familiar from TV shows of that period. Mr. Deacon, of course, was available because The Dick Van Dyke Show had just ended its glorious run.

A reader of this site who calls him- or herself "Orange Apple" sent me this link to the pilot. It was directed by Jack Arnold, who directed such great films as It Came from Outer Space, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man and the Peter Sellers version of The Mouse That Roared. The script was by Frank Tarloff, who spent much of his career writing for the top situation comedies (including The Dick Van Dyke Show) often under pseudonyms because of The Blacklist. Mr. Tarloff won an Academy Award for co-authoring the movie Father Goose and he also wrote one of my "guilty pleasure" faves, A Guide for the Married Man…in which Sid Caesar also appeared.

Of special note is the unusually-long theme song for which Allan Sherman not only wrote the lyrics but sang 'em. The pilot never became a series but you might want to give it a look. I can name worse shows from that period that did sell…some for more than one season.

Here's yet another clip of Allan Sherman performing on The Ed Sullivan Show, this time the telecast for April 24, 1966.

The song is "Second Hand Nose," a parody of "Second Hand Rose," a popular tune from 1921 which Barbra Streisand was performing in '66 wherever she performed. The original recording of it was by Fanny Brice, the personality Ms. Streisand portrayed in Funny Girl, the Broadway show from '64. It was probably just too tempting for Sherman, doing a "nose" song associated with Barbra.

A couple of interesting points about it here: Sherman himself had had a nose job when he was much younger and at time of this show, he was doing everything he could to alter his current appearance — losing weight, swapping glasses for contacts, letting his hair grow out, etc.

Also, he changed some lyrics. In "Second Hand Nose" as it appeared on his then-current album, in the part about him going to the plastic surgeon, he sang, "I've been to this office once or twice and / All his patients look like Barbra Streisand." Here, he sings — and he stumbles a bit on the words as if they're new to him — "He said if I can handle the finances / My nose will be the same as Cary Grant's is."

Near the end on the record, when he's singing about sitting with girls in his car, the line goes, "We'll sit there sniffing glue." Here, it's "They'll meet their Waterloo."

One suspects Mr. Sullivan demanded the changes…

Another appearance by Allan Sherman on The Ed Sullivan Show. This one's from February 20, 1966, shortly before he entered his "lose weight, grow your hair out and ditch the glasses" phase of trying to change his life and image…

Earlier today, I linked to a 1965 Allan Sherman TV special that I enjoyed very much as a kid. I am about to tell you just about everything I know about one of the credited writers on it…a gent name David Vern. I wish I knew more.

David Vern wrote a lot of TV shows, including work with Red Buttons and Sam Levenson.  But he also wrote a lot of pulp magazines, science-fiction novels and comic books. The pulps, novels and comics were usually signed with pen names including Coram Nobis, David V. Reed, Alexander Blade and David Levine. His real name was David Levine and as that was also the real name of at least two other men who worked in comics and cartooning, that caused some confusion.

All of Vern's known comic book writing was for DC Comics, starting apparently with a Batman story in 1949. Among the comics in which his work appeared were Superman, Mystery in Space, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Strange Adventures, Danger Trail and most of the war and romance titles. His employment there probably had a lot to do with Julius Schwartz. Before Julie became an editor at DC, he was an agent for science-fiction writers and one of his clients was Dave Vern.  Mr. Vern had gone to high school with another writer of pulp science-fiction, John Broome, and he helped Broome break into writing for DC where he became one of their best writers.

Vern was also a good friend of Allan Sherman, dating back to before Sherman became a performer with top-selling comedy records. Back then, Mr. Sherman was a producer of game shows, most notably I've Got a Secret, which he co-created. In 1961, Sherman was in Los Angeles producing Your Surprise Package, a short-lived quiz program hosted by Groucho's old sidekick, George Fenneman. Here's the opening to one episode…

A few years later when Sherman was a star, he wrote his autobiography, A Gift of Laughter. I've recommended it here before because it's a pretty good book…not particularly accurate but very entertaining. In it, he told this story about how some of the offices at CBS had no windows so they'd hang curtains on a wall as if you did have a window but for some reason preferred to keep the drapes closed over it…

One of the writers on the show, a brilliant and dissolute soul named David Vern, took advantage of the bare wall behind the drapery in his office. He would arrive every morning and lock himself in, and we would hear him humming and singing and busily occupied inside. He never let anyone else into his office for months, and we all wondered what the hell he was doing in there. I would yell in to Dave that we needed the script, and pages would keep sliding out from under the door. But never, never would he let me or anyone else in that office.

A year later, when the show went off the air, I found out what he'd been doing in there. Dave is a very literate man, and in his youth was a fine illustrator. He was fascinated, not only by his bare wall, but by the question: "How long will it be until someone finally opens these draperies?"

From his childhood, Dave remembered reading The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe's horror classic about a man who seals his enemy into a brick wall. And so for one solid year, Dave had labored in that locked office, and on the day we left he called me in to show me his masterwork.

"Behold!" Dave exclaimed, and he pulled the drapes open. The entire wall had been painted in oils and appeared to be an exact replica of a freshly laid brick wall. You could feel the wet mortar between the bricks. And near the bottom, in the scrawl of an obviously suffocating man, was the message: "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MONTRESOR!"

Dave was apparently also writing comic books in that office, mailing scripts in to faraway New York. He seems to have treated writing for DC as supplementary income to his work in television and for novels and magazines.

He was also involved with a very interesting book that was published in 1970. Back when the novel Valley of the Dolls was on the best-seller list, a lot of folks wrote imitations and one of them was Mort Weisinger, the longtime editor of the Superman comics for DC.  Weisinger had been a judge for the Miss America beauty pageant and he "wrote" (I'm using that word loosely) a steamy novel about the backstage doings at a similar competition.  Or maybe it would be more accurate to say he edited it.

It was reportedly ghost-written by a tag team of freelancers he knew which included DC scribes Bob Haney and Dave Vern. It was called The Contest and it sold well and made Weisinger a lot of money, partly due to a huge movie sale, though no movie was ever made of it. (I just found my copy of the book to scan its cover for you.  Somewhere here, I have a copy of the screenplay.)

Vern's last published comic book work seems to have taken him full circle at DC with a number of Batman stories between 1975 and 1978.  The editor was his old colleague, Julius Schwartz.  According to Vern's Wikipedia page (which makes no mention of his TV work), he died in 1994. I never met the man but I enjoyed a lot of his work…in comics and on TV. The guy sure got around.

On the evening of January 18, 1965 — in the week before Lyndon Johnson was sworn in for his full term as president — NBC aired a great special called Allan Sherman's Funnyland. It starred (of course) Allan Sherman and his guests included Lorne Greene, Jack Gilford and Angie Dickinson. One of the high points was when Mr. Greene sang his then-current hit record "Ringo," followed by Allan Sherman walking out to perform a parody of it.

I thought it was a great special…and I guess it was also a pilot but it didn't turn into a series. I played it over and over again…and you may be wondering how I could do that in 1965, long before anyone had invented the VCR or the DVR or anything that would record both video and audio off the TV. I recorded just the latter on my Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder and listened to it often for several years. Three decades later, I managed to obtain a DVD of the show and it really was as good as I always remembered.

Someone uploaded a video of the special to archive.org and I've embedded it below. The image isn't great but it's watchable…and if you start watching it, I have a feeling you'll watch the whole 59 minutes of it. Later today, I'll tell you some interesting things about one of the people who worked on it…

Sheldon Sturges saw the previous item on this blog, noticed the credit "Produced by Allan Sherman" and sent me this e-mail…

My Dad had that Cosby record and played it all the time when it first came out, so I used to say "rightttt" a lot in the first grade, which confused my teacher, the lovely Miss Jolicoeur. Just curious: what does a producer do on a comedy/spoken word record?

Well, it could mean many things on other records but I believe on this one, it meant they paid Allan Sherman some money to let them put his name on there. He was the hottest seller of comedy records ever at the same time while Cosby — then largely unknown — was putting out his first and for the same company. Someone there probably thought it would help sales and it probably did.

Speaking of Allan Sherman: I will be in the next day or so. Fans of his work will enjoy what is to come here.