Here at long last is the second excerpt from Allan Sherman's 1965 TV special…but before we get to it, we need to discuss and maybe view another clip.
One of the guests on the special was Lorne Greene, who was then a pretty big star. Bonanza was just about the most popular TV series in the country and Mr. Greene had a hit record — a western-themed ballad called "Ringo." On the special, Greene performed the song in western garb. The tune was slightly abridged from the record but it was done with the same seriousness and style. Then he exited and Allan Sherman walked out in western garb and performed his parody version on the same set.
This excerpt from the special begins with Sherman's parody and omits the Lorne Greene performance he's spoofing. So here, in case you're unfamiliar with it, is Lorne Greene and "Ringo," as heard on the record…
Then imagine Greene exiting the screen, Sherman walking in wearing much the same outfit and assuming the same opening pose and — well, go ahead and click…
As you've just seen, the special continued after the "Ringo" number with a few other items. Mr. Sherman sang a serious song called "His Own Little Island," which was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans for the 1961 Broadway musical, Let It Ride. The show was not successful — it closed after 68 performances — but like many non-hit musicals, there was one song that outlived the show, and a number of artists recorded it. Sherman's version had lyrics that differed slightly (but not to be funny) from some of the others but it's kind of a nice recording. You can listen to it right here…
Livingston and Evans, of course, had a pretty good joint career despite the failure of Let It Ride. Among their many hits were "Buttons and Bows," "Silver Bells," "Mona Lisa," "Que Sera Sera" and the song you can hear in the player below. It was sung by Mr. Livingston himself…
Sherman's recording of "His Own Little Island" has an interesting story. The man was not happy being a fabulously-successful recording artist with his parody albums. Almost immediately upon going overnight from unemployed TV producer to wealthy superstar, Sherman began pushing Warner Brothers Records to let him do an album of serious songs. They fought him all the way for obvious reasons but it was hard to say no to their biggest star. Grudgingly, they agreed to release a single (not an album) of a serious song Sherman had written years earlier as a love letter to his wife — the one he divorced not long after.
It was called "Oddball" and since records have two sides, he sang "His Own Little Island" as the "B" side, the side a lot of buyers never bother to play. In the era of CDs, it has become a lost phenomenon but it was not unusual back then for someone to record a single and to sweat and work and to have all sorts of great expectations for the "A" side…and then have the "B" side, which was chosen and recorded almost as an afterthought, become the hit. The Livingston-Evans hit "Mona Lisa" was the throwaway "B" side of a Nat King Cole record that no one remembers.
Anyway, neither side of Sherman's single got much attention but almost 100% of what notice it did get was for "His Own Little Island," and he took to singing it often in concerts and night club appearances. It became kind of a personal theme for him and since the song's origins were so obscure, a lot of people thought he wrote it.
One other thing about the special before I let you go…
As I mentioned the other day, I audio-recorded this special when it appeared and played that tape over and over. A few years ago when I finally got a DVD of it, I was eager to check out the writing credits, which I hadn't noted back in '65. It turned out to have been written by Sherman, David Vern, Sam Bobrick, Bill Idelson and Roger Price…all names well-known to me.
Starting at the end and working backward, Roger Price was the inventor of Droodles, a funny gag panel which I wrote about back here. He was also (a) an occasional collaborator with Harvey Kurtzman and a contributor to MAD, (b) the editor-publisher of Grump, a good but unsuccessful and generally-forgotten humor magazine that tried to be MAD for an older audience; (c) a frequent TV panel member and the host of a short-lived TV series based on Droodles, (d) the co-creator of the game, Mad-Libs and (e) a co-founder/owner of Price-Stern-Sloan, a major publisher of silly books. A very funny, prolific man.
Sam Bobrick was — and still is; he's still with us — a very prolific author and co-author of TV shows and plays (including the oft-performed Norman, Is That You?). Bill Idelson was a former radio actor who became a successful TV producer and writer, best known for playing Herman Glimshire — or however you spell it — on The Dick Van Dyke Show.)
And then there's David Vern, a man I don't know a whole lot about but he seems to have had a fascinating career. He was an old pulp writer with hundreds of credits under a dozen names in science-fiction and mystery magazines. He worked a lot in television, including a number of game shows. Just before Allan Sherman hit it big with his record, My Son, the Folk Singer, he was producing a game show for CBS called Your Surprise Package. David Vern was one of the writers for it and he seems to have worked on other TV shows, occasionally changing his name. He wrote for Sam Levenson, Red Buttons, George Gobel and many other TV comedy stars of the fifties.
His birth name was David Levine but his main professional name was David Vern Reed and when he wasn't writing TV or pulp magazines, he was writing comic books, mainly for DC and sometimes for the editor there who had once been his agent, Julius Schwartz. His first comic book credits seem to be for Batman around 1949 and he wrote quite a few of them and also many Superman stories, scripts for the mystery and war books and others. He was away from Batman for a long time but in the mid-seventies, did a long string of stories under the name "David V. Reed." He was a pretty good writer, I thought…someone we need to keep in mind someday for the Bill Finger Award. He died in 1989.
I never met the man but I was a fan of his comic book writing. So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered he was one of the writers on this TV special I remembered so fondly. Maybe one of these days, someone will post the rest of it.
