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.