Carole Vernier — Herb Caen’s aide and muse
Carole Vernier had a smoky voice, a throaty laugh and an extra- dry wit, a combination that made her the perfect backstop for Herb Caen.
Ms. Vernier, who served as The Chronicle columnist’s assistant until his death in 1997, was found deceased in her Bush Street apartment in San Francisco this week. The cause of death was heart failure complicated by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to her sister, Darryl Cole. She was 75.
During two stints — 1971 to 1979 and 1989 to 1997 — Ms. Vernier sat outside Caen’s office, at a desk cluttered with letters and notes that arrived by the hundreds. A cigarette was usually burning in the ashtray.
“You have to imagine the phone ringing every 10 seconds, and there were three lines,” said Jesse Hamlin, a former Caen legman turned Chronicle staff writer and jazz critic. “She’d be constantly opening mail while the phones were ringing off the hook, and Herb would be calling out from his office for her to check something that he needed right away. It was just juggling balls that never stopped.”
Since Caen lived in the old world of telephones and typewriters, Ms. Vernier was essential in dealing with press agents and publicists who were forever trying to get their clients’ names in the column.
She’d help callers craft items and help Caen craft items, by supplying punchlines. In a 1995 column, he recited an obituary a tipster had sent him.
“She left a husband, nine sons, eight daughters, four sisters ( one named Olive Dog Taking Gun, another Hazel Weasel Head), 76 grandchildren, 135 greatgrandchildren and 12 great- greats. Surmises Carole Vernier: “The thought of one more Thanksgiving dinner must have done her in,” Caen wrote.
At the end of the workday, Ms. Vernier could be found at the famed newspaper hangout, the M& M at Fifth and Howard streets, holding court, cigarette in one hand, “Vitamin V” in the other. Publicists would seek her out to learn whether an item had made it into the next day’s column, then they would wait for the early edition to come off the presses at 11 p. m.
Carole Anne Vernier was born in Los Angeles and grew up all over the world, owing to her father’s job with Standard Oil. After graduating from high school in The Hague, Netherlands, she attended Stanford University, where her grandfather Chester Vernier had been a professor of law.
She moved to San Francisco in the early ’ 60s and found a $ 160- amonth apartment above a Chinese grocery store on Pine Street.
Married briefly, she worked in several secretarial positions until 1971, when she landed a job as a stenographer. Her break came when Caen put out a call to replace his longtime assistant and listed “attractive ankles” as a criteria, Cole said.
“She signed the signed the application ‘ Ankles Vernier,’ ” her sister recalled. In 1979, Ms. Vernier was denied a promotion to reporter status and left The Chronicle to work at an ad agency. She returned 10 years later to her old job with Caen.
Assisting Caen was never just a day job. Ms. Vernier was expected to be out on the town at night, a second set of eyes and ears. She’d hit the Venetian Room, Washington Square Bar & Grill, Perry’s, Cookie’s, Tosca, and was often at theater and nightclub openings.
“She was never given the title of reporter, but she certainly deserved it,” said Hamlin, who has not forgotten the time Ms. Vernier drove her boyfriend’s sports car into the bay in Sausalito and emerged unscathed. “If it wasn’t a Herb Caen item, it would have been a good one.” Hamlin says “She was quite a dame and always a lot of laughs.”
After Caen died, Ms. Vernier worked on the copy desk for a few years before retiring to Santa Cruz to care for her ailing mother, who died in 2001. Ms. Vernier then returned to San Francisco and became a freelance book editor. Among her clients was Johnny Weissmuller Jr., who wrote his book about his father, the famous Olympian.
“She was working until the end,” says her longtime friend Diane Weissmuller, widow of the younger Weissmuller. “Journalism was so important to her.”
Late in 2015, Ms. Vernier became involved in a PBS TV documentary on her old boss. By then just breathing was such a struggle that she could barely get down the front steps of her apartment building, according Jennifer Blot, a Chronicle colleague and friend who drove her to the documentary shoot.
Survivors include her sister, Darryl Cole of Hayward; a son, Dirk Clarke of Southern California; and a niece, Cindy Hauser of Sunnyvale. At Ms. Vernier’s request, her ashes will be scattered at sea. No services are planned.
Donations in her name may be made to Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco.