Carole Vernier, aide and muse to Herb Caen, dies
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[...] 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.