Vaughn Meader, 68; Comedian Known for Impersonating JFK

Vaughn Meader, who created a national sensation impersonating President Kennedy on the hit 1962 comedy album “The First Family,” but saw his career come to a virtual end when Kennedy was assassinated a year later, died Friday. He was 68.

Meader, a longtime smoker, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at his home in Auburn, Maine, his wife, Sheila, told The Times.

During the early days of the Kennedy administration, the New England-born Meader was a struggling young piano-playing comedian performing in small clubs in New York City’s Greenwich Village. His act consisted of song parodies and one-liners, but the routine that had audiences howling was the one that he did for a sure-fire finish: a mock presidential news conference in which he fielded questions from the audience and ad-libbed his answers with a pitch-perfect Kennedy impersonation.

“No matter what I was doing in the act, I knew I could do that last five minutes and save it,” he once recalled.

Meader first came to national attention in July 1962, when he did Kennedy on TV’s “Celebrity Talent Scouts.”

The appearance caught the attention of comedy writer Earle Doud and his partner, Bob Booker, who came up with the idea of producing a comedy album lampooning the Kennedys.

After being turned down by major record companies that feared offending the White House, Doud and Booker struck a deal with the small Cadence Records label.

With Meader providing the voices of both John and Robert Kennedy and Naomi Brossart as the wispy-voiced Jackie Kennedy, supported by a cast playing various relatives, dignitaries and “freeloaders,” the album was recorded before a live audience in New York City on Oct. 22, 1962.

Mild by today’s standards, “The First Family” featured 17 skits that took good-natured jabs at the Kennedys. In one, Jackie asks her husband why he didn’t touch his salad.

“Well, let me say this about that,” he says. “Now No. 1, in my opinion the fault does not lie as much with the salad as it does with the, uh, dressing being used on the salad. Now let me say that I have nothing against the dairy industry. However, I would prefer that, uh, in the future we stick to coleslaw.”

Another bit, set in the Kennedys’ White House bedroom, lampoons the extended Kennedy clan.

Jackie: Family, family, family. Jack, there’s just too much family. Can we ever get away alone?

Jack: Tomorrow, I, uh, promise -- tomorrow, we’ll get away together. No more family for a while. Now I promise. Now, uh, turn off the light. (click) Good night, Jackie ...

Jackie: Good night, Jack.

Jack: Good night, Ethel. Good night, Bobby.

Voices: Good night, Teddy. Good night, Peter. Good night, Pat ...

“The First Family” arrived in record stores in mid-November. Spurred by constant radio airplay and word of mouth -- from children and adults, Democrats and Republicans -- the album’s sales topped 2.5 million in only four weeks, setting a Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling album in history. It went on to sell 7 million copies and won a Grammy for album of the year.

It also turned the 26-year-old Meader into one of the hottest names in show business. He made appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” “The Jack Paar Show,” “The Andy Williams Show,” “What’s My Line?” “To Tell the Truth” and “The Joey Bishop Show.”

From earning $7.50 a night playing SoHo coffeehouses, Meader suddenly found himself headlining at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas for $22,500 a week.

Former President Eisenhower was a fan of the album, as was Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), who called it “very clever.” Even President Kennedy was forced to acknowledge the album, joking to reporters that “I thought it sounded more like Teddy than it did me.”

The album made Meader wealthy. He alone among the album’s cast had chosen royalties instead of a salary. He later estimated that he cleared about $300,000 -- the equivalent of $1.8 million today -- from album sales alone.

And he spent his good fortune freely.

“I lived like I thought a star was supposed to live -- wine, women and song,” he told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000.

But Meader wanted to be known as more than simply the guy who impersonated Kennedy.

“I thought I could sing and write songs and play [piano],” he later said. “I knew I had talent.”

He balked at doing a sequel album, for which he was contractually obliged. Only after the album’s producers hit him with a $1-million lawsuit did he do “The First Family, Vol. 2,” which was released in the spring of 1963.

Then, on Nov. 22, 1963, the unthinkable happened. Meader had just arrived in Milwaukee to perform at a fundraiser for the state Democratic Party. At the airport, a taxi driver asked if he’d heard about Kennedy in Dallas.

Figuring it was the setup for yet another Kennedy joke, Meader said, “No, how’s it go?”

After the assassination, comedian Lenny Bruce commented onstage that two graves had been dug in Arlington National Cemetery -- one for John Kennedy and one for Vaughn Meader.

The assassination was indeed the beginning of the end of Meader’s high-flying career. His bookings and TV appearances were canceled, and record stores pulled copies of the “First Family” albums off the shelves.

“That was it,” Meader told The Times in 1997. “One year, November to November. Then boom. It was all over.”

Born Abbott Vaughn Meader in Waterville, Maine, he was a year old when his father died in a diving accident. His young mother moved to Boston and left him with his paternal grandparents, who placed him in the first of a series of children’s homes.

After graduating from Boston’s Brookline High School, where he learned to play the piano by ear, Meader joined the Army. While stationed in West Germany, he played with the Rhine Rangers, a rockabilly band that toured American bases.

Discharged in 1957, Meader and his young German wife, Vera, moved to New York City, where Meader began playing piano in small clubs. While doing his act in November 1960, he made some political comments, then added in President-elect Kennedy’s voice, “Let me say this about that.”

“The place loved it,” he recalled.

He became so closely associated with Kennedy that shortly after the assassination, while walking down Second Avenue in New York City, a construction worker dropped his rivet gun and ran over to him. Tearfully grabbing Meader’s hands, the man said, “I’m sorry.”

“I was getting a reaction of pity, which is death for a comedian,” Meader later said.

The Kennedy impersonation had made up only 10% of his act, but even after dropping the presidential routine, the man who once sold out Carnegie Hall found it difficult to get bookings. “I was a reminder of that tragedy,” he said.

And without the thing that had made him famous, Meader was just another comedian. “Have Some Nuts!!!,” a comedy album in which Meader played a variety of characters but not Kennedy, was released in the spring of 1964 but attracted little attention.

Meader began drinking heavily. He went through the last of his album earnings and his wife left him.

By 1967, he had turned to the counterculture, leaving New York for San Francisco. He gave away all of his possessions, including his gold record and Grammy.

Meader didn’t abandon show business entirely, however.

In 1971, he recorded another comedy album, “The Second Coming,” on which he played Jesus visiting Harlem. Although the album received good reviews, many radio stations considered it sacrilegious and kept it off the air.

After moving to Louisville, Ky., in 1972, Meader formed a country band called the Honky Tonk Angels. He later had a couple of bit parts in films, including the campy 1976 comedy “Linda Lovelace for President,” and he starred as a Kennedy-obsessed man in a play that ran briefly in Los Angeles.

He met his fourth wife, Sheila, in the mid-1980s while playing piano in a bar in Moosehead Lake, Maine. He had long since reverted to calling himself by his first name, Abbott, and many locals had no idea how famous he had once been.

Meader is survived by his wife.

A celebration of his life will be held Nov. 21 at a bar called the Wharf in Hallowell, Maine, where Meader often played. The event comes one day before the 41st anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.