MEADER, (Abbott) Vaughn

(b. 20 March 1936 in Waterville, Maine), Grammy award–winning comedian, singer, and satirist known for his uncanny mimicry of President John F. Kennedy; his career never fully recovered after Kennedy's assassination.

Meader was the only child of Charles Vaughn Meader, a millworker, and Mary Ellen Abbott. After Meader's father broke his neck in a diving accident and drowned when Meader was only eighteen months old, his mother moved to Boston to work as a cocktail waitress, leaving Meader behind with relatives. A sometimes unruly and troubled child, Meader was sent to live with his mother in Boston at the age of five, but she had become alcohol-dependent and placed him in a children's home. After shuttling among several schools in Massachusetts and Maine, Meader eventually graduated from Brookline High School in Boston in 1953 and joined the U.S. Army. While stationed in Mannheim, West Germany, as a laboratory technician, he formed a country music band (the Rhine Rangers) with fellow soldiers, later adding impressions of popular singers to his repertoire. Meader married the German-born Vera Heller in 1955.

After his discharge in 1957 at the rank of private first class, Meader sold sewing machines door to door in Maine, before moving to New York City in 1959 to study at the School of Radio Technique under the GI Bill. While performing as a singer, musician, and comic in small nightclubs, Meader began impersonating Senator John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign. The audience reaction was so favorable that Meader ended every performance with a "JFK press conference." Although Meader was not, strictly speaking, an impressionist—the Kennedy routine was just five minutes of his thirty-minute act, which included original songs, parodies, and jokes—he mastered all of Kennedy's mannerisms (such as jabbing his forefinger for emphasis) and phrases (among them, "Let me say this about that "). Meader's physique was similar to Kennedy's, and he even adopted Kennedy's hairstyle. The Kennedy bit became popular enough for Meader to appear on Celebrity Talent Scouts on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) during the summer of 1962 (the show was taped on 25 June and broadcast on 3 July) and to have a full-page captioned photograph in Life magazine as part of a feature on Kennedy mimics.

After seeing Meader's stage act, the producers Bob Booker and Earle Doud, who had been planning a comedy album based on the Kennedy family, quickly signed him up. The First Family was recorded on 22 October 1962 before a live audience—the same night that President Kennedy himself was on television announcing that the Soviet Union had nuclear missiles in Cuba. Rejected by a dozen labels, the album was released on Cadence Records on 7 November 1962, and it became a sensation, helped also by the fact that Kennedy's popularity had soared as a result of his strong stand against the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The First Family mostly consisted of short segments gently satirizing the Kennedys by putting the president in nonpresidential situations, such as sorting out children's bathtub toys, as well as presidential ones, such as humorous press conferences. Record distributors could barely keep up with demand, and it became the fastest-selling record in history (about 4 million copies sold in four weeks). On 15 December 1962 the album went to the top of the charts and remained there for twelve weeks, eventually selling more than 7.5 million copies. Meader, only twenty-six years old, appeared on numerous television programs, including The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jack Paar Program, The Steve Allen Westinghouse Show, and The Andy Williams Show, and went from earning $7.50 a show in nightclubs to more than $5,000 per appearance.

Meader's mimicry was so good—Playboy lauded him as a "carbon copy of the President"—that even Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (a special assistant to the president) was startled when he heard "Kennedy" make some impolitic comments on the radio. Although First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy did not appreciate the record, Kennedy himself was amused, even playing it for the cabinet and purchasing 100 copies to send as Christmas gifts. Officially asked at a press conference if the album annoyed him, Kennedy quipped, "I actually listened to Mr. Meader's record, but I thought it sounded more like Teddy than it did me—so he's annoyed."

After the cast went on a successful tour (opening at Carnegie Hall), Meader began to grow weary of the act. Although the Kennedy routine had been very profitable—he earned seven cents in royalties for every album sold, and women threw themselves at him as if he really were Kennedy—he feared being typecast, and initially resisted participating in The First Family, Volume Two. That album was released in March 1963 and sold about 2 million copies. He signed with Verve Records and began working on an album of new material, Have Some Nuts, which was released in early 1964.

On 22 November 1963 Meader was in Milwaukee for an appearance before a group of Wisconsin Democrats, when a cabdriver asked him if he had heard that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Meader, thinking he was being set up for a punch line, replied, "No, how does it go?" Because of Kennedy's assassination, Meader's television and nightclub appearances were immediately postponed or canceled, and any remaining copies of both First Family albums were re-called and destroyed by Cadence. Meader announced that he would never do Kennedy's voice again and went into seclusion. The comedian Lenny Bruce later observed that they put two graves in Arlington National Cemetery, one for Kennedy and one for Meader. Strangers came up to Meader on the street to offer their condolences, as if he were a member of the Kennedy family. Oddly enough, although the material he had taped for December's Grammy Awards telecast was cut out, The First Family won the Grammy for album of the year, and Meader won for best comedy performance.

Kennedy's assassination effectively ended Meader's career, since (as he put it in 1977), he was "a living reminder of a tragedy." The public was not interested in any of his new albums or routines, and he went through what he described as his "wine, women, song, and drugs period." He drank heavily, his wife left him (they divorced in 1965), and by 1965 he had squandered all the money from the original album. Meader briefly quit the music business and lived in seclusion in a log cabin in Maine with his second wife, Susan Hannah (they married in 1969 and divorced in 1973), before giving away all his possessions and moving to San Francisco in 1967, where he began to use LSD and eventually cocaine and angel dust. After moving back to New York, he recorded The Second Coming (1971), an album about Christ's reappearance in the rock-music age, which received no airplay due to perceived offensive religious content.

Meader continued to work throughout the 1970s and 1980s as a saloon singer (reverting to his given name Abbott), forming various country and bluegrass groups in Kentucky and Maine. He even tried his hand at film music and acting, starring briefly in a play in Los Angeles about a man obsessed with John Kennedy. Meader married his third wife, Christine Surma, in 1979; they divorced in 1984. After marrying his fourth wife, Sheila Colbath, in 1986, Meader managed a restaurant, the Wharf, in Hallowell, Maine, and continued to perform original songs, although he suffered from emphysema. He never had any children.

Meader's talents as a satirist and singer were always overshadowed by his impression of John F. Kennedy, with whom he was perpetually linked, both in life and death.

Although there is no full-length biography of Meader, aspects of his career are discussed in Richard Lamparski, Whatever Became of…? (1974), in Joe Franklin's Encyclopedia of Comedians (1979), and in Ronald L. Smith, Who's Who in Comedy (1992). An interesting profile of Meader is Andrew Goldman, "Vaughn Meader Is Alive and… Well, He's Still Alive," Boston Magazine (Mar. 1997). Other informative articles are Rudy Maxa, "Camelot's Comedian: Getting Ready for Teddy with Vaughn Meader," Washington Post Magazine (4 Nov. 1979); David Lamb, "A Long Way from Camelot: Vaughn Meader's JFK Impersonation Made Him a Star. Then An Assassin's Bullet Took Everything Away," Los Angeles Times (20 Apr. 1997); and Stephen Nohlgren, "From Camelot to Gulfport," St. Petersburg Times (21 Mar. 2000). An early article about the First Family album is Peter Bunzel, "A Kennedy Spoof Full of 'Vigah,'" Life (14 Dec. 1962). Reactions to Meader's record by Kennedy and his advisers is in Nicholas J. Cull, "No Laughing Matter: Vaughn Meader, the Kennedy Administration, and Presidential Impersonations on Radio," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 17, no. 3 (Aug. 1997): 383–399. An interview with Meader is "Vaughn Meader," New York Times Magazine (21 Nov. 1999).

John A. Drobnicki