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?
