Joseph Planta's Commentary - thecommentary.ca

Sunday, 28 November 2004

Who was Vaughn Meader?

By Joseph Planta

VANCOUVER - About a year ago, felled by bout of insomnia, I was watching some 1960s rerun on the Game Show Network featuring a young comic named Vaughn Meader. I have certain knowledge of show business, and despite knowing who Eddie Cantor or Lillian Gish were, I did not know who Vaughn Meader was. I was off to the computer, and immediately went 'Vaughn Meader' into my preferred search engine. Up came numerous links about who this Meader man was, and the deeper I got into the search results, the more I learned about what a tragic career that was for one Abbott Vaughn Meader.

Who was Vaughn Meader? If you are a pop culture enthusiast, you'd probably know the name, but rarely if ever do people know who he was and what he did.

Fame can be a very terrible thing sometimes. One minute one is at the top of their game, the next they're out faster than a New Jersey governor. Vaughn Meader's rise and fall in show business has been one of the more spectacular ever.

One night whilst performing stand-up and other musical comedy entertainments, Meader decided to do his impersonation of President John F. Kennedy. Meader mastered the Kennedy accent thanks to his own upbringing in Maine. The parody was a hit, and soon he put out a satirical album called The First Family. In late 1962, it took but two weeks for the album to sell well over a million copies. Bookings on all the big shows, Ed Sullivan, Jack Paar and others soon followed. He won two Grammy's for The First Family, including Album of the Year (which by the way, to put it all in perspective, Outkast won this year). Meader was one of the biggest stars of the times, magazines like Time and Life did stories on him, and Democrats hired him to play at fundraisers. Once, Kennedy himself opened up a speech with, "Vaughn Meader was busy tonight, so I came myself."

His impersonation of Kennedy was precise. When Jack Paar died this year, they trotted out some of the clips from the old Paar show. Included was Meader as Kennedy, and though gentle compared to the ribbing that comics assail politicians with today, Meader was nonetheless entertaining with his take on the Kennedy's. Paar's was not the only stop for Meader, as he was everywhere that year or so his talents were in great demand. He became rich and of course, famous. One unsubstantiated story is that Frank Sinatra even tried to recruit young Meader into the Rat Pack.

Then of course, all that changed with the murder of Kennedy, November 1963, 41 years ago last week. Meader, in Milwaukee, was getting into a cab when the driver asked, "Did you hear what happened to Kennedy in Dallas?" Meader replied, "No, how does it go?" thinking the cabbie was prefacing a joke.

Lenny Bruce, a caustic comic of the 1960s had a line that put it all in perspective, that not only did they have to bury President Kennedy in Arlington Cemetery, but also Vaughn Meader's career. Yes, with a career inextricably linked to poking fun at John Kennedy, soon after the national tragedy of the President's assassination, people were not in the mood to laugh, or hear their fallen leader mocked so. At 27, Vaughn Meader's career was halted. Like the young President in Dallas, for one brief shining moment Vaughn Meader was at the top of his profession. The next, he was but a wandering troubadour, with no one wanting to hear him anymore.

The money invariably dried up. He told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000, "I lived like I thought a star was supposed to live: wine, women and song." He became part of the counterculture in the late 1960s, and later in life was still active musically, with some minor success, yet never equalling his previous celebrity.

He died in late October of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Meader was 68.

Long before I began hosting interview segments at THECOMMENTARY.CA, I had suggested to my assistant that we perhaps see if we could contact Meader, and interview him. Surprisingly enough, a close friend of Meader's, Elizabeth Munster, responded with interest, saying an interview with Meader could be arranged. Alas, I never followed through. Ms. Munster wrote me soon after his death and said that Meader liked being interviewed, and that Playtone, the production company co-owned by Tom Hanks had bought the rights to Vaughn Meader's life.

When the obituaries ran in the major newspapers, in death, the Grammy-winning impressionist, forever associated with his mimicking of Kennedy couldn't escape the man whose life was the reason for his remarkable success. Inevitably, the word Kennedy was in most of the headlines. Perhaps it is indicative of our celebrity culture that such is the fate of talented artists. For that was what Vaughn Meader was when you get down to it. His was a life full of talent and promise, allowed to shine, yet due to circumstances bigger than he-the assassination of a President. His career, collateral damage as it were.

Vaughn Meader's story may not have been all that pleasant, but it's a good story in the fact that even in that tragic fall from fame, it was still fascinating. One has the feeling that we haven't heard the last of Vaughn Meader.

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