Vaughn Meader, 68, Kennedy impersonator

Vaughn Meader, 68, 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.

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

During the early days of the Kennedy administration, the New England native 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.

Mr. 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, Doud and Booker struck a deal with the small Cadence Records label.

With Mr. 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 number one, 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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."

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

A sequel album, "The First Family, Vol. 2," 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 fund-raiser 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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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," Mr. Meader told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. "One year, November to November. Then boom. It was all over."

The Kennedy impersonation had made up only 10 percent 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, Mr. 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.

Mr. 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.

But he didn't abandon show business entirely.

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, Mr. 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.

Meader is survived by his wife.