Revisiting Camelot With Vaughn Meader and “The First Family”

If there was ever a performer whose career went from zero to sixty and back to zero in a faster arc than that of Vaughn Meader, I am not sure who it might have been. From an obscure New England comic with a gift for doing impressions, Meader became massively successful following the 1962 release of a comedy album that poked fun at President Kennedy and his family. But in November the following year it all came to a sudden halt, and Meader’s career died forthwith. But 60+ years later, it is easy to see how his album became the incredible hit that it was.

With recent declassifications of government records concerning the Kennedy assassination, we have become aware of how information was suppressed for a long time. This development (and some recent reading which I will get around to sharing soon) has had me thinking about President Kennedy and his administration. It was in this process that I remembered one other relic that was repressed, both actually and by the public at large. Would you believe that it was a comedy album?

When I was a kid, I was allowed full use of my parents’ record player and access to their not-very-impressive record collection. It was probably my mother’s collection, as I don’t recall my father ever putting a record on the turntable during my entire life. Anyway, if Mom had it, I played it. But some of them got played more than others. And one that got played quite a lot into my early grade school years was a disc entitled “The First Family”.

I knew nothing about this record, because all we had was the bare disc. The album cover had somehow disappeared before I ever recalled seeing it. And without an album cover to provide me with the all-important liner notes about the disc, all I had was the disc itself. But I played it over and over.

Abbot Vaughn Meader was born in Maine in 1936. He grew up with an unstable home life and following graduation from high school, joined the army which saw him stationed in Germany. While there, he occupied his spare time playing in a country music band (The Rhine Rangers) and developed an ability to do impressions of other singers.

After his discharge, Meader went to New York where he honed his comedic skills. It was during this time that he discovered a gift for doing a good impression of the unique way of speaking of the junior Senator from Massachusetts – a fellow named John F. Kennedy.

What good fortune for him, then, when that same John F. Kennedy edged out Richard Nixon for the Presidency in November of 1960. You have to go back to probably Theodore Roosevelt to find a President whose youth, vigor and family life so captivated the nation. Kennedy was young and good looking, with a lovely wife and two adorable little children. Kennedy’s lifestyle just ached for some good natured kidding, and Vaughn Meader was there and ready.

Earle Doud had gotten his start writing pulp fiction novels, and by the early 1960’s was a comedy writer for television personalities, as well as a writer for Mad Magazine. He became acquainted with radio DJ and aspiring comedy writer Bob Booker, and the two riffed out several ideas. One of which was a series of sketches poking fun at politics in general, and the popular President Kennedy in particular.

Booker and Doud saw Vaughn Meader on a television show called “Talent Scouts” and quickly signed him for the project. Also hired was a hopeful young actress named Naomi Brossart for the role of The First Lady. Booker and Doud then recorded a demo and began shopping it to record companies. After several passed on the idea (a friend of Booker at Capitol Records reportedly said that he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole) they wound up at a small label, Cadence Records, which decided to run with it.

The album was recorded at Fine Studios in New York before a live audience on October 22, 1962. That, as it turns out, was the same evening that Kennedy went on television about a blockade of Russian ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fortunately, none of the audience had been aware of the Kennedy speech before the recording session. Archie Bleyer, owner of Cadence, came close to scrubbing the project, certain that the country was on the eve of war and would not be in the mood for such an album. But the crisis passed shortly thereafter and the project went forward.

In 1960, Bob Newhart proved that the comedy album was a genuine thing that could sell in large numbers. When “The First Family” was released in November of 1962, Booker and Doud decided that their best chance to get the album rolling was radio air play. Booker worked as a DJ in New York, and knew that the perfect choice was Stan Burns at WINS. Burns played the album for his entire 3-hour shift, and the phones lit up with people wondering where they could get it. Booker and Doud had a bunch of copies with them, and started delivering them all to other NYC radio stations. Booker once described the special treatment one such copy got – it was attached it to an 11 foot pole, which he and Doud personally delivered to Capitol Records.

The record spent weeks in the No. 1 spot, and had sold 7.5 million copies by the time a sequel (“The First Family, Volume Two” was released six months later, in the spring of 1963. “The First Family” sold more copies than any other album up to that time, and would not be outsold by an album of any kind until The Beatles came on the scene shortly thereafter. It also won a Grammy for Best Album in early 1963. It has been reported that Jackie Kennedy was furious about the record’s treatment of its subject, but the President played the entire thing at a cabinet meeting and even gave out copies as Christmas presents. He even opened one public appearance by saying that “Vaughn Meader was busy tonight, so they asked me”.

But just as suddenly as success burst onto the scene for Meader and the writers, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in November of 1963 and that was that. As the nation mourned, Cadence Records pulled every copy from stores and destroyed them all. In my own experience, it seemed that there was no album found more frequently in secondhand stores when I would paw through their cheap, donated records in the mid 1970’s. I thought about buying a copy just to get an album cover for the one that I had adopted into my own collection, but I never did.

Bob Booker would go on to write and produce several other comedy albums, as well as to write for multiple television shows.

Earle Doud’s career took a similar path, though with more political comedy albums, including “Lyndon Johnson’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the 1980s album “The First Family Rides Again”, in which Rich Little portrayed President Reagan. Doud died in October of 1998 at age 71 and Booker lived until July, 2024, when he passed away at age 92.

Vaughn Meader had a more difficult time. He recorded and released a couple of comedy albums in 1964 that had nothing to do with the Kennedys or with politics in general, but he had become so associated with the late President that they sold poorly. After a descent into alcohol and drugs, Meader eventually returned to his roots and played in a bluegrass band in his native Maine before he died in 2004 at the age of 68.

So, all these years later, what is “The First Family” like to listen to? It is easy to see why it was such a success. It was cleverly written, and the impressions of Meader and Brossart of Jack and Jackie Kennedy were delightful. It helps to have a working knowledge of the political issues of the day – Kennedy’s attempts to fight inflation by leaning on the steel industry to keep prices down, and the names world leaders and tastemakers of 1962 are a couple of them. And the names of the original group of astronauts. But I didn’t know any of those things (OK, I knew the astronauts) when I listened as a tot and I still found it funny. But it is funnier now that I know, for example, of how distant Kennedy was with his Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson or a rumor that Fidel Castro had been kicked out of a New York hotel in 1960 for keeping live chickens in his room.

I had never known about Part Two, and listened to it for the first time in the last several days. It sold well enough, but I found it uneven, and I only recommend diving in if you cannot get enough of a 1962 time capsule experience from the original. (It can be found here, if you are so inclined.) The original album hit all of the right notes with hardly a clinker among its jokes during its 35-minute running time. In Part Two, the best jokes were excellent but the places the album falls flat (like a televised prime time extravaganza press conference) are not that funny now and probably never were. And one gag that supposedly takes place in the 1990’s is simply melancholy now, given what we know about the tragedies that befell the Kennedy family in the years after the album was recorded.

“The First Family”, the complete 1962 album.

All these decades later, the aura of the Kennedy presidency is largely undimmed. Many have referred to it as being like Camelot, a magical place from times past that will never come again. But in 1962, the JFK Administration was just another ordinary Presidential term, with an extraordinarily popular Family residing in the White House. “The First Family” is a gem that has preserved a bit of that time for us to enjoy today.

32 thoughts on “Revisiting Camelot With Vaughn Meader and “The First Family””

  1. I was a kid at the time, and it’s hard to describe how this album was everywhere at the time. I’m absolutely sure the nuns brought a copy into my Catholic grade school to play one of the “kid” approved cuts.

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    • It occurred to me that unlike today’s comedy, this wasn’t really political and was meant to appeal to everyone. It was bought by nuns in a Catholic grade school and by my parents, neither of whom ever voted Democrat in their lives. There are people who do pretty good impressions of modern political figures but they often only appeal to one side or another with partisan comedy rather than just doing comedy for comedy’s sake.

      I tried to find a listing for top selling comedy albums, but couldn’t come up with anything solid. There was a source that tracked them from the 90s into the 2010s, and the top seller in that period only hit maybe 200k copies. 7.5 million was an amazing number and apparently still is.

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      • I photographed a jazz horn player not that long ago, for an album of his, and he told me of a pretty famous recent era jazz player you would recognize, that had an album out that only sold 15,000 copies! He said most jazz people just self record and publish now, because there isn’t enough volume to get even jazz labels interested. 7.5 million just seems impossible now, even for popular music acts, more likely to have 10 million single song downloads?

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  2. I’ve never heard of this album before and this has me highly curious.

    The disclaimer below the talent credits amaze me. This was produced a decade prior to me and it all seems so genteel. Quite the contrast to current times.

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    • I thought of it about a week ago for the first time in decades. A lot of it was nostalgia for me because I listened to it so many times as a kid, but I still think it holds up really well – if you have a bit of a handle on the history of the era. I think this was a first of its kind – I don’t recall ever hearing of anyone ever doing an impression of Eisenhower or Truman or FDR for comedic purposes.

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  3. As an impressionable early teen, I thought Bob Newhart really mastered the comedy album. Vaughn Meader and Bill Dana (as Jose Jimenez) were also favorites. If Kennedy served a full two terms, I wonder if that would have made any difference to Meader’s career arc.

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    • Geoff, Bob Newhart was Chicagos favorite son, and developed his deadpan delivery while working at an accounting firm before moving on to advertising. He is the master of the one-sided telephone conversation, and the downtrodden Midwest salaryman! I’m with you, he really was the guy that raised the comedy album to something you could listen to with your pals!

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    • It would have almost certainly been different than it was – I doubt that career implosion on that scale could have happened any other way.

      I have always been a Bob Newhart fan

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  4. Doud has a bit of Nicolas Cage in his look (at least in the photo here). I got a kick out of the “caveat” paragraphs below the list of the cast on the album. I’ll bet Saturday Night Live wouldn’t touch those with the endless comedy they get at Trump’s expense. Or should I say, SNL wouldn’t touch those paragraphs with an 11-foot pole? 🙂

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    • I find the comedy on this record to be infinitely funnier than any political humor SNL has done. I think when you turn up the political aspect, it crowds out the humor. This record amplified traits and speech expressions that everyone recognized and applied them to funny situations. I think the comedy writers of that era had skills that have become less common.

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  5. Geoff’s entry above has started me thinking about other comedy albums, and I remember my friends and I trading around Bill Cosby’s 1963 and 1964 albums, “Bill Cosby is a very funny fellow: right.” …and…”I started out as a child.” We thought these were also hilarious, and we were still in grade school when these hit. Bill certainly did not weather his life too well.

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    • It was a little later, but we had Cosby’s “200 M.P.H.” album from maybe 1968 or 69. It was really funny too. I should seek out those earlier ones.

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  7. I have never heard of these albums JP, but then we were not living in the U.S. at the time either. That is a good impression of Kennedy’s voice as I’ve heard it in speeches. I’ve seen many photos of the First Family, but not that one which was probably taken at Hyannis Port, a good-looking family, casual, smiling, bronzed from the sun … Caroline sadly the only one remaining. I guess this would have been like a Saturday Night Live skit. I watched SNL when it first came out, but it’s been a while though I caught some of the campaign skits for 2020 when they’d pop up on YouTube, with Alec Baldwin as Trump.

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    • I have never really been a fan of SNL – they have had their moments, but their political humor has been very sharp edged and one-sided. I think the 60+ year old comedy on this record humanizes Kennedy more than anything else.

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      • The few times I’ve gone to YouTube to view a SNL skit as I’ve heard about it on the radio, commenters say the whole show has gone downhill. Well he sure had Kennedy’s accent down pat. I remember one of my favorite impersonators over the years was Rich Little – he was so good at impersonating everyone, from Presidents to movie/TV stars.

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      • Linda, I can tell you, for the entire 50 years SNL has been on the air, the commenters have said “it’s not as good, and it’s going down hill”, every time there was a cast change. Lorne Michaels has even commented on this. Having said that, I’ve never been a huge fan. I was blessed with living in a TV market back in the early 70’s that had a pretty good PBS station and a few broadcast independents. We got to see Monty Python, SCTV from Toronto, the short lived Fridays, Kids in the Hall, Living Color, and Mad TV; all much more cleverly written than SNL, and if I was home on a Friday or Saturday night, I would have been more likely to be watching those than SNL. BTW, I consider Alex Baldwin a genius, mostly for what came out of his mouth on the show 30 Rock, which was basically the same stuff coming out of our corporate managers mouths at the time. We were hoping he would put a book out on corporate management, an easy million seller, but I don’t think he ever did.

        As far as political satire, SNL certainly had biting looks at the presidents, especially if they actually had something to bite on, but my favorite skit still remains: “President Reagan: Master Mind”, which I still laugh over today, a softer look, and I’m not so sure it wasn’t close to what was going on. The late, great, Phil Hartman, of course:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8

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  9. This was interesting and new to me also…..although I remember Bill Cosby having some comedy albums when I was a bit older. The lady who did Jackie’s voice was really good. Jackie might have been furious as maybe she thought they were making fun of her voice, but hey, your voice is your voice, and hers was certainly unique.

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  10. I had heard a brief portion of the album years ago. I do remember reading that Kennedy’s assassination tanked Meader’s career. Jackie had a love-hate relationship with the press and publicity in general. She liked to control her exposure and public appearances, and viewed her children as off-limits when it came to publicity. I can see why would not have liked this album, no matter how gentle its treatment of her and the family.

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    • I think you are probably right. That was what I read – that she was really upset that the comedians included the children as characters.

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  11. All I know is that this album pops up at thrift stores and garage sales more than anything else in the history of recorded sound. I may be exaggerating but not by much. Last winter I attended our town’s annual library sale. They only had two small bins of record albums this year but, sure enough, The First Family was one of them.

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    • I remember this being true in the mid-late 70s, and from your report it is still true! With the sales records this album set, as well as a nation that lost its willingness to laugh at the Kennedys (even if only in good fun) we should not be surprised.

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