Exactly 40 Years Ago, For A Brief Shining Moment, Vaughn

In early November 1963, Meader walked into a recording studio and cut a new album, Have Some Nuts!!!, as part of a two-record deal he'd signed with MGM/Verve. He didn't do the Kennedy voice once. Instead, while he played a variety of characters -- a salesman, an advertising agency client, a man looking to buy a grave for his turtle -- he took care to give each character the same name: Vaughn Meader.

Meader is reclining on the hospital bed that's been set up in his living room. He's fighting late-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a form of emphysema. He can only walk a few steps before becoming winded, and takes frequent drags from an oxygen tank -- when, that is, he isn't sneaking puffs from cigarettes.

His manner shifts between ingratiating and gruff. Asked whether he minds being known primarily as a Kennedy impersonator, he says blithely, ''No. It isn't hard.''

Sheila, his fourth wife, who he says has been married to him for either 19 or 20 years (neither can remember; in fact it's 18) has been bustling quietly around in the background, but at this, she can't resist interjecting ''It's been a thorn in your side since I've known you.''

After Meader, and the nation, recovered from the initial shock and trauma of the Kennedy assassination, it took him a while to realize that Lenny Bruce was right. His career was over. One day, he was walking down the street when a construction worker put down his jackhammer, took Meader's hand, and expressed his sympathy, tears streaming down his face. It may have been a kind gesture, but Meader now recognizes that that impulse effectively marked the end of his career. ''There's one thing a comedian does not need, and that's pity,'' he says. ''Anger and hatred beat pity. You can't make a crowd laugh when they're feeling sorry for you.''

In a reversal of his fight with Booker and Doud the year before, Meader now had to browbeat MGM/Verve just to release Have Some Nuts!!! It was no use: The album sank without a bubble. ''Nobody paid attention to it,'' Meader says. ''It didn't have the sound they expected from me'' -- that sound being the voice of a dead man. Meader's record was wiped out of the Guinness book, surpassed by a tribute album of Kennedy's speeches.

Meader's bookings began to dry up. In Going Too Far, a history of dark comedy, Tony Hendra repeats the possibly apocryphal response of one club owner to an agent pitching Meader: ''I need this act like I need a hole in the head.'' Pablo Ferro, a film-title designer who befriended Meader around this time, refers to him as a ''dead man walking,'' adding, ''There was no way he could change his face. He probably should have had plastic surgery right away and changed his name.''

Meader made a handful of TV appearances to promote his new album -- calling in favors from the hosts who'd jockeyed to put him on the air a year before -- but something was wrong. To watch Meader's pre- and post-assassination appearances is to witness an entertainer diminishing in his abilities. The television appearances Meader made as Kennedy still feel fresh and funny today -- they are small gems of tone and comic timing. As Kennedy, he has poise and grace; he knows when to let a laugh go, and when to cut it off. In his handful of post-assassination appearances as Vaughn Meader, that's all gone -- his eyes dart, he rushes his punchlines, he smiles at his own jokes. Maybe, in addition to mimicking Kennedy's voice, he was also mimicking Kennedy's ease and charm, shrugging it on like a borrowed coat. Now Kennedy's charms deserted him.