DUELING IMPRESSIONISTS One week after the assassination of President Kennedy, ...

ESSIONISTS One week after the assassination of President Kennedy, Lenny Bruce was scheduled to perform at the Village Theater on the Lower East Side. The whole country was still in a state of shock, and the atmosphere in the theater was especially tense that night. He walked on stage, removed the microphone from its stand. When the applause had subsided, he stood in silence for a few seconds, milking the tension.

"Whew," he finally whistled into the microphone, "Vaughn Meader is screwed...."

There was an explosion of laughter. And Lenny was right. Meader had been scheduled for appearances on Hootenanny and To Tell the Truth, but was canceled out of both, even though he had planned other material for the former and would not have appeared as JFK on the latter. Yes, Vaughn Meader was indeed screwed.

Ah, but not David Frye. He could do Lyndon Johnson.

In 1960 I was a misfit among misfits attending a comedy workshop at a Times Square rehearsal loft. A group of would-be stand-ups met every week and tried to make each other laugh. There were two performers who did impressions: Vaughn Meader, whose specialty was John Kennedy, and David Frye, whose specialty was Richard Nixon. So it became an attachment beyond ordinary political considerations that motivated Meader and Frye to root respectively for Kennedy and Nixon in the presidential campaign.

When Kennedy won, Meader seized the opportunity. He began to comb his hair with a flamboyant pompadour dipping across his forehead. He consciously regressed to the Boston accent he had tried so hard to lose. And he made a comedy album, The First Family, which broke sales records and turned him into a star.

After Kennedy's assassination, Meader dropped out of comedy, moved to San Francisco and became a late-blooming flower child. He returned to New York in 1968, and attended a few Yippie meetings. We invited him to play Bobby Kennedy at our counter-convention that summer in Chicago. In mid-March, RFK announced that he was going to run for president.

On March 31, Meader asked me for a tab of LSD. That evening, President Johnson went on tv and announced that he would not seek re-election. My phone rang immediately. It was Vaughn Meader. In the middle of tripping, he had just seen LBJ, and wasn't sure if this was an acid hallucination or an April Fool's Eve joke. But it was true-LBJ was out of the race.

"Whew," Lenny Bruce whistled from the grave, "David Frye is screwed...."

Frye's luck returned when Richard Nixon was elected that November. Then, in August 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign from office.

"Whew," Lenny whistled, "David Frye is screwed again...."