Word: meeker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...following June he was in New York. He got a couple of small television parts and then, for $150 a week, a job understudying Leading Man Ralph Meeker in a new play, William Inge's Picnic. Later, when Meeker went on vacation, Newman took his place for a week in the sexually charged lead role. He asked Director Josh Logan, on the strength of his performance, whether he could take Meeker's role when the play went on the road. Said Logan: "I don't think so because you don't carry any sexual threat." Newman...
Asked Vasquez: "Do you think she's in love with you?" Replied Meeker, tilting his head to the right: "She loves me." With a click, he unloaded the gun and tilted his head to the left. Said he: "She loves me not." There was another click as he loaded the gun and said: "She loves me." Click. "She loves me not." Click. Meeker stared intently at Vasquez and shouted: "She loves me!" A blast ripped into Meeker's face, and he fell dead...
Relatives and friends insisted that the shooting was accidental. Said TV Producer Grant Tinker, Moore's estranged husband and Meeker's stepfather: "Both Mary and I had talked to him that day. He was never more 'up.' " Said Linda Jason: "I know it wasn't suicide. He was the happiest he's ever been." According to friends at work, Meeker bought the gun to hunt rabbits. Said his father Richard, a TV executive in Sacramento: "He just liked guns. He had them all over the place. It was just one of those things...
Still, some friends portrayed young Meeker's early years as hectic and troubled. The only child of Moore and Meeker, he was six when his parents were divorced in 1962 after seven years of marriage. He lived first with his mother, then moved in with his father at age 15. He attended a string of schools, started high school late and dabbled briefly in drugs. But friends said that in the past few years he seemed to be on track. Said Janet McLaughlin, 22, another housemate of Meeker's: "Richard wasn't emotionally troubled...
DIED. Richard Carlton Meeker Jr., 24, son of Actress Mary Tyler Moore by her first husband, a Sacramento TV executive; of a self-inflicted shotgun wound; in Los Angeles (see NATION...