Editor's note: Donald Meyers was a Renaissance person with a string of accomplishments and a life story that earned wide respect and admiration. He died on Monday at age 86 after an extended illness. Meyers was an actor and director constantly busy in the local film scene, he was an artist and graphic designer who worked in the “Mad Men” era of advertising, and he was a bon vivant who found friendships at all levels. In July 2020, Memphis magazine published a "Local Treasures" feature on Meyers that gave a glimpse into a creative, thoughtful, and embracing personality. Here is Chris McCoy's story.
“I was born on Chicago’s West Side in the 1930s, during the Depression,” says Donald Meyers. “I remember standing in line at the local fire department with my mom Lillian, dad Raymond, and brother Greg for a basket of food when our family was on relief in 1939.”
One of the biggest influences on Meyers’ life was his grandfather, Daniel Sokolowski. “He was an artist, a musician, and a teacher. I loved him to death.”
For Meyers and his grandfather, Chicago was a wonderland waiting to be explored. “We had these great Sunday mornings together,” he recalls, “when we would visit old bookstores and the Art Institute.”
The passion for creativity sparked by those expeditions with his grandfather would go on to shape Meyers’ life. “My dad was great, but he didn’t get that interested in the things I wanted to do,” he says. “He had a little print shop in the basement, and he wanted me to take that over. But I never really liked it. I wanted to get into art.”
One thing Don and his father had in common was a love of fast cars. “He owned two Hudson Hornets, vintage 1949. He raced one of them at the old O’Hare stock car track in Chicago. They were ugly as sin, but fast as hell, and he drove them like beasts. … Suffice it to say we were all speed freaks back then.”
Like many men and women of his generation, he joined the Army after graduating from high school. He shipped off to Berlin, the front lines of the Cold War. “They assigned me to police a battery, and I was an MP for a while,” he says. “It was pretty tough patrolling that area, because a lot of German citizenry were still opposed to any kind of American occupation of the country. They would take potshots at us.”
Police work was definitely not Meyers’ bag. He lucked out when an opportunity came to try out for the Army baseball team. He played ball for about three or four months before his rotation back to the States.
One of Meyers’ Army teammates was Billy Martin, who would go on to great fame as the cantankerous manager for the New York Yankees. “He was kind of an asshole, but he drove a pink Cadillac.”
After his two-year stint in the Army was up, Meyers returned home to Chicago, where he “just floated around for a couple of years deciding what I wanted to do.” Throughout, “Art kept tugging on me, because I was always drawing cartoons.”
He went back to school for an art degree, and with a fresh diploma in hand, Meyers found work with one of Chicago’s most famous publications: “I saw an ad in Playboy, so I went over there with my portfolio, and they hired me as a photo assistant, because there were no openings in the art departments. … All I did was load film. It was 4-by-5 and 35 millimeter film in those days. They shot a lot of stuff on 35 millimeter, because it was so fast — 30, 40, 50 rolls in just an hour.”
Working on Playboy photo shoots was a dream job for a twentysomething guy in the early 1960s, but Meyers was ambitious. “When there was an opening,” he recalls, “they shoved me into an art director position.”
In his new job, Meyers found more prestige and responsibility, but less glamour. He worked in a cramped basement office, where “We had to do a lot of mechanical work. They didn’t use computers, so everything had to be pasted up and keylined.”
Meyers worked in Hollywood in the 1980s, drawing storyboards and creating concept art for films in pre-production.
Meyers was proud that he was able to send some jobs to his father, who was still setting type by hand in his basement print shop. After a childhood of Depression poverty, he enjoyed some newfound prosperity by buying a Ford Mustang. “I lost my license three times,” he says. “I bribed our precinct captain with a case of scotch to get my license back each time.”
Meyers’ officemate in the basement of the Playboy building was Shel Silverstein, the cartoonist and songwriter who later penned “A Boy Named Sue” for Johnny Cash. “It was two or three years of the most enlightening times of my life,” he recalls. “He wore this white shawl and white clothes. He drew with these Rapidograph pens, which were very sharp, architectural points. He always had lots of stains on his clothes, because those pens kept leaking. But he kept drawing all the time, always drawing just as fast as he could talk.”
One day, Meyers and Silverstein received a coveted invitation from their boss, who was one of the original investors in Playboy. “He said, ‘Do you want to get on Hefner’s list?”
That was the first time Meyers visited the fabled Playboy Mansion, and it wouldn’t be the last. “I walked around with Shel Silverstein, and we just sketched people.”
He hit it off with Hefner who, it turned out, was a cartoonist himself. “He always had a penchant for artists, for people who could draw,” according to Meyers. “I was invited to those parties every other weekend, and they were everything you thought they were. Everything.”
As an art director for Playboy in the early 1960s, Donald Meyers designed magazine covers and sets for Hugh Hefner’s television show.
Parties at the mansion glittered with celebrities, but Meyers was most interested in the musicians. “Some of the people I rubbed shoulders with in Hefner’s group were Dave Brubeck and Woody Herman. We would get free passes to wherever they were playing in Chicago. Stan Kent would come into this little place called The Plug Nickel with a 20-piece group. Everybody would go there on Friday and Saturday night. It was all bare walls, straight-back chairs, and bare tables. But there were big guys coming in there, like Count Basie. I would sit through five, six, seven sets in a night. I would get home at four in the morning and go to work at six.”
When Monday morning rolled around, the hungover Playboy staff would drag themselves back to work. “We were all up against the deadline — and things got really quiet when we were trying to publish a magazine,” Meyers says. “And then one day, the elevator door opened and there was Jonathan Winters. He was holding a staff with a skull on the top of it, and he started doing a scene from Hamlet. He walked down through the aisles of our art department shouting, ‘To be or not to be!’ Those were the kind of people Hefner had around the magazine.”
Eventually, Meyers moved into the advertising world as a creative director for the Leo Burnett agency. It was a high-speed change of pace. “With agency work in those days, you had three days to do a campaign,” he recalls. “You learned pretty fast, because there was so much competition. You could throw an X-Acto knife in Chicago, and you’d probably hit three art directors walking down the street.”
At the Burnett agency, he worked on campaigns for electronics firms, United Airlines, and, fatefully, Avis Car Rentals. That was when he met Nancy Gates, who would soon become his wife.
But the Mad Men life was taking its toll on Meyers. “I found myself working around the clock many days and the pressure was intense,” he says. “After many late-night episodes at the agency. Nancy and I decided to get out of Dodge. I was close to getting a serious ulcer and we needed a change.”
The couple adopted their daughter, Lea, and moved to Little Rock, where Meyers’ experience helped him quickly land work. “A nice agency hired me for a Chicago wage, which was unheard of.”
But life in the slow lane didn’t last very long. Nancy was getting noticed as a writer, and in 1979, they moved to Los Angeles. “I was feverishly doing illustrations at the time, and my wife was working as a script reader for Universal Pictures,” he says. “We were doing script work on Predator when Arnold Schwarzenegger walked in. I didn’t know it, but I had parked in his spot at the studio. He walked in and said, “WHO PARKED IN MY PARKING SPOT, GODDAMNIT?’ I said ‘I did!’ He said, ‘That’s OK. You go on with your work.’ I was scared shitless. He said, ‘Can I see some of your sketches?’ I said sure. I found him to be a fun and engaging guy.
One of Meyers’ concept sketches for the alien in the 1987 film Predator.
“There were about three of us assigned to the project,” he continues. “One was a model maker who had to decide what the Predator was going to look like. When they went into production, lo and behold, the Predator kind of looked like my original sketch. I was proud of that … I worked on many films with a crew of talented artists and writers, and I cherish those years, which helped me in my development as a creative director and designer.”
Immersed in Hollywood, Meyers started taking acting classes at night. He got his Screen Actors Guild card as a day player on the soap opera General Hospital and worked with actors such as Alan Alda. “I did a lawyer and a doctor, a couple of those things,” he says. “That’s how I got the acting bug. I did my art thing during the day, then went to auditions in between. But events catch up to you. You get a point where the energy is gone. You can’t get to bed, and you end up exhausted during the day.”
Nancy and Don split up, and after 12 years in L.A. he returned to the Mid-South to live with his second wife, Lydia Stainfield and stepson, Raymond. He got a good paying job with the local agency Chandler Erlich, but says “once again, agency work is not 9 to 5. It’s more like 7 to midnight.”
Painting has been a lifelong passion. In 2019, his work appeared in a show at the WKNO studios.
The acting bug never went away. In 1992, he auditioned for The Firm, which was filming in Memphis. He was offered the part of a lawyer in the film, but had to turn it down due to his inflexible work schedule. “That would have been a juicy role for me to get in Memphis,” he admits. “But it didn’t work out, and that’s okay.”
As the new century dawned, Meyers got involved in the nascent independent film scene when he became the oldest member of the Digital Media Co-Op. Located in the basement of First Congregational Church on Cooper, the Co-Op was a freewheeling creative environment filled with people learning the art of filmmaking. Meyer’s experience would prove invaluable: “That was when I met Sarah Fleming and Christopher Reyes and Morgan Jon Fox. And I met you there.”
I became acquainted with Donald Meyers when I cast him as a stern boss in my 2006 film Eat. He had the energy and drive of a person half his age, and I was very impressed. We saw each other frequently as Meyers became a mainstay in the Memphis film community, working on or appearing in at least 22 movies in the aughts and early teens.
“I worked on Rod Lurie’s production of Nothing But The Truth, a political thriller which was produced and filmed here in Memphis,” he tells me. “I was cast as Alan Alda’s stand-in for three weeks. … When Alan and I met up on the first day of production, he was surprised to see me, and we relived those days of auditioning in L.A. Rod Lurie didn’t ‘cotton’ to anyone bothering his actors on set or talking to them, but when he saw Alan come up to me with a hug he kind of looked shocked and said to me. ‘You know Alan?’ I said, ‘Of course, I do! We go way back.’”
Hypnotic Induction,” based on a vampire story written by Corey Mesler. “I’ve met so many great creative people here in Memphis,” he says.
Meyers’ most recent film is his first documentary, “Sundays With Gramps,” which premiered at Indie Memphis 2020. It’s a reminiscence of the Chicago of his youth, and the grandfather whose creativity inspired him to lead such a rich and varied life. “This burning desire to create is what drove me into different fields,” he says. “To me, they’re all tied together. You get this creative spark, and you branch out from one thing to another. There’s always another film to make, right?”
Meyers acting on a film set in the P&H Cafe
