“A friend suggested I watch the series, “Mad Men”. It feels like deja vu….this photo was taken in 1960 in Manhattan (the series takes place in the same year and place)….my mother and stepfather (a television executive) look a lot like the main characters Don Draper and his wife Betty. It all feels so familiar…the hair styles, the thin ties, the smoky air, the cocktails…….the extra-martial affairs……”

This photoset of childhood in Manhattan is delicious. Give it a click through, you will enjoy.

I promise.

May 3, 2010

“How about a movie? I hear The Apartment is good,” Joan baits Roger, waiting for an opportunity to describe the misfortune of Fran Kubelik, a congenial elevator operator played by Shirley MacLaine who sleeps with the married men her office building. “The way those men treated that poor girl, handing her around like a tray of canapés?” Joan snaps when Roger says nothing, “She tried to commit suicide”.

This exchange comes on heels of a hotel room tryst where Roger suggests Joan get her own apartment so they could stop sneaking around.

“Don’t you like things the way they are?” Joan asks while re-adjusting her dress.

“Are you kidding?” Roger responds. “This has been the best year of my life. Do you have any idea how unhappy I was before I met you? I was thinking about leaving my wife.”

Released in 1960, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment likely sparked similar spats between professional men and the women who loved them (no, not their wives—the other women who loved them). Jack Lemmon stars as a hapless middle-manager whose apartment is considered community property by his bosses: use the pad to conduct extra-marital liaisons. The suicide attempt to which Joan refers comes after MacLaine’s Kubelik, object of affection to Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter, is faced with the grim realization that Baxter’s Sheldrake, played by Fred MacMurray, is, despite his apparent interest in her, is cold, rational, and unlikely to leave his wife. Sound like anyone we know?

April 27, 2010

A selection from Don’s office library:

“By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it. There were many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling. For one thing, the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths.

—Sloan Wilson, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

You guys! We’ve never discussed the Most Important Outfit of All: Don Draper’s uniform! The gray flannel suit.

So the gray flannel suit gets a bad wrap; the single breasted, three buttoned, narrow lapelled, tapered trouser is cultural short hand for the stultifying conformity of the 1950s and early ‘60s (with the accompanying necktie serving as a metaphorical noose. ) No other dress style of the modern era elicits with such scorn as the gray suit. This is thanks in part to the 1960 book The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and the Gregory Peck movie based on the novel . The suit in Sloan Wilson’s story is emblematic of pervasive soullessness in the mechanized world, making men numb to themselves and their families and their morals.

Yet the reason for the mass adoption of the suit was not likely due to thoughtless conformity. Before the late 1960’s men didn’t really own very many clothes! As men moved off the factory floor and into a corporate building the new standardized uniform became the gray flannel suit. From lowly office drone, to FBI spook, or IBM engineer, the men riding the train into Grand Central wore the same wore the same thing (sometimes accented with a brimmed hat, tweed overcoat, and a handy umbrella).

The gray suit was an acceptable wardrobe to wear daily that didn’t require much upkeep nor varied season to season. And while yes, the suit was a type of uniform, to make the historic verdict that men who donned the outfit did so out of unquestioned conformity is too simplistic.

According a Time magazine article “The Masculine Mode,” from 1964, the American male over 30 actually preferred to dress similarly to everyone around him. “If one of his colleagues — or two of them — turns up in the same outfit he is wearing, he does not feel embarrassed, as would his wife. He feels reassured.”

In Don’s case, as for most men in gray flannel suits, their business uniform allowed them to singal a sense privilege and status that a farm boy on Madison would not generally be able to access.

*Man in a Gray Flannel Trap [LIFE archive 1956]

*Brooks Brothers Don Draper Edition [Colider]

November 30, 2009

One of the things Don actually admits to, under extreme interrogation by Bobby and extreme alcohol intake, is he likes the movie La Notte! Well, what a svelte cineaste Don is. Notte was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Story of a Love Affair, Blow-Up), it stars a personal favorite actor, and Draper-esque prototype, the above pictured Marcello Mastroianni.

Have you ever read James Joyce’s The Dead? Imagine that, but way more Italian. There’s a focus on memory and the resurgence of the past, on intangible relationships, on wandering through life like sleepwalkers, half alive, half dead. (But keeping with the Italian thing, there’s also some DANCING.) It’s about a man and his wife who engage in flirtations and affairs until the end, when she wakes up one morning and tells him she doesn’t love him anymore. Hmmmmm.

There’s a big party scene where Giovanni, the husband, socializes and gladhands while his wife lingers on the edges of things, there as a trophy, lonely in a crowd of people. The similarity should strike you pretty quickly if you recall Don and Betty at the Kentucky Derby party. It doesn’t end there. Giovanni is a restrained man-child, someone who has everything he could want but can’t manage to connect to the happiness those trappings ostensibly entail. His indecisiveness, his recklessness, and his creative frustration (he is a writer) remind us of our own leading man.

P.S.! As a film history side note, are you interested in why Don loves foreign film so much? Well, I’ll tell you! The educated consumer, middle class, with tendencies toward art, totally gave up on American cinema around the 50s and into the 60s. In short, this is because American 50’s cinema sucked. Badly. It was all gimmicks and wide screen and teenage idols like James Dean romping around — not serious enough for a man of Don’s taste. This is when imports took off, and in particular, Italian cinema boomed. The neo-realist movement, referred to by some as “male weepies”, really got an American audience interested. The French Nouvelle Vague and the British working class “Kitchen Sink” movement was also right around this time, and provided a foreign escape route from the American chaff of the day.

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

November 26, 2009

Don is not interested in your dime-store critique of the capitalist ‘system.’

Let us all be thankful for restorative weekends in Palm Springs.

Ok, Footnotes crowd: Let’s get long form! I think you’ll like. From one of the best scenes of the series.

* * *

Man in Fez Hat: Dig Ad man had a heart. Toothpaste doesn’t solve anything. Dacron sure as hell won’t bring back those ten dead kids in Biloxi.

Don: Neither will buying some Tokaji wine and leaning up against a wall in Grand Central pretending you’re a vagrant.

Man in Fez Hat: You what it’s like to watch all you ants go into your hive? I wipe my ass with the Wall Street Journal. …Look at you—satisfied, dreaming up jingles for soap flakes and spot remover, telling yourself you’re free.

Don: My god. Stop talking. Make something of yourself

Midge’s Lover: Like you? You make the lie. You invent want. You’re for them… not us.

Don: Well I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent .

Man in Fez Hat: Man, why’d you have to say that?

* * *

It is so easy to take Don’s side in this moment. History, more or less proves him right. (Plus, it’s difficult to feel sympathy for a pigeon-chested twentysomething in a peasant shirt when he is standing next to Don Draper). The political changes that defined the 60’s and 70’s came about through a combination of disciplined political action — not music festivals.

This idea of counterculture, and the Us v. Them dichotomy has always existed Western Civilization (see supreme court case Jesus v Romans), but this specific bohemian scorn against ‘the ad man’ was fomented specifically during the 1960s.

In the view of Midge’s glassy eyed party guests, society had become overrun with lies and propaganda thanks to hyper consumption fueled by advertising. The world was soiled by injustices (like Biloxi) and yet people were told freedom was to be found in washing machines and Cadillacs. “The system”, then, was considered a huge swindle of images and symbols that repressed individualism and truth. The way to rebel was to renounce symbols of greed, discipline, and uniformity.

The rub? This was done by adopting a whole new system of symbols: a hammer and sickle pin to show your defiance to the rigid McCarthyism of the 50’s, a bare midriff to outrage the mothers who taught their daughters to be polite and find husbands, or even a Paul Kinsey style beard to broadcast the notion that you and your face will not be constricted by the tyranny of disposable razors!

Yet according to Don there is no system; the universe does not care what kind of shoes you do or don’t wear; it will continue to spin mercilessly, unmoved by human turmoil (no one knows this better than a dust bowl farmhand like Dick Whitman). So the counterculture that Midge’s buddies adopted was supposed to build a new world on individual freedom. Now, we have the benefit of being 40 years in the future and seeing that this project of theirs did not work so well: The system of hyper consumerism was not staved off by bearded men in ironic fez hats, it’s actually still thriving!

So then, where does that leave Don? Don is also in revolt, yes? But is his brand of rebellion any more or else authentic than the hippies in the corner? After all this conversation is being had in the apartment of Don’s mistress. Don revels in the same kind of hedonism and rule breaking to satisfy his individuality as the dope smokers do. I mean, the guy shows up an hour late every day, bucks at authority, and has joyless sex with powerful women for what reason exactly? To shake off that creeping alienation that comes from a world living in a world of well disguised lies?

At least his feet are clean when he does it.

November 17, 2009

Pete Campbell shows his upstart tendencies early on in season one when he takes that supremely German woman’s research out of Don’s trash to try to impress the Lucky Strike executives. Not surprisingly, the research is uber-Freudian in nature, discussing the controversial “death wish” theory.

Freud posited that, after World War One, people’s desire to live was counterbalanced by a sublimated aggressive streak, known colloquially as the death instinct. This instinct stemmed from a form of masochism, a wish to destroy the corporeal body.

Our German lady thinks maybe this can hoity-toity up the Lucky Strike advertising! Don disagrees, because — well because you try to peddle some of that European fancy talk on a farm hand like Don and you know he is NOT IMPRESSED. Pete, on the other hand, is looking forward to an age of counter-intuitive advertising (and relying a little bit on machismo), and applies the research to smoking; if they can’t say smoking is healthy anymore, maybe they should embrace the risks. Maybe a real man would like to destroy his lungs from the inside out! Or something. The idea is definitely raw, and the Lees of Lucky Strike pretty much decide Pete’s a little crazy for even suggesting it.

Although Lee Jr. knows a little something about self-destructive urges, no?

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

November 16, 2009

Can you guess what Boho lover lady put on for her afternoon romp with Don?

Of course you can.

It is the crowning jewel of a masterpiece: Blue in Green. It’s the third track on Miles Davis’ 1959 Kind of Blue. The composition was co-written by Bill Evans who played piano on the album. Evans was to the piano, what Davis was to the trumpet. Both men begun with a bop beat and then slinked into a cooler, looser, slow-like-honey mode with the rising influence of West Coast jazz at the the beginning of the 1960’s. Davis, of course, went on to wilder orchestrations and built a discography defined by musical innovation.

Evans found his steady rhythm in cool jazz. In the mid-sixties he was a part of the breezey California sound along with tenor sax titan Stan Getz. The two did album together which is also very good to listen to when committing adultery in the Village. Or anywhere.

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