Alex Balk, Smoker
Carol Diehl, Art Critic
Matthew Gallaway , Novelist
Megan Lubaszka, Architect
Angela Serratore, Historian
Tim Siedell, Ad Man
Natasha Simons, Writer
Christina Perry & Derrick Gee, Designers
Dave Wilkie, Ad Man
“Wasn’t until years later that I realized you were the only person I could remember that time with.”
“What do you want to remember?”
“What I was like at that age. Paris before the war. Eating in cemeteries. People were jumping out of windows and we were on vacation.”
Mmmmm look at those tasty apricot-colored pillows!
Most homes built in the early 1900’s, like the Drapers, were relatively stripped down and lacked 18th century flourishes of the older homes. To achieve the traditional Colonial style during the mid-century, designers and homemakers were instructed to “paint the walls a soft tint such as ivory, parchment, green, or apricot.” Additional touches such as small period details, fabric, lighting, and small Colonial style furniture including tilt-top tables, the rush seated chairs, were encouraged.
image via this really great interview.
One of the things that grabs Ladies of a Certain Age about Mad Men is the authenticity of the seriously fraught gender dynamic of the era.
Take Peggy for instance, through each season we watch her get squeezed between her two desires to be liked by men and respected by them. Given the setting, it seems she can only pick one.
Well, here’s a fantastic post by art critic Carol Diehl about the sexuality of the era, featuring appearances by Brigitte Bardot, Ann Margret and Mad Men:
“Last night, after the turkey, we watched two films from 1963-64 back-to-back: Brigitte Bardot in Jean Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” and “VivaLas Vegas” with Elvis and Ann-Margret. To my male friends it was high camp, but for me, watching them produced flashbacks of what it was like to grow up in that era: wanting men, wanting them to like you, wanting them to want you, but at the same time having to fend them off on a daily basis, the frustration of having your strengths ignored while being valued for your sexual potential…”
Servants!
What an emotionally fraught and ambiguous place they hold in American life! Once the Victorian live-in maid was replaced by the once-a-week cleaning girl of the 1950’s things got even more complicated.
Consider Carla’s role in the Draper household.
Betty never refers to her as a nanny — but as a housekeeper. Not that Betty carries any maternal burden about it, after all, she was raised with a live-in nanny and turned out just fine. She’s just being historically accurate about the role of The Help. Betty, as was common, had no consternation about what bond or influnce Carla was building with the children. Even though Carla just came by in the afternoons, it was she who stepped in multiple times to serve surrogate mother to Sally and Bobby when Betty was striken with (rightly filled) parania and melancholy about Don.
It is Carla who enables Betty is able to 6 ‘divorcation’ in Reno. “To make an omelette you need not only broken eggs ” Joan Didion wrote in her essay on the Women’s Movement, “but someone ‘oppressed’ to break them.” Though she may be one of the unintentional forbearers of the Woman’s movement, it would have been impossible for a woman like Betty leap into emancipation if she didn’t have Carla’s back to do it off of.
The nanny-mommy relationship would grow increasingly tense as black women, after centuries of servitude, were leaving domestic work en masse during the late Sixties.
Luckily for Betty —and Henry Francis— that’s still years away.
Bert puts some socio-economic theory into practice when he hands Don an unexpected bonus. Befuddled and slightly alarmed, Don begins to stammer in lieu of gratitude Bert explains that he gave Don an extra $2,500 because of Ayn Rand. He explains:
‘When you hit 40, you realize you’ve met or seen every kind of person there is. And I know what kind you are, because I believe we are alike. By that I mean you are a productive and reasonable man and in the end completely self -interested. It’s strength. We are different. Unsentimental about all the people who depend on our hard work.’
Bert encourages Don to take two bucks out of his mondo bonus and pick up a copy of Rand’s 1957 best selling novel Atlas Shrugged. For the uninitiated, the primary lesson of Atlas is the individual must be put first, else a society will collapse.
In Rand’s dyspeptic future, parasitic autocrats and businessmen are able to horde a nation’s wealth by collectivizing land and industry. In protest to the nation-wide swindle, the country’s best innovators go on a ‘strike of the mind’ , refusing to contribute to the economy. Society then quickly disintegrates with oil fields set ablaze and trains derailed by striking industrialists.
Rand’s intention was to champion the ethos of unfettered ‘rational self interest’:
‘I work for nothing but my own profit—which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it’
This was the mantra of the mind mindstrikers, who’s creativity, according to Rand, was more important to society than physical labor if their creativity was not rewarded our progress would decay.
So what else would the grease the Sterling Cooper gears of a big fat check for the Head of Creative?!
Something that caused a bit of a ripple when it occurred in the season 3 premiere was Betty’s dropping the word “lesbian” in relation to little Sally. She tells Don when he returns from his adventure in Baltimore that Sally ‘has taken to his tools like a little lesbian’.
Was the use of this word at all common in those days? Well, taking into account Betty’s background at Bryn Mawr, one of the Seven Sisters rather known for its lesbian proclivities, she probably has some experience knowing lesbians. From this, her rather un-demure comment to Don comes from this background: Betty feels she has the authority to say this, whereas Don doesn’t know as much about it. If you notice, in these areas, Betty grows more decisive and stronger in voice, in this instance and a few others (when she orders food, for example).
As for the use of the word, it isn’t at all unbelievable that it would be flying around at this point.
From commenter Luna in this post:
“Between 1955 and 1969 over 2,000 books were published using lesbianism as a topic, and they were sold in corner drugstores, train stations, bus stops, and newsstands all over the U.S. and Canada. However Most were written by, and almost all were marketed to heterosexual men. Coded words and images were used on the covers. Instead of “lesbian”, terms such as “strange”, “twilight”, “queer”, and “third sex”, were used in the titles, and cover art was invariably salacious.”
Apparently “lezzie” was also the preferred insult, so perhaps Betty was being kind by using the full word?
• footnote - by Natasha Simons
Lyndon Johnson is sworn in as president by Judge Sarah Hughes aboard Air Force One, Nov. 22, 1963.
via - peterfeld
