Mad Men-ia

I’m rewatching Mad Men, the final season first, then watching season 6, 5, 4 … I like to deconstruct the storylines and this way of watching it allows me to observe how the writers wove tendrils of story, story that visits more than a decade throughout the series. So much to see, visually, how the Art Director and their team pulled it off, as indeed they have, because I have yet to see anything significantly out of place and I was a little girl in much of the era portrayed on screen. How an art department tells story in pictures, the set dec etc. in Mad Men is brilliant, right down to the swag lamps and toys in the children’s rooms (I certainly remember some of the toys, especially the creepy clown).

This past summer we drove to NYC and back from the west coast in less than three weeks. Every day we drove through massive amounts of infrastructure projects, little had we known that President Biden had put the country back to work big time fixing things, lots of things, over 60,000 projects are ongoing actually. And every single day of that 10,000 km road trip we were rerouted or forced to wait for 20-30 mins. at least for oncoming traffic to clear as we passed through worksite after worksite on highways, over rivers, and through cities. It truly was impressive, albeit super annoying as we stopped yet again … but had no choice but to drive to NYC and back — we were clearing out an NYC father-in-law’s final possessions after the closing down of his upper west side apartment (sigh).

Father-in-law’s apartment was big by NYC standards, tho not Don Draper Meghan-era big. Now Draper’s, that was an apartment. But my father-in-law’s apartment was perfect, and one of its perfect aspects was its real 60s-70s vibe with Danish modern lamps, an Eames chair and footstool (Pa was an architect), his now slightly out-of-date art (he was a collector) and a whole lot of different shades of brown and cream. And I loved it and used to pinch myself when I came to stay with Pa just a block or so off Central Park, a little off Broadway, a little distance to Zabar’s, just as I super love Don Draper’s apartment, and the neighbour Sylvia’s kitchen (I’m sure my mom had most of those cookbooks), and the offices and the clothing, and all that smoking. I mean as a kid it was ghastly sitting in the back seat of my dad’s Pontiac Parisienne with all the windows rolled up and him smoking, smoking, smoking, but somehow I’m envious of those Mad Men folks lighting up, inhaling deeply, not giving a damn about who was inhaling their second-hand smoke in the car, nor even for their own lungs: smoking in elevators, planes, restaurants … (and I never smoked in my entire life and I’m so envious of such selfishness)!

Above all, one of the things I like most in Mad Men is the ambient noise on the series. The Foley artists are surely geniuses to tell so much story via sound. I mean the squeak of Don Draper’s leather shoes can’t help but scream expensive, or the shoes that clunk with heft, gravitas, as when Roger Stirling takes off his shoes and drops them to the carpet at night — well you just know they cost a fortune, cheap shoes simply don’t clunk like that. Ditto the snap and click of those purses, ohhhh those lovely, lovely, and very expensive handbags the wives carry … sorry, Peggy has slouchy cheap purses. (And how I’d have loved to go to a Mad Men set sale once the show ended!!!) Then let’s not forget the sounds of kisses, belt buckles being undone and pants dropped to the ground or clothing rolled or peeled off bodies, then dresses zipped back up, and yes, the bed sheets kinetic and noisy (high thread count for sure)! Most of all, I love the sound of cold, hard cash on the show, especially when someone is counting out a roll of bills for some side deal that’s going on (e.g., Peggy doing Mohawk Airlines for Roger after hours).

In the offices of the ad agency, in all its iterations, we have the sounds of electric typewriters. There’s a certain urgency of a Selectrics, especially the better ones with the light action, the light touch, the sentences RUSH onto the page. And the telephones! Won’t someone PLEASE let me have an old-school rotary phone, one with a handset that has real heft, a handset you can unscrew and dissect and peer at the magic of its diaphragm and receiver, a phone with a proper coiled cord you can play with as you yack, a number plate (and who DID type our number onto that little sticker anyway?), a finger stop, a cradle!!! Please get me a real phone. And then what about the sounds of Mad Men phones as they’re dialled, picked up, hung up, their ringers all so much alike — none of these customized electronic ringtones.

Why even the papers, the binders crackle and tell story. And finally, I’m thinking there’s a Gestetner machine in some of the episodes (or am I willing this to be so?), surely there must be? Season 2 Episode 1 (1960) does intro a brand new state-of-the-art Xerox machine that weighs in at a quarter of a ton and cost $29k (approx. $200k in 2013 dollars) and the ad agency’s clerical staff are intrigued but don’t know where to put it! Oh so much of what I love is on these Mad Men sets, perhaps I love nothing more than those Xmas tree lights, REAL lights, not the pathetic blobs we now have so virtuous and energy saving.

Last summer we packed up the end of a life, my father-in-law’s. Boxes of the mundane and boxes of the ‘exotic’ — it was once fashionable to collect ‘native’ or African art. One piece, a west coast mask that my father-in-law had on his sideboard, well it terrified me so much that when I visited I used to turn it so it looked away from me where I sat at the kitchen table. It’s off to auction right about now. I think of the transience of the high-end tchotchkes in Don Draper’s apartment, and the boxes and boxes of my father-in-law’s ‘stuff’, and I think of the stories they tell, wondering now if anyone even cares to hear them anymore.

Paper

Paper plays a big role in Mad Men: the sounds of papers, documents, portfolios shuffled, flipped open, signed, crumpled (like Bobby’s whale picture with the love note from Don to Meghan on the back of it being smushed and thrown into the garbage can by Betty) … Images of paper throughout continually remind the viewer that advertising always begins with story, audible (the strategy), written, and then. But paper in the set decoration (set dec) also plays a role. A few images stand out for me. One such scene, in Season 5, after Don Draper exposes the comptroller Lane Pryce’s fraud via his forging a cheque for a bridge loan, and after Draper tells Lane he must resign, we see the comptroller return to his office. It’s snowing outside, and Lane sits at his desk looking morally depleted and filled with despair. The camera shot is of his face, but in the foreground we see old-school red and blue airmail envelopes in a holder on his desk, and in the background a small Statue of Liberty on his window ledge: the transAtlantic dilemma (one I know so well) of living a life in two places at once, two utterly different places — the still war-weary UK and the electric NYC of the 1960s . In the camera shot, the Statue of Liberty is focussed, whereas the airmail envelopes in the foreground are out of focus, clearly New York is where Lane sees his life bold. But the old life across the Atlantic ultimately drags him down: the middle-class expectations of position and decorum, school fees, and finally, a major tax issue back in the UK that might end with his being jailed if he doesn’t pay within two days. The result of all of this is devastating.

But even after Lane’s death we have paper play a part. Don Draper visits Lane’s widow with a cheque for $50,000 (approx. $750k in today’s economy), the amount Lane invested in the ad agency as a senior partner. Paper cheques, the signing of them, the receiving of them, and the forging of them, well they all tell a big part of the story.

Booze & Cigarettes

If Roger Stirling doesn’t have a Lucky Strike in one hand, and a glass of Stolichnaya in the other, it’s just not a good day at the office. The clink of ice in those round, gold-embossed glasses that Don Draper drinks his Canadian Club out of, and Roger, his ‘Stoli’, well these are the sounds that make up the sonic tapestry of Mad Men, along with the old-school telephone ringers and machine-gun tap of the electric typewriters.

And while Stoli wasn’t imported to the US until 1972 (by PepsiCo), there’s a scene in Season 3 in which Roger comes into Don’s office and he throws a box of Cuban cigars onto Draper’s desk, he then walks over to pour them both a glass of vodka and tells Don, ‘I sent them from Greece’ — clearly he’s shipped Cuban cigars and Soviet vodka to himself in NYC after both embargoed in 1960s US. In 1972, PepsiCo did a deal with the Soviets and became the first importers of Stoli in exchange with the Soviets importing the first ‘western’ drink, Pepsi.

In November 1990, just months before the Russian coup, I had the fantastic experience of visiting Leningrad and Moscow, travelling there from Stockholm via ferry to Turku, Finland, then transferring onto one of those old coal-fired Soviet trains at Helsinki, a train that took us to Leningrad for a few days, then by night train to Moscow. On the night train to Moscow we met Soviets who offered us home-made vodka and sausage. Old farting women in babushka headscarves drank and yacked all night long, and I got outrageously drunk after just a few swigs of that gasoline — so drunk, the filthy toilet at the end of the car didn’t even bother me, nor the dirty sheets on our bunks where we tried to sleep. On the night train to Moscow I met a handsome young Dane who gave me one (well many actually) of the best kisses of my life. Did I say we had all had too much vodka? l remember that man’s kisses still, seared they are, the taste of them, all raw vodka, cigarettes, and the smell of the coal-fired engine of that old Soviet train, and, of course, his tall and appealing youth.

Later, everywhere we went in the USSR, the only ‘clean’ drink we could find was Pepsi. There’s no way I was going to drink water out of those rusty taps of the firetrap hotels we stayed in, nor drink from the communal glasses chained to water dispensers throughout Moscow. That week or so that I was in the Soviet Union I even brushed my teeth with Pepsi. Seriously.

On the train, as I leaned out the window and watched the Soviets queuing at dusk for their trains, in little villages and bigger cities, in shabby clothes looking as tired as the country did to us from the West, I knew I was travelling somewhere new, somewhere like no other place in the world. And I felt so alive, excited, and so damned young.

Sleepovers, Pyjamas

There’s a scene in Season 4 in which the little girl Sally has a sleepover with a friend (it doesn’t end too well but I won’t digress here on it). I remember sleepovers, rare for me because I was such a shy girl. They were at my best friend May-May’s house, usually on Friday nights, and sometimes at our house. One of the best parts of sleepovers was watching late night t.v. hunkered down and snuggled in on our fold-down couch in the rec room, eating chips and probably drinking Mountain Dew. And it wasn’t that the movie was so great, quite the opposite actually as we often watched a cheesy and badly dubbed Japanese horror movie, but there was something comforting and companionable to those evenings. I think I was a deeply lonely child and May-May’s presence alleviated this loneliness.

I always slept on the side of the bed facing away from the old t.v. because I didn’t like scary movies. I still don’t. But there was something really comforting in falling asleep to the sound of those film tracks, the flicker of black and white t.v. throwing shadows against the rec room walls and the roar of the patently fake giant monster figures.

It’s a pleasure to look at the sleepwear on Mad Men and remember. Sally and some of the adult women wear Baby Dolls pyjamas made of this really awful synthetic material. I seem to remember owning a pair — were they yellow? How strange they were, I mean, what were Baby Doll pyjamas all about … infantilising girls and women, why … oh let’s not go there.

Toys

In Season 4, a scene opens with the creative team gathered around a toy I remember well, a ‘Lucky Bird’. This bird seemed to dip and drink from a glass of water endlessly. My grandmother had a dipping bird and it absolutely captured my attention as a little girl, just as it captures the attention of the ad agency’s creative team in Mad Men. A quick scan of the info out there tells me that the thermometer-looking toy is actually a ‘heat engine […] that works through a thermodynamic cycle’. What appears to be a pretty simple toy is in fact quite sophisticated. Do a search and you’ll see just how complex and wondrous this toy actually is. I loved my grandmother’s and I’m wondering if they still exist? Or did they, perhaps, have all kinds of noxious ingredients that would no longer be deemed safe?!

NYC

So let’s talk about NYC. Because, really, NYC is the actual star of Mad Men isn’t it? She is the star of the series, yet for the most part we really don’t see much of her do we? Sure we hear her, lots of her: sirens, traffic, the dull background roar. And we do read (newspaper and magazine articles in Don Draper’s hands) a lot about her: riots, garbage, strikes, muggings, protests, traffic jams, elections.

In Mad Men, NYC is a city about to go down, waaay down in the late 60s and 70s. We see her before she rises again sometimes in the late 80s and becomes the shiny city it now is. As Don Draper says sometime in Season 3, ‘New York City is in decay’ …

But there is a caveat to this all .. with the shine NYC now has, it has got a whole lot duller — gone are the New York taverns, the delis where the guy behind the counter tells you to ‘shut up you’re going to eat the pickle’, the little bars … gone are the great publishing houses, gone are the city dwellers, ordinary people, people who actually worked for a living … and in their stead, billionaires buying the same dull baubles, all those deadly dull Lulu Lemon and well-being shops, and all those other boring flagships of shops you see on every street of every city in the world. Only a few holdouts such as Zabars and Katz’s deli … but the latter is a nightmare. Last summer we hiked down to Soho to get a Reuben. Twenty-eight bucks for a Reuben. Repeat, $28!!! A lineup around the block to even get in, it was hot and crowded and nothing as enjoyable as it used to be in the old days when it was just a New York deli.

Still, I love the city. More later …

The Cuban Missile Crisis

As I’m rewatching Mad Men from the final season first to the first last, I am only in Season 3 and am just beginning to hear hints/echoes of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In a scene with Peggy, Paul, and I don’t know the third character’s name (because I’m watching Mad Men backwards and thus encountering characters in reverse order), the three from Creative have smoked a joint and are in a max-relax state in the office trying to come up with new ideas for Bacardi Rum. Paul is lying flat on the office floor and morbidly states, ‘I keep thinking about rum, and I keep thinking about Cuba, and about how we are all going to die’. ‘We almost died,’ he adds. The other guy says, ‘But we didn’t’. And indeed we didn’t. Fast forward three decades and we saw the end of the Cold War. Still, it cast a long shadow on the imaginations of us kids growing up with it.

I remember being a little girl living in North Vancouver, a small Canadian city on the north shore of Burrard Inlet, a city of hills and valleys at the foot of the coastal mountains, a city of workers, church goers, boy scout troops, and simple lives. Surely North Vancouver was no epicentre to anything, no Soviet target — I mean it had been decades since Burrard Dry Dock had been a major ship builder in WWII and thus had no military significance in the bigger scheme of things in the Cold War. I remember an air raid siren about a block away from our house in Victoria Park (it’s still there). Though a very young girl somehow we knew the siren was there to give us an early warning in the case of a Soviet attack. Thinking about this now, I’m appalled that little children would be frightened so. But my spouse, who grew up in Detroit, talks about duck and cover exercises little kids had to do in case of the same.

Brent Richter / North Shore News 2019

• Television ‘Clickers’

I had an uncle who served as a captain in the Air Force, a brilliant Red River Métis boy who never knew he was Métis, so buried deep was his mother’s identity way back in the bad old days. My uncle and mother knew they were French, and possibly had some ‘Indian’ in them, but nothing more — so efficient was the Canada’s attempted erasure of an entire nation, a nation rich in kinscapes that tell the history of a continent.

A somewhat fatherless boy, my uncle’s dad, his white dad, was feckless — a rich American son of a rich American representative in the Iowa Legislature who was a wealthy landowner. Grandfather left Iowa and landed in Alberta as a land developer after having to cut his political career short after falling in love with a married woman, after his own wife wouldn’t free the grandfather. Intending on running nationally for the Democratic party (which was back then the conservative party), maybe even taking a run at the vice-presidential job, the grandfather abandoned all political hopes and moved north. And with him brought my grandfather, a boy who became a man so feckless he abandoned not one but five families of children over the course of his 89 years. And in his wake, the boy became a feckless man and left so many brilliant children that I just shake my head at all of them and their mothers, especially my beloved and so beautiful Métis grandmother; how hard life was for them all — separated from their kinscapes, their homelands, and back in the day, no social safety nets. My uncle, his brothers, my mother, and their mother ended up living in Vancouver and never looked back once they crossed the Rockies and headed west to the coast.

Well my uncle found a father, a family in the Canadian Forces. He was a Cold Warrior for decades, and his brilliance led him higher and higher to the point he was consulting as an engineer to NASA by the time he wound down his work life. My God he looked good in his RCAF blues. And the women loved him too in his uniform. But that’s not an uncommon story for its time, and those Métis men were so handsome, such sharp dressers. I’ve in recent years met close Métis cousins whom I never knew existed before, and they have shared photographs of their fathers, some in uniform, always so good looking, the proverbial tall, dark, and handsome and so beautifully dressed. It’s a thing.

Lately I’ve been watching Mad Men, streaming it actually. And I love it. I love it because it brings back so much of my parents to me, my long-dead parents. The 60s’ polyester clothing, the cigarettes, the amber-coloured drinking glasses, the helmets of hair, the wedge shoes, the silver brocade (I still have my mom’s 1968 silver and hot pink brocade jacket), the straw basket bottles of Chianti … all of it. I have happy memories of my parents as young. And alive. Happy, until they were no longer happy, and one summer I was put on an airplane to spend a month at my uncle’s home in married quarters at Camp Borden because they wanted to get me out of the way of their difficulties. It was 1968, the year of the moon landing, I know this because my cousin Andy gave me a souvenir photographic sheet of the momentous event.

My uncle was strict. He wanted beds made properly, meals eaten properly, manners exact, even how we should drink milk at the dinner table (after eating not during). He ran his house with military precision. His wife less strict was kind, but I never felt at home that summer. Still, I found it interesting in that they lived a really different way from my family. Unlike my parents who struggled financially (all those teeth to be fixed), my uncle’s home seemed to be a place of plenty, not the least with a colour television set with a clicker!! A channel changer. Now that was a great thing. Back home we still had a monster black-and-white television set, one that we had to hit from time-to-time when it acted up, one we had to get up off the couch stroll over to and turn the stiff dial to change channels. It was one of those old things with huge vacuum tubes and wires and rabbit ears in a blonde wooden box. Am I imagining that my uncle had cable? We surely didn’t. Not for almost another decade. In any case he had Ontario t.v., and that was superior to what we had at home, almost as good as American, or so I imagined.

I love Mad Men. All that smoking and real silverware and glass glasses and china on airplanes. I sure remember all of those. And on Mad Men I love the scenes with newcomers from eastern Europe in their undershirts and work pants, and their first-generation offspring all neurotic, nervous, even though it was the parent that lived through the war and not the American-born kid. I recall some newcomers. Fondly. We had a Belgian housekeeper the year my mother had tuberculosis and had to go away to the ‘San’. Our housekeeper, a refugee from post-war Europe, had her wages paid for by the church — those were the days when church was as much a social service and a recreation club, as a religious gathering place. Mrs. Cousins (I don’t think that’s how to spell her name) baked beautiful bread and cared for all five of us children while our father worked and our mother convalesced.

I grew up with many friends whose parents left Europe after the war. This includes my best friend’s dad, a man who was a former Hitler youth and who had escaped from East Berlin when the wall was first there. For some reason he hated me. He never welcomed me into my best friend’s home. He looked at me with a cold scorn I only twice experienced thereafter — once from another good friend’s new Dutch boyfriend who was jealous of how close my friend and I were, and the other time from someone whom I was once very close to but who shut their heart off to me. I never understood why my friend’s dad looked at me with cold hatred, I was a good kid. Only years later, when I realized quite a few people have seen me visually as ‘Indian’, did I understand the hate my friend’s dad had for me was blatant racism.

I had more than a few schoolmates whose newcomer fathers were so strict that they weren’t allowed to do anything except go to school or work in the family businesses. One boy, he was a grade younger than I, well his father made him wear lederhosen to school until he was in Grade 8 or 9. And we all knew his father beat him with a thick leather belt. In those days a parent could basically do what they wanted. I always wonder what happened to that boy. Another friend had a Dutch father with a really terrible temper. He made life miserable for his entire family.

A refugee that I met and remember well was my friend Miriam’s mother. Miriam and her mother lived alone in an apartment building my mother and I moved to when my parents went separate ways. Back then a solo parent was unusual. And as Catholics, divorce wasn’t on our radar either, so this was a new world my mother and I entered. And it was an uncomfortable world.

Well, Miriam was a really nice girl from Montreal, a shy girl. I don’t know how it was that she and her mom came to British Columbia, but we struck up a friendship, used to go swimming together in our apartment’s pool, used to sit around and chat, listen to music maybe, usually at Miriam’s house where I had the chance to get to know her mom because her mom didn’t work, unlike mine. Miriam’s mom was very quiet but very kind. One day I saw the sleeve of her cardigan roll up her arm, and on her forearm I saw blue numbers tattoo’ed across her skin. I didn’t understand what I was looking at and Miriam’s mom explained to me how when she was just a few years older than Miriam and I were, she’d been taken to the camps where she had been tattoo’ed. She didn’t say much more than that, and to be honest, while I don’t really remember what happened next I suspect she offered me some strudel or something equally delicious, because Miriam’s mother cooked old-school food and I loved it. I remember Miriam’s mom as being soft and kind and now I have lived life, I cannot imagine how Miriam’s mother survived life, nor Miriam, really. Miriam and I didn’t go to the same school. I rode a bus and travelled to the school I began in long before my parents split. But we two girls, lonely girls really, well we found a lovely friendship in that modest apartment so long ago, an apartment in which two brave mothers and two brave teenage girls built a new life.

And though it’s only a television show, Mad Men somehow provokes these memories of so very long ago.