Connections: Mad Men
First off, I confess that I had no idea “Mad Men,” the popular cable-television series about the Madison Avenue advertising world of the 1960s, had arrived 10 years ago and continued for seven seasons. I was certainly slow on the uptake even though I had a vague interest in the show’s time and place.
Minor surgery two weeks ago changed the situation. I was advised to avoid walking except when necessary, at least at first, and it turned out to be very easy to go to bed, put up my leg, and turn on the TV.
Anyone who knows me knows I like to work, and it would be correct to think I did so from bed. But suddenly there was time for pastimes. Number one on my list were books. I finally finished a great classic I had avoided for 50 years. Then I turned to Colson Whitehead’s stirring “The Underground Railroad.” There also were copies of The New Yorker around, recent and not so recent, with long stories of particular interest. And then my husband and I found time to revive the enjoyable practice we have taken up over the years: reading aloud. In this case it was Dickens’s “Little Dorrit,” which we had started but abandoned more than a year ago. Now, as I lay about with my foot on a pillow, we had a perfect reason to get back to it.
However, I also had something else staring right at me. The younger generation had bought us a smart TV for Christmas because they thought it was past time that we availed ourselves of all the entertainments available with subscriptions to Amazon’s streaming service, Netflix, and so on. Which brings me to “Mad Men.”
I started watching for “a-ha” moments that would evoke a past I once knew, and there they were. I never worked in an ad agency, per se, but I spent a short time as a trainee in the advertising department of Newsweek magazine in roughly the same era as the first season of “Mad Men.” I had chosen a job in the advertising department rather than one as an editorial assistant because it paid more — $35 a week. I was amused when I heard Peggy, one of the drama’s important female characters, who starts out as a secretary, say she made $35 in one of the episodes.
For those who somehow haven’t yet seen the show, Peggy is not only different from the other secretaries in appearance and style, but she turns out to have copywriting talent. I was no Peggy, but I was the only woman given a prestigious cubicle to work in while all the other women in the department were secretaries who shared an open room. I wore dresses with tight waistlines, not unlike some seen on “Mad Men,” and I recognized the banter.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, it seemed that I was given the advertising position to make a point that Newsweek didn’t discriminate against women. Having my own cubicle didn’t make me any female friends, and the men in charge gave me almost no work to do. The blow that shortened my time at Newsweek, however, was being told it was a mistake to be seen carrying a copy of The Nation. I had bought the magazine because a college friend had a poem in it, but the reason didn’t matter. McCarthyism was still in the air.
I didn’t stay at Newsweek long enough to know if the men in the ad department were lechers, like those on “Mad Men,” or to learn who was at the top of the pecking order, or if everyone drank as much as they do in the show, or if the secretaries at Newsweek accepted their roles as sex objects like the secretaries on “Mad Men” do.
My leg is healing, and I am told by my doctor that I no longer need to keep it elevated. There are several more seasons of “Mad Men” that I could indulge in, but I am beginning to lose interest in Don Draper, the brilliant but empty protagonist, and the stream of women he beds. Maybe this is because his sort of character is not just fiction to me, but a kind of guy I once met all the time. Okay, maybe they weren’t quite as handsome or quite as quick to write clever slogans in real life, but they could be just as sexist. Perhaps the next time I want to binge on TV I should look into something like “Madame Secretary.”