Barbie dolls, Aqua Net, Maidenform, Pond’s cold cream….
Betty Draper, with her beauty, her pettiness and her frustration at not being taken seriously by the men around her, has some parallels with my mother.
“My mother was very concerned about looks and weight,” Betty tells the psychiatrist she sees. Betty herself does everything she can to pass those same concerns down to her daughter Sally. Still, she refrains from making her most damning comment – “Sally looks fat” – in earshot of her daughter.
My mother wasn’t so discreet. Her nightly advice to my sister was the last thing any young girl wants to hear: “You could be so pretty if only you tried.”
She also kept insisting to me that Elizabeth Taylor was the most beautiful woman in the world, to the point where I wanted to say, “Okay – but what do you want me to do about it?”
In other words, the huge emphasis that Betty puts on appearances couldn’t feel more familiar.
As for Don, he’s far more smooth and confident in manner than my father ever was – even if my father, in his thirties, did have his dapper moments. Don also pulls down a bigger salary than my father ever did.
Still, my father and Don reinvented themselves in oddly parallel ways. My father was a Southerner who became a Northerner – quite a feat. Don’s transformation, of course, is a bit more drastic. As flashbacks gradually reveal, his real name is Dick Whitman. He grew up in a brothel in the Midwest, in dire poverty (“My dream was indoor plumbing”). Harshly treated by the adults around him and desperate to escape, he joined the military and was posted to Korea. There, he had a chance to leave “Dick Whitman” behind forever by adopting the name of his dead commanding officer with whom he was almost killed in action.
The two names sum up Don perfectly. “Dick” covers the philanderer in him. “Whitman” suggests he’s living by his wits. With “Don Draper,” he dons or drapes himself in a disguise. As more than one person on the show observes, he’s “a handsome cipher.”
“Who’s in there?” Betty asks aloud as she looks at her sleeping husband in bed.
“Who knows who you are?” his colleague Roger Sterling muses after Don once again has proven inconveniently evasive.
The show plays up this mystery both for laughs and to build intrigue.
“I’m from the Midwest,” Don declares. “I was taught that it’s not polite to talk about yourself.”
On the few occasions when he does talk honestly about himself, he winds up sabotaging his own carefully constructed carapace. In one amazing episode – Season Six’s closer, “In Care Of” – his candor results in him being forced to take a leave of absence from the ad agency in which he’s a partner. The circumstances: After presenting his planned ad campaign for Hershey bars, he calls his satisfied clients back into the conference room as they’re about to leave and tells them what Hershey bars really meant to him as a young boy growing up in a whorehouse.
It’s a disastrous professional move – but a liberating flameout for Don. With this disintegration, he launches himself into full flight, either up toward the heavens or down toward the abyss, it’s hard to say which.
Hershey bars, Clearasil, Coca-Cola…
These things were talismans. These things, as preposterous as it may seem, told us who we were and what we wanted.
— excerpt from “Memory-Meld: A Mad Men Stroll Through the 60s” by Michael Upchurch, part of the Better Living Through TV feature in Salmagundi #195-196, Summer - Fall 2017: single issue and subscriptions available here
