The times they were a-changin’
How ‘Mad Men’ reveals the forgotten side of the ’60s
R obert Morse, best known these days as ad agency patriarch Bert Cooper on “Mad Men,” may be the only member of the cast who actually dealt with Madison Avenue in the 1960s, the setting for the AMC drama.
Not surprisingly, Morse’s impression of the real Madison Avenue back then was rather less dramatic than the Madison Avenue portrayed on “Mad Men,” which returns Sunday night with a two-hour episode that kicks off season five.
“You’d get a call from your agent saying go over to Madison Avenue and read for this commercial,” says Morse. He doesn’t, but could, mention he was a hot property then, having won a best-actor Tony in 1962 for playing J. Pierrepont Finch in the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “So you’d go to the 17th floor of some building, and you’d pass people in the hall who said they loved your show. Then you’d go to the sound room where they’d tell you, ‘You’re the tiger in the cereal.’ “You’d do the line and they’d decide if they wanted you. If they did, it paid very well.”
That is to say, Robert Morse was seeing Madison Avenue from the perspective of a potential hired hand.
He had a worm’s-eye view, which casts no disrespect on his skills.
The fictional Bert Cooper, on the other hand, is an eagle, soaring high above and seeing the whole field.
One of the many things that has set “Mad Men” apart through its first four seasons, in each of which it has won the Emmy for best TV drama, is that creator Matthew Weiner incorporates both those perspectives.
The show dusts off aspects of the 1960s — its psychology, for want of a better word — often ignored or brushed aside in other period dramas.
Whole important parts of the ’60s “have been forgotten,” says Weiner, or more specifically, they have been selectively telescoped.
We know about the civil rights movement and black power. We know about the Vietnam War and the protesters. We remember assassinations and the moon landing.
What we remember less, Weiner suggests, is the deep shadow World War II still cast over that decade, or the conflict between the swelling sense that the world’s new No. 1 power could do anything and a deep unease over changing traditions and cultural shifts.
h undreds of small and large events affect Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), Roger Sterling (John Slattery, Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) and the rest of the “Mad Men” cast, forming a continuing and not always comfortable undercurrent in their lives.
Yet at the same time, “Mad Men” reminds viewers every episode of the ways in which America did not change, and certainly did not change overnight.
“I’m learning a lot about that era,” says Weiner, a research fanatic who has done a remarkable job evoking the ’60s. “It’s about how you perceive history while you’re in it.”
The whole idea that Weiner has found a different angle on 1960s culture is remarkable, given that the 1960s are probably the most chronicled and analyzed decade in modern American history.
Hundreds of thousands of baby boomers have written billions of words explaining what it all meant.
Most of the “Mad Men” characters, conversely, rarely raise their heads to ruminate on anything that doesn’t directly affect their next set of decisions about the fundamentals in their own lives: jobs, relationships, friends, kids.
Even so, we have already seen them affected by the changes in the country and the world just from 1960, when the story began, to the end of 1965, where it finished last season.
“I want to see people change as we move forward,” says Weiner, and while the patriarch Bert may change less than the young Peggy, no one gets to hide away in a bubble. Not even Don Draper, who sells himself as the steady ship impervious to any storm.
It’s one of the show’s dirty little secrets that Don quietly savors the time he spends in
the looser subculture of California. Back in the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices where his life is anchored, though, he’s still Don Draper, wearing his hat to work and advising clients how to sell airplane rides or pantyhose.
“Don’s a chameleon,” says Weiner. “His job is to be you,” because that’s how he makes you want to buy his clients’ products.
Fans of “Mad Men” know Weiner has returned repeatedly to several specific areas of change in the ’60s, none more regularly than the role of women.
He has made his points, though, by setting up scenes and vignettes that force viewers themselves to connect the dots and draw the conclusions.
One of the final scenes last season had Peggy and Joan, who had always circled each other warily, having a chat in which Joan for a change wasn’t matter-of-factly cynical when Peggy lamented the treatment of women.
Neither was heading for a picket line, but their quiet frustration made the strong unspo
ken point that women would have more impact if they did what the Old Boys have done for centuries and banded together.
“Peggy-and-joan is fun,” says Hendricks. “They’re both watching [what’s happening around them]. I can’t say where Joan is going, but I can see things changing a little bit to where we can compete more with men.”
That’s a real-life evolution still very much underway today, a point hardly lost on Weiner.
“We are going through many of the things [addressed in ‘Mad Men’] right now,” he notes.
He also notes that in the 1960s, like today, a person’s reaction to what’s happening is often dictated by that person’s circumstances.
Just because some portion of America turned to Carnaby Street for its fashion cues in the middle 1960s doesn’t mean paisley and polka dots supplanted Brooks Brothers for the welldressed Mad Man. “Don can keep his hat,” says Weiner. “His grandfather wore a hat. There are some things that don’t go away.”