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 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its real 60s-70s vibe with Danish modern lamps, an Eames chair and footstool (Pa was an architect), his now slightly out-of-date art (he was a collector) and a whole lot of different shades of brown and cream.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 of 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!

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.

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.