But as much fun as it is to revel in the cosmetic retro fascination of the era — ooh, bullet bras, up-do hairdos, and finger-snapping hepcats down in the Village — the series about a Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s works best as a startling reminder of just how distant the near past really is.
But as much fun as it is to revel in the cosmetic retro fascination of the era — ooh, bullet bras, up-do hairdos, and finger-snapping hepcats down in the Village — the series about a Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s works best as a startling reminder of just how distant the near past really is.
Americans may be heavier, with a diminished attention span, even less classy than the troubled souls of the Men in the Gray Flannel Suit costume drama. But clearly, we’re better off in most regards.
Consider the show’s treatment of three themes: personal health, attitudes toward race, and sexual equality.
My parents and their friends were nicotine fiends, the women smoking even during late pregnancy. The high point of tobacco addiction was around 1964, when 42 percent of adults smoked. Today, the figure is less than 20 percent — a modern low.
I remember rattling around inside a station wagon filled with secondhand smoke. No seat belts, of course. And after the ride, we 6-year-olds reeked of Lucky Strikes.
Now, smokers are such pariahs that the actors on the set of “Mad Men” can’t even puff real cigarettes; they have to use herbal ones, or run afoul of the law.
If a driver of that station wagon had a drink or two before getting behind the wheel, so what? Drunken driving was a respected social skill. Last year, 11,773 Americans died in accidents involving drunken driving — tragically high, but down by more than 50 percent from a generation ago.
Roger Sterling, the silver-haired sybarite in the “Mad Men” ad agency, suffered a major heart attack, telegraphed from his first three-martini lunch. Today, coronary heart disease is still the leading cause of mortality in the United States, but the death rate from heart attacks is down 72 percent since 1960.
The brooding, unfathomable ad man at the center of the show, Don Draper, has high blood pressure. When his doctor asks how much he’s boozing, he admits, after some hesitation, to five drinks a day. He also has sexual problems, unable to match the passion of his stunning wife, a Grace Kelly look-alike who is a shrink session away from going full Betty Friedan.
Another mad man has an African-American lover. When a child sees the girlfriend in a picture frame on his desk, she asks, “Is that your maid?”
It was not an unreasonable assumption. Interracial marriage was illegal in more than a dozen states until 1967, and constituted less than 2 percent of all sanctioned unions in that decade. Now the number is close to 7 percent. And the child of one such marriage is president of the United States.
Women are portrayed as both ferocious felines and passive hens in the show. Peggy Olson, the secretary allowed into the writers pool, is smarter than most of her colleagues, but is still treated like office furniture — a situation that matches my mother’s memories of writing ad copy with the Brylcreemed boys.
“When God closes a door,” Sterling says at one point, “he opens a dress.” The more meditative Draper asks Sterling, in a Freudian ad moment, “What do women want?”
“Who cares?” he replies.
In the office 2009, he would have to care, or risk offending his boss. Women account for 51 percent of all workers in high-paying management, professional or related occupations, the federal government reported in its latest labor force portrait. They outnumber men as writers and public relations managers.
For gays, it’s been a similar sea change. A closeted homosexual art director, Salvatore Romano, can only sigh and speak in artsy code with the writer he pines for on the show. Gay marriage, which has been legalized in six states, would not even have made a source of homophobic office jokes in 1962, it was so far-fetched.
Is all of this progress, a march toward a more tolerant, equitable, less socially inauthentic society? Sure. Plus, Don Draper would have Lipitor for his heart and Viagra for his sexual troubles. The interracial couple would hardly draw a stare in most states. Romano would be part of an old married gay couple. Peggy would run the place. But Roger Sterling, beyond redemption, would be dead.
Still, some things are clearly missed from those days, when life was perhaps better in the margins. Breakfast without a BlackBerry next to the blueberries, for one. No rush to tweet or post every idle thought, for another. And that soundtrack ... fly me to the moon.
Timothy Egan writes Outposts, a column at nytimes.com
Nicholas D. Kristof is off today.
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