Mad Men Unbuttoned: Sex, Lies, and Skinny Lapels
Taken from this week’s edition of PJM Political, Ed Driscoll interviews Natasha Vargas-Cooper, the author of the new book from Harper-Collins, Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America, and its swanky accompanying Weblog, “The Footnotes of Mad Men.” In this 24-minute long interview, Vargas-Cooper explains what it is about the early 1960s that makes it seem like uncharted territory to today’s Gen-X crowd, who the real Don Draper was, and what makes TV’s hottest advertising men so lovable, as they break all of today’s politically correct taboos.
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Natasha Vargas-Cooper. Do I detect a little bit of pomposity in such a uniquely important sounding name? Let’s see, believing Natasha has a handle on what it was like in the that time of advertising is a little like thinking Buffalo Bob Smith knew farming. “What’s a crop” he might ask. The fact that MMen is growing in popularity has more to do with some nice character development than anybody having a feel for what it was like in the late 50′s and 60′s. The effete, pompous boys and girls of the Ad Biz lived in the 80′s when money was pouring into to their wallets like BP oil gushing out of the hole in the Gulf. If you want to talk about A Holes, it was them. The ones in the early 60′s weren’t sweating from testosterone over use, but, rather, from the fear of losing accounts and jobs. Of course, there were also guys like Charlie Brower, President of BBDO with a fiduciary relationship with Lucky Strike who insisted that any creative director coming into a meeting with the Lucky guys would be loaded for bear, unlike Don, who pulled a campaign idea out of his butt. Never happened in real life, honey. Charlie never strayed from his wife because he was married to his business. You think Bill Bernback would have found anything in common with Don? Think Mary Wells would have? Or Jerry Della Femina? A guy like Draper would have lasted with real ad guys about two New York seconds. Don even screwed up the Hilton presentation with a theme line that was stupid on so many levels. “Expect the world” is more Hilton’s style in the real world. In fact, Jim Courtright, ad genius in his own right fathered that line back in 1992. The closest thing to an advertising guru today is a guy named Gibson Carothers.
You crave a little historical perspective? A little real world historical perspective? Okay. Guys in advertising at upper levels back then were often WWII veterans. The running joke in the ad biz was:
So a management supervisor (big shot account guy) is at his therapist and in the middle of the session the therapist says, “Bill, you led Marines in WW2 on Iwo Jima and never got rattled, never shook, never started crying. Bill answered, “Yeah, but on Iwo, I never lost an account.”
I’m sure Natasha tried hard and did her research, but she reminds me of Inspector Clouseau. When it comes to the real MadMen of the late 50′s and early 60′s, the poor girl doesn’t have a clue.
A lot of the great writers back then were Jewish boys writing about their mothers, not worrying about office conquests. If they read about Piggy and Ralph, Lords and Flies in high school, that was the extent of their literary exploration. Ogilvy probably was the exception, I’ll grant you that. But most of the boys from the rich families became account guys cause they weren’t smart enough to be creatives. They made their twenty grand a year and liked it. And were lousy golfers, too.
All the other insights in the girl’s new book aren’t insights at all. They’re deductions which if were cheese would be full of holes.
Want a historical predication. The Supremes will come down on Arizona’s side 5 to 4, at which point Obama’s lawyers will spend the next two years trying to outflank the law with executive orders and help from the Federal trade and commerce commissions.
If John Caples (of “they laughed when I sat down” fame) saw Cooper’s educated speculation on Advertising the times and the events of that period, he’d have sent her back where she came from. And told her to go into Public Relations.
The Don Drapers did babysit clients because they generally were the best people in the agency with people. But when they weren’t doing that, they were thinking of ideas as backups in case their people came up empty. If any creative director spent his time chasing skirts, he’d end out on his butt.
How do I know all this? My father worked with Brower at BBDO. I spend 20 years creative directoring in Chicago. My son is an ACD today. It truly does help writing about something if you know what you’re talking about. Natasha I doubt could hit an account guy with a push pin at 20 feet.
Although I don’t subscribe to tarring someone by association its interesting to note that Vargas-Cooper’s father is Marc Cooper, erstwhile SDS member, editor of Huffington Post’s Obama vehicle On The Bus, and Senior Lecturer of journalism at USC Annenberg School (http://www.marccooper.com/). While Don Draper worked in Mad Ave her dad was busy subverting middle class America by attacking it as racist and power ridden. Read the Port Huron Statement to find out the details.
After viewing a few episodes through Netflix I came to the conclusion that Mad Men’s popularity rests on the exploitation of alienation and nihilism of the privileged – just what SDS counted on in the 60s. There is no more alienated character to my knowledge in current American television than Don Draper. His isolation is so complete its even debuted in the opening credits with a figure falling through a concrete landscape.
Thanks Shanghaicharlie. And Rachel you are so right. I was Asst. Art Director, and Fashion Illustrator for Promotion Art. for Conde Nast, Mademoiselle Mag.,on Mad. Ave, in the 1960′s, and this show is so far off I cant sit thru it… What a crock! At least the old musical, “How to Succeed in Business w/o Really Trying” had Robert Morse in his prime, but both HTSIBWORT and MadMen’s “take” on Mad Ave are absolutely ludicrous!
It’s so sad and funny that people who want to write about the 50′s-60′s think that they can really get down to business and do some serious research by watching old “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter” & “Seven Year Itch” & Doris Day “Thrill of it All” videos!!
There were a lot of “sex-romp” musicals and films set in NYC in the 60′s, but in reality, business was always too important and the stakes way
too high to be sloshed under the sex dreams of any hollywood writer’s NYC Power-Lunch-o-philia!
If you wanted to write a serious intriguing TV show about the French Art world of 1900, would you really base your characters on the old Jack Lemmon movie “Irma La Douce”? Welcome to MadMen!
Well, it’s the next day, and I re-listened to the deep as a piece of paper interview Between Natasha and Ed. Shooting at it is like ducks in a barrel.
For example, in The Sopranos, there’s a gay character trying to hide it. Then he’s at Cooper. Sorry, Mouseketeers, but blenders get things less mixed up than Weiner. Flash. Gay art directors hid nothing, from their sexual orientation to their inability to draw.
Then Natasha picks her favorite ads. The Marlboro Man? Is she serious?
Creatives at places like DDB; people like Jay Wolf and Ken Charov, (9 out of 10 divorces end up in marriage) looked at Draper and D’Arcy like horse and buggy creative; barely out of the 40′s. The Marlboro Man and “Please don’t squeeze the” Sharman, Natasha’s style of advertising, were laughed at with enough disdain to fill Bill Clinton’s ego by members of the Bernback revolution. If Natasha picks ads like she picks bands, I’d expect her to say the Swinging Medallions and the Knickerbockers were more representative of the era than the Beatles. Apparently, the poor girl wrote about Mad Men without being aware of the creative revolution. It’s like writing about the Detroit sound of 60′s music and leaving out Barry Gordy’s influence.
One final jab, Ed and Natasha. Guys like Draper and Dick Van Dyke didn’t commute from upstate New York. Really, you two sniff out insights about 60′s advertising like you’re cocker spaniels who think you’re bloodhounds. After listening to the two of you explain Mad Men, I can’t wait for Natasha to write a book on Patton; then you guys can have a discussion about why his first and second armies were so much better and more interesting than Patton’s 3rd.
Thanks Shanghaibill. And Rachel you are so right!
I am so tired of children barely dry behind the ears trying to tell us how things supposedly worked in the late ’50s/early ’60s. They have no clue—and “Mad Men,” which has the same relationship to the time it pretends to portray as “South of the Border” has to Mexico, merely shows that.
I’ve seen the “Mad Men” show a few times, and it is almost unwatchable if one actually lived through the period. Certain obvious things stand out—the lack of hats on the men, for one (hats remained standard wear for men through the mid-Sixties, and few of the people in “Mad Men” wear them); the fact that while the people in the show smoke with abandon, they don’t know how to smoke the way people actually did; the lack of pipes (very much affected by Madison Avenue types) and cigars (very common then; almost nonexistent on the show). In addition to this, there is an obvious grafting of modern feminist fantasies onto the earlier period; the show is a rewriting of the prior era according to the orthodoxies of early-Seventies feminism. Also, the aggressive art direction does not understand either how much home decoration retained accoutrements of the ’40s up through the late ’60s, nor that the wide-lapel suits and jackets which were popular through the middle-Fifties remained in use by many men up through the early Sixties.
I’m a former creative director and I enjoy watching Mad Men. Gee Whiz, why don’t you people lighten up? I’ll bet you didn’t care for the directing or cinematography in Ben-Hur, either.