We didn't look like that. We didn't dress like that. We didn't talk like that.
Mad Men has nothing to do with the real advertising world of the Sixties.
It's just a narrative about people, you could have set it in a hedge fund.”
Such is the verdict of Mary Wells Lawrence, who knows a thing or two about
advertising in the Sixties. After all, she ended the decade as the highest
paid advertising executive in America.
The acclaimed television show returns for its second series this evening. The
first concluded with Peggy, the seemingly unassuming, yet quietly ambitious
secretary, entering the men-only world of Sterling Cooper, the fictional
Manhattan advertising agency around which the show is based. The junior
copywriter may be just the first rung on the ladder but it's the position
from which Wells Lawrence ascended to become the first woman to found and
run her own ad agency, Wells Rich Greene, and the first female chief
executive of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
So does Mad Men seem familiar to her at all? As Don Draper, the fictional boss
of Sterling Cooper, lights up yet another cigarette, swigs bourbon in the
middle of a working day, mutters sexist banter (“The whole world is like one
big brassiere strap just waiting to be plucked,”), and cheats on his
anxiety-ridden wife, is it ringing any bells? “We weren't lusting after each
other,” says the trim and still-glamorous 80-year-old multi-millionaire,
looking 20 years younger than her age as she sits in her panoramic Park
Avenue apartment, just a block away from Madison Avenue,. “We were lusting
after ourselves. We were all crazy about ourselves. Crazy about the talent
that we all felt we had. When you are that self-centred, you don't have room
for romance with anyone else.”
Far from exaggerating the truth, though, Wells Lawrence thinks that the series
doesn't go nearly far enough. The Mad Men aren't famous enough, they're not
wild enough and they don't earn enough - at one point Wells Lawrence owned
30 houses across the world. “If people weren't crying, screaming and
yelling, we rarely got big ideas. There's an atmosphere of tyranny that is
required for people to stretch. I expected - demanded - a small miracle from
each employee daily.” It was that tyranny that helped Wells Lawrence to
create iconic adverts for names such as Alka Seltzer (“It's the season to
plop plop, fizz fizz...”), and Braniff International, the airline whose
campaign (“When you got it flaunt it”) was fronted by Andy Warhol, the
artist who often just wanted to have a glass of wine with Wells Lawrence and
“stop being Andy Warhol for a while”. Although there's little sense of the
coolness of the industry in the series, when Wells Lawrence refers to
“Mick”, there's no doubt as to which rock star she is referring. There was
no deference to celebrity, she explains, because they were famous
themselves. “The ads were more important than the TV shows.”
It was one of Wells Lawrence's employees, the wife of the actor Robert Wagner,
who persuaded Frank Sinatra to sing the theme tune for the “I love New York”
advertising campaign, a slogan that still adorns carrier bags, T-shirts and
baseball caps in souvenir shops across the city. “We were stars. People
asked me for my autograph.”
In her youth, Wells Lawrence, with her signature flicked hairstyle,
minidresses and fabulous legs, resembled a sassier version of the actress
Tippi Hedren. She is far from the awkward Peggy, with hair scraped back in a
twirly pony tail, whose dowdy clothes prompted a fictional male colleague to
remark: “Are you Amish or something?”
Tellingly, Wells Lawrence - born into a suburban family in Poland, Ohio -
studied drama at college, a training that she exploited: “We were always
acting out,” she recalls. “You had to hit the boards.”
While Peggy's character may be wide of the mark, the Mad Men storylines do
reflect the real advertising revolution that helped to propel post-War
America to become the largest shopping mall in the world. So colossal that
two-thirds of US growth is derived from consumption.
The revolution was spearheaded by Charlotte Beers - almost ten years younger
than Wells Lawrence - who became the first woman in America to head two
advertising agencies - J.Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather. No one,
male or female, has done so since.
Unlike Peggy, whom she describes as “the most morose secretary in the world”,
Beers didn't claw her way out of the typing pool; she was a Texan maths
major who was poached by J.Walter Thompson while working in marketing for
Uncle Ben's rice. Yet she did deal with jealous peers: “I remember a
colleague doing a devastating impression of me,” she says. “I went to see
her afterwards and said I'm not leaving your office until we work out how to
present a united front to the men. She roared with laughter and took me to
lunch. I didn't go back to the office that day.”
Beers is known throughout the industry for having invented the concept of the
brand - creating a family of related products, an entity so familiar to us
in the 21st century that it is difficult to imagine an era without it. She
created the brand of American Express: “We realised that people connected
with a sense of exclusive membership,” she says. It was Beers who worked out
that consumers felt an emotional connection with the product that they
aspired to buy. “It's not a clear, linear rationale about why we buy
something. It's emotional, full of intangibles, just as any emotional
relationship is. It's about intimacy.”
Matthew Weiner, the producer and writer of Mad Men, tries to address this
advertising shift, at the beginning of the first series, in a scene during
which Don Draper asks a black waiter why he smokes a particular brand. The
waiter says that it is a sense of nostalgia that leads him to buy Old Gold
cigarettes. “They gave Old Gold to me in the Services.” says the veteran. “I
love smoking.”
Whatever the series' shortcomings, Weiner is on safe ground when he pins the
plot to a theme of misogyny. Beers explains that while the bulk of all
products in the Sixties were chosen and purchased by women, overwhelmingly,
it was men who ran the advertising campaigns and told female customers why
they needed such items. Many products, including cigarettes and cars, were
entirely out of bounds for female account executives.
“When I joined the advertising industry,” says Beer, “women were never allowed
near beer commercials.” So dominant were men that even by the early Eighties
they still held 80 per cent of the senior positions in the sector.
Wells Lawrence, though, plays down perceived sexism: “I know everyone goes on
about it, but every single person who hired and promoted me was a woman.”
While other women may have paved the way to the senior ranks, Beers
remembers the biting rivalry that existed between women at agencies. “Women
who were on accounts wore hats to differentiate them from secretaries. I
remember one secretary I had. She was a wise woman in her forties - much
older than me at the time - and we liked each other, but she quit, saying:
‘I have to leave because you are never going to go anywhere.' She went to
work for a man who ended up reporting to me.”
One of the most famous anecdotes about Beers concerns a power drill. Sears,
the retail giant, was J.Walter Thompson's most important client at the
Chicago office where Beers worked in the early Seventies. Power drills fell
within the marketing remit of men. “But we desperately wanted the budget to
sell this drill. The Sears people would sit in a U shape with these
courtiers behind them. To walk into the middle of the U was to hand your
heart away. I had a degree in maths and minored in physics, and I really had
to crank up on all this stuff. So I started to take the drill apart in front
them, talking about the various speeds and these magnetic ball bearings. “I
can't believe that they didn't laugh. I guess they wouldn't because product
is everything at Sears. I rounded off by saying it was the best power tool
in America, and I got a standing ovation.”
While Beers and Wells Lawrence are both keen on Mad Men, Beers feels that the
show is closer to the advertising industry that she helped to build than
Wells Lawrence believes. “What Mad Men has, which has always been the case
in advertising, is that if you have an idea, it catapults you. You can
out-rank the others - merit really gets you there. You see this with the
character of Peggy, who gets a promotion from secretary. That was true then,
and it's true now. A good idea will out prestige names.”
For all the discrepancies between the show and the real Madison Avenue,
perhaps the final joke is on the viewer. Mad Men, with its Diana Dors-shaped
women, its greased-hair suited men, the chain-smoking and the Revolutionary
Road-style suburbs, is selling us the Fifties and early Sixties, packaged,
reassuring nostalgia in an environment of uncertainty. Perhaps our emotional
connection is with the excess, money and indulgence that seem years away
from the economic predicament of America and Britain.
As Wells Lawrence says: “I've done it all. I've had it all. But I still want
it all.”
The second series of Mad Men starts tonight at 10pm on BBC4 (repeated tomorrow
on BBC2).
The Mad Men women: Missed the first series of Mad Men?
These are the women who held it together
Peggy Olsen (played by Elisabeth Moss)
Of all the career arcs at the Sterling Cooper ad agency, Peggy's is the most
dramatic. Once the mousy, frumpy, introverted secretary to creative golden
balls Don Draper, she wises up to the machinations of the company. It's she
who overcomes the endemic corporate sexism to break through the glass
ceiling of the typing pool, ending the series with a junior copywriter
position and her own office. The only thing that seems destined to hold her
back is the discovery that she is pregnant; the father is the creepy junior
ad exec Pete Campbell (brilliantly played by Vincent Kartheiser).
Betty Draper (January Jones)
Don's wife is the stereotype of the perfect suburban wife. Having sacrificed
her career as a model, Betty has fulfilled all the obligations of a dutiful
wife, including giving birth to two beautiful children. Yet, the cracks in
their relationship - the result of her husband's secrecy over his real
identity, his repeated philandering and his lack of empathy to her
unfulfilled career ambitions - result, first, in psychosomatic illness and,
later, in sexual fantasies involving door-to-door salesmen. Her washing
machine, she discovers, provides more satisfaction than her husband.
Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks)
Joan's pneumatic hour-glass appeal has guaranteed her position as the Queen
Bee in the secretarial hive, but her days of being the lust object of every
junior exec that stalks Sterling Cooper is fading. What she wants is to bag
a handsome, made-man, such as Don Draper, but the cold reality of her life
is being trapped in the role of concubine to the senior partner Roger
Sterling. When he suffers two life-threatening heart attacks, her hopes for
the good life seem very fragile indeed.
Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff)
After Rachel approaches Sterling Cooper to revamp the image of her department
store, she falls for Don Draper. As Don's world collapses - Pete Campbell
attempts to blackmail him over his identity-switch with a dead soldier with
whom he served in the Korean War - he suggests to Rachel that they run away.
Finally seeing through him, she realises his motive is simply fear of
discovery and condemns him for his cowardice. Faced with no other
alternative, Don reveals his true identity (Dick Whitman) to his boss,
Bertram Cooper.
Shaun Phillips
