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Like a lot of my fellow boomers, I tuned in devotedly to the season four premiere of Mad Men, the high-style TV drama that follows advertising whiz Don Draper (portrayed by Jon Hamm), his beautiful but psychotic wife Betty (January Jones), and their group of Madison Avenue movers and shakers through the tumultuous 1960s.
For me, Mad Men is like stepping into a time machine and being transported back to a world I briefly glimpsed in my childhood and always wanted to take a second, closer look at. In 1964, the year season four begins, I remember going with my family to a convention in New York and staying at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, a few blocks from where the fictional ad agency of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce does business. As a 7-year-old rube from a Pennsylvania mill town, I remember gazing in wonder at the people on the sidewalk who looked like they had stepped out of a department store ad--the men in their aerodynamically fitting gray flannel, skinny ties, gleaming wingtips and hats, the ladies in pillbox hats and gloves and form-hugging skirts in iridescent space-age hues. They were gliding gracefully in and out of the revolving doors of those impossibly tall granite and steel towers, looking like the royalty of a fantasy kingdom. Off on the horizon, a sea of neon and a cacophony of cab horns beckoned them to adventures of the sort I could only imagine.
As I got older and less wide-eyed, I found myself drawn to the pop culture relics of that era, many of which provide Mad Men with its feel of authenticity. I've love the references to "Bye Bye Birdie," the black-and-white French New Wave movies that Don Draper sometimes sneaks off to see during working hours and Bob Dylan's Greenwich Village folkie period. There was a lot of cool, fresh, original stuff going on in the 1960s--a period of breathtaking creativity that in some ways makes our present era seem hopelessly derivative and uncreative by comparison.
But Mad Men, which views the 1960s from a 2010 perspective, also reminds me that my little fantasy world had a lot of unpleasantness to it. For all their originality, the music, movies and design of that era also sometimes display a naiveté --or maybe a blithe dishonesty--that's as painful as adman Paul Kinsey's tweedy, bearded, pipe-smoking impersonation of an Ivy-League bohemian. Similarly, who could not be repelled by the show's depiction of the ugliness beneath all that style--the misogynistic attitudes, the racial and religious prejudice, the tautly wrapped judgmental mores, which the characters, of course, secretly violate with steamy, sordid and thoroughly hypocritical abandon. And I'm astonished by the characters' ability to gulp down copious quantities of liquor around the clock and to smoke like Pittsburgh's long-defunct steel mills. (Much of the show is shot in California, where smoking on sets is illegal, so the actors reportedly puff on herbal cigarettes rather than tobacco.) You wouldn't want to be a 1960s adman's liver or lungs in 1980.
I have to admit that I strongly identify with one of the show's characters. No, it's not Don Draper, the dapper, rakish advertising genius whose veneer of polish and confidence hides a tortured, duplicitous past. Don is 40, a decade or so younger than I am now, but he was born in 1924, which makes him one year younger than my late father (who also owned a few natty custom-tailored suits, though he only wore them when he wasn't in a butcher's apron at his corner grocery). Don and I are polar opposites, and not just because the actor who portrays him is much better looking than I am. As Sunday night's episode again reminded us, Don is an impostor of Ferdinand Demara magnitude, the impoverished offspring of a hooker who switched dog tags with a corpse during the Korean War to insinuate himself into the educated professional class. He keeps his past--and his emotional life--a closely guarded secret, even from his own family. In 2010, as Jeffrey Rosen details in this New York Times Magazine article, the web makes that increasingly difficult for people to do. Instead, I've become accustomed to revealing myself, like a lot of other boomers. We discuss details of our lives on Facebook pages, Tweet our doings to the world continuously and join classmates.com to track down old buds. Some of us even invite reality television cameras into our homes. Draper, obsessed as he is with remaining a cipher, would be horrified by that.
No, the member of the Draper family I identify most with is the one who only appears in fleeting glimpses on the show, seldom figures significantly in the plot and is so inconsequential that at various times he has been played by three different actors. I'm talking about Bobby Draper, Don and Betty's young son. Bobby (currently portrayed by Jared Gilmore) looks to be about six or seven in 1964, which makes him and me approximately the same age. What little that we know about him is that he's a pleasant but unexceptional kid, and a bit of a screw-up. There was the time he burned himself on the stove, the time he broke Don's record player, and the time he tried on the German helmet that his granddad brought home from World War I ("That's a dead man's hat--take it off!" his dad admonished him). All the same, he's eager as a puppy to please adults and get along. At that nightmarish Thanksgiving dinner scene in the season premiere--for those who haven't yet seen it, I'll leave out the details--Bobby tries to break the tension by uttering one of his few lines: "I love sweet potatoes!"
But just because we don't see Bobby much doesn't mean he's not there. Or that he's not taking it all in. To the contrary. I like to imagine Bobby, grown up and the age that I am now, as the one who is retelling the story. He's thinking back on the turmoil of his parents' lives and the escalating chaos of the era into which he was born, and struggling to make sense of it all. Grown-up Bobby remembers hearing adults talking in hushed tones about the Cuban missile crisis, and trying to go to sleep each night without thinking too much about an H-Bomb turning suburbia into a cinder. He remembers watching John-John salute his slain father, JFK, as his hearse passed by on TV, and feeling terribly sad for him. He'd remember his older sister having a crush on Paul McCartney, and watching her trying to do the dance steps from Shindig and later, Soul Train.
Likewise, Bobby can recall crying on his father's sleeve when his parents broke it to him that they were splitting up. He'll remember the moment he realizes that his dad was not telling him the truth about something, and how many years it took for that bitter disillusionment to evolve into understanding and sympathy. He'll remember the ugliness and the tragedies, but he'll remember the cool stuff, too, like riding in his dad's sleek 1962 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, the one with the tail fins that made it easy to imagine it was a rocket. He even remembers the Nashville Teens' 1964 hit "Tobacco Road," the song that played during this season's premiere episode's closing credits, and how surprised he would be decades later to hear a contestant performing it on American Idol.
Of course, I don't know for sure what's in Bobby's head, what he really would say about the vanished world of our childhood. But I like to keep imagining it, and what sort of man he's grown up to become. That is one of the things that keeps me watching.
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