MM@M: Old Fashioned Sixties Sweethearts

Mad Men at the Movies. Now practically concurrent with episode airings!

Mad Men 4.2 "Christmas Comes But Once a Year"
In this episode SCDP scrambles to make their low budget Christmas party festive for their biggest client Lee Garner Jr.. Don Draper gets drunks and beds his secretary. Awkward! Meanwhile, Freddy Rumsen (Joel Murray) returns with a valuable client in hand. He and his former protege Peggy argue about the Ponds soap campaign. Freddy wants to enlist a celebrity as the spokesperson.

Freddy: Tallulah Bankhead? She's glamorous. She seems more uncompromising than a movie star. She's on Broadway.
Peggy: She never got off Broadway because she's not beautiful enough.
Freddy: Shame on you. C'mon.

[imagining commercial] A little backstage at the makeup mirror with Ponds. Opening night 'The choice of professionals.' It's good, right?
Peggy: All of their research says they're trying to get young women.
Freddy: Young women look up to older women.
Peggy: For beauty tips. Are you joking?

Joking indeed. Here's Tallulah Bankhead in 1930 and again in the 1960s (she died in 1968). She was one of the hardest living, wittiest and most quotable of stars. Glamorous? Yes. A good spokeswoman for clean beauty regimens? Um... No

Later in the episode...

Freddy: On the short list I got Tallulah, Jessica Tandy, Barbara Stanwyck, and Doris Day -- different types.
Peggy: I don't even understand your list. What's wrong with Elizabeth Taylor?
Freddy: Isn't about making old ladies look good?
Peggy: Nothing makes old ladies look good.
Freddy: The Ponds does.

Freddy's wish-list suggests that he goes to the theater a lot (Tandy & Tallulah both being stage rather than movie stars). An argument erupts between them about what young girls want and whether they'll get married or not and such. Peggy, who has just been called "old fashioned" by her boyfriend in a previous scene, deflects the insult Freddy's way.

Peggy: You know, Freddy, I've brought up your name a hundred times to come in and freelance for me. But everyone is right about you. You and your grand dames and your poor old typewriter and your desperate spinsters. You're so old fashioned, you know that?

Hey, if loving grande dames makes you old fashioned, I've been old fashioned since I was five years old! I've always loved theatrical women of a certain age.

In 1964 when this episode takes place, Liz Taylor was a mammoth star and at 32 still the screen's preeminent beauty (Peggy's suggestion makes sense) but it was actually Doris Day, ten years Liz's senior, who was the box office queen. Day was the top earner, male or female, from 1962 through 1964 according to the Motion Picture Almanac, so it's interesting that Day would be grouped in with Freddy's "old fashioned" taste. But I guess the romantic comedy queens, who always seem to be the top earning females no matter the decade, do appeal to the most conventional and traditional of moviegoers... and therefore all age ranges. (It's interesting that Mad Men is suddenly using Peggy and Freddy, two allies, to dramatize the widening generational gap of the tumultous 1960s.)


Liz and Doris are the constants but the sweetheart crown shifts from Debbie Reynolds to Sandra Dee and then, in the mid to late 60s, a real shakeup begins with the musical stars exerting their power be it Ann-Margret, Shirley Maclaine or the tsunami sized arrivals of both Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand (just a few short years away). Natalie Wood is a constant during the early 60s (the peak of her popularity) but one assumes she just missed these lists since the bulk of each top ten is made up of male stars.

Since we're now writing about the episodes shortly after they air, I thought I'd add three new elements to each write up.

Best Line
Peggy to her horny boyfriend: "You're never going to get me to do anything Swedish people do."

Best Intangible Something
I absolutely love that everyone is going to have to blow Lee Garner Jr. (metaphorically speaking) to keep his business. Consider it Sal's phantom revenge. (For those just joining the series, Sal --who used to be the defacto star of "Mad Men at the Movies" -- lost his job basically because he refused Lee Garner's sexual advances behind the scenes.)

Best Single Moment
Joanie leads a conga line.


This moment was a major hit with fans everywhere if Twitter is any indication. It prompted several amusing online responses including a conga from GIF PARTY and a campaign for an entire episode composed solely of Joanie leading a conga line. Hell, I'd watch!

Other references: (Music) The Beatles | (Myths/Characters) Potemkinville, Rasputin, Santa, Three Wise Men, Hitler, The Tin Man | (Literature) Article "The Swedish Way of Love"... this episode takes place in December 1964 so we're still a couple of years away from the famous I Am Curious (Yellow) film but the "Sexual Revolution" is approaching in America and Sweden was an early influential leader in this regard.

Mad Men at the Movies 1.1

A truism: In New York City, people are often engaged in the arts. They talk movies, theater, books. One of my favorite things about Mad Men, Matt Weiner's fascinating series about the men and women of "Sterling Cooper" a mid level Manhattan ad agency, is how it references the arts of the 50s and 60s. In most filmed entertainment, other arts are generally only used in facile ways to underline themes, tell contemporary (and instantly dated) jokes or crudely reference an era. Mad Men weaves them in as smartly as the rest of its period details (costuming, sets, politics) to steep you in the world the characters are actually living in or the world they wish they were living in.

With Season 3 debuting this weekend it's a good a time to begin looking at the series' cinematic shout outs. It's also a sneaky way to work a great television series into The Film Experience. Even for you film buffs who've never seen an episode, I hope you'll enjoy these funny, telling or throwaway references to movie stars and cinema. Most episodes of "Mad Men at the Movies" won't be this wordy but I have to lay the groundwork. It's the pilot episode.

1.1 "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"

Twelve minutes into the premiere, creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is exercising in his office when Salvatore the art director (Bryan Batt) enters to discuss an account.

Salvatore: Oh look at you, Gidget. Trying to fill out that bikini?
Don Draper: Summer is coming.

I'm guessing this isn't the first time a gay man called another man "Gidget" in 1960, old school queens loving feminizing monikers as they do. The funny thing about the scene is that Salvatore hasn't even come out to himself and isn't in with the gays. He comes by it innately -- nature not nurture. The weird thing about the scene, in the larger context of Mad Men, is that Don Draper rolls with the girlish ribbing. He's a smidge more lighthearted in the earliest episodes. TV shows (even great ones) always take time to "settle".

Gidget, starring Sandra Dee, opened in April 1959 a year before this episode takes place. It was so popular that it spawned multiple sequels, imitators (see the beach party genre) and a mid60s TV series starring Sally Field. "Gidget" and "Sandra Dee" quickly turned into those sorts of names that also double as adjectives in the common vernacular. Consider Grease's "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee" musical ribbing.

Salvatore's reference becomes funnier the more you think it over. Don is doing the exercise motion I personally remember girls doing in the late 70s (or was it early 80s?) while chanting "I must. I must. I must increase my bust. The bigger the better the tighter the sweater, the boys depend on us". I searched for the etymology of that rhyme and kept coming back to Judy Blume's "Are You There God, It's Me Margaret?" though surely the rhyme precedes that 1970 bestseller? Why else the reference to tight sweaters, which seem to place it in an earlier decade. Gidget herself is considered a flat chested (despite Sandra Dee filling out a swimsuit just fine) tomboy.

She acts sorta teenage, just in-between age
Looks about four foot three
Although she's just small fry, just about so-high
Gidget is the one for me

A regular tomboy but dressed for a prom
Boy, how cute can one girl be?
Although she's not king size, her finger is ring-size
Gidget is the one for me

James Darren, Sandra Dee and Cliff Robertson "The
Big Kahuna" in Gidget (1959)

As you may have gleaned from this post, I can't get enough of Mad Men. Even Gidget would have loved it it's so swell. "Honest to goodness it's the absolute ultimate!"

other Arts references in this episode:
<--- Cinema: A stripper at Pete's bachelor party does a weak Marilyn Monroe
Broadway: My Fair Lady (both verbally and musically "On the Street Where You Live")
Books: Bambi, A Life in the Woods
Magazines: Reader's Digest
Television: The Danny Thomas Show (also known as Make Room For Daddy)

Special thanks
To the Lipp Sisters at Basket of Kisses (a great Mad Men fansite) for providing a starter list.