OPINION: Being Don Draper
Posted August 4, 2010 11:11 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Courtesy TheMarkNews.com
Got a mental picture of Don Draper? I look almost exactly like him. Just make him bald. Give him a grey beard. Weaken his chin considerably, then add a whole bunch of wrinkles.
Make him three, maybe four inches shorter, and roughly 40 pounds heavier (pretty much all of it in the stomach). Oh, and don’t forget to lose the suit. Picture your new Don Draper in khakis and a wine-stained polo shirt from Giant Tiger.
But you can keep his smokes. I smoke. A lot. Just like Don.
Okay, so I don’t look much like him. Big deal. But I was the creative director of an ad agency. And I’m taciturn as hell.
As for the shenanigans? Alas, I arrived a little late to the party, missing the in-office drinking and inter-mural sexual activity (although I did catch the tail end of the mandatory cigarette-smoking policy). That’s not to say people weren’t drinking and getting laid during office hours. Just that by the time I’d arrived, a wafer-thin veneer of propriety was in place.
But after all, those were the ’80s – the years that put the decade in decadence. And by then, of course, cocaine had become the fuel of choice for creative departments. (Imagine the sight of Peter Campbell on a three-day coke bender.)
Like Don’s, my job was to come up with ideas. Unlike Don, I was rarely able to produce them out of thin air on cocktail napkins between multiple sexual conquests. I did it at a desk. Boring, I know.
I also came a little late to the Mad Men party. Didn’t really pay attention until the third season, when suddenly Sterling Cooper was in play. The buying-back of Sterling Cooper is my favourite part of the show. I wish we’d seen some more of the machinations these things always produce.
The buying and selling of ad agencies was fairly uncommon in Draper’s day, but in the ’80s and ’90s it became the norm. It seemed everyone was either buying or selling something.
We were reluctant entrepreneurs. Our agency was for sale the day we opened our doors. And there was no shortage of suitors. For a time, it seemed everybody in town was hell-bent on buying us or merging us, and it was fun to feel wanted.
One day, the president of the Canadian branch of a large U.S. firm took us to lunch. We made small talk for several minutes, and then ordered some food. As the waiter left, our host looked around to ensure no one was eavesdropping. This was, after all, an extremely delicate and confidential matter that could impact several dozen people’s lives.
Then, with quiet pride, he boasted: “I got the whole thing down on a single piece of paper! A paragraph!”
He dramatically reached inside his jacket. No paper. Then the other pocket. No paper. “Oh my god!” he said. “Where the hell is it?”
He searched frantically under our napkins and behind our plates and beside our glasses. He even checked under the table cloth.
Suddenly, he realized that he must have put the paper inside the menu he’d held. Distraught, he leapt from the table to the hostess station and began frenetically sorting through the stack of menus there. It was quite a spectacle.
Needless to say, that marriage was over before it began.
The Mad Men storyline is remarkably similar to our experience, only backwards. We started as a scrappy little shop of three people, but we grew and grew until we could live every Canadian’s dream: We sold to the Americans. Yup, bought by New York. But then New York sold us to Chicago. And then Chicago flipped us to Paris, which at least allowed us to buy the place back in an office overlooking the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées.
For the most part, I find Mad Men very faithful to the ad business and Don Draper to be the greatest character created in this millennium. I hope the show plays itself out to the end of the 1960s. At what point, for example, did it become not OK for men to talk to women the way they do in Mad Men? When did someone say, “Maybe it’s not a great idea to be plastered for a client meeting at 10 in the morning?” When did it become inappropriate to drive with a tumbler of rye in your hand? Who finally said, “Okay, Peter Campbell’s a toad, let’s fire his ass?”
As for my doppelganger? How long did Don keep it together? Does he even have an entire season in him? Exactly how much of an enigma can one man become?
I don’t know. But I do know this: for me, the stress never got to the point where I paid somebody to slap me. I swear to God.
The Mark News is Canada’s online forum for opinion and analysis.
