Living the Mad lifestyle
Her memoir, Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond, certainly paints a picture of a world like that from the popular TV show.
“I think Mad Men hits the mark in many ways and misses it in many ways,” she says. “It’s absolutely accurate in terms of the way we looked and dressed. Nobody realises all the layers that women wore in those days. Philip Roth, the novelist, is a classmate of mine from Bucknell University. I sent him a copy of the manuscript and he said, ‘Oh, I’d forgotten about slips — slips were so sexy. Undressing a woman who was wearing a slip was so wonderful.’
“Pantyhose had not been invented yet. We were wearing garter belts and stockings with seams up the back, which you had to make sure were straight. We had brassieres that made your breasts look like javelins. And of course women wore hats and gloves and high heels. Wearing flat shoes was unheard of. Women never wore pants; perhaps in a blizzard — to get from here to there, but once you got to there, you changed into the dress you carried.
“Only women copywriters wore hats in the office, not secretaries. They wore them as a badge that they had made it from the secretarial pool to being a copywriter. One of the rare mistakes that Mad Men makes is that Peggy Olson, who is a copywriter, does not wear a hat at her desk.”
The drama, inevitably, is also heightened on the TV show, she points out. There wasn’t as much backbiting in the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency she worked in from 1964 to 1976.
The cavalier approach to smoking and drinking alcohol was much the same; with the exception that the boozing in the morning, when fictional characters like Roger Sterling often reach for a decanter first thing, is a false note, she says.
But lunchtime, especially for male colleagues, who had a more relaxed work ethic and approach to calorie intake, was a swirl of martinis and other cocktails. The fact that clients were also as liquored in the afternoons made it acceptable. One creative director Maas worked for liked to drink scotch while having a haircut during brainstorming sessions in the office.
For years, Maas smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Jerry Della Femina, who headed up another ad agency at the time, once put down a cigarette during a client presentation to draw something on a blackboard, finished his sketch, and then tried to light a piece of chalk.
Staff members smoking marijuana — which is only touched on in Mad Men — was also de rigour, particularly once the ’70s hit (the latest season of Mad Men concludes in 1965). One creative group at her office smoked hash all through the day.
“Remember, this was the hippy era of San Francisco and Haight-Ashbury, love-beads and flower children,” she says. “Clients considered pot smoking important for the whole creative process.”
The office sex that Maas catalogues in her book is the measure of Don Draper’s philandering in Mad Men. During one brief period, five of the senior men in her office, which represented half of their cohort, were having extramarital affairs — three with colleagues; one with an actress commissioned for an ad; and one with a client. All of the affairs ended in divorce and re-marriage.
Senior guys tended to get most of the action — they had big offices with locks on their doors and couches, not just chairs like their junior colleagues — and they had the money to splash out on hotel rooms (the Hotel Lexington was a favourite spot for midday trysting) and weekends away.
The affairs were tilted in the men’s favour. A couple at Young & Rubicam — which, apparently, the Mad Men office is modelled on — were rumbled late one night. The office where they were having sex didn’t have a door and a boss stumbled upon them. The account man was promoted and got an office with a door; the female secretary got fired.
Maas — whose biggest achievement was “being married for 45 years” to Michael, an architect who passed away in 2002 — endured a torrid time trying to repel the relentless advances of her boss over a two-year period.
Like the fictional Don Draper, he was dashing — tall, slim and attractive. He was also gifted. Recruited by David Ogilvy, the agency’s figurehead, he often rode in at the eleventh hour with a big idea to save the account.
On a business trip in the mid-west, he drunkenly knocked on her hotel room door late at night, entered and made a pass at her, which she diffused by telling him that she was having her period. On subsequent out-of-town trips, she pretended not to hear him when he would come knocking on her door. She was so exasperated by his “battering, exhausting, cat-and-mouse harassment” that she used to cry herself to sleep. There was nowhere to turn.
“Who would I have said anything to?” she says. “Human Resources? There wasn’t any Human Resources. There was a guy known as the office manager. He was the guy I mention in the book who got drunk at the Ogilvy boat ride and fell overboard into the Hudson River. Am I going to go to him and say that I’m being sexually harassed? Am I going to go to my husband, a former officer in the United States Marines? He would have probably come into the office with his rifle.
“I began to see a psychiatrist who didn’t understand it anymore than any other man of the era. ‘Tell your boss that you’re happily married,’ he said. Well, that wasn’t going to work.
“Finally, I went to David Ogilvy. I didn’t tell him that I was being harassed sexually, but I think he probably knew. Looking back, probably everybody in the office knew but they were just averting their eyes. I quickly ran out of polite fibs about wanting to be transferred and began to cry. He pretended not to notice and said, ‘My dear girl, I think that would be very good for you.’ In three days, I was assigned to a new group.”
Maas had a stellar career in advertising. She birthed one of the most famous ad campaigns, “I Love New York”, and finished as president of an ad agency. She juggled her career and family life, raising two girls, with great difficulty, a challenge that hasn’t changed, she says, for the girls coming behind her in Madison Avenue today.
“There weren’t very many of us working mothers in the ’60s. It was considered improper to go to work full-time if you had children under 12. Other women were disdainful. Women who were staying at home taking care of children used to say to me, ‘What do you do if they’re sick? What kind of mother are you?’ Men felt sorry for us because we must have been married to real bums or else why did we have to work?”
Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond by Jane Maas is published by Bantam Press, €14.99.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
