I was Peggy Olson

IT’S a rainy morning in Los Angeles, and Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olson in the television series Mad Men, is standing outside the stage door smoking.

On the set, the actors are restricted to herbal cigarettes, so she has ducked out for “the real thing.” I say I am a reporter from Newsweek who started as a secretary, and she says “I am you.”

Olson is a striving Norwegian-American Catholic girl from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (coincidentally my birthplace, too), who started her career in 1960 “straight out of Miss Something secretarial school,” Moss says. That was the path for women and as Mad Men enters its fifth season on Sky Atlantic tonight, Peggy has been recognised for her skills as a writer, rising from Don Draper’s secretary to his trusted number two in the creative department at ad agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.