‘Who is Don Draper?”
In the season-four opener of “Mad Men,” a journalist asks the enigmatic ad agency Romeo the question many viewers have wondered during the first three seasons of the Emmy-winning AMC drama.
And of course, Don (Jon Hamm) doesn’t really answer the question. Because Don Draper is mostly an illusion. For his advertising colleagues, he’s the brilliant creative director who projects an image of debonair unflappability.
For his ex-wife, Betty (January Jones), he appeared to be the epitome of debonair perfection, but was exposed as a fraud who lied about his entire past. Betty thought she had married the total package — until she untied the ribbon and found that the pretty box was empty. For his mistresses and prostitutes, Don is a wanton soul begging to be set free — or smacked across the face for his transgressions.
Season three ended with Don’s life in shambles. Betty was en route to Reno to divorce him. His agency, Sterling Cooper, was kaput. Don’s solution? Reinvent. Just as Dick Whitman became Don Draper, he decided to start over. He formed a new agency with new partners. He let Betty go, to her new husband, Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley).
In most television series, exposing the hero’s charade, ending his marriage and closing his place of employment would signal the end of the story, but “Mad Men” creator — and voice of Don Draper — Matthew Weiner saw the creative possibilities.
“I felt it doesn’t matter who Don is,” he says. “He’s going to have to question everything he worked for and who that person was that he created. He’s not going to change his name back to Dick Whitman. I saw it was great for Don to lose this persona that he created and fight for the thing he thought he could win, the agency. Here’s Don taking charge of his life.”
The new season jumps ahead in time one year to Thanksgiving, 1964. Don’s new agency — Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce — has offices in the Time-Life building. Weiner reveals that the destruction of Sterling Cooper was inspired by industry trends in the early 1960s.
“I wanted to tell a story in this climate of mergers and acquisitions. [Firms] buy agencies but don’t know why. Sometimes they buy to stop competition. If Don Draper was to remain a creative force, he would never be working at a big agency,” he says.
The new agency reunites the characters that made “Mad Men” so distinctive at its beginning. Most welcome back into the fold is Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), a pivotal character who represents the American woman on the threshold between the ’60s and the ’70s, between subjugation and liberation, Joan is the show’s Aphrodite — with a steno pad. Her voluptuous figure, her vividly colored fashions and her soft purr were missed when she left the agency last season, thinking she’d married the perfect package, a Ken doll on the verge of a brilliant medical career, and found out, like Betty, that her husband was fatally flawed.
“Joan wanted this husband more than anything,” Weiner says. “She’s a sexually confident person who married this handsome doctor. It was a disaster.”
“It was incredibly hard for Joan to leave Sterling Cooper; it had been her home for a decade,” says Christina Hendricks. “She’s more capable than a lot of people. Really rolls with the punches. Anything that’s been thrown her way, she’s been able to clean it up and move forward.”
Hendricks promises that “the professionalism and the capability that Joan has shown in the past is back in full force. She’s ready to go.”
With Betty sidelined and even more severe, Joan is set to reemerge as “Mad Men’s” queen bee. Does that mean there’ll be rekindling of her affair with silver fox Roger Sterling?
“People have been wanting us to get back together for a long time,” she says. “Me, too. I love working with John Slattery so much. There’s so much chemistry.”
Slattery, who says, “I get sent a lot of Martinis in restaurants” because of his portrayal or Roger Sterling, plays his cards close to his vest when it comes to making predictions about Roger and Joan.
“Who knows? Never say never,” he says. But ask the Boston-born actor his favorite lines and he’ll mention one that Roger said to Joan. “I’m talking to someone in the bathroom in a scene. You think it’s my wife, then you see it’s Joan and you realize they’re having an affair. Roger looks at some food on tray and says, “Napoleons, Oysters Rockefeller. If we lead the food alone , it will take over Europe.’”
Slattery will direct two “Mad Men” episodes, the fourth and the twelfth.
“I asked last year if I could trail a director, Phil Abraham. He was generous enough to let me glue myself to him and be a pain in the ass,” Slattery says. “I asked Matt during the off-season, ‘Will you let me know what I have to do to make [directing] happen?’ I thought I would have to do a short film. Then he took a leap of faith, which is a huge thing with a show like this. It went well enough that he gave me another [episode].”
Three seasons in, there’s no question that “Mad Men” has changed the lives of its entire company, much in the way “The Sopranos” did for its cast and crew, without the show having to wait as long to win the Best Drama Emmy. “It changed my life entirely, and definitely for the better,” says Hendricks. “To find a project where everything seemed to click has only happened a couple of times in my life and never on this level.”
“It’s good to have a job,” says Slattery. “It’s a great thing. You’d be an idiot not to know how you good you have it.”