Mad Men Note: Obstetric
For once, what I can’t wait for isn’t next week’s episode (although the teaser was very teasing!) but for tomorrow’s commentary. What will the young ‘uns make of this evening’s window on giving birth, Sixties style? Perhaps the Golden Age of martinis and men on top won’t look quite so attractive. But who knows?
In the waiting room, Don spends a long night with a guard from Sing Sing — the prison in Ossining (Don’s suburb) that stands right on — in, really — the Hudson River (hence “going up the river” for “going to jail”) — and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. We know that Betts is having a terrible time, if only because she’s not in the mood to be birthin’ babies; we’re also told that the guard’s baby is positioned for a breech birth — a sticky wicket even today. What will happen? The fact that the fathers aren’t in the delivery room, knowing what will happen as it happens, must be shocking to husbands under forty. (When my daughter was born, in 1972, the obstetrician — a woman! — made it clear from the start that she excluded fathers from the proceedings, a sign that things were changing.)
A nurse eventually appears and tells the guard that his wife and son are doing “fine.” This news is immediately contradicted: it turns out that the mother lost a great deal of blood and can’t be seen right now, but the baby is in the nursery. (Maybe that’s a lie, too.) The guard leaves, but not without a fine, almost World-War-II buddy parting from Don. While the guard is all enlisted-man emotion, Don exudes the stoic, silent assurance of the officer class into which we know he made his way by guile: what better preparation for a career in advertising, or, for the matter of that, for patting a new father on the shoulder and telling him that our worst fears are — our fears. If you ask me, Jon Hamm (with the help of some extremely favorable lighting) leapfrogged his way into the Cary Grant class even faster than “Don” joined the officer class.
The other great scene takes place in an elevator. Peter Campbell is feeling his way around the idea that advertising to “Negroes” might be a good business strategy. In this, he is woefully behind the times; it’s as though he’d just discovered the fact that African-Americans buy stuff. As someone who’s always signed up for Schadenfreude events starring Pete Campbell, I was delighted to see Roger Sterling ream him a new you-know-what, but I found the elevator scene excruciating. Pete actually stops the elevator so that he can have a serious heart-to-heart with Hollis, the black elevator operator, about television-buying habits.
What horrified me wasn’t that Pete has no sense of boundaries. What horrified me was that nobody in Pete Campbell’s class had a sense of boundaries. I know, because I belonged to the surburban auxiliary. It would not have crossed anyone’s mind that an elevator operator’s privacy was being breached. Privacy was something that separated us, the people at the top, from one another. In our imagination, other people were unencumbered by privacy concerns — lucky them! (That’s why so many well-educated and sweet-natured boomers became hippies.) If you pointed out to a Pete Campbell that he had just been intolerably presumptuous with Hollis, he would be shocked. He’d have seen it like this: the elevator operator, naturally shy and retreating, would need a certain amount of convincing that Pete was actually interested in his opinions. Pete’s shutting off the elevator would be the convincing. What “Negro” wouldn’t be grateful for Pete’s prying questions? To be recognized as a person with personal opinions would be tantamount to wanting to share them. Actually, reality television is based on this premise today.
Not for the first time, I thanked the powers that be that my birthdate fell no earlier in time, and that I’m around to see the very different world that we live in today. Getting from there to here hasn’t been without its bumps, and, again not for the first time, I applaud Matthew Weiner and his crew for mapping some of those bumps so evocatively. How they’ve done it — in many cases, their parents weren’t even married when the Mad Men episodes were taking place — is one of the great creative mysteries.