• At the close of season two, we see Don greeting the Pacific Ocean with his arms outstretched. Wading in Southern California's baptismal waters, it seemed as though Don had found himself. But unlike prior visits, where Don has slinked out of the life he'd constructed on Madison Avenue, this time Don carried visible markings of his inability to conduct his life back home. There's Don on a California poolside patio, one of the most informal settings in the world... wearing a hat and a tweed jacket. By 1965, this outfit was severely old-fashioned and out-of-date. But it's not really a fashion faux-pas. It's Don's crisis: he's so hermetically ensconced in his own emotional life and its decadent dramas that he seems to have lost that once-sure grip on the world around him.

• Oh, Betty! We leave her sprawled out on Sally's stripped bed after getting (at last) reprimanded by her husband for acting out ("There are no fresh starts!"). One of the problems posed by the increased spending power of middle class families in the post war era is that they could now access the services once reserved for the aristocracy-namely, servants! Is Carla a nanny or a cleaning lady? A babysitter? Betty once said she didn't allow Carla to take the kids to the playground but does allow her to take young Sally to her shrink's office. Before the economic boom, nannies and maids were worlds apart. The sole responsibilities of nannies was the care of the children-like Marry Poppins! Some were formally trained to be maternal surrogates, while maids kept the house in order. The two were separate and there was a whole Victorian caste system and social mores about dress, expectations and wages to keep the whole thing in place.

In Maud Shaw's memoir about serving about serving as a nanny to Caroline and John Kennedy Jr., White House Nanny, she wrote, "The seven and a half years I was with her, [Jackie Kennedy] never as much asked me to pick up a pin for her. Even in the White House, she never once asked me to do anything that was not strictly within my province."

While Betty is from money and had a close relationship with her own nanny, she hasn't in her married life had the means to have a full-time live-in staff member. What you see transpire between Betty and Carla, with full-time, non-live-in domestic workers occupying the space between homemakers and housekeepers,creates the terrible and volatile dynamic that plays itself out in millions of homes today.

• In this season's penultimate episode, Don sat across from Midge and asked her, in earnest, why she didn't ‘just quit' heroin. Her response later inspired Don to write his full-page-Times-ad tobacco letter. But we know something that Don may not have the wherewithal to recognize. He's an addict too. When Don doesn't have booze, and even sometimes when he does, he medicates with women.

In 1965, Life magazine did multi-page photo spread on two New York heroin junkies named John and Karen. Accompanying the shoot was James Mills' famous account of life in Needle Park (it would later become The Panic in Needle Park, staring Al Pacino).

Mills wrote:

Almost all addicts are childishly immature; full of demands, empty of offerings. When they want something, they it want it yesterday, and they want it effortlessly. Nothing is their fault-the addiction, their degradation, their desperation.... Psychiatrists who have studied them over long periods know that most of them are extremely narcissistic, that their intense preoccupation with heroin is a surface manifestation of a more profound emotional preoccupation with themselves.

In his village apartment, Don's fiancée sleeps in the crook of his arm. Outside, New York City is beginning to slip into one of its darkest periods. But not to worry. There's a lovely haunted house in Ossining that just went on the market.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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• The philosophical underpinnings of modern drama stem from the myth of Sisyphus. This is what Albert Camus described as the conflict between what we want from the universe (such as meaning, order, explanation) and what the universe gives us (a big rock that never makes it uphill). The great art produced in the latter half of the 20th century and this last decade embodies this existential stance.

• The exact moment of no spiritual return would have to be the use of the atomic bomb. In 1957, Norman Mailer diagnosed the unfathomable havoc the atomic bomb wreaked on the human psyche:

For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization-that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect-in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.

The bleak realities of World War II, the camps, the annihilation of millions, according to Mailer, "presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it." The traditional values and expectations-the guilty are punished, the virtuous are rewarded, the authority of the church and state stand as legitimate-could no longer hold the same guarantee.

• A secular world is a lonely world. Isolation, the absence of wholeness; the longing for some structural integrity to the psyche permeates modern drama. Nietzsche said that once we reject the Christian myth, chaos ensues inside of us: "Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up and down left? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing."

Science then validated our sense of isolation and insecurity with two words: kinetic theory. The discovery that solid objects were comprised of negative and positive electrons bouncing off one another in a constant state of gyration destroys the assumption that we can trust what we see or touch in front of us, let alone what we feel in our own bloody hearts. This insecurity translates itself, in narrative, into an identity crisis for our heroes, the very essence of himself questioned and unknowable.

• How did you feel when Don wolfishly smirked at his next possible sexual conquest? If you're like me, it was a twinge of disgust, then a rallying sense that "we got our boy back." While the afternoon of spooning post anxiety attack seemed delightful, it's Don's delinquency that enthralls us. Characters with mass appeal win their audiences not by demonstration of their heroic dimensions but through their display of weaknesses and ambiguities. When we get glimpses of nihilistic, fuck-all instinct in our hero, it's difficult not to feel twitches of worship. Pauline Kael, in an essay on appeal Dean and Brando called this certain kind of charisma "the glamour of delinquency":

One thing seems evident: when the delinquent becomes the hero in our films, it is because the image of instinctive rebellion expresses something in many people that they don't dare express...these kids seem to be the only ones irresponsible enough to act out, not the whole system of authority, morality, and prosperity.

If we know that attempts at individual decency go unrewarded, then it's up to the delinquent hero to test our limits of how much self-indulgence we can stomach. Kael points out that we're uneasy about the rebel's moral indifference. "When he attacks the weak or destroys promiscuously" then we realize what are necessary values. Otherwise it's all just too grim and disturbing. So we formulate our own ethical schema through their folly, always a bit on edge that we'll unwittingly beg our hero to go too far. Anyhow, that's why last night's episode was so damn good.

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• Let's spend time in Sally's pre-teen world. It was likely that she would have subscribed to or at least thumbed through the teen magazines-an enduring badge of maturity for the aspiring adolescent. The most widely read teen glossy of the era: Seventeen. Also popular were Mademoiselle and Charm. While Mademoiselle modeled itself as a miniature Vogue-a self-serious catalogue of fashion, décor, and girl glamour-Seventeen followed in the tradition of Woman's Home Companion: home-spun advice on manners, recipes and thrifty clothes-shopping (not "fashion"). Fashion trends were acknowledged: for example, the cover girls, always with energetic smiles instead of a smoldering stare or pout, would be in step with the times (cropped clam-shell coifs were replaced with flips and bouffants), but the emphasis of the magazine was on wholesome living. In the essay "Up the Ladder: From Charm to Vogue," a history of women's magazines, Mary McCarthy described Seventeen this way:

Thoughtfulness is the motto. The difficulty between being both good and popular, and the tension between the two aims (the great crux of adolescence), are the staple matter of the fiction; every boy hero or girl heroine has a bitter pill to swallow in the ending... Poorly gotten out and cheaply written, it has, nevertheless an authentic small town air....

Another major motif of Seventeen is groupy-ness. "Get your gang together!" Each issue had a litany of projects that required every one's cooperation: games to play, after school theme parties, management of a high school prom-and even "how to stop a family quarrel."

• As far music goes, we can only imagine the sophistication Sally's musical palette. But if she's like most tweens of that era (with little cash to burn on obscure musical acts) then her tastes would be guided by what was popular and accessible. The Beatles were at their squeakiest in 1965 with "I Want To Hold Your Hand." In 1965, there was huge glut of girl groups, thanks in part to the success of the Supremes, who by that summer were having their fifth number-one hit. The major themes of the girl groups were ready-made for teenagers: puppy love, anxiety over chastity, loneliness, hopes of marriage, talk of boyfriends. The groups ranged from the soulful New-Jersey-founded Shirelles, who had sex laced throughout their lyrics, to the more proper lyrics of the Bronx-born Chiffons. Compare the lyrics of the Chiffons' Carole-King-penned "One Fine Day"....

One fine day
You'll look at me
And you will know
Our love was meant to be
One fine day
You're gonna want me for your girl

The arms I long for
Will open wide
And you'll be proud
To have me by your side
One fine day
You're gonna want me for your girl....

To the Shirelles, on the opposite tip, from 1963:

Foolish little girl, fickle little girl
You didn't want him when he wanted you
He's found another love, it's her he's dreaming of
And there's not a single thing that you can do

"Forget him cause he don't belong to you"
"It's too late he's found somebody new"
"There's not a single thing that you can do"

But both groups were on their way out with the tide-even though Motown was just five years old. Jefferson Airplane was forming. Phil Spector was about to retire (for the first time). The Rolling Stones were on the top of the charts.

• Speaking of boyfriends, we already met the man who brought Sally to slip her hands under her nightgown: David McCallum, our man from UNCLE. Another male who could have seized her heart (and hands) was Luke Halpin, the often-shirtless, tawny star of "Flipper," both the films and the TV series that began in 1964. Halprin was the Zac Efron of the afternoon airwaves.

But Sally has already displayed a taste for more mature objects of erotic fantasy. For Sally's gaze, then, Warren Beatty.

He had become one of Hollywood's most formidable sexual personae (cough) by 1965. He was still boyish, still too young to be considered anything but beautiful. He was fresh off his turn as a gigolo in 1961's "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" (co-starring Lotte Lenya!), in which his sex appeal could not be undone by his horrible Italian accent. Though Beatty oozed sex more freely than Brando or Dean, he was withholding, mischievous, cerebral, a bit troubled on screen. Critic David Thomson wrote of Beatty, in 2004: "Beatty was not open or generous. He seemed reluctant to yield himself up... Despite valiant efforts, Beatty the actor never persuaded me that he knew how to lose control... Control is his thing and maybe his curse."

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Things turn dark when he encounters the drained pool in the backyard of an emptied home of his neighbors. Ned can't remember where they had gone and feels a creeping despair: "Was his memory failing," Ned wonders as he plods barefoot through the overgrown lawn, "or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth?" The more Ned swims, the more comes to light through the comments of his neighbors, some welcoming, others offering pitying condolences for all Ned's troubles at home. Here emerges a constant Cheever theme and one of the great paradoxes of greater New York: where the separation between city apartment buildings can be as narrow as a pencil, there is great anonymity, whereas in the seclusion of the suburbs, behind fences, we can find ourselves the most exposed.

It's in suburbia where Don faces his most punishing humiliations, like the remnants of his former life packed into musty boxes, piled on the sidewalk as his ex-wife's new husband plows the front yard, without a glance or a word as Don loads up his car to return to the city, further asserting the quiet cruelty of Ossining.

Here is the best passage from "The Swimmer" with some nice parallels:

The next pool on his list, the last but two, belonged to his old mistress, Shirley Adams. If he had suffered any injuries at the Biswangers' they would be cured here. Love-sexual roughhouse in fact-was the supreme elixir, the pain killer, the brightly colored pill that would put the spring back into his step, the joy of life in his heart. They had had an affair last week, last month, last year. He couldn't remember, It was he who had broken it off, his was the upper hand, and he stepped through the gate of the wall that surrounded her pool with nothing so considered as self-confidence. It seemed in a way to be his pool, as the lover, particularly the illicit lover, enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an authority unknown to holy matrimony. She was there, her hair the color of brass, but her figure, at the edge of the lighted, cerulean water, excited in him no profound memories. It had been, he thought, a lighthearted affair, although she had wept when he broke it off. She seemed confused to see him and he wondered if she was still wounded. Would she, God forbid, weep again?

I won't spoil the end for you, but like Don about swimming, "you get wrung out."

"That sad bastard," is how Francine's husband, the philanderer, describes Don Draper. The same could be said about Cheever and he would be the first one to tell you that. Like Don, he kept a journal. A collection of his journal entries were eventually published, to much chatter, given that the journals were remarkably dishy (turns out Cheever was a bisexual who thought his daughters chubby and his son a sissy) and soaked in pathos. Cheever was in constant despair about the doubleness of his life; the competing desires for comfort and tradition couple with an impulse to assail the conventions of wealth and family life.

Here's a passage where he describes his weary frustrations in his latter years while on vacation:

The redness of the marshes makes the blueness of the water seem to be a thrusting force, and the splendor of the landscape is emphatic; but I am an old, old man — and it was so different in my youth — who finds that the bounty and splendor of the world fail to cleanse the thoughts of his heart. My heart is in some motel room, howling at a consummate lewdness.

All this belongs to time that has already passed by Don Draper and his cohorts, though these are concerns of and preoccupations of the Great White Male in literature. David Foster Wallace argued that Cheever, like John Updike, Phillip Roth, Norman Mailer, and Frederick Exley were a league of extraordinary narcissists, whose erudite, philandering, self-pitying protagonists, Wallace claims, were actually stand-ins for the authors. Never attached to any cause, lover, or clan, the individualism of Cheever's characters, like Ned, may have at one time seemed heroic but are despicable today. They don't face the great horror: "the prospect of dying without ever having loved something more than yourself."

Cheever wrote about the stultification of affluence and comfort, his ambition to be recognized as a scribe of his generation and also of humiliating himself at garden parties because he was drunk, cheating on his wife, and disappointing his children. Until he died, John Cheever considered himself lonely.

Previously: Footnotes of Mad Men: The Promethean Woman, or, Our Dog in the Parthenon

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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• Simone de Beauvoir wrote that "one is not born a woman; one becomes a woman." Even postmodern feminism and materialist feminism in some ways express the same: that there is no essentialness to womanhood, merely constructions-in the eyes of the postmodernists, totally linguistic constructions. But the act of childbirth and abortion are unique to women and there's much violence associated with both. Blood, suction, tearing, screaming, stitches; all civilization falls away when you enter and exit the birth canal. In both situations, birth or abortion, a woman is at the mercy of nature. Not only is her body surging with chemicals that tell her to bond with the creature metastasizing inside of her-even when the creature is beyond her body-but biology creates a ricochet. The female circuitry is shorted; enormous emotional triggers are switched. A darkness can fall that seems impenetrable. Woman swells, transforms and experiences carnage, she cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding blood. She does this alone and the knowledge derived from this confrontation will always set her apart.

• The Promethean narrative in Western Civilization is an inherently male one. There are exceptions, when women strike out and create their own lasting fires, usually in the arts, sometimes in science or industry. But in general, the protagonist is a man. (Perhaps because he is unencumbered by nature's strong arm?) The diversion-or destiny-of woman's will to power in the domestic sphere has been one of our great dilemmas, especially when that ambition for achievement and desire for hierarchical dominance pushes in her into the race with men. Domestic affairs, then, inspire the anxiety of creative annihilation. Especially for women-because not only are you fighting with men all day for glory, recognition and resources, but then having to face the threat that your life and heart could be ensnared in a domestic drama by a man? Ghastly. This is why a woman with the Promethean ambition kindles and protects her spark with the sacrifice of domestic harmony (and at great peril). Any man who does not share her Promethean spark should be regarded as a distraction (sometimes, of course, a welcomed one.).

• For the Promethean woman, most men are a race of confederates, with the frequent exception of two: one's dad and one's boss. The latter assumes the role of the former when she becomes an adult. But a boyfriend offers a predestined biological path. The ultimate consummation of that relationship will end with her becoming nature's conscript: a mother, a wife, the vessel for a lineage. Whereas, what she could achieve with an admired professional patriarch is glory, power, even empire.

Sometimes these desires misfire (Freud's "erotic transference"); a woman's desire for approval gets scrambled and mistaken for a desire to conquer. A mistaken lady may endeavor to exploit or control the power dynamic and the intensity of her admiration by bringing her boss down to the level where men most often see her: as sexual object. This undermines his authority and gives her the advantages of other women. With the right amount of backbone, a male boss could resist the storm of her advances in exchange for achievement of their shared goals. If he's smart, he could tell the difference between admiration and attraction, even when she doesn't. Acting on these emotions is behavior reserved for equally predatory and pathetic men. But a real boss is equipped to meet the psychological needs of a real, unconfused Promethean woman. He serves as a father-figure, existing as one of the few men in the world who make no biological demands of her. At best, like a father, he is there to reward her best behavior with attention, praise and advancement.

This is why the approval of your boss outweighs that of your boyfriend.

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• The Vicks Chemical Company for which Peggy and the beastly art director strip down to brainstorm plays a significant role in the liturgy of advertising. Vicks is where Draper Daniels got his start in the industry. The Chemical Company offered aspiring ad men a crack at copywriting in their New York offices if they spent a year in the field pitching Vicks' products door to door. "A salesman," Daniels wrote in his autobiography, Giants, Pygmies and other Advertising People, "traveling, or otherwise, was the last thing in the world I wanted to be, but the ‘plus expenses and a car [offer]' shattered any sales resistance." After a year of canvassing the South in the name of cough syrup and vapor rub, Daniels landed in the New York headquarters and was eventually hired by Young and Rubicam, the premier ad agency of the 1940s. Per Daniels: ‘Young and Rubicam was heaven, or the next door to it, and God's name was Rubicam."

• Cold medicine also served as a histamine-free muse for one of the other advertising greats: Julian Koenig.

Koenig, a copywriter, and George Lois, art director, were the first ad and copy team to break off and start their own boutique company (Papert, Koenig, Lois) after their success with the Volkswagen campaign (Think Small and Lemon) at Doyle Dane Bernbach. The upstart ad agency garnered a good deal of esteem in 1964 when their commercial for Xerox nabbed a Clio for this quite dry but very effective ad.

• The April 1965 copy of Playboy that the Stan was thumbing through featured the following pieces:

–An interview: Art Buchwald

–Excerpt from ‘Man With The Golden Gun' by Ian Fleming

–"The Force of Habit" by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty.

Getty had this to say:

The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might of the force of habit and must understand that practices are what create habits. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.

• So what of the ‘Klan-ad' cameo in the new art director's resume?

This was part of the historic Lyndon Johnson presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater from 1964. President Johnson hired DDB to produce the spots. The Klan commercial never ran, largely because the first spot in the series caused such a furious reaction from the GOP and television viewers. This was the Daisy spot.

(Better resolution here.)

It only ran once but that was enough (50 million people were watching). News programs ran the ad, newspapers covered the reactions: anyone who hadn't seen the ad was sure to have been told about it. The GOP chairman, Dean Burch, filed a formal complaint to the Fair Election Practices committee: "This horror-type commercial is designed to arouse basic emotions and has no place in this campaign."

Well, Burch was right. "The commercial evoked a deep feeling in many people that Goldwater might actually use nuclear weapons," said Tony Schwartz, the ad-man responsible for Daisy and the never aired Klan spot. Schwartz, whose major client before the White House was American Airlines, also said: "the stimuli of the film and sound evoked these feelings and allowed people to express what they inherently believed."

There is, however, no Clio award to be had in the category of political advertising.

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● Jacques Lacan, at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress on August 3, 1936, first presented on the "mirror stage."

While the idea of this enlightenment supposedly occurs before the age of 18 months, well, we're not always all grown up, or not narcissists, are we?

"Mad Men" is built around moments of seeing oneself in other people, with understanding or with misidentification, resulting in horror. Picture Peggy blowing up at Don's poor discarded sex-toy secretary, who views Peggy as a former Don cast-off. Peggy is revolted, somewhat unfairly-although, yes, this act of assumption strips Peggy of all her hard-won authority and competence. Not everyone sleeps with the boss, sister! Particularly when sleeping with the boss, contra Helen Gurley Brown, seems like the fast ticket to lack of success, not your own office.

● While Don isn't wrong entirely to berate our lady of the focus group (though he is doing it for the wrong reasons, his wounded male hubris), he's wrong about their efficacy and use for good.

February 4, 2003:

Robert K. Merton, one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, whose coinage of terms like ''self-fulfilling prophecy'' and ''role models'' filtered from his academic pursuits into everyday language, died yesterday..... His studies on an integrated community helped shape Kenneth Clark's historic brief in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that led to the desegregation of public schools.

And:

One early example of such illuminating insight appeared in a paper called ''Social Structure and Anomie'' that he wrote as a graduate student at Harvard in 1936 and then kept revising over the next decade.

Mr. Merton had asked himself what it was that brought about anomie, a state in which, according to Mr. Durkheim, the breakdown of social standards threatened social cohesion. In a breakthrough that spawned many lines of inquiry, Mr. Merton suggested that anomie was likely to arise when society's members were denied adequate means of achieving the very cultural goals that their society projected, like wealth, power, fame or enlightenment.

● Malcolm X was shot on February 21, 1965, placing "Mad Men" now at the end of that month. In May of 1963, Playboy published an interview with Malcolm X, conducted by Alex Haley.

PLAYBOY: What is the ambition of the Black Muslims?

MALCOLM X: Freedom, justice and equality are our principal ambitions. And to faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves, and of our own people. He cleans us up−−morally, mentally and spiritually−−and he reforms us of the vices that have blinded us here in the Western society. He stops black men from getting drunk, stops their dope addiction if they had it, stops nicotine, gambling, stealing, lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, prostitution, juvenile delinquency. I think of this whenever somebody talks about someone investigating us. Why investigate the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? They should subsidize him. He's cleaning up the mess that white men have made. He's saving the Government millions of dollars, taking black men off of welfare, showing them how to do something for themselves. And Mr. Muhammad teaches us love for our own kind. The white man has taught the black people in this country to hate themselves as inferior, to hate each other, to be divided against each other. Messenger Muhammad restores our love for our own kind, which enables us to work together in unity and harmony. He shows us how to pool our financial resources and our talents, then to work together toward a common objective. Among other things, we have small businesses in most major cities in this country, and we want to create many more. We are taught by Mr. Muhammad that it is very important to improve the black man's economy, and his thrift. But to do this, we must have land of our own. The brainwashed black man can never learn to stand on his own two feet until he is on his own. We must learn to become our own producers, manufacturers and traders; we must have industry of our own, to employ our own. The white man resists this because he wants to keep the black man under his thumb and jurisdiction in white society. He wants to keep the black man always dependent and begging−−for jobs, food, clothes, shelter, education. The white man doesn't want to lose somebody to be supreme over. He wants to keep the black man where he can be watched and retarded. Mr. Muhammad teaches that as soon as we separate from the white man, we will learn that we can do without the white man just as he can do without us. The white man knows that once black men get off to themselves and learn they can do for themselves, the black man's full potential will explode and he will surpass the white man.

Mosque Number 7 is still open on 127th Street, which is nowhere near "Ground Zero."

Look how far we haven't come!

● Dan Graham, then 22, co-founded the John Daniels Gallery in New York City, on East 64th Street, in 1964, where they showed Donald Judd and Robert Smithson. Smithson had begun working with mirrors then, exhibiting "Untitled, Mirror Surfaces" in 1965, and then, a few years later, the first "corner pieces."

In the 70s, Graham himself would begin making pieces like "Alteration to a Suburban House": "It proposes replacing the siding of a single-story 'ranch' style home with glass; a mirror would bisect the house lengthwise." And mirrored and semi-mirrored rooms, like 1976's "Public Space/Two Audiences." From Parkett, 2003 [PDF]:

A game of prestige, it took advantage of man's very ingenuous perception of space to double the reference coordinates of a place, using a "simple" mirror-wall and another in transparent glass that intersected a rectangular room. It was like looking through a bottomless mirror, with one's ego reflected in it; but it was also pervaded by a transparency. Meanwhile other wandering presences could be discerned, though it was impossible to ascertain their exact whereabouts. This work inaugurated a new approach by Graham to time delay: a dizzy perception postponed, an opportunity to observe a stranger, albeit only for an instant, before recognizing the stranger as oneself.

And still later, he'd turn to the two-way mirror, just as our callow, lady-baiting shrink focus-grouper on "Mad Men" does. "Two-way mirror used in office buildings is always totally reflective on the exterior, reflecting the sunlight and transparent for workers inside. Surveillance power is given to the corporate tower," wrote Graham.

Over the years to come, Sterling Cooper Draper Prices of the world would move from their glass-walled entryways and sunny towers and shared elevators-all the better to meet the fun local lesbians in-to more forbidding and mirrored corporate towers, as corporate power began to be expressed by outward-looking, all-concealing, security-conscious hide-outs. All the better to see you with, my dears.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is on vacation this week.

Still, you can always find more footnotes right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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• The dogma of parental authority was being slowly dismantled through the early 60s and was eventually bulldozed, thanks in part to the protest movement coming from Don's Long Beach Lolita's college. Throughout much of 1963, Berkeley students were actively involved in mass protests against banks, grocers and city government for racial discrimination taking place in nearby Oakland-a suburb that played host to a tiny affluent population and a large, mostly black population mired in grinding poverty. After enough business owners and politicians complained to the school's administration for their unruly and cantankerous student body, the Berkeley dean took action: student political groups were banned from using the school's plaza to solicit support for "off campus political and social action." This sparked giant and immediate demonstrations on the plaza, in front of the administration's building and eventually inside of the dean's office. In the melee, a charismatic young man with wild hair and a riveting manner became the de facto leader of the protests when he gave this impromptu speech in late 1964, before leading students into halls of the dean's office for a sit-in.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

• Joan has had abortions or, as she refers to them "procedures," but now Joanie would like the option to have a baby. Though her doctor has proven himself to be a condescending finger-wagger when it comes to ladies and family planning (remember in season one, when he warned Peggy not to become the "town pump" if he gave her the pill?), he was willing to put not just his medical license on the line but possibly his own freedom, as he once performed an abortion for Joan. Aborting pregnancies in 1964 in New York, depending on the length of pregnancy, could mean jail time for physicians.

If Joan were to find herself with an unwanted pregnancy-as a married lady-she could have put in application to the Mount Sinai abortion panel in New York. She would have needed the recommendation of a psychiatrist that her life would be in danger if she were to become pregnant-due to threats of suicide or a promise utter mental collapse. Then two consultants would have to be consulted and one would have to testify before the abortion panel. 1 out of 4 abortions approved by the panel in 1958 were given to married women. It wasn't until 1965 that abortion reform would begin to loosen state laws around performing legal abortions for rape and incest victims.

• Lane Pryce with his lower-upper class accent and prim disposition! He makes me want to salute the Union Jack every time he comes on screen. (Or, apparently, off-screen.) He was finally on camera long enough to get a look at that distinctly continental apparel. The English suit that Pryce dons is heavy even for winter, nothing like the less-elaborate suits of Wall Street in the 60s, or the slanted pocket Italian suit with the barely-there-lapels. Pryce's suit is purebred English: with vest, tie with a full Windsor knot, in muted browns, grays, and blues-if you want to get cheeky you could go cream-a white pocket square (no patterns), with the shirt quite starchy with hard collar. (He's an interesting contrast as Don's ties are getting ever-thinner.) And on the jacket, beautiful buttonholes. As Oscar Wilde wrote, "A really well made buttonhole is the only link between art and nature." An Englishman's business style rested upon the idea that through conformity to tradition there is dignity.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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• There's a coldness to the new digs, no? The modern design of Roger's office serves as headquarters' frozen center. The layout is far from cozy-it's antiseptic, and frightfully full of symmetrical things. Roger chalks up the Stockholm style to Joan who, as we've learned, is a gal that prides herself on staying in touch. The Scandinavian influence was the big design fad at the time and has remained the iconic interior decor of the period (this sort of pop Scandinavian modern has also been adopted as a lingua franca of decor among young Americans today due in part to it's unobtrusiveness and, on a different level, to a company called Ikea.) Tranquility through minimalism; uninterrupted lines, efficient instead of ornate design, neutral colors thought to soothe the eye and spirit: the critique of this sort of modernism is that it goes too far in soothing and actually numbs those who are exposed to it. It can become a visual novocaine that makes the visitor sedated but not relaxed.

• Freddy's back (with the serenity to accept the things he cannot change and the courage to change the things he can). He's a member of a fraternity that has only one rule for admission: a desire to stop drinking. It seems Freddy is somebody's sponsor now, seeing as how he made a not-really discreet phonecall to his buddy at Pond's, who had just spent an afternoon with a truly boozy Roger. We're assuming Freddy took Roger's advice from season two and checked himself into Hazelden. Hazelden was founded on a 217-acre farm outside of Minneapolis by a few members of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1949-it was intended for the rehabilitation of priests. But things changed fast; the American Medical Association categorized alcoholism as a disease in 1956, and Hazelden grew from 26 to 157 beds in the mid-60s. By the time Freddy would have gotten there, in 1963, their main facility was also just beginning to convert to coed. Turns out women sometimes had trouble with alcohol and drugs too... although at this time Betty Ford, who would become one of the first famous and public female faces of addiction, was just beginning to be prescribed the painkillers to which she would become addicted.

• Musical break! Here's some advice to Don, via one of the founding texts for the ethos and aesthetics for "Mad Men": How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (featuring a bushy tailed Robert Morse).

A secretary is not to be


A secretary is not a toy. 


This play was produced in 1961. It snagged Tony Awards for Best Musical and Best Book, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Drama Critics Circle Award before the movie version came out in 1967.

• Lee, the devious and rather evil and at-least bisexual Lucky Strike heir, got his Christmas wish: a pretty new Polaroid camera. Polaroid became a hot consumer item in the mid-sixties largely thanks to its advertising campaign by Doyle Dane and Bernbach. The ads were cheap looking and marketed the bulky camera with text heavy spreads that explained the new technology of "instant photographs."

The team at DDB decided to focus on the pictures instead of the process. They hired photographer Howard Zieff to shoot a series of homespun pictures that gave the feel of a candid shot of typical but familiar snapshots of American family life: barefoot kids catching toads, Sunday dinners in messy kitchens, daughters giving living room dance recitals. To best communicate the simplicity of the product, the copywriters used only sentence: "It's like opening a present."

Polaroid's TV campaign perfected the pitch. They captured moving and sentimental moments-an accomplishment in sixty seconds of commercial time about a chunk of plastic.

Polaroid sold millions of cameras for the first time in 1961.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Decency is being traded in for freedom, divorce, bikinis and soulless PR campaigns used to drum up consumer excitement over something as mundane as congealed canned ham-remember the gals are paid to fight, then they actually do fight, but every one buys more ham. The good news is that with the burgeoning state of kooky consumerism, we have more access to the market and other store-bought (or by-the-hour) indulgences, so it becomes easier to simulate pleasure. The things we buy, the story we tell ourselves and others, is more in our control as the caste system dissolves in a deluge of consumer goods.

Our stories even become commodities. Or to put it more politely, as hero Bert Cooper said, we are "turning creative success into business."

• Selling your self-mythology is a craft. All the ad-men of the golden era (Ogilvy, Lois, Burnett, Daniels) wrote autobiographies. Not only are they all quippy and dishy (they are, after all, creative folks) but the self-made machismo makes them disarmingly charming. You root for each one of these businessmen as if they were saving a village of orphans when really they are selling cigarettes and canned corn. They are always the visionary, always the underdog, always the one with the balls to grab the advertising world by, well, the balls! Here's my favorite, as told by Draper Daniels about Leo Burnett:

By now everyone in advertising must have heard the story of the friends who sneered and told Leo [when he gave the news he was starting his own company] he'd be selling on apples on the street corner in six months. Undaunted, Burnett replied, ‘the hell I will. I'll give them away.' If you haven't heard it before, you have now, and you know why there's a bowl of apples in every Burnett reception room.

Who knows if this story is even true? To date, the firm has spent zillions of dollars to have fresh apples in each of their offices.

• Stan Freberg, another ad man/personality (question: where is our favorite rebel with Wellesian scowl and beard, Paul Kinsey?) popped up on the show. The "John! Marshaaaa?" bit that Peggy and her new dreamy art boy keep doing is from a soap opera satire that Freberg released on a comedy album-first as a single, later in compilation.

Freberg also popularized the "abnormal" and "absurd" radio commercial. Ad Age named Freberg one of top 100 most influential men of all time. You can trace the Bud Lite Real Men of Genius commercials and the Old Spice commercials to this one quirky Jew and his microphone! (Update: Or so you might think! "Freberg" is Swedish, and his father was a minister.)

• Don's Glo-Coat commercial comes from a real life campaign.

You can see the difference in tone between the pre-revolutionary style of the light-hearted, virtue-heavy spot that aired in the late 1950s, featuring housewives and families gliding across a slick floor to the homespun, narrative simulated by Loretta Lynn. This comes from the notion that a compelling story behind the product will make people will want in, even if it's utterly phony.

The thinking goes, if you put a sign up that says FREE KITTENS, maybe a person or two will pick up a pussycat. Put up a sign that says FREE AMISH KITTENS and they'll all have homes before sunset.

• Bikinis: score one for freedom over decency! Here's an example of the chaste image the family men of Jantzen were looking for from 1964. Here's Sears for Jantzen.

Don's implied topless ad-which featured photography instead of illustration (miss you, big gay Sal)-could have come from a fashion world scandal that rocked 1964: THE TOPLESS BIKINI.

On the runways of Paris, designer (and Mattachine Society co-founder!) Rudi Gernreich and his model Peggy Moffitt debuted a bathing suit with a bikini bottom and straps that went up over your shoulders and that's all, folks! Breasts, fully exposed. "Once you get over the shock," a writer for Life magazine said of the suit in July, 1964, "which takes about ten minutes, the new suit begins to strike you as the most absurd garment since those two rascally weavers manufactured the emperor's new clothes." It's no good for swimming, or sunbathing because of "disastrous straps." The bare-breasted suit was only good for "connoisseurs of pop art, for aficionados of the absurd, and especially for a high fashioned laugh. (One funny thing about toplessness is that it doesn't really have to do with breasts. Breasts of course are not absurd; topless swimsuits are. Lately people keep getting the two things mixed up.)"

The difference between the image and the authentic are going to remain mixed up for a very long time. Though we all know now that the real difference between a bikini and underwear is just what we call it.

Previously: The Footnotes of 'Mad Men'

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is the author of Mad Men Unbuttoned. You can always find more footnotes here.

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