I have been rewatching "Mad Men", and recently, I have been enthralled in a way I wasn't when I was 15. Yes, the drinking, smoking, and womanizing of the show don't shock me as much as they did when I was 15, but the show's complex depiction of changing identity and social issues in the advertising industry in the 1960s.
You can't talk about "Mad Men" without delving into its enigmatic protagonist: Don Draper. Don Draper is the creative director of Sterling Cooper who takes another man's identity after the Korean War, and then fakes his way through life masterfully. Tim Goodman of SFGate states perfectly that Don Draper is "a man who's been living a lie for a long time, [a man who's] built to be a loner." The handsome, hard-drinking and chain-smoking creative director is brilliant as an idea man, but has unmatched existential angst.
I am continually fascinated by Don Draper, even eight years after I first watched the show. It is only recently that I have re-watched the seasons and episodes I've been watching since I was a teenager and Don Draper is, perhaps, one of the most human characters I have encountered, with the exception of Nate Fisher from "Six Feet Under". He is an alcoholic and pursues pleasure. He cannot stay faithful. But he has his redeeming characteristics as well, such as the way he treats people he regards as his equals, and the way he loves his children. Although not as viscerally unlikable as Cersei Lannister of "Game of Thrones", Don has plenty of redeeming characteristics that go along with his many vices.
But who was the real-life Don Draper?
The real Don Draper could have constituted many men throughout history. The first of these was George Lois. George Lois was a cover designer for Esquire in the 1960s. According to Jane Maas, another acclaimed creative director, "George Lois was the bad boy of the 1960s." Maas shares an anecdote about how one time, a client didn't like an idea that George Lois was very passionate about, and Lois threatened to throw himself out of a 14th story window. This stunt made the client publish the idea.
A producer at "Mad Men" talked to Lois very late in the filming process, but he was offended that they hadn't heard about him. George Lois, like Don Draper, was drafted to fight in the Korean War. He later formed an advertising firm called Papert Koenig Lois, PKL, in 1960, a small firm that grew from nothing to nearly a $40 million company. Popular accounts that Lois obtained with PKL and his subsequent agency, Lois, Holland, Callaway, included Braniff International Airways, VH1, Jiffy Lube, Tommy Hilfiger, Xerox, USA Today, and multiple U.S. senators.
Lois himself did not have kind things to say about the depiction of ad men in "Mad Men". He said in a 2012 article in CNN that "Mad Men" ignored the "Creative Revolution that changed the world of communications forever." He lamented that the show just fulfilled stereotypes in the early 1960s and glamorized the chain-smoking, womanizing, and heavy drinking.
Lois claims that the counterculture actually found a home on Madison Avenue through the creative generation of copywriters and directors who were "mad men". These men "bridled under the old rules that consigned them to secondary roles" by technocrats and took their work into their own hands. When Lois started PKL with Papert and Koenig, two partners on the new company were copywriters. Lois, as an art director, had his name go on the masthead of the company.
"The instant success of our trailblazing firm inspired a handful of other creative groups to form agencies and join our passionate revolution," Lois said. "As we created advertising and imagery that caught people's eyes, penetrated their minds, warmed their hearts, and caused them to act -- raising the bar of mass communication throughout the world."
"Mad Men" was a TV drama and not a historical documentary, but I can't help but try to find real world connections. For the record, a lot of ad men could have been inspirations for Don Draper. Perusing the Internet has found all sorts of claims, but none as defiant and compelling as George Lois.
But Don Draper is a fictional character, and I believe he stands strongest as a fictional character. He may have started with real-life influences, but if "Mad Men" were a historical drama, the drama quickly overtook the historical. Don Draper is such a compelling character because the viewer sees so much of themselves in Don. The viewer sees their own mistakes and the shame in trying to hide their identity in Don.
"Mad Men" is much more than a depiction of the advertising industry in the 1960s, but rather a journey into American self-discovery and acceptance that became catalyzed from the changes to society in the 1960s. Throughout the series, we see all the characters grow, not into perfection, but into a place where their existential angst becomes channeled into acceptance. The lies finally stop, and each character, especially Don Draper, lets the skeletons come out of the closet.
The inspiration behind "Mad Men", truly, then, is not one man. It is not George Lois, but is instead a whole generation of people finding who they were in the 1960s, as the world changed beyond their wildest imaginations.
