'Mad Men' and Me: Growing Up in the Advertising Age

The shabby and creaky New Haven Railroad commuter cars are what I remember best from the "Mad Men" era. The Gillette blue-bladed men in their crisp white shirts with narrow Peter Gunn neckties silently hiding their hangovers behind copies of The New York Times and Herald Tribune on the morning pilgrimage into the city. The same men, their ties loosened and their moods elevated by paper cups filled with J & B and Cutty Sark from the bar car, talking loudly about advertising agencies (BBD0, Young & Rubicam) and sports (Mickey Mantle, Frank Gifford) as they headed home to the John Cheever suburbs.

These recollections are a composite from two summers in the mid-1960s when I played sophisticated commuter on my way to a job just a few blocks from Grand Central (cool) in the mail room of a global engineering firm (not so cool). I grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut, a small middle-class city on Long Island Sound that was neither a bastion of WASP privilege, like neighboring Darien, nor a stereotypical rollicking ad-man town, like nearby Westport. My impressionable years were on the cusp of the world defined by Madison Avenue -- close enough to glimpse the glow and feel the seductive attraction, yet just far enough away to wonder about the moral worth of devoting a lifetime to concocting clever ways to sell mouthwash.

As a freshman at the University of Michigan, I can still hear myself (and how I cringe at the memory) declaiming during late-night dorm room discussions: "Of course, I could go to Madison Avenue and make $90,000 a year. But it would be wrong." It was one thing if wittiness might lead to a seat at the Algonquin Roundtable (or, in the 1960s, a comedy career like Mike Nichols and Elaine May), but there seemed to be something tainted if the reward for being cleverly glib was a Bigelow on the floor and a title on the door that read, "Creative Director." The parallel to the Madison Avenue of my youth, or so I imagined it at the time, was Hollywood during the 1930s -- the place where once-great novelists went (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis) to squander their talents on boozy hack work.

Much of the enduring genius of "Mad Men" lies in how well it captures the ethical ambiguity of the golden age of advertising. (Bulletin for those who have until now been buried under an avalanche in the Himalayas with a broken satellite phone: The show's fourth season premieres Sunday night). In an emblematic scene during one of the initial episodes, Don Draper saves the Lucky Strike account with a Hail Mary inspiration during a client pitch meeting by improvising on the spot a new ad slogan ("It's Toasted"). The inherent deception is conveyed by a puzzled Lucky Strike executive: "But everyone else's tobacco is toasted."

My own teenaged skepticism about advertising was largely fostered by Mad magazine, the madcap antidote to the world of "Mad Men" and one of the few early 1960s cultural touchstones not to get a cameo on the show. Mad magazine reveled in demolishing the hucksterism of real-life Don Drapers with lights-out precision. In a memorable sequence, Mad magazine imagined how famous ad slogans might look on neon signs if some of the bulbs had flicked out. "You Can Be Sure If It's Westinghouse" was transformed into -- with the removal of just three letters -- "You Can Sue If It's Westinghouse."

Beyond the obvious sexually charged blandishments of the Don Draper lifestyle, why does the world of "Mad Men" so beguilingly shimmer nearly half a century later?

My own theory is that it is because -- adultery, alcoholism and avarice aside -- Madison Avenue in the 1960s was so innocent compared to today. Sure, Sterling Cooper (the fictional ad agency that has now morphed into Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce) had no moral qualms about representing cigarette companies, Richard Nixon and the developers who demolished the Beaux Arts treasure that was Pennsylvania Station. Sure, the pre-feminist depiction of women in the workplace brings to mind the song, "A Secretary Is Not a Toy" from the 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."

But compare the men of Sterling Cooper (plus the pioneering Peggy Olson) to such 21^st century creative figures as reality show producers, the proprietors of paparazzi-style websites, public relations apologists for BP and, yes, even the advertising executives who put together "Tell your doctor" drug commercials. The supposed hard-drinking cynicism of "Mad Men" seems almost quaint against the backdrop of our trashy obsession with minor celebrities and the cultural belief that nothing succeeds like excess.

An infectious pride in the quality of work and the advertising game itself is at the heart of "Mad Men." Connoisseurs of the series may recall Roger Sterling's wonderfully deadpan reaction when he is told that a drunk secretary riding an out-of-control lawn tractor has badly injured someone in the Sterling Cooper offices: "Somewhere in this business, this has happened before."

Without blinding myself to the (warning: laundry list of "isms" ahead) sexism, racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia of the advertising world of the 1960s, "Mad Men" also inspires in me an inescapable longing to go back to a Manhattan defined by style, self-confidence, optimism and fun. Of course, as depicted on television, it is a gossamer fantasy. But how much I would give to ride that commuter train into New York once more, dressed in my summer-weight Palm Beach suit, enviously watching the tribal rituals of those long-ago ad men.