TV Quote of the Day (‘Mad Men,’ on Inferior Ad Submissions)

[Two ad firm partners are discussing the portfolio of a spouse’s cousin.]

Don Draper [played by Jon Hamm]: “His book.” [Chuckles] “It was filled with old ads.”

Roger Sterling [played by John Slattery]: [Chuckles] “Plagiarism. That's resourceful.”

Don: “He had five originals. There were all the same thing.”

Roger: “I told him to be himself. That was pretty mean, I guess.”—Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 6, “Waldorf Stories,” original air date Aug 29, 2010, teleplay by Brett Johnson and Matthew Weiner, directed by Scott Hornbacher

TV Quote of the Day (‘Mad Men,’ on What a Top Client Can Expect for Christmas)

Roger Sterling [played by John Slattery]: “If Lee Garner Jr. wants three wise men flown in from Jerusalem, he gets it.”—Mad Men, Season 4, Episode 2, “Christmas Comes But Once a Year,” original air date Aug 1, 2010, teleplay by Tracy McMillan, Matthew Weiner, Brett Johnson, and Erin Levy, directed by Michael Uppendahl

Appreciations: John Cheever’s Tale of Midsummer Dissolution, ‘The Swimmer’

“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. ‘I drank too much,’ said Donald Westerhazy. ‘We all drank too much,’ said Lucinda Merrill. ‘It must have been the wine,’ said Helen Westerhazy. ‘I drank too much of that claret.’” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Swimmer,” originally printed in The New Yorker, July 18, 1964, reprinted in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

In the middle of yet another ungodly heat wave, there’s nothing like a nice, cool swim.

Well, even a good idea can be carried a little too far sometimes. Just how far—and how wrong—that kind of idea can be was conjured up by one of the great chroniclers of postwar suburbia.

A full immersion in the waters of John Cheever is enough to get you drunk by osmosis, and one of his most anthologized short stories, “The Swimmer,” wastes no time doing so, in this first paragraph.

Even on Sunday, a day not just of liturgical but recreational grace, inebriation cuts across vast cross-sections of the New York suburb in which this tale is set. Not only is the phrase “drank too much” used four times in the quoted paragraph above, but “drank” is italicized in each case.

Even before the title character is introduced, the major cause of his ultimate degeneration has been identified, albeit as a characteristic shared with the friends and ex-friends increasingly nettled by his presence.

“Drunk” is not the only word repeatedly employed throughout the story. So are “seemed” and “might,” with each use attached to an associated image indicating that the perceptions of the protagonist, Neddy Merrill, will be fragmented and unreliable.

In a 1971 essay, Cheever hailed F. Scott Fitzgerald for his “acute awareness of the meaning of time,” with characters who “lived in a temporal crisis of nostalgia and change.”

By the end of this story, the crisis that Neddy Merrill has been denying becomes increasingly apparent, despite his impulsive, startling decision to recapture his youth by swimming the eight miles from the Westerhazy’s pool to his own.

I haven’t yet seen the 1968 film adaptation of thisstory, but it’s hard for me to imagine a better actor to portray Merrill onscreen than Burt Lancaster (in the image accompanying this post). 

Two decades into his film career, the Oscar winner still showed the amazing physique he had achieved as a youthful acrobat. But few actors were better at depicting the complexity and insecurity below this kind of magnetic presence than he was.

Almost as soon as Merrill has conceived his almost surreal ambition, Cheever is undercutting him as a figure of epic self-delusion:

“He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda, after his wife. He was not a practical joker, nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.”

The irony will only mount as Merrill stops periodically at one party after another, in the course of which he is not only stopped by one hostess but “slowed by the fact that he stopped to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the hands of as many men.”

Midway through his swim (after, not so coincidentally, about a half-dozen drinks), a storm breaks out, and Merrill’s temporal perceptions become progressively unsure. A neighbor had bought Japanese lanterns “the year before last, or was it the year before that?” It’s supposed to be midsummer, but Merrill finds himself shivering, as if it’s already autumn.

Before long, he is finding a less hospitable landscape: neighbors’ properties overgrown with weeds and the doors locked; jeering by passersby as he crosses a highway barefoot; sneers by another hostess at this “gatecrasher”; and remarks and gossip he doesn’t register about his “misfortune.”

While the story is seen entirely through the consciousness of Merrill, the voice of Cheever slips through at times, as when Neddy wonders if he was “losing his memory” or if his “gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill?” 

By the end, Neddy has been exposed as an alcoholic, a philanderer, and a spendthrift whose financial ruin has destroyed his family and left him friendless and locked out of his suburban paradise.

Like the Lucinda River, alcoholism runs like a subterranean stream in a number of Cheever stories, such as “Reunion” and the novel Falconer. But seldom has the psychological dissolution it unleashes been rendered with such irony and phantasmagorical brilliance as in “The Swimmer.”

Cheever shared far more than a thirst for liquor and an equally desperate quest for grace with Fitzgerald: Both also have tempted filmmakers to create on-screen visual counterparts to prose whose shimmering effects are felt primarily in the imagination.

So it was with The Great Gatsby, and so it was in the late Sixties when the husband-and-wife screenwriter-director team of Eleanor and Frank Perry tried to adapt Cheever’s tale of altered consciousness. 

Frank Perry was fired midway through, and even a young Sydney Pollack, hired to complete filming, couldn’t steady a production that had become as uncertain as Neddy’s nautical journey home.

Despite a pleasant on-location experience in Westport, CT (where Cheever made a cameo appearance at a poolside cocktail party, where, Neddy-like, he marveled at a “terrific 18-year-old dish”), the author loathed the finished product of the troubled production. (I’ll have to wait till the next time it comes on TCM to assess the merits of his complaints.)

In a way, Cheever is the missing link between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mad Men (just a few of the many literary references on the late, great series examined in Jenny Tighe's post on the "Bloomsbury Literary Studies" blog). It’s apparent symbolically even in the opening credits of the classic AMC series, in the vertiginous fall suffered by its main character.  

Mad Men’s showrunner, Matthew Weiner, took his time (seven seasons) showing how ad man Don Draper hit rock bottom, just as Fitzgerald took an entire novel to detail the warped promise of its once-dazzling protagonist, psychiatrist Dick Diver.

In contrast, Cheever compressed the story of Neddy Merrill, but the result is the same in all three cases: men fooled by the shimmering surface of the American Dream, with not enough intestinal fortitude to survive the loss of their illusions.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Mad Men,’ With an Ad Man’s View of Love)

“What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons.” —Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm, pictured) in Mad Men, Season 1, Episode 1, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” original air date July 19, 2007, teleplay by Matthew Weiner, directed by Alan Taylor

Fifteen years ago, Mad Men premiered on AMC, propelling the cable station away from vintage movies and more towards original programming.

More important, it solidified a trend that began nearly a decade before with The Sopranos: an anti-hero (in this case, a smoking, drinking, womanizing ad agency creative director) who kept viewers coming back week after week, despite (or maybe that’s because of) his continual falls from grace.

I know that I couldn’t bear to miss a single one of its 92 episodes in its seven seasons.

For a fine summary about why this quintessential period drama was “a show built to last,” read this blog post by Vulture’s Matt Zoller Seitz.

Photo of the Day: Meet Me at Don Draper (Or Is That Dick Whitman?) Way

A day late and a dollar short—that’s the story of my life. That explains why I was utterly mystified when, checking my Facebook feeds last night, I noticed a co-worker’s mysterious reference to “Don Draper Way.”

It wasn’t until this morning that I read that yesterday, key creative people from perhaps my favorite drama series of the last decade had shown up only a block from where I work, at Rockefeller Center. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, star Jon Hamm, and fellow cast members January Jones, Christina Hendricks, John Slattery and Elisabeth Moss had appeared at the Time and Life Building (headquarters for Sterling Cooper and Partners) as part of a promotion for the final season (or, rather, the last half of the final season), which begins airing April 5.

The fascination in all this wasn’t only that street signs at the corner of the building were altered to read “Mad Men Ave.” and “Don Draper Way.” But the image you see here—which I got around to taking this morning, nearly 24 hours after the show’s major players had come and gone—is a temporary artwork that tips its hat to the show’s famous opening—a silhouette of Don Draper on a bench, in a casual, who-cares pose, cigarette in hand, just after his counterpart—the doppelganger he has spent a good decade and more fleeing—falls endlessly from an office high up in one of postwar Manhattan’s iconic skyscrapers.

Quote of the Day (Time Magazine, on ‘Mad Men’s’ Don and Peggy)

“Peggy and Don are opposites, and they’re soul mates; you can’t really understand one without the other. The show’s opening credits show us the Saul Bass-like silhouette of a man who looks a lot like Don falling from an office tower. But if his descent is half the story of Mad Men, Peggy’s ascent is the other half. Her elevator is going up, his is going down, yet they’re more alike than anyone on the show, creatively driven, stubborn, secretive. They’re the Janus face of Mad Men, he looking toward his past, she toward our future.”— James Poniewozik, “The Last Days of Mad Men,” Time, April 7, 201

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on a Female Terror)

“It was a Sunday evening; he had left a cocktail party in a Washington Square apartment and had decided to walk a few blocks up Fifth Avenue before he took a bus. As he was passing the Brevoort, Joan called to him. She was with a man at one of the tables on the sidewalk. She looked cool and fresh, and the man appeared to be respectable. His name, it turned out, was Pete Bristol. He invited Jack to sit down and join in a celebration….They had dinner and drank champagne with their dinner. They drank more champagne afterward and then went over to the Lafayette and then to two or three other places. Joan had always been tireless in her gentle way. She hated to see the night end, and it was after three o'clock when Jack stumbled into his apartment. The following morning he woke up haggard and sick, and with no recollection of the last hour or so of the previous evening. His suit was soiled and he had lost his hat. He didn't get to his office until eleven. Joan had already called him twice, and she called him again soon after he got in. There was no hoarseness at all in her voice.”—John Cheever, “Torch Song,” from The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

This being Halloween, it’s appropriate to discuss this elegant exercise in Jamesian horror and ambiguity. Along with the usual notes of beauty and wistfulness associated with John Cheever, there’s a sense throughout that something more is deeply wrong here. There’s a dead giveaway even in the second sentence: “She always wore black, and he (Jack) was always given the feeling, by a curious disorder in her apartment, that the undertakers had just left.” Over a year later, when he comes to the apartment of the woman he nicknames "The Widow" again, there is “a death rattle in the lock” when he rings the doorbell.

The dominant impression of a John Cheever short story is of a mid-20^th century suburbanite seeking elation and grace at a party that inevitably ends with someone, usually the male protagonist, getting drunk, flirtatious, stupid and even violent. Jack Lorey, a WWII vet who knows Joan Harris from their Midwestern small town, could be a kind of literary counterpart to Mad Men’s Roger Sterling in his surface charm, serial marriages and slow-dawning realization that he has let his life slip away. Except that Roger does not come within the sights of an emotional vampire after a series of debauches.

In the preface to his Library of America horror anthology, American Fantastic Tales, Peter Straub identifies an instinct associated with terror and the uncanny dating back to the Puritans: “the surrender or collapse of the individual will.” Particularly in its latest season, Mad Men has shown how this collapse has undermined Roger, Don Draper, and other males on the show. That psychic deterioration has been a long time coming. So does the unraveling of Jack Lorey.

You might think it entirely coincidental that Roger’s secretary on Mad Men shares the same name as the big, healthy woman who may well be far more in Cheever’s much-anthological story. But remember that, as the seminal series about the Sixties begins, Don Draper lives in Ossining, the town at the heart of Cheever Country.

Cheever has been labeled “the Chekhov of the suburbs,” but the other nickname for him, “the Ovid of Ossining,” sounds, in instances such as “Torch Song,” more appropriate—testimony to the astonishing metamorphoses experienced by his characters when they are fully in the grip of desires beyond their control.

The heartache underlying so much of his fiction derives from the vast distance between the states of grace sought by his men (and they are, overwhelmingly, men) and the circumference of everyday life. That distance also accounts for the element of the fantastical in his work. No less than “The Enormous Radio” and “The Swimmer,” “Torch Song” mixes the real and the surreal.

At the same time, the mounting terror in the story also results from an ambiguity at its heart: how much of Jack’s final lashing out against his longtime female friend as a “lewd and searching shape of death” comes from an actual realization of her true nature versus the distorted psychological understanding of a diseased man?

Joan has a habit of picking one drunk, drug addict, consumptive, and general abuser after another. Yet, for all her bad luck, she hardly seems to have aged.

“Torch Song,” like so much of Cheever’s fiction, clearly reflects the author’s misogyny. If Joan Harris is, in fact, a psychological vampire who drains her male victims of their energy and life essence, if not of their physical blood, then the violent ways they act to expunge her from their lives become justified, in their twisted way of thinking. Thus, “Torch Song” has become anthologized not just in horror anthologies, but even at least one on domestic violence (Mark Spilka’s ironically titled Eight Lessons in Love: A Domestic Violence Reader).

Posthumous revelations about Cheever’s private life have led some to see this tale as a manifestation of his sexual orientation. By this reckoning, the numerous lovers of Joan that keep dying are, symbolically, fellow homosexuals that the closeted Cheever would have regarded as sick. An interesting, but probably too reductive, take on a tale that mounts in ambiguity and dread from first to last.

Quote of the Day (John Cheever, on Hard-Won Grace)

“Kneeling, I am too deeply moved to shape a coherent prayer. I would like my daughter's happiness, some largeness of my comprehension, but my feeling is inchoate and close to tears….The candles, the fires, are countless, and much of the force of this ritual is ancient and bold. I believe in God the father. What a courageous declaration! The movements of the priest, the acolyte, and the communicants are like some vestige of a pavane. It is the tower bell that rings as we approach the mystery of the Eucharist…..Leaving the church, I greet the priest…`Good morning, John,’ he says. He is the same priest—unnamed and uncalled-for—who gave me Communion when I was last thought to be dying. I’ve not seen him since. There is no mention of God’s will. We settle for an ardent handshake and loud laughter.  We are both crying.”—John Cheever, mid-year diary entry for 1975, The Journals of John Cheever (1991)

Man’s natural inclination is for the light, believed John Cheever, who was born on this date 100 years ago today in Quincy, Mass. When his journals were published nine years after his death, critical attention focused on his late-night terrors over his bisexual leanings. Yet an equally powerful cross-current in his daily jottings is the connection to God he felt through Sunday Episcopal services.

Cheever’s life resembles F. Scott Fitzgerald's in a number of ways (notably, difficult relationships with alcohol, class and his wife), but even if you knew nothing about either writer and confined yourself strictly to the reason we honor them in the first place—their stories—you’ll find a shared quality: an ability to elevate ordinary experience into extraordinary epiphanies that shed light on Edens lost and forever re-sought.

Perhaps the foremost chronicler of postwar suburbia, Cheever created characters who have come into a world they once could only have dreamed of. Of course it can't last, and somehow or other--usually through one too many drunken fights at parties, a furtive extramarital fling, or some combination of the two--The Fall comes. If the scenario sounds like some recent television work, it should: Don Draper, the magnetic but conflicted advertising creative director in the cable TV series Mad Men, lives, when that series first opens, in Ossining, N.Y., a very self-conscious nod to Cheever's longtime home.

The journal entry above was written at an inflection point in Cheever’s life. Three years before, he had had a heart attack, and at the time of this entry he had only recently finished a stint at a rehabilitation center for his acute alcoholism.

To read Cheever’s journals around this time is to grasp a man who emerges from a dark, dank cave, blinking at the light—grateful to emerge back into the world at all, and astounded that--through no effort of his own weak will, only God's help and mercy--he’s been delivered from despair. The novel he wrote after his release from the rehab center, Falconer, ends with an escape from the titular prison (like Cheever's rehab center, a setting of confinement) and an affirmation of faith: “Rejoice, he thought. Rejoice."

Quote of the Day (Norman Mailer, on Ernest Hemingway)

“Hemingway’s style affected whole generations of us, the way a roomful of men is affected when a beautiful woman walks through ---their night is turned around, for better or for worse. Hemingway’s style had the ability to hit young writers in the gut, and they just weren't the same after that.” – Norman Mailer, quoted in Michiko Kakutani, The Poet at the Piano: Portraits Of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights, And Other Artists At Work (1988)

Like future other images of aging Papa, the image accompanying this post attests to the darkness gathering force in his wounded psyche.

Fifty years ago today, 48 hours after returning from a second round of electroshock treatment at the Mayo Clinic, Ernest Hemingway picked up his favorite shotgun in his Ketchum, Idaho home and shot himself.

The act, committed while his increasingly anxious wife slept upstairs, shocked a world of readers who had encountered the Nobel laureate’s work on high school reading lists or in magazine profiles. 

They simply could not imagine that a man decorated for bravery in World War I, whose Byronic travels epitomized the rugged life and whose fiction consistently celebrated courage as “grace under pressure,” could have chosen this way out.

Little did they know about the all-consuming depression that brought him to this end. Hemingway’s intimates were alarmed, during his Mayo Clinic stay, by the sign he’d hung up outside his room: FORMER WRITER. 

And friend (later biographer) A.E. Hotchner would not soon forget what the “former writer” told him of his condition in his last days: “What does a man care about? Staying healthy. Working good. Eating and drinking with his friends. Enjoying himself in bed. I haven’t any of them. You understand, goddamn it? None of them."

(Hemingway’s suspicion that he was under surveillance by the FBI proved to be more true and less paranoid than any of his close friends could have guessed at the time, as ruefully acknowledged in Hotchner’s op-ed article in today’s New York Times.)

The surprise must have been especially palpable for men such as Norman Mailer in the 1950s, for whom Hemingway, like Frank Sinatra, represented an ideal of style—not just the celebrated modernist writing style, but of living life full-tilt and reaping the rewards. Characteristically, Mailer compares the older writer’s impact to that of a beautiful woman.

Indeed, those of the generation of The Naked and the Dead author, after World War II, saw much to admire in the older writer’s quest for wealth, wine and women, as well as his stoic code. Hemingway’s death, then, signaled the first crack in this cult of machismo. 

Within a generation, a “Me Decade” deeply antithetical to Hemingway’s suck-it-up ethic, as well as a feminist movement that eyed much of the novelist’s work as overgrown Boy’s Life adventures, had called into question the values by which Hemingway had lived. Inevitably, the search began for new idols.

The question now becomes whether Hemingway’s time may have come again. Abe Sauer, a contributor to the Web site www.brandchannel.com, lists several recent events that might signify the return of Hemingway as a “New Male Lifestyle Demo,” including:

* The writer’s appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, wherein the young Hemingway of the Twenties appears as a character, already in the process of creating his legend;
* Country star Kenny Chesney's 2010 album, called Hemingway's Whiskey:
* The Nicole Kidman-Clive Owen HBO biopic, Gellhorn and Hemingway.
* Even “the current popularity of full beards on men,” according to Sauer.

When myth collides with reality, however, all of this counter-revisionism becomes a bit harder to sustain.

If you want an idea of what the death of Hemingway signified in larger terms, focus on the opening credits of the Emmy-winning AMC drama series about advertising men in the 1960s, Mad Men. It shows an illustrated version of protagonist Don Draper falling from a great height.

But Draper represents far more than himself. Indeed, that image is symbolic of the cult of masculinity in free fall.

Watching Draper’s credits-sequence fall is like viewing a slow-motion series of quietly desperate acts—in much the same way that Hemingway’s family and closest associates beheld with mounting, powerless horror the writer’s increasingly troubled condition following two plane crashes on safari in Africa in 1954.

Nobody would have validated Draper’s lifestyle of heavy drinking and wenching as the rewards of a demanding job more than the novelist. But that’s not their only point in common.

One particular episode from the series’ first season, "The Hobo’s Code," hints at further affinities that the ad man might have felt for the bestselling novelist.

At one point, Don rushes over to the apartment of his mistress, freelance artist Midge Daniels, and urges her to run away with him for the weekend to Paris, the romantic dream city of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Lost Generation writers who hoped to live cheaply and simply there without distractions.

But deeper connections bound the creator of commercial fantasy and the novelist-memoirist. Each grew up under circumstances they were anxious at all hazards to obscure and even lie about. Each found in the chaos of war an opportunity to become a fabulist about his military service and, later, his identity.

Aside from a father (also a suicide) who taught him about hunting and fishing, Hemingway found little about either his hometown (Oak Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb filled with what he called “broad lawns and narrow minds”) or his family worth celebrating. His mother (whom he blamed for his father’s death because of what the writer regarded as spendthrift ways), an organist for local churches, took her adult son to task for his dissolute ways.

The young Hemingway took refuge in telling stories. That tendency didn’t end with the written page, however: he also took to spinning ever-more-creative visions of his background. 

Years later, after their divorce, third wife Martha Gellhorn was astonished, upon being driven through Oak Park, to find it was nothing like what he’d told her: “The son-of-a-bitch! He told me he grew up in a slum!”

Similarly, Draper (or, as he was known as a child, Dick Whitman) was at pains to camouflage his background, though this time because of a sense of shame. His is a tale of two mothers: one biological, a prostitute who died while giving birth to him, and a second adoptive—like Grace Hemingway, a “church lady” (albeit one with quiet but real generosity). 

A second parent, Don’s adoptive father, is far more problematic, leaving the boy abused in body and disabused of compassion, committed only to a “hobo’s code” that leaves him unburdened, footloose but empty.

Their creative lives give the two men an outlet for sexual impulses that older generations would have frowned upon. 

The astute critic-novelist (The Year of the French) Thomas Flanagan has much of value to say about Hemingway in an essay “The Best He Could Do” (collected in the posthumous collection, There You Are), but one sentence in particular sums up “Papa’s” increasingly fragile psychosexual state in the last two decades of his life: “Behind the marlin-fighting lay a different person, uneasily aware of the fragility of gender boundaries, sexually insecure, and aware of aspects of himself which created that insecurity.”

Two of Hemingway’s posthumous books, the novel Garden of Eden and the “memoir” True at First Light, would have jolted contemporary readers with the author’s descriptions of lesbianism, threesomes and his weird quasi-courtship (with his wife fully aware of it) of a young African girl while the fiftysomething novelist was on safari.

Not content with a wife whose blond beauty evokes comparisons to Grace Kelly, Draper takes up with an artist, a client, even a stewardess--and that doesn’t begin to exhaust the extent of his restless philandering.

Eventually, thrown off-kilter by what they saw in war--Hemingway in World War II, Whitman/Draper by the Korean conflict--they return home having created a new myth for themselves. 

Not content with his very real bravery as a wounded non-combatant ambulance driver in 1918, Hemingway, upon returning home the following year, told Oak Park audiences that he’d served as a lieutenant in the Brigata Ancona during the Monte Grappa offensive.

Draper’s change is even more dramatic. Like Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, he assumes the identity of a dead person--in this case, an officer he served under during Korea.

Draper would have agreed with Hemingway’s description of writers in True at First Light: “All a writer of fiction is really is a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.”

And Papa Hemingway would have nodded in agreement when the outwardly self-confident, inwardly anxious ad man says: “People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.”