By Chrissy Iley
We know him as handsome Don Draper, the misogynistic,
chain-smoking, hard-drinking Sixties advertising man at the
centre of the brilliant TV show Mad Men. But it took him seven
auditions to land the part and he'd been toiling in Hollywood bit
parts (and worse) for years.
There are many things to love about Mad Men. Its impeccable style
- the suits, the martinis, the ashtrays. The lighting
(fluorescent office, amber nightclub), the permanent halo of
smoke, the way women wear corsetry to work and are revered and
despised in equal parts, the sexualised selling of ideas - all
are period-perfect. It's a Polaroid of the advertising world of
early Sixties Manhattan on Madison Avenue. It is politically
incorrect and recreates an era where great change was about to
happen but had not happened yet. It has the repression of the
Fifties more than the swing of the Sixties. At the heart of the
drama is Don Draper, rarely without a chunky glass of bourbon in
one hand and a cigarette in the other. He has a Grace Kelly-style
wife, a beatnik mistress and another lover, a gorgeous Jewish
woman from the Upper East Side.
Draper is played by Jon Hamm. This year, he won the Golden Globe
for best actor ahead of Hugh Laurie (House) and Jonathan Rhys
Meyers (The Tudors). He is 37 and is being compared with George
Clooney, who was about that age when he got his ER break and had
similarly been toiling unnoticed in lesser-known US series.
I am waiting for Hamm in a cafe in Silver Lake, a boho-chic part
of LA, wondering what he is going to look like without the suit
and Brylcreemed hair. And here he is, as tall, lean and buff as
could be in jeans, battered navy polo shirt, all unshaven and
solicitous. How is my jetlag? How is my life? He recommends
Devil's Nest, a scramble of avocado, sour cream, spicy sausage.
Hamm is not self-consciously Hollywood, showy or full of himself,
which probably comes from several years working at the coalface
of showbusiness and before that as a waiter and a teacher. 'I
taught daycare when I was in college. I taught after-school stuff
for little kids.
'I was a theatre major in college and they didn't prepare you for
the massive amount of rejection you have to go through. Most
people who are successful, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, had
to eat shit at a lot of auditions and still not get the parts. So
you have to develop resilience. Especially for Mad Men, where it
took seven auditions to get the part. People really needed
convincing that they wanted me.'
The show was created and written by Matthew Weiner who was a
writer and producer on The Sopranos. He pushed for Hamm despite
the cable network's nervousness because this was the cable
channel AMC's first foray into drama series and it wanted the
security of a star name.
Hamm had been a regular for three years on a show called The
Division. 'It was on a network called Lifetime, which is soft
programming for women. It was a cop show, five women and me, but
the women got to be much more macho than me. I was the slightly
emasculated cop; now I get to be a little more masculine,' he
says. But, he shrugs, he's no alpha male. 'I was raised by a
single mother and I've been in a 10-year relationship with my
girlfriend. My whole life I've been surrounded by women.'
Does he at all resemble the slick but haunted ad man Don Draper?
'The closest thing I have in common with Don is that I'm looking
for something. If you look at the literature of the early
Sixties, like Cheever and Updike, it's existentialist. People
sitting around smoking, thinking 'what am I doing with my life?'.
Postwar America was riding as high as it's ever ridden. It had an
incredibly paternalistic sense of its place in the world. America
was the good cop. It healed Japan after it had utterly destroyed
it, protected the world from communism. Americans had money,
ability to travel and see the world. And at the core of it was:
I'm still not happy. What Don Draper is doing is trying to sell
happiness because he can't buy it himself. I think that
resonates.'
The eggs arrive and he eats heartily. Does he smoke as much as
Draper? 'I gave up 10 years ago when I started teaching kids. I
don't miss the hacking cough in the morning or the mouth that
tastes like cat litter, but I miss it when I'm on this show. It's
glamorous, I got to tell you. [They smoke a non-nicotine herbal
blend.] In the show, we know smoking kills, but we don't give a
shit. These guys had three-martini lunches... I appreciate
alcohol. I love the place that alcohol holds in our society, but
I'd never attempt to drink as much as Draper.'
Hamm may relate to the smoking and the drinking, but not to the
way the women are treated. He is devoted to his girlfriend, the
actress and writer Jennifer Westfeldt, while Draper and his
colleagues spend most of their time humiliating women when they
are not sleeping with them and even when they are. They refer to
Peggy, his frumpy secretary, as 'a lobster. All the meat in the
tail'. At one point, Draper says to one of his inamoratas: 'What
you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.'
Draper sells lies for a living. He cheats. He is emotionally
withholding, morally ambiguous, with a past he can't face up to,
yet we can't help rooting for him. There's a genius in this
portrayal. Hamm stares into his Devil's Nest. 'There's a
vicarious thrill in it. When we see people misbehave, sometimes
we want them to get away with it.
'I've gotten away with a lot in my life. The older you get the
more you realise you're not getting away with it, it's taking its
toll somewhere. So you try not to put yourself in those
situations. Part of the mysterious process called growing up.
Some people do that better than others. It's a daily struggle,
especially in this city where everyone is a child and often
rewarded for it.'
I tell him I cannot imagine him as a child. 'Well, I was forced
to grow up very early because I lost my mother when I was 10. So
that tends to take a lot of childhood out of the equation and you
become very aware of adult things.'
Hamm's parents divorced when he was two and he lived with his
mother. 'She died suddenly over the course of about three months.
A stomach ache one day turned out to be an advanced cancer that
spread rapidly through her internal organs. She had two-thirds of
her colon removed and it killed her.
'When you are 10, you just don't have the tools to process it.
You're coming home from playing kick-ball to talks about how
they've got to set you up a trust fund [which paid for his
high-school education]. I do have very good memories of being a
kid running around, but that all pretty much got lost. It was
hard to bounce back from losing my mum. It's an incredibly tough
process and you see a lot of that in Don as well. His childhood
was... ' He searches for the word. Tortured? 'Yeah.' This would
be the moment where Don Draper would light a cigarette and smoke
the pain away. Hamm dips his sourdough into his eggs and swills
it about.
It must have been strange suddenly to go and live with his
father? 'Sort of. Though I loved my dad and I would see him every
other weekend. It wasn't like he was a guy I didn't know. He had
not remarried, but he had two children from a previous marriage,
one of whom was living with him, as well as my 80-year-old
grandmother.
'My dad was in many ways essentially Don Draper. A businessman in
the Sixties, very powerful, self-assured. I didn't find out about
that when I was a kid. He passed away when I was 20. We didn't
have a chance for many adult discussions or to deal with each
other as adults. He was sick for several years. He just
degenerated over the last couple of years until he passed away.
He packed a lot into his 63 years. It was a hard life.'
Hamm came west to LA from St Louis in 1995, prepared for hard
work. 'I tried to get my affairs in St Louis in order the last
year I was there, but I was never very good with money and by the
end of the summer I had saved only $150. Fortunately, gas was
cheaper then and I made it here in my car. The car died an
interesting death. I had $1,600 of parking tickets accrued in my
first four or five years here and the good people of Los Angeles
decided to take the car back on their own.'
In Los Angeles he lived in a big house, just down the road from
where we are having breakfast, with four other guys. In those
days, the eastern district of Silver Lake was not cool or
sought-after. It was rough. 'It was a crazy house and it was so
cheap even I could afford it. An 85-year-old woman owned the
house. She was a soap actress who lived in New York and we were
four guys, my size and bigger. But we broke so many pieces of
furniture, these little-old-lady chairs you would sit on and they
would crack. Plus we would have parties and the keg would leak.
It was my job as the diplomat of the group to say to her,
"Marilyn, we love you" and make her feel good. I was
always the one who was behind on the rent. I was very proud that
once I started working I was able to pay her back completely.'
Hamm now lives just down the road in his own place with his
girlfriend. 'We met through some mutual friends at somebody's
birthday party. We didn't really hit it off immediately. She
thought I was a cocky asshole.'
Soon after, she called him from New York to ask if he would come
over and work on a project with her. It started off as a sketch.
She thought maybe it would be a play and it turned into the
critically acclaimed movie Kissing Jessica Stein in 2001. 'I was
working downtown as a set dresser for some very bad softcore porn
when I got the call from New York. I was making $150 a day and my
friend was the electrician, so we would share a ride to work. I
would carry my little bucket around and move what needed to be
moved, but I would be terrible at it. I would fall asleep in a
corner and they could never find me. So when I got the call, even
though we had not particularly hit it off, I was like, yes,
anything but this. I had no money, no car and all these parking
tickets. Anything to get out of here.
'I borrowed the money from a friend and went to New York and we
did this cool little play which turned into Kissing Jessica
Stein. That's when Jen and I became really close. A year after
that, we started going out and that was 10 years ago. We just had
our anniversary in Mexico. We had a blast. We very much
complement each other in this insane industry. We live and we
work it out together. It's been great.'
It sounds as if she was a grounding force in his life? 'It's hard
when you move cities and don't have a lot of friends and you're
just trying to keep your head above water and trying not to get
caught up in all this bullshit, to go out on auditions and not be
totally soul-crushed when you don't get it. Especially out here,
especially in the television industry where they dangle all this
in front of you...
'And then they pull it back at the last second every time. How
many more times am I going to be like Charlie Brown trying to
kick the football and have them pull it away again? A lot of
people after five or six times think, this is not for me, I'm
done. It is so arbitrary and capricious.'
'Eventually I got there. Everybody on Mad Men is at the top of
their game and it feels great.' And is he happy? 'Absolutely I
am. I have a pretty stable relationship that brings me love and
happiness and comfort. I have a great house and a great dog.' He
shows me a picture of a dog wearing a baseball cap.
What about babies? 'I don't necessarily want kids. A lot of our
friends are having children and I don't know if it's for me. I
haven't come down hardcore on either side of the argument. I
think when people come from a stable family having children
becomes a celebration and I'm not sure it would be that way for
me.'
And perhaps, for the moment, being the main guy in the best show
on TV is enough. 'It doesn't suck,' he admits.
With that, he picks up the bill for breakfast as if that's
perfectly normal when, in fact, it's unheard of.
No Hollywood actor has even bought me a chai latte before. And
then he offers to drive me home, as he doesn't want me to wait
and call a taxi. I live half an hour away. We sit in his car
listening to Steve Jones on the radio. How much better can it be?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/apr/27/television |