Actually, I didn’t understand the mention of pantyhose. As I remember, Peggy said something like, “I have to buy pantyhose, unless I have a newspaper.” So is she using the newspaper to shield her bare legs.
Average salary in 1963 was somewhere around $5,900-6,200 according to Google which seems low in Sterling Cooper terms.
In the episode where TV Guy becomes TV Guy and not just an accounts guy (I can never remember his name), he’s told by Sterling that no one there makes $300 a week and is offered $285 (?) which would be $14,820 annually. But he had opened his co-worker’s paycheck and it was $300, hence his demand for a raise.
Cosgrove is given a salary of around $20k as 1/2 of Head of Accounts. Don Draper demands $40k from Sterling in season 1 to keep him at SC and gets it.
As a junior copywriter, I’d guess Peggy’s making… $225-250? a week. Maybe a little less. She got her office mainly because she asked for it, not as a promotion.
I think the seats of whatever transportation she was taking was shredding her hose.
I took it to mean that she has to buy new pantyhose unless she has a newspaper to sit on and keep the jacked up mass transit seats from running her hose.
The seats were rattan- cane weaving- so they snag her hose.
The newspaper is for sitting on, to protect her hose.
I’m assuming the wooden subway seats snag and tear up the pantyhose so she sits on the newspaper.
Right. She was saying if she didn’t have a newspaper-to put on the seat as a cover- the chairs on the subway would snag her pantyhose.
Yep. I figured Big Things would happen for him once he created the TV job out of thin air. It was odd how no one, including him, really saw the huge influence TV was going to have in the coming years and decades.
Similarly, if Sal can get more work as a commercial director, he can have a bright future.
(Thanks, by the way, to everyone for the explanation of the subway seats. I’m so used to the formed plastic seats they have now, I forgot about the old seats.)
Is it remotely possible that, down the road, we could see Draper Olson instead of Sterling Cooper? Don seems pretty disillusioned with SC, and Peggy clearly doesn’t get the respect she deserves. They could take Joan with them. Maybe I’m just fantasizing, but that would be a cool way to end the show.
I’ve never seen Don be excited about anything, not even the women he beds. He’s disillusioned with everything. He’s great at his job, but he’s just not…enthusiastic about it.
Don very much reminds me of Gatsby. He worked hard to get to where he is, and it was all financial. It was the scene with “Connie” that made me think that.
He has moments of great intensity of feeling though: that Kodak commercial with the carousel, that was beautiful. It must have come from somewhere real. Also, when we see him with the first Mrs. Draper, when he has no defenses up, he is capable of expressing wonder and a childlike openness. I think living life as Don Draper, never able to be the real him, not even able to tell anyone he knows it’s his birthday, is taking its toll on his psyche. That, and he’s surrounded himself with shallow jerks.
I don’t know that starting his own agency would help any of that, but it sure would save him from having to submit to the bullshit decisions of people like Lane Pryce, tolerate dissolute assholes like Roger Slattery, and deal with the sophomoric greed of people like Pete Campbell. Nah, it wouldn’t solve any of his problems, but he might find a raison d’etre that’s currently lacking.
And I think that’s what makes him such an irresistible, intriguing character. We know it’s THERE somewhere.
As soon as he went to bed that flight attendant (aw, c’mon, I should be able to say stewardess in this context), I wrote him off. Done. Dead to me.
But I can’t. He’s my favorite character on the show. Peggy is second.
Maybe his worst mistake has nothing to do with Sterling Cooper. Maybe it was marrying Betty. He really sold himself out there, because that marriage will never be based on truth, and it will never be Real Love ™. I don’t think Don can live the rest of his life without it, so he’s doomed to hound dogging it forever.
It is interesting to think though that if you were that f***ing handsome, and were irresistible candy to the ladies, and constantly being hit on by women how your attitudes about casual sex and monogamy might change. Like a beautiful woman you would have this “power”. It’s like a fisherman where the fish are jumping onto your boat. Part of the lizard brain reason why men value quality women is that it usually takes some level of commitment/financial attainment/etc pushups to land one.
Don is so naturally handsome and macho tasty none of these things are necessary and women get moist just being near him. I think amazingly good looking guys (like beautiful women) are going to have a more cynical take different take on women and monogamy than other men.
I have a question about the procedure at the agency.
They’ve signed Pepsi to do an ad for them. Despite misgivings, Pepsi wants Ann-Margaret-Lite in Bye Bye Sugar. They do the ad. Pepsi says ick, no thanks. They shake hands.
Does that mean that they’ve lost the Pepsi account? Do they get another shot? Or was this a case of flirting, with Pepsi being big enough to say Show Us What You Can Do and If We Like It We’ll Sign on the Dotted Line?
That’s a good question. Also, did they get paid?
My guess is that they were competing for the Patio account only. (Presumably Pepsico has a lot of advertising business for the various products, although I don’t know how many products they had then.) As I understand the advertising business, one way (and possibly the primary way) that the ad agency makes money is through a cut of advertising sales (so that Sterling Cooper keeps part of the money paid for the commercials and print ads). So they may develop an ad like this in the hope that they get the account and make it up later.
Speaking as a graphic designer, if someone wants a specific design, and I make it, and they choose not to move forward with it, they at least owe me for the time and money that I spent on the project up to that point.
Considering that they’ve already made an investment with Sterling-Cooper, and that the reps from Pepsi acknowledged that S-C gave them exactly what they wanted, I was surprised by the way they left the meeting. I certainly got the sense that they plan to drop S-C and use a different ad agency. On the other hand, they might’ve just been leaving to brainstorm some new ideas before coming back to S-C.
Damn work, missed the edit window! Please add to the first paragraph: I don’t know if that’s how it works in the ad industry, but I’d be surprised if Sterling-Cooper didn’t have contracts in place that require a partial payment in this kind of situations.