Wouldn’t surprise me if she doesn’t. I had the impression that he has the kids once every two weeks.
This was an episode that made me dislike Draper, by the way. In an ideal world he’d man up and take Sally in at the very least.
And the t-shirt-as-top thing got my attention too, though she surely (hopefully) did not understand what it looked like. But the enormous despair of what she was doing, her desperation to prove to her father that she could be a good little girl, her attempt to be a wife-substitute in making him breakfast – broke my heart, it did.
Part of me wishes the woman from the train had given Don more of a verbal smackdown.
I agree. From the conversation she had with Don, she thinks that he’s going to marry Faye. (If she’s hoping that her parents will get back together, that would make that less likely.)
Don’s hands were tied. Even if he had any idea of how to raise a kid (and he’s admitted that he doesn’t know what to do with them) Betty would never in a million years be the woman on the block whose child was taken by her father. She’d fight, and what judge would give Don custody over Betty? Don “manning up” to take Sally in wouldn’t actually do her any favors.
What makes you think he has that option? Betty would breathe fire.
And Don would have learned what exactly from that? That he’s expected to accomplish the impossible – i.e., persuade Betty to let Sally live with him? Put her in a New York City public school in 1965 when the city is on its way down to the bottom?
Well, to be fair Don probally can afford private school for Sally. Everything else still stands; Sally living with Don fulltime just isn’t an option in 1965 (barring Betty’s death or institutionalization). Even in 2010 courts are highly reluctant to grant full custody to the father.
She’s at least 30, and still not married. It looks like she made a conscious decision to go with grad school & a career over marriage & family. And she’s been very succesful in her career (in a male dominated field). Then she has to deal with a child (something which “should come naturally for a woman”), and fails.
I don’t see Don & Faye getting married, but it would be interesting to see Don in a marriage/long-term relationship with a woman totally different than Betty. One with her own career.
I seem to recall Betty’s attorney opining that Don might well get the children when she was considering filing for divorce.
Anyway, in a just world, Aslan would whisk Betty, Pete, Joey, and Glenn into Narnia and send them on a quest to save the lands from, I don’t know, being stomped flat by the Northern Giants or something and whiel they would succeed,only Glenn would return to Earth.
Yeah, the attorney did warn her of that. But I think a judge would be more inclined to give Betty Frances, married to a stable man in the suburbs custody of Sally rather than a single-father who lives in the village.
Skald, you’re bringing your 2010 expectations into Mad Men’s 1960s world. No one would think that a man should take the children in a divorce (unless he’s remarried), or that the liquor at home should be put someplace safe from the kids. Heck, we’ve seen pregnant women smoking on this show as a sign of how different the times were.
The only way Don would have ever gotten the children was if he’d’ve had some woman to take care of them – hired, or married. And the booze wasn’t hidden or locked away during my own childhood in the 70s; it’s surely not something to be expected of a man in the 60s.
The thing about this episode that really struck home was that every time that Don faced a problem with Sally… he turned to a woman to fix it. And they accepted that. In fact, all the women trailed along to the lobby to make sure Sally was okay – where were all the men in the office, then? Sally had just had a screaming fit tearing through the entire place, after all.
The only person who actually expected Don to step up and deal with his daughter was… Betty.