Mad Men and Bad Girls

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01dowd.html?_r=1&hp
Back in the early ’60s, Holly was the woman we wanted to be. The slender and stylish New York beauty was supported by men, yet she seemed free.

Now, back in the early ’60s on TV, Betty is the woman we don’t want to be. The slender and stylish New York beauty is supported by men, and she seems trapped.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was cool because of its modern glamour, ushering in a sexy future. “Mad Men” is cool because of its retro glamour, recalling a sexy past.

Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, a call girl with a crazy streak, got money from strange men at boîtes for “trips to the powder room.” January Jones’s Betty Draper, a housewife with a crazy streak, cheated on her husband, when she was pregnant, with a strange man at a boîte.

The tightly wound Betty is a gilded bird in a cage; she needs to belong to someone, this season to a new, older husband, an adviser to Governor Rockefeller.

The wild-child Holly is terrified someone will put her in a cage — in the Truman Capote novella, she won’t even walk past the Central Park Zoo — and she doesn’t want to belong to anyone. (She also doesn’t want anything to belong to her; that’s why she dumps her cat in a garbage can at the end. In the tacked-on happy ending of the movie, she finds the cat; in the book, which has no leading man to tell her she’s already in a cage of her own making, she doesn’t.)

The alcohol-swigging Betty never calls her blue periods “the mean reds,” as the alcohol-swigging Holly did, but the women have their vertiginous moods in common: luminescent looks overlaying dark psyches.

In Georgetown, in the window of a vintage store called Annie Creamcheese, there’s an iconic poster of Audrey Hepburn as Holly, sleek with cigarette holder, long black Givenchy dress and pearls. Right around the corner, in the window of Banana Republic, there’s a huge picture of Jon Hamm, looking sleek with Don Draper’s mysterious, matinee-idol smolder.

Even though many of us grew up not realizing it, Holly’s a hooker. And in the new season of AMC’s “Mad Men,” which started last Sunday, Don hires a hooker and wants to be slapped.

Set in the same era, the two Manhattan fantasies are dashing escapes from the prim, airless Eisenhower era. Both feature magnetic characters, smoke rings and, in Capote’s phrase, “martini laughter.”

Their gorgeous visual style cloaks strangled emotions, and both narratives brim with louche trysts, sexual liberation, bohemian flashes, suppressed demons and reinvented lives.

In “Mad Men,” the single Richard Whitman from Pennsylvania coal country morphs into the married Don Draper after an accident in the Korean War. In “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the married Lulamae Barnes morphs into the single Holly Golightly to get out of the backwater Tulip, Tex.

“In New York you can become anything,” Sam Wasson, who wrote the new book “Fifth Avenue, 5 a.m.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the Dawn of the Modern Woman,” told Vanity Fair.

Wasson asserts that Holly was the precursor of Carrie and the “Sex and the City” singletons (not to mention TV trailblazers Mary Tyler Moore and Ally McBeal.) Truman Capote had wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role of the teenage hillbilly turned chic prostitute, and it would have been fun to see that version, too.

But when the producers chose the less exhausting Audrey, her real-life good-girl persona helped mask the raciness of her character.

In the 1960 movie of John O’Hara’s “Butterfield 8,” Elizabeth Taylor’s call girl had to die in a car crash for her sins, just as 20 years earlier, Vivien Leigh, playing a ballerina-turned-prostitute in “Waterloo Bridge,” had to be punished for her wicked ways with a final leap off the bridge.

It would be many years before audiences would embrace overt hookers as heroines: Jamie Lee Curtis in “Trading Places” in 1983, Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” in 1990 and Kim Basinger in “L.A. Confidential” in 1997.
Married to the oppressive Mel Ferrer and with a new baby boy, Hepburn’s princess-swan image bled into Holly, making her seem less like a member of the oldest profession and more like a modern, fun-loving single girl.

“In ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ all of a sudden — because it was Audrey who was doing it — living alone, going out, looking fabulous and getting a little drunk didn’t look so bad anymore,” Wasson writes. “Being single actually seemed shame-free. It seemed fun.” So, as a haute hooker, Audrey Hepburn was a fairy godmother, not only to feminism but to the prevailing ethos that style and cool trump all.