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Elle
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
The Enduring Style Legacy of 'Mad Men' Women
Earlier this year, I found myself enthralled by an impromptu rewatch of Mad Men — the seductive period drama about the golden age of advertising during the 1960s that concluded its seven-season run almost exactly 10 years ago, on May 17, 2015. As someone who's still trying to discern, a decade later, whether Don Draper (Jon Hamm) found nirvana in the end or simply went back to shilling soda, it was impossible to not be lured in. The visually rich series is captivating, thanks in part to its mesmerizing and meticulously researched costume design, helmed by Deadwood , The Last Tycoon , and 1883 —is a master of her craft. And the sartorial evolutions of Mad Men 's complex, painfully flawed characters prove as much. Jordin Althaus/AMC/Everett Collection Christina Hendricks as Joan Harris on Mad Men. Joan Sees Green The ability to choose and create a life for oneself irrespective of societal expectations is a central theme of the show. But for the female characters, it's a power struggle on the brink of boiling over. The second part of season 7 takes place from April to November 1970. The turbulent '60s are spilling into the '70s; though Roe v. Wade would not be decided for another three years, second-wave feminism and women's liberation are on the rise. Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) understands these changing cultural tides when she confronts the cruel McCann Erickson executive Jim Hobart (H. Richard Greene) about the $500,000 she's owed as a former partner of SC&P, following McCann's acquisition of the agency. During this exchange, she's wearing an emerald green ensemble and gold jewelry, which essentially scream, 'Show me the money.' Even so, Jim chauvinistically belittles her partnership and the value she brings to the company, instructing her to play nice with a gross colleague who's making unwanted passes at her, or else expect a letter from their lawyer. 'I wonder how many women around here would like to speak to a lawyer,' Joan retorts. 'I believe the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has one.' She threatens to file a complaint, arguing the ACLU would be in her office and Betty Friedan in the lobby 'with half the women who marched down 5th Avenue.' (Friedan led the Women's Strike for Equality on Aug. 26, 1970.) When this scene first aired 10 years ago, I remember practically lunging off my couch, cheering on Joan for going toe-to-toe with the show's most formidable villain figure. Initially, it felt like a departure from the compromising positions Joan had previously been put in by men, when she was forced to choose between safety and survival. Take, for example, season 5 episode 11, aptly titled 'The Other Woman,' when Joan officially enters the boys' club. She becomes a voting partner after agreeing to sleep with a sleazy Jaguar rep who's been eyeing her so the agency can secure the account. After the deed is done, she walks into the office with her newly-minted status and partnership stake, wearing yet another money-hued look—a fitted dress, adorned with a gold brooch, plus her signature gold pen necklace, and a scarf in shades of (you guessed it) green. A woman securing her financial future and climbing the ranks of a male-dominated industry should be celebrated, and Hendricks masterfully plays the role without any semblance of shame. However, it's hard to stomach the reality that Joan was presented with an unfair choice from the outset. She could either be responsible for the agency not landing Jaguar's business and still struggle to make ends meet herself (by this point in the show, she was the family breadwinner and a single mother) or sell her body, name her price, and be set for life. Sure, she had choices. They weren't good choices, but they were choices. So, instead, she was pragmatic. That's how it is when men continually call the shots. In contesting Jim, though, Joan threw pragmatism out the window and stood up for her worth. Unfortunately, that effort, however noble and necessary, would only go so far in a patriarchal world that was hardly ready to accept women as equals. (And, let's be honest, still isn't ready.) 'I'm willing to give you 50 cents on the dollar to never see your face again,' Jim counteroffers, diminishing not only her monetary value but also notably insulting her beauty, the commodity that has curried her the most favor throughout her career, for better or worse. Bryant brilliantly bookends these scenes with Joan outfitted in, yes, the color of cash but also the color of growth. Ultimately, her former boss and paramour Roger Sterling (John Slattery) convinces her to take the buyout, even though it wasn't what she was promised. 'It's plenty,' he tells her. Is it? Once again, she's left with no good choices and must settle for the most palatable path forward, even if that means (literally) cutting her losses. Jordin Althaus/AMC/Everett Collection The Politics of Peggy Few on-screen scenes leave such an impression that they are forever emblazoned on my brain, like when Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) struts into the McCann offices after finally receiving her delayed office assignment. Sporting a mod mixed-print minidress that has since been cemented in the Meme Hall of Fame, Peggy embraces the change in environment as best as she can. She enters this new phase of life with unabashed boldness, complete with dark sunglasses, a cigarette dangling from her mouth just so, and sexually explicit artwork in tow ( This now-iconic moment in television history exemplifies the manner in which Peggy must tiptoe along the gender line to advance her career. Her decidedly feminine frock, coupled with the art piece which centers female pleasure, juxtaposes the brooding, mysterious masculinity of the other accessories. 'You know I need to put men at ease,' Peggy tells Roger earlier in the episode when he gives her the Hokusai piece. Does she, though? Do any of us? I'm reminded of the advice Bobbie Barrett (Melinda McGraw), one of Don's many flings, gives Peggy in season 2, shortly after she's plucked from secretarial obscurity and promoted to copywriter: 'No one will tell you this, but you can't be a man. Don't even try. Be a woman. It's a powerful business when done correctly.' This idea resurfaces in season 5, episode 4, when Peggy stays late at work one night and discovers Don's secretary, Dawn Chambers (Teyonah Parris), sleeping at the office. She's afraid; racial tensions around Harlem are escalating following nationwide race riots in 1966. Peggy convinces Dawn to crash on her couch. The two share beers and discuss office politics. 'Do you think I act like a man?' Peggy, wearing an avocado-green dress layered over a short-sleeved white blouse, asks Dawn, who replies, 'I guess you have to, a little.' Peggy reveals to Dawn, whose appearance is more muted in a dark blue crosshatch-patterned dress, that she's unsure if she can keep it up, or if she wants to. Eventually, Peggy, tipsy and tired, heads to her bedroom, leaving Dawn to sleep on the sofa. But Peggy stares for a smidge too long at her green leather purse strewn atop the coffee table. It contains $400 she just received from Roger for taking on extra work, and her implicit bias is definitely showing. Dawn notices Peggy noticing the purse and even though Peggy continues on her way to bed, there's no undoing the damage. Come morning, Dawn is out the door, with a thank-you note strategically placed on top of Peggy's purse. In this moment, given Mad Men 's frustrating lack of BIPOC characters, we get a rare glimpse into how gender dynamics take shape when they are racialized. It's one of the few instances in which a white woman's privilege is contextualized within the broader sociopolitical landscape of the volatile 1960s, and the costuming plays a key role in illustrating that. Yes, white women had limited choices and options. But women of color had—and continue to have—even fewer. Mike Yarish/AMC/Everett Collection Wives in Blue Marriage to Don Draper would likely leave anyone feeling a bit blue (what with all the adultery, gaslighting, and outright lies), so it's no wonder that his two wives, Betty (January Jones) and Megan (Jessica Paré), regularly reached for the color in their everyday wardrobes. Perhaps one of Megan's most memorable sartorial moments was at the top of season 7. She picks up Don at the airport in Los Angeles, arriving in a sleek convertible. She steps out wearing a powder blue babydoll dress with sheer pleated sleeves and a giant bow affixed to the front. She's figuratively and literally in the driver's seat, at last in control of her budding acting career. Or so she thinks. Fast-forward to later that season when Megan, estranged from and in the process of divorcing Don, can't find work and meets with Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) while sporting the same powder-blue number. She's hopeful he has legitimate leads, but really, he just wants to proposition her. The trajectory of that single blue dress illustrates how suddenly fortunes shift. What was once a stylish symbol of possibility has morphed into a shell of itself, becoming something that was beautiful before the world got its hands on it. Megan storms out, defeated and deflated, not carrying the same levity she had just months prior in L.A. It's not until she accepts a million-dollar check from Don as a divorce settlement that the spark in her eye starts to return, and perhaps rightly so. I wasn't necessarily #TeamMegan, but Don, unsurprisingly, treated her pretty terribly. I like to think she bought a groovy home in the Hollywood Hills, went on a massive shopping spree, and eventually found some steady acting work. Mike Yarish/AMC/Everett Collection January Jones as Betty Draper on Mad Men. First wife Betty, meanwhile, was almost always in blue, from dinner dates to running errands. Near the end, she makes clear that she, in fact, intends to spend all of eternity in blue. In the series' penultimate episode, she provides her daughter, Sally (Kiernan Shipka), with straightforward instructions for handling her posthumous wardrobe when she eventually dies from lung cancer. Specifically, she'd like to be buried in her blue chiffon dress from the 1968 Republican winter gala. But that's not all she leaves with Sally. In the same note, she writes, 'I always worried about you because you marched to the beat of your own drum, but now I know that's good. I know your life will be an adventure.' However flawed her mothering style may have been, it turns out the steely ice queen isn't entirely cold-hearted. With death looming, Betty lets her guard down with her children and her ex-husband. In season 7 episode 3, Don and Betty share a sweet, final moment of intimacy; when he stops by to visit Sally who isn't there, he offers a shoulder massage to Betty, who's reading 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria' by Sigmund Freud (likely an assignment from one of her psychology classes) and wearing a demure lilac dress. Purple isn't seen in Betty's wardrobe as often as blue. Considering violet is the last color in the rainbow, her outfit in this moment suggests some kind of forward movement. Even with her terminal diagnosis, she's still willing herself to learn; to step out of her comfort zone. It's an admirable effort, especially from someone who was once as emotionally stunted as Betty (though, to be fair, so was Don). Through its female characters and their costume design, Mad Men beautifully illustrates how one's style is both a means of expression and an exertion of personal choice. For women in particular, that feels like a significant reminder as we navigate an era of increasingly restricted rights. We now live in a time that Mad Men wrapped in May 2015, a certain presidential contender hadn't even announced his candidacy yet. There was widespread hope for the first female president of the United States. We hadn't experienced global lockdowns, a deadly pandemic, or an insurrection. The present moment just may be our defining moment. While it sometimes seems like the world's spinning into chaos and everything's out of control, the decision that no one can take away from us is how we choose to show up. And, perhaps most importantly, whether we show up at all. 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Washington Post
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘The Great Gatsby' is a classic. But a century ago, it flopped.
F. Scott Fitzgerald would be flabbergasted to hear that on the 100th anniversary of its publication, 'The Great Gatsby' is being celebrated around the world. Fitzgerald knew that he had written a great novel, but at the time of his death in 1940 at the age of 44, he also knew that pretty much nobody was reading it. Eight months before he died, Fitzgerald pleaded with his editor at Scribner's, the legendary Maxwell Perkins, to promote the book. 'Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers — I can maybe pick one — make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose — anybody,' he asked in a letter. The resurrection of 'The Great Gatsby' began almost immediately after Fitzgerald's death, when influential literary friends like Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson and Dorothy Parker pushed for reissues of his work. Wilson, who had been a year ahead of Fitzgerald at Princeton, edited his friend's uncompleted fifth novel, 'The Last Tycoon,' which was published in 1941. World War II gave 'Gatsby' a huge boost, when 155,000 copies of the novel were published by the Armed Services Editions as pulp paperbacks. Designed to fit in service members' pockets, the books were distributed to soldiers and sailors serving overseas. After the war, the paperback revolution swept up 'Gatsby' (Bantam brought out an edition in 1946), and the novel was dramatized on early TV shows like CBS's 'Playhouse 90.' By the late 1960s, 'Gatsby' was well on its way to becoming required reading in high schools and colleges across the land, thus generating hundreds of thousands of essays on 'The Symbolism of the Green Light.' For a man who famously declared that such things didn't exist, Fitzgerald and his novel have enjoyed one of the most miraculous of all second acts in American life. It's one thing to trace how Gatsby was rescued from the dustbin of history; it's another to fathom the mystery of why. What did some G.I. who picked up 'The Great Gatsby' in 1945 see in the novel that most of the smarties who reviewed it in 1925 missed? 'F. Scott Fitzgerald's Latest a Dud' was the headline of the review in the New York World. When my own book on Gatsby came out in 2014, I received a letter from one of those early second-wave readers, who identified himself as a 'young paratrooper in 1945.' The letter writer recalled that he first encountered Gatsby in an Armed Services Edition and, referring to the title character, said, 'I knew right away I was in the presence of a great man.' But why? What makes 'The Great Gatsby' — the novel and its main character — so great? Why does the story haunt so many of us readers, just as Gatsby himself haunts Nick Carraway? For the sake of pithiness, I'll answer that Question-as-Big-as-the-Ritz with the help of two quotes: one from the Italian writer Italo Calvino; the other from a former graduate student of mine. Here's how Calvino defined a classic: 'A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.' Yes, that's right: 'The Great Gatsby,' like all great art, is inexhaustible, bottomless, still talking to its time and to ours. The central events of the novel take place during the summer of 1922. The story is set on Long Island ('that slender riotous island') and in New York City, and the novel's restless excursions into the city make 'Gatsby' the first Great American Urban Novel. (In contrast, Huck and Ahab are out there on the wide-open waters of the Mississippi and the Briny Deep, respectively.) And what a city New York was in 1922, when Fitzgerald patronized its bookstores, breakfast cafeterias and speakeasies. It was a center of modernity (skyscrapers! radio!) and a testing ground for democracy in its crowded streets. A second great wave of immigrants, largely from Europe, was being uneasily absorbed into the existing population, as were Black people internally migrating from Southern farmlands to Northern cities after World War I. 'The white race will be — will be utterly submerged,' huffs Tom Buchanan, Fitzgerald's embodiment of a dinner party eugenicist, who gives voice to the racist and nativist anxieties of the 1920s and anticipates those of our own time. Whether or not the promise of America is truly extended to everyone — think of those Valley of Ashes dwellers bypassed by the novel's fancy roadsters and commuter trains — is one of the animating and eternally relevant concerns of the novel. I haven't forgotten that second quote, which captures the peculiar magic of 'The Great Gatsby.' Years ago, a graduate student who was reading it with me came into my office, sat down and declared: 'It's the Sistine Chapel of literature in 185 pages.' I locked eyes with him and asked, 'Can I quote you?' And I've been quoting him ever since. 'Gatsby' tells us that the American Dream is elusive — perhaps even a mirage — but it does so in language so gorgeous, it makes that dream irresistible. Fitzgerald said the novel was about 'aspiration,' and he himself never stopped aspiring for perfection in its composition. Princeton's Firestone Library has Fitzgerald's copy of the first printing of the first edition. I've had the privilege of paging through it. Everywhere, Fitzgerald has made changes in pencil after the novel has already been published. Had he lived longer, he probably never would have stopped tweaking. Fitzgerald's own literary aspiration produced a masterpiece; aspiration, 'The Great Gatsby' insists, is also the quality that distinguishes us as Americans. Listen to the enigmatic last words of novel, so resonant at this moment in our country, when our aspirations are both graceful and grotesque, elevated and avaricious: 'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. … So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' Gatsby is about reaching, striving, even though we know, inevitably, we'll fall short. No one has ever captured the yearning — not for who we are, but for who we want to be as Americans — in such a powerhouse amalgam of poetry, slang and oracular prose. We beat on and, thankfully, so does 'The Great Gatsby.' Maureen Corrigan is the author of 'So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.' She is the book critic for 'Fresh Air' and an English professor at Georgetown University.
Telegraph
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Was this the most significant Hollywood duo in history?
They don't make 'em like this anymore. It's 1921, and William Daniels turns up for the umpteenth retake of a scene in Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives – only to find his cameras missing. 'I got a car and went after them,' he recalled. Alas, not only could Daniels not recover the kit, by the time he was back on location his lights had gone too. It turned out that the studio's new manager, Irving Thalberg, had confiscated the equipment and was calling time on the shoot. 'If you were not my superior,' von Stroheim snapped, 'I would smash you in the face'. 'Don't let that stop you,' came Thalberg's cool reply. What really goaded von Stroheim was Thalberg's age. At the time of this dressing-down Thalberg was just 22. 'Since when,' von Stroheim sneered, 'does a child supervise a genius?' Sorry, Erich, you're in the wrong game. No film-lover doubts your genius, but if you wanted to use it unsupervised you would have been better off writing poetry. In the movie business – and before they're anything else, the movies are a business – the talent takes orders from the suits. Thalberg wasn't merely a money man. Though he never wanted to write, he had spent his sickly childhood reading the great novelists and philosophers. A devotee of William James, he had an instinctive feel for the pragmatics of storytelling, how to tighten and tune a tale until it sang. In The Last Tycoon, F Scott Fitzgerald, who worked for Thalberg at MGM, reimagined him as Monroe Stahr – a visionary Icarus who 'saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and… came here from choice to be with us at the end'. Sadly for Thalberg, that end wasn't far off. He was dead at 37 – a couple of years older than Mozart at his passing, a year younger than Caravaggio. Like Fitzgerald before him, Kenneth Turan is in no doubt that this was a tragedy. In his joint biography of Thalberg and Thalberg's father-figure champion, Louis B Mayer, the former movie critic of the Los Angeles Times goes in for some startlingly old-fashioned film aesthetics. Forget the auteur theory that dominates popular talk on the cinema. Though Mayer and Thalberg always insisted their names not appear on the finished product, they were, Turan argues, always the guys who called the shots. Not that they were martinets. Thalberg's run-ins with von Stroheim are justly famous, but anyone with a cool head can see that while the director was a genius he was also a goofball. Hitchcock once said that the length of any movie should be determined by the endurance of the human bladder. Von Stroheim's rough cut of Greed clocked in at nine hours-plus. Ordered to trim some fat, he got it down to a mere five-and-a-half – at which point Thalberg reached for his shears. Von Stroheim aside, everyone else got on well with Thalberg. Men liked him because if they followed orders he left them to their own devices. Women liked him because he left them alone. Happily married to one of MGM's biggest stars, Norma Shearer, he invited girls to his office not to put the moves on them but to ask what movies they liked. 'When you've got a picture women want to see,' he explained, 'the men have to go along. A woman can always keep a man away from a picture that attracts only him.' No, it isn't exactly feminism, but nor is it sexism, and it resulted in some of the best 'women's pictures' there are: Camille, Queen Christina, Anna Karenina. (Incidentally, Mayer was only slightly less morally exemplary. Save the odd bottom-pinch, the closest he got to the casting-couch was placing his hand on the young Judy Garland's chest as he encouraged her to sing from the heart.) Eventually, of course, Thalberg and Mayer fell out. Though Mayer was the boss with the bigger pay cheque, he was far less cultured than Thalberg, and he came to resent the man Hollywood went on calling 'the boy wonder'. As Thalberg's demands for pay-hikes and profit-shares got louder, Mayer gradually edged him out. In 1933, Thalberg suffered a massive heart attack (his second) and demanded a year off to recuperate. Mayer hired his son-in-law, David O Selznick, as stand-in. A few weeks later, Thalberg was advised that his job had been abolished. In 1936, he died. Turan, who calls Mayer and Thalberg's partnership 'arguably the most consequential in Hollywood history', tries his best to make a weepie of all this. Fair enough, although he never faces the basic fact: though MGM always made more money than its rivals, next to Warner Brothers or RKO it was an also-ran in the quality department. For every 80-minute masterpiece like Red Dust, there was a four-hour clunker like Gone with the Wind; for every moody melodrama like Anna Christie, there was a soporific sudser like Grand Hotel. As for the Marx Brothers, only a blockhead could find their work for MGM (A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races) more fun than their work for Paramount (Horse Feathers, Duck Soup). Maybe it's for the best that they don't make like 'em that any more.
Fox News
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Jack Nicholson reached out to ex Anjelica Huston when her home was threatened in LA wildfires
Jack Nicholson was ready to support his ex, Anjelica Huston, during the recent LA wildfires. Huston revealed Nicholson reached out when she was evacuating from her home last month in a recent interview with The Guardian. "I was in a car with three dogs, two cats, and the housekeeper, and he called and asked if I was all right, and if I had someplace I was staying," she told the outlet. "That's the bottom line with he and I – when the chips are down, he's there," she said. Huston's home survived, but it was a close call. "My house almost burned down. It came very, very close. My electricity and water and power are still off, but we were safe," she said. The 73-year-old was able to flee to a ranch she owns – home to seven donkeys, six horses and numerous dogs and cats. Nicholson and Huston were in an on-again-off-again relationship for 17 years, from 1973 to 1990, starring in three films together, "Prizzi's Honor," "The Last Tycoon" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice." The actor was unfaithful throughout the relationship and things ended for good in 1990 when he fathered a child with another woman. Looking back on their relationship, Huston said, "I loved him. I think in the world that I was living in, it wasn't disrespectful. It was how he was, and it wasn't so personal. I think as soon as I clocked that, it was all right, I knew how to protect myself. It didn't make me happy, but I knew what I was doing." "I did what I wanted to do, and I did it with sureness," she continued. "If I wanted something, I knew how to go after it, so it wasn't as though anything was being done to me. I wasn't a wilting flower." "That's the bottom line with he and I – when the chips are down, he's there." Huston married sculptor Robert Graham in 1992, staying with him until his death in 2008. Nicholson has a reported six children altogether: Jennifer Nicholson, 59, whom he shares with his first and only wife Sandra Knight, Caleb Goddard with Susan Anspach, Honey Hollman, 42, with model Winnie Hollman (though he has never formally acknowledged paternity), Lorraine and Ray Nicholson with actress Rebecca Broussard, and Tessa Gourin, who claims she is the actor's illegitimate daughter with Jennie Gourin, though he has never publicly addressed the claim. The 87-year-old made his first public appearance in two years during the "SNL" 50th celebration special earlier this month, with his daughter Lorraine. He was on hand to introduce Adam Sandler, with whom he starred in the 2003 film "Anger Management." "Yeah, baby! Let's hear it for Jack, baby! Jack made it out tonight! Love you, brother," Sandler said from the mic.
