DAUGHTER OF A “MAD MAN” by Ellen Byron

Ellen has written over 200 articles for national publications and served on the Editorial Board for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program’s books,  Inside the Room and Cut to the Chase.  Ellen’s T.V. credits, shared with Lissa Kapstrom, include comedies Wings, Still Standing, Just Shoot Me,and the drama, Young Americans, as well as pilots for NBC, CBS, and Disney.

Most importantly Ellen is a good friend of WW&C.; she is a great mother, adoring wife and Lots of fun to be around.

We are looking forward to hearing Exclusive excerpts from  Ellen’s first mystery,

You Can Never Be Too Thin or Too Dead.

which won a coveted William F. Deeck-Malice Domestic Grant.

DAUGHTER OF A “MAD MAN”

Ellen Byron

            I think it was the first scene in the second episode of Mad Men where Roger Sterling told Don Draper that he’d “taken a steam with Jim Jordan.”  As soon as I heard that name, I gasped, paused the TV and called my mother.  Her instant response was, “That sonuvabitch died the death he deserved; he had a heart attack while scuba diving.”

To understand her vitriol, you need to know that my dad, Richard Seideman, was a real-live Mad Man.  And Jim Jordan was a real-live executive at the venerable advertising agency, BBDO.  He was also the man who fired my father.

Like many of his generation, Dad didn’t set out to work in advertising.  He wanted to be a “real writer.”  But he got married and needed to support a family, so it was goodbye, Great American Novel, and hello, Bread Pal.  (A product he worked on that combined peanut butter and jelly in one jar.  It was ahead of its time.)

Like Sally Draper, I occasionally visited my dad’s office.  I loved those visits.  I’d take boxes of silver paper clips from his desk and string them into necklaces.  The best was getting to visit the art department.  I remember graciously accepting the apologies of Dad’s art director after he accidentally sat on a statue of Statue of Liberty I’d made out of the department’s plasticine clay.  (My one quibble with the notoriously detail-obsessed Mad Men creator Matt Weiner – where are the fabulous carousels of magic markers that every art director had on his desk?)

I also loved the lingo of the office.  “Let’s run it up a flag pole and see if anyone salutes.”  “Let’s put it on a train and see if it gets off at Westport.”  Yes, they actually said stuff like that.

Dad was Don Draper if Don Draper had been Jewish, devoted to his wife, and didn’t look like, well, Don Draper.  So I guess he was really Michael Ginsberg.  Like Michael, Dad started his career at a “Jewish” agency, then made the jump to agencies that sounded more like WASP-y law firms than bastions of advertising creativity – Dancer, Fitzgerald, Sample (DFS), Kenyon & Eckhart (K&E), and of course the legendary Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborne (BBDO).  Dad was doing well enough to move us from a house in Queens to a bigger house in a better school district

.  But before he did, he checked in with Jim Jordan.  “I’m about to buy a house in Scarsdale,” he told his boss.  “I love my job.  I just need to know I’m good here.”  Jordan assured him that he was.

Six months after we moved, Jim Jordan told Dad that he could either relocate to Minneapolis and work full-time for his number one client, 3M, or he could leave the company.  I was young, but I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face when he came home from work that day as he climbed the stairs to have a private conversation with my mother in their bedroom.  Shocked.  Defeated.  Blindsided.

Dad left the company.

Even though Dad stayed in advertising until literally the day before his death, I don’t think he ever fully recovered from that moment.  Certainly his career was a roller coaster of decent to crappy agencies after that, until he and a friend started their own agency, Richard Rodd (RR).  But Dad really did love his job, and every client he had was the best client he’d ever had.

I met Matt Weiner when we picketed together during the 2007 WGA Writers Strike, and shared the Jim Jordan story with him as we marched back and forth in front of Universal Studios.  He told me that after the episode aired, he got a funny email from one of Jim Jordan’s daughters.  I’m not at liberty to share its contents, but suffice to say that Jordan and Draper weren’t that far removed from each other.

            My father never reached the financial or career heights of Jim Jordan.  But like Jordan, in the end Dad got what he deserved.  For Jordan, it was a somewhat creepy death.  For Dad, it was three kids who adored him, and followed in his footsteps to become writers.

As Mad Men journeys toward its end, I hope Don Draper finds some kind of redemption.  I hope that instead of being a Jim Jordan, he becomes a Richard Seideman.

He’d make his three kids very proud.