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I've only watched a couple episodes of Mad Men, but the Times Magazine article on the series has some interesting tidbits, including interviews with advertising executives from the era. So was it really so drunken and freewheeling and crazy? Well, opinions differ:
George Lois, the legendary art director who co-founded Papert Koenig Lois in 1960 and recently had an exhibition of the iconic covers he designed for Esquire magazine at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, says: “When I hear ‘Mad Men,’ it’s the most irritating thing in the world to me. When you think of the ’60s, you think about people like me who changed the advertising and design worlds. The creative revolution was the name of the game. This show gives you the impression it was all three-martini lunches.”Wasn’t it?“Of course not, are you serious?” he retorts. “We worked from 5:30 in the morning until 10 at night. We had three women copywriters. We didn’t bed secretaries. I introduced Xerox. It was hard, hard work and no nonsense. ‘Mad Men’ is typical of ‘The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,’ those phony S.O.B.’s. I was a Greek bigmouth, a Korean War veteran. I used my ethnicity to promote my talent. Before you knew it, most of the great creative talent was Italian, Greek and Jewish. We broke through the terrible WASP-ness of the business.”[...]Della Femina, who is now 69, says drinking abounded. “People had bottles in their drawers,” he recalls. “For lunch, we used to go to the Italian Pavilion, which is now where Michael’s is” (he’s referring to the media power spot on West 55th Street). “The bar was still in the same place, and the bartender would start shaking our martinis as soon as we walked in. They would literally serve us the first martini as we were sitting down, the second, the third, then we would figure out what to eat. It was such a wild time, and the best period for advertising, so much looser. We had Blue Nun, which was a terrible wine to sell to people. If there were a Nuremberg trial for selling bad wine, we should have been hanged.”I tell him about George Lois’s reaction to the show. Della Femina laughs. “I love George,” he says. “Maybe he was working that hard, but he had some of the all-time great drinkers working for him. I guess it’s Rashomon. I always said advertising was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. At this stage in life, it’s the most fun you could have with your clothes off too.”Presumably, this is how blogging will be remembered. "Yeah, youd walk into the coffee shop, and they'd start making your latte immediately..."
