Roger Sterling, freshly divorced, has his mojo back just in time for the stay of the Calvets at the Draper residence. It’s not the divorce so much as the fact that Roger has recently dropped acid, which through bathtub visions of baseball and other hallucinatory insights has provided him with enough impetus to get back to work both in and out of the office.
In fact the business prospects of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce play a prominent role in ‘At the Codfish Ball’, but the office is really just a conduit for affairs of the heart, as it has been for Don since the beginning of the season and his marriage to Megan. In this episode Megan scores with her first big pitch, while Roger sees a lavish dinner hosted by the American Cancer Society as an opportunity to reestablish his credentials.
‘At the Codfish Ball’ is an episode all about embracing change and then wishing you’d been a little more circumspect. Megan manages to reel in Heinz with a concept that imagines baked beans through the ages, mother feeding child from the dankest caves of the distant past to some interplanetary future. In the process she pulls the deal out of the fire: the Heinz executive Raymond Geiger was just about to drop the agency following a series of failed pitches from Peggy.
The new concept hits the spot, capturing the zeitgeist for space and carrying some semblance of an appeal across the generations, but Raymond has also been waiting on Don with bated breath, hoping to be spoon-fed some tasty morsel. We get the sense that he is more susceptible to a pitch from Don, backed up by his willing wife at the end of dinner, than he ever was in an office setting with the upstart Peggy.
The pitch was Megan’s idea, and she played her hand to perfection, so at the office the following morning she rightly receives most of the credit. Peggy could understandably feel irked after putting in so much work on Heinz, but she has other things on her mind and instead basks in a little bit of womanly advice, though she looks slightly perturbed as Megan wanders off to savour the moment.
For Megan that means a shopping spree with her mother Marie and Don’s daughter Sally. An accident at the Francis household as Pauline trips over a telephone cord forces Don to tend for Sally and Bobby, bringing three generations under one roof in his and Megan’s luxury apartment. Megan’s parents are in from Montreal, with her professorial father Emile expecting to meet with his publishers, but for the time being he and Marie excel only in the art of the putdown. He makes crude insinuations regarding her class and character, while she steadily chips away at any pretence of scholarly success.
In the meantime Peggy’s boyfriend Abe has visited the office and left in a hurry. We wonder whether he might have been put off by all of the bawdy talk around breasts and cup sizes, but it turns out there’s something more at play. Joan convinces Peggy that a proposal is coming, but instead Abe wants them to move in together: a big step for any couple and emblematic of sixties generational change. Peggy comes round to the idea, following more words of wisdom from Joan who manages to gloss up some of the hard-won sentiment. Needless to say Peggy’s devoutly Catholic mother does not approve.
Megan’s successful pitch for Heinz sees Don relinquish an unusual amount of professional authority. Typically he takes charge and shapes the direction of a campaign or tosses it off entirely: rarely does he play spokesperson for somebody else’s work. After their triumph over dinner he lavishes Megan with praise in the back of a taxi, and the pair make a quick stop back at the office at the behest of some time alone.
Roger is also in a conciliatory frame of mind as he seeks help from his ex-wife Mona. In her personal life, Peggy still does not march to the beat of her own drum. Her relationship with Abe seems to be moving forward, but she appears increasingly comfortable amid the ribaldry of the office and has clashed before with his self-seriousness and idealistic airs. She continues to tear herself apart in an attempt to appease her mother, who tells Peggy that Abe is just using her for practice, bluntly diagnosing a fear of loneliness and prescribing for her daughter a lifelong series of cats.
As Sally matures and continues to face a fractious home life, she increasingly forces her way into Don’s self-contained world. In the fifth season of Mad Men the character has become a powerhouse with as much interior complexity as anyone else in the show. In ‘At the Codfish Ball’, it is Sally who frames the narrative and delivers with disdain the final word.
In a telephone conversation with Glen, who lingers in the corridors of his dorm at boarding school, Sally makes fun of her step-grandmother Pauline, who she calls ‘Bluto’. When the bloated bully falls and injures herself, it is over Sally’s outstretched telephone cord. At Don’s place, Sally cannily passes the blame onto one of baby Gene’s toys, before reluctantly taking credit for her response to the crisis, which saw her contact an ambulance and put ice on Pauline’s foot.
While Bobby plays with one of Emile’s fountain pens, using the carpet as a blotter, Sally seamlessly makes a good impression on the guests. She earns an invite to the big American Cancer Society dinner, where Don is to be feted for his letter which excoriated the smoking industry after the agency lost its longtime client Lucky Strike.
Megan has bought Sally a new dress for the occasion, and when she emerges in all of her youthful glitz and glamour, Emile in his thick French accent reminds Don, ‘There is nothing you can do. No matter what, one day your little girl will spread her legs and fly away’. Mad Men is rarely so gratuitously crude, which makes the quip that bit funnier. Sally can still wear the dress, but the makeup and boots must go.
‘At the Codfish Ball’ captures beautifully the anticipation and inevitable deflation of any marquee event. Pete Campbell is an irresistible disappointment as the handsome prince who welcomes Sally and company to dinner at the American Cancer Society, immediately whisking Don away to meet with Ed Baxter, who is Ken Cosgrove’s high-powered father-in-law.
The episode is named after a song-and-dance routine from the Shirley Temple vehicle Captain January, which was a box office smash upon its release in 1936. In the film Temple’s character is rescued at sea and taken in by a lighthouse keeper, whose bond is salvaged when her extended family members make him the helmsmen of her own private yacht.
In the extended dance sequence, Temple sings ‘Come along and follow me / to the bottom of the sea. / We’ll join in the jamboree / at the codfish ball’. Despite its success, Captain January has gained a degree of notoriety for its shoddy animal welfare practices and a critical notice by the eminent English author Graham Greene, who was eventually sued for dwelling too long on Temple’s childish rump and alleged coquetry.
When Sally arrives at the American Cancer Society dinner, her first thought is that there can be no ballroom without a staircase. Still she finds herself at the centre of a vertiginous company, entertained by a rapidly expanding family which encompasses not only her newly acquired step-grandparents and family friend Roger, but the likes of Pete and Ken and other assorted well-wishers and hangers-on.
The highlight of the episode flashes again and again in Roger’s easy repartee with Sally, to whom he serves as a sort of chaperone while incorporating her as his wingman. She is to take all of the business cards which he manages to acquire over the course of the evening, offering words of encouragement while stashing them in her purse. In the meantime she tries out the fish.
Pete provides Emile with a dazzling example of his talents as an accounts man. Sally gets a baked Alaska for dessert, and when she accuses Roger of interrupting the speeches, he joshingly calls her a mean drunk. ‘At the Codfish Ball’ makes the smart decision to skip Don’s acceptance speech: the grandstanding has already occurred around the Heinz pitch earlier in the episode, and what we’re really watching now is a family gathering. When we dissolve back to the dinner table, the high spirits are dissipating and the emotions begin seeping out.
Megan has seemed loathe to embrace the acclaim of the office. Perhaps she was worried about upsetting Peggy, and perhaps she is suffering the first flush of impostor syndrome especially in view of her prestigious position as Don’s wife. Either way her shopping spree with Marie and Sally seemed only partially celebratory, more like a means of escape.
Now over dinner her father identifies the nature of her discomfort. He suggests that she has settled for a life of humdrum materialism, effectively using Don’s wealth and profession as an easy way out. He chides her for foregoing her passion, which was previously for acting. And no doubt there is some truth to what Emile is saying, but as Megan rightly points out this is neither the time nor the place.
For a start it’s a parents job to open doors, not to dig trenches. If Megan was already having doubts about her new career path, Emile’s intervention only makes the mood more downbeat. Besides Emile has been bickering all episode with his wife, from whom he is emotionally detached and who has labelled him a perennial disappointment. Most of his interactions in ‘At the Codfish Ball’ carry this sense of wounded pride and ready antagonism, laden with a sneering albeit eloquent spite.
Meanwhile Marie has been seducing Roger at the bar, flattering his youthful vim and rekindled ambition. Inadvertently Sally has served as a wingman to more than Roger’s business interests: his wit and charm with Sally has piqued Marie’s curiosity all night. Now Sally leaves the dinner table in search of the ladies’ room, and stumbles upon Marie giving Roger a blow job in the dark. The moment casts a pall not only over her evening and her relationship with Roger, but over adulthood writ large. Ballrooms and fancy dresses are not confined to fairy tales: in the real world everything serves a purpose, and it’s rarely chivalrous.
The other shoe also drops for Don. In ‘Blowing Smoke’, the penultimate episode of the fourth season, we get to indulge in a rare fist pump as Don responds to the loss of Lucky Strike with a full-page ad in The New York Times. Railing against the tobacco industry, his letter is slow to bear fruit but succeeds in changing the conversation around Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. The bold move feels like a win for Don, and a statement of intent on behalf of a flagging agency.
Not least it won him the invite to dinner with the American Cancer Society, and the opportunity to add some illustrious names to his little black book. Now as the celebrations die down, Ed Baxter explains to Don that his letter won him plenty of admiration but no trust. Nobody will do business with someone who might turn on them in public. Don can only hope that Ed is just a mean drunk.
There is a wonderful rhythm to the final sequence which leaves everybody crestfallen around the dinner table. Sally is disgusted beyond words, and Megan and Don have been left utterly despondent. Roger and Marie seem to make out best, succumbing not to change but to a youthful vision of themselves. Right on cue before the bossa nova beat of Antônio Carlos Jobim kicks in, Sally back at the apartment calls Glen and issues her verdict on the city. The grandeur of Manhattan has been covered in filth.
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Quotes
Emile to Don on Marie’s drinking habits: ‘I see she has convinced you that she’s particular. I’m to prove that she is not’.
Roger to Don ahead of the American Cancer Society dinner: ‘You’re gonna be like an Italian bride. People lining up to give you envelopes.’
Roger to Sally at the end of dinner: ‘I got you a Shirley Temple, it’s time to start tapering off’.
