From the season one episode ‘Babylon’ which first shines a light on Peggy Olson’s creative talents and makes explicit the affair between Roger and Joan to season four’s ‘The Beautiful Girls’ whose final shot features three women at a crossroads, an elevator triptych between Joan, Peggy and Dr. Faye, each go-around Mad Men tends to carve out at least one episode which focuses on the inner lives of its female characters.
But as season five draws to a somewhat grisly climax, foisting change on nearly all of the cast, it is the women who are often at the fore with ‘Lady Lazarus’ centred around Megan Draper’s decision to quit Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and return to acting before ‘Dark Shadows’ is framed by Betty’s progress at Weight Watchers and its near derailment as she reacts impulsively and with feelings of bitterness to the sight of Don’s new life with Megan at their luxe Park Avenue apartment in New York.
It is in ‘Christmas Waltz’ that Pete tells Don and the rest of the partners that they are back in with a shout for the Jaguar account, a major prize as in Don’s own words when he delivers a stirring speech to the gathered employees at the end of the episode, ‘Every agency on Madison Avenue is defined by the moment they got their car’. ‘When we land Jaguar’ he adds with aplomb and vigour, rousing the staff for a hard slog which will cover the Christmas period into the middle of January, ‘the world will know we have arrived’.
‘The Other Woman’ is crunch time for the Jaguar account, with Don set to pitch the automobile company as the creatives rack their brains for a suitable tagline which might make them stand out. It is therefore a pivotal moment for the agency, long headed by Bert Cooper and Roger Sterling but defined by the creative flair of Don Draper, yet the episode in the end will leave Don stranded, ignorant and ultimately helpless as to the events which revolve around him as ‘The Other Woman’ instead emphasises those life-altering decisions made by Peggy, Megan and perhaps most of all Joan.
The crux of the episode is a decision foisted on Joan by Herb Rennet, the dealer manager for Jaguar with considerable sway over their decision-making process, and Pete Campbell the account executive and junior partner at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. With the creatives including Don drawing blanks back at the office it is Pete and his fellow account executive Ken Cosgrove’s job to lather Rennet up, taking him for dinner while learning about his desires for the Jaguar account. Rennet bluntly makes it known to Pete and Ken that he has but one desire, which is to spend a night with Joan who he lusts after having spied her on an earlier tour of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices. Ken cooly rebuffs Rennet but Pete in his own crass way lets the desire be known, and while Don twice objects to the consummation of the act the die unbeknownst to him has already been cast: everything is coming up emerald green.
Would the firm’s partners really be so crude and uncaring, at once fiendishly self-interested and in a way submissive or at least deferential, as to allow Joan to sleep with the man? Bert Cooper has the least business with Joan through the course of the series and is an arch pragmatist, so I don’t doubt that he would be content for such an arrangement to go ahead provided that it wasn’t too strongly coerced and that Joan still had her say. With Don storming out of an informal meeting on the subject in a display of outrage, as the gathering of the four remaining partners draws to a conclusion it is Bert who tells Pete to remind Joan that ‘she can still say no’. The tawdriness of the matter seems to prick at his pragmatism.
The other partners are all in the midst of complications concerning money, women or both. In swift succession during the course of season five Roger solicits his first wife Mona for assistance winning an account with the Firestone tire company then receives fellatio from Megan’s mother Marie at a ball for the American Cancer Society, which is honouring Don for his anti-smoking screed (both occurring in ‘At the Codfish Ball’).
Still reeling from what he feels has been his own life-altering experience with LSD – though the impact seems less mind-expanding than a renewal of his desire to succeed in the workplace, even where that means resorting to old habits and charms – he then bargains with Jane, his second wife with whom he is busy separating, at the cost of a new apartment to join him for dinner with the kosher brand Manischewitz, relying on her Jewishness to help him seal another deal. A successful dinner and Jane’s allure to the client’s son stirs Roger’s passions, and he and Jane have sex in her new apartment with both apparently agreeing the morning after that the encounter has poisoned the well (‘Dark Shadows’).
Then as the availability of the Jaguar account stokes business excitement, in ‘Christmas Waltz’ he suffers a different kind of personal disappointment when Joan rejects his offer to financially support or be otherwise involved in the life of their young son Kevin. While he never seems vindictive towards Joan and at first suggests that Pete should have told Rennet to ‘take a long walk’, in ‘The Other Woman’ he is perhaps returning the favour by foregoing sentiment or attachment and focusing instead simply on what’s best for one’s bank account. Plus as Roger says in ‘Christmas Waltz’ when he delivers to Joan from the reception a bouquet of roses, ‘How many times have I left you alone with a card from another man?’
Lane is mired in financial and legal crisis as he owes back taxes in the United Kingdom (the opening scene of ‘Christmas Waltz’). Scrambling for the funds or facing the threat of prison, he has extended the firm’s line of credit without informing the other partners then repeatedly encourages them to dole out hefty Christmas bonuses, all to no avail. So he surreptitiously forges Don’s signature on a cheque to himself that would cover the relevant taxes but remains caught in a quandary, waiting upon the forged ‘bonus’ while seeking some better way out.
Always straining to keep up appearances especially with his family, as the pressure builds Lane’s advice to Joan in ‘The Other Woman’ reflects his own selfish necessity as well as genuine moral concerns and some of the hard-won business acumen which he wishes had been his from the start. He harbours feelings for Joan but can also reckon intimately with the difficulties of her situation because his own crisis has left him almost out of rope.
And meanwhile Pete is still lusting after Beth, the wife of a neighbour and fellow Manhattan commuter who he slept with in a fit of passion in ‘Lady Lazarus’. The prospect of the Jaguar account is his pride and purpose while the women in his life have become a subject of rancour. If Pete is one of the characters who grows most markedly during the decade-long course of Mad Men, still ‘The Other Woman’ finds him back at his sleazy worst, offering another contrast with the virtuous Ken Cosgrove who has dismissed Rennet’s overtures and also tries to console Peggy, who is suffering her own hardships and uncertainties, though Ken gets scant reward for his more noble efforts.
In the end of course Joan does get to choose what happens. And her immediate sense of indignation and revulsion over the idea – a revulsion which would be heightened tenfold if she understood to whom Pete was referring, the Jaguar dealer manager with his seedy, self-satisfied smirk, his receding hairline and corpulent bulk – probably cedes into a sense of indignation at Pete for posing the question before giving way to more practical concerns. Forced to be a pragmatist by her times and circumstances, Joan is forthright at work and can occasionally blow up at the underlings as she shows when she savages the office receptionist in ‘Christmas Waltz’ for allowing the wrong person into the building. But when it comes to sexual matters her history with married men like Roger and her own devastating relationship with Greg – a liar and a rapist – has taught her to keep schtum.
The fact that she doesn’t blow up at Pete gives her time to consider the practicalities of the proposed arrangement, whose financial benefits might secure not only her own future but that of her son. Those considerations are given an extra tweak or push when she arrives home late from work and is forced to contend with her embittered and overly opinionated mother. The following day Lane further tilts the balance when he suggests that instead of a one-off payment of $50,000 – an amount which would coincidentally end his prospect of a Christmas bonus – she might secure a partnership stake in the company yielding an annual five percent. The choice she makes then is one of somber and seething empowerment rather than borne of desperation or purely coerced.
There is a complex layering between ‘Christmas Waltz’ and ‘The Other Woman’ when it comes to the relationship between Don and Joan. He almost pimps her out himself in ‘Christmas Waltz’ after their heart to heart at the bar in one of Mad Men‘s most celebrated scenes.
Joan has been served with divorce papers by her estranged and abusive husband Greg, which prompts Don to whirl her away to a Jaguar showroom where they pose as a couple and ask to test drive the company’s sleek little speedster, an E-Type in candy red. Stopping off at a bar they reminisce and query why they never tried going together with Don professing that Joan ‘scared the shit’ out of him as he was intimidated by her apparently stern and self-possessed character. Don recalls Joan receiving so many flowers at work that he thought she must be dating Aly Khan, while Joan says that her mother raised her to be admired. Spotting a lone admirer of Joan at the other end of the bar, Don offers to return the Jaguar solo and hands her a bit of ‘mad money’ in case the dalliance doesn’t work out. We then cut to a scene of Don, his face a vision of grim intensity, as he throttles the E-Type.
It is at work the following day that Joan receives her bouquet of roses, delivered by Roger from the reception but presumably sent by Don as the card reads ‘Your mother did a good job. Ali Khan’. On the one hand he seems to have consoled a friend while intuiting her wants and needs without judgement, but on the other hand he almost seems to have stage-managed a curious sequence of events from their posing as a couple to him leaving Joan alone at the bar and then sending her a bouquet of flowers as though to cap their one-night stand.
Towards the end of ‘The Other Woman’ when Pete brings Joan into Roger’s office as one of their fellow partners, waiting intently on the results of Jaguar’s telephone call, Don realises later than everyone else that she has had sex with Rennet and made something out of it. His ensuing vexation seems more about the devaluation of his own work. He no longer believes that the Jaguar account was won thanks to his pitch and is left somewhat emasculated, his big bold and virile presentation all just for show. In a kind of abstract reading then Joan has defied Don and eschewed his control as much as anybody else’s.
From the same sort of perspective Pete is in fact quite candid with Joan. While he tries to make her feel guilty over the future of the firm should they fail to win the Jaguar account, he lacks the influence and charisma to compel any one course of action or to encourage others to see things precisely his way. While he can certainly be sleazy his attempts to be conniving or coercive are always affected and in the end thinly transparent. What he’s saying to her then becomes no more than ‘Look, this is the situation, and there’s something in it for you if you help us all out’.
While we wait on Joan’s decision ‘The Other Woman’ also centres the career prospects of Don’s wife Megan and his self-described ‘protégé’ in Peggy. The mood between Megan and Don vacillates over the course of the episode as they continue to stake out the ground now that she has left the advertising agency and returned to the stage. For Don her decision to forego a promising career in advertising is a blow to his own creative self-esteem and that resentment mixes with an indifference towards high art and his low expectations regarding her future prospects, but he doesn’t want her to fail as much as he’s wary of the change. Megan seems fully committed to the life of an aspiring actress but probably knowing Don’s attitude and temperament, she isn’t always forthcoming about what such a life entails.
Straight after the dinner between the Jaguar bigwig Rennet and Pete and Ken, in ‘The Other Woman’ we see Megan and Don at home in their bedroom. We learn that she has won an audition for a play, which will turn out to be Little Murders, a black comedy by the renowned satirist Jules Feiffer which in real life opened on Broadway in 1967 starring Elliott Gould, Barbara Cook and David Steinberg before later being adapted and directed by Alan Arkin on film.
Don is surprised at the news but a nervous Megan quickly changes the subject, which gives Don the opportunity to probe her (at first somewhat chidingly) for help with the tagline for his Jaguar pitch. She asks him about the strategy, and he sums it up saying ‘Jaguar is beautiful, but unreliable. It comes with a toolkit the size of a typewriter. You basically have to own another car to go places, so we’re saying it’s your gorgeous mistress’. ‘So a wife is like a Buick in the garage’ Megan swiftly retorts, effectively excusing herself from the conversation while Don – heedless to the analogy and focused with a certain bloody-mindedness on the task at hand – explains that the word mistress will not be in the ad.
We next see Megan immediately prior to her audition when she and her friend Julia surprise Don at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. He is hunkering down with his junior creatives in an endeavour to crack that tagline which is now stretching into the night, so late in fact that Don is asleep in a chair and it is Julia who wakes him by putting her hands over his eyes. The other creatives – a gathering which includes the copywriter Ginsberg and the art director Stan – tease Megan for a few ideas to which she responds ‘Jaguar: it’s your problem not mine’ before whisking Don away to his executive office. And as her friend Julia puts on a show for the remaining staff members Megan has her way with her husband, referring to her imminent audition and whispering ‘I wanna walk in there with confidence’ as she begins to straddle him on his couch.
Ginsberg who feels locked in a battle of wits with Don, having had the ground cut out from underneath him in ‘Dark Shadows’ when Don spurns his pitch for the Sno Ball account, stands gazing through the glass walls of the meeting room in the direction of Don’s office, even though Julia is busy crawling across the table on all fours and pawing at the air like a jaguar while revealing her undergarments. ‘She just comes and goes as she pleases, huh?’ he says aloud to nobody in particular, referring to Megan, at which Stan responds ‘Ginsberg!’ while gesturing back towards Julia in the midst of her burlesque act. ‘Yeah, I got it’ he says with a sigh before continuing to gaze ponderously ahead.
In fact what Megan prompts in Ginsberg’s mind is the winning tagline for the Jaguar pitch. The next day he wanders into Don’s office and after asking for permission to ‘speak freely’ explains that he has kept imagining ‘the asshole who’s gonna want this car, and how he’s probably already got a lot of beautiful things’. Elaborating on his idea (and referencing the episode’s title), he tells Don that ‘the copy is still describing the car as another woman, but a woman you can’t have, because they have all the qualities of a Jaguar: good looking, expensive, fast and frankly not practical’.
Lighting a cigarette, between drags Don says ‘I’ve always been fine with all that’ blowing an air of exasperation as he adds ‘but what’s the line?’. After a pregnant pause Ginsberg delivers, with ‘Jaguar: at last something beautiful you can truly own’. Don stares wide-eyed before swiftly reckoning with the idea, his pupils darting and his eyelids drooping closed with a deep sigh of satisfaction as Ginsberg clasps his hands and punches the air in triumph.
In the meantime however that moment of abandon between Megan and Don in his office has given way to rancour back at home. The morning after her audition Megan tells Don that she has received a callback for Little Murders, and he duly congratulates her with a quick peck on the lips. He does not realise however that rehearsals for the play are scheduled to begin in ten days time in Boston, and when Megan says ‘You have to promise you’ll come visit every weekend’ he blows up. She tells him that if she gets the part, she will be committing to eight weeks of rehearsals plus previews and he tells her to ‘forget it’ if she’s thinking of leaving him alone for three months. Megan chastises Don for not bothering to think through the details or ramifications of her chosen career, which she takes as another sign that he expects her to fail. And in an echo of the still gestating plans for the Jaguar pitch, ‘Just keep doing whatever the hell you want’ he shouts after her as she storms out the room.
They have previously fought in ‘Christmas Waltz’ where Megan throws her own plate of food against the wall after Don arrives home late and drunk from his dalliance with Joan. She is putting her foot down and with a certain dramatic flair as she bemoans his current indifference to work, worrying that she is the cause, while telling him to sit down and eat his dinner, acting like a girl and speaking to him like a little boy.
But she isn’t jealous of Joan in particular and nor does she have any reason to be. When he and Joan abscond from work to take the E-Type for a spin before landing at a bar, they clink glasses and Don takes a first sip from his old fashioned before telling Joan ‘I don’t know what it is, that car does nothing for me’. In his words and his manner and again in his leaving, there is the implication that while friends he and Joan are just along for the ride.
Megan’s callback for Little Murders takes place between the Jaguar pitch and Peggy’s meeting with a rival advertising firm. One moment amid a flurry of episodes which probe women’s sexuality and contemporary attitudes towards it – the ways in which women are reduced to sexual objects at home and in the workplace and are oftentimes forced into the most comprising of situations, but can also sometimes use their sexuality to subvert expectations and get what they want – here Megan in front of the playwright and two other male decision makers is reduced to a skirt, as she is called ‘sweetheart’ and asked to do a twirl. She doesn’t get the part and back at home reconciles with Don, though she also warns him that if he makes her choose between him and her acting prospects ‘I’ll choose you, but I’ll hate you for it’.
The preceding sequence reveals that Joan has slept with Rennet, and is handled with both cuteness and aplomb by the director Phil Abraham and writers Semi Chellas plus the show’s creator Matthew Weiner, who interweave the punchiness and aspirational quality of Don’s big Jaguar pitch with the seediness and wilting glamour of the night before. We learn that Don’s last-ditch visit to Joan’s apartment was too little, too late as she robes and disrobes in a way that masks her prior engagement. Don thinks he can still influence Joan and while she appreciates the gesture, calling him a ‘good one’ after previously believing that even he had been willing to have her sleep with Rennet for the sake of a deal, it is not clear that his earlier interjection would have made any difference to the outcome. The decision to have sex with Rennet was ultimately her own.
Owing to a decision which she made at the end of the first season, Peggy is not encumbered like Joan with the need to support a young child. That allows her to take different chances with her career with ‘The Other Woman’ setting both her and the show on an uncharted path.
Don really gets the ball rolling albeit inadvertently when he throws a wad of cash in Peggy’s face. Amid the brewing furore over Herb Rennet’s indecent proposal, Peggy scores a minor triumph when she manages to reorient an advertising campaign for Chevalier Blanc cologne ahead of Valentine’s Day. The new ad will be broadly the same as the last – a riff on the popularity of the Beatles and their film A Hard Day’s Night, with a leather-clad hero being swamped by fans as he makes a bold getaway – only Peggy’s version will feature Lady Godiva on horseback and take place in Paris in a bid to appeal to the purchasing power of wives and girlfriends.
Her quick thinking saves the campaign, but when she, Ken and the television honcho Harry Crane bring the good news to Don he is feeling vexed, having just walked out on an ad-hoc meeting of the partners which was called by Pete to discuss Joan’s situation. Don assumes that any commercial in Paris will involve Ginsberg who was originally managing the Chevalier Blanc account, and when Peggy protests he raises his voice, saying ‘Jesus. Peggy, you know what, you wanna go to Paris – here, go to Paris’ as he pulls a wad of notes out of his trouser pocket and slings them brusquely in her general direction.
Peggy stews in her office and is almost as brusque to Ken who attempts to console or rally her after the incident. He is speaking as a friend when he promises her ‘I’ll get you to Paris, and if I don’t, we’ll both get out of here’ but Peggy dismisses his remarks, ascribing them to an attempt to renew their ‘stupid pact’ while telling Ken to ‘save the fiction for your stories’.
We already know that Peggy is peeved to have been shut out of the Jaguar account, with the creative process deemed a place for men only. As the likes of Ginsberg and Stan work under Don, straining for a winning idea, Peggy is put in charge of pretty much all other outstanding creative work at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, a show of faith if not quite a promotion. But to borrow a phrase she feels outcast from life’s feast, quite literally as the opening scene of ‘The Other Woman’ shows her pining through the glass while the Jaguar troopers receive a lobster lunch courtesy of Roger.
Peggy’s rising star is one of Mad Men‘s slow burns and while her frustration has been brewing over a long period there is nothing in the preceding episodes of season five to suggest that change is imminent. Just like Don, in ‘Dark Shadows’ she is irked by Ginsberg’s rising status and when Don takes him down a peg she can hardly conceal her pleasure.
But perhaps Ken’s words in ‘The Other Woman’ do resonate for the following day Peggy has lunch with Freddy Rumsen, formerly a senior copywriter at Sterling Cooper. While she jokes about having something to throw back in Don’s face, Freddy manages to convince her seemingly for the first time that a move to a new agency would not only stick it to Don and demand his respect but serve as the hard-headed decision to make if she truly wants to wring the best out of her career. In other words he appeals not just to her feelings but to her sense of personal and professional pride, making a switch seem almost obligatory as he offers – at the cost of a slice of pie – to put out some feelers and arrange a few meetings.
Don and his team – with Roger, Pete, Ken, Harry and Stan all in tow – march into the Jaguar pitch meeting like something out of The Magnificent Seven or Reservoir Dogs or even The Right Stuff and descendants like Armageddon, crossing paths in comic fashion with another firm who are on their way out of the showroom and all with nary a woman in sight. As they bask in the afterglow of a strong pitch – we see Don and Roger arrive back at the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices, where Roger tells Joan that ‘It was one of his good ones’ in an echo of her description of Don the night before – and Megan begins to make her way home from her demeaning Little Murders audition, Peggy is setting out for lunch with Ted Chaough of the rival firm which bears his name.
A successful adman who is a partner at Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough who at first appears in Mad Men as an antagonist to Don and seems to work in his shadow, Ted in the parlance of our own times makes Peggy feel seen. She takes him to the same cheap restaurant where she met Freddy and seems to want the meeting to be discreet and low-key, but he praises her work with Clearasil – her very first account – and quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as he extols her creative insight. She scrawls down the figure of $18,000 on a small white pad and he returns it having upped her prospective salary to $19,000 per annum, which causes Peggy to mutter ‘oh’ and furrow her brow. Now it’s real and she asks for a chocolate shake to settle her nerves as she ponders the major life decision which she in the process of making.
The climax of ‘The Other Woman’ revolves not around Joan’s ordeal or the firm’s success in procuring a major automobile account. Instead as the rest of the office toast and revel in their Jaguar victory, Peggy who was interrupted by the Jaguar call manages to get a moment alone with Don, who is at first glad of the distraction. In one of the show’s major scenes and another benchmark moment for Peggy and Don following such episodes as ‘The New Girl’ and ‘The Suitcase’, she is about to tell him that after almost seven years and a relationship which has veered between subordinate and boss or protégé and mentor with the odd prick of real friendship, now she is all set upon leaving.
At first Don just wants to drink, and when Peggy tells him that this is a serious discussion he begins speaking at cross purposes, telling her that the Jaguar guys won’t accept a girl on their account, then gesturing towards Joan’s situation as he defends her becoming a partner. Peggy is surprised but brushes the news off and gets to the heart of the matter. She tells Don that he changed her life and expresses deep thanks for their time together but says that she is leaving Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce having accepted another offer.
He reacts with surprise then tries to conciliate with an air of amused condescension, praising her for finally picking the right time to ask for a raise. But when Peggy holds firm and explains that she has agreed to move to Cutler, Gleason, and Chaough he stumbles through some of the other stages of grief, at once bitter and rueful and defiant as he offers to beat their offer then tells her that she needn’t bother with her two weeks notice. Finally Peggy holds out her hand. Looming above him in a way that is both awkward yet authoritative and even maternal for Don throughout their conversation has remained seated, she expects a firm shake but instead Don clasps her hand and goes to kiss it, holding her hand to his lips.
Jon Hamm has a brilliant capacity for looking effortlessly sleek and handsome in one moment only to contort his face, those veins bulging in his forehead as suddenly he assumes a greasy and pallid complexion almost like a death mask. Don’s gesture when he clasps Peggy’s hand isn’t that of a lothario though there is the vague sense that this is how he knows to act around defiant or disappointed women. Instead it’s a show of acute emotion, tenderness mixed with pain and no doubt a sense of abandonment as he realises the extent of his loss.
Elisabeth Moss who plays Peggy says that her tears in this moment were real, especially since the long clasping of her hand which takes in closeups of a pained, almost meditative Don and an emotional Peggy was not written in the script. When Mad Men finally ended after seven seasons, the burgundy dress which she wears in this episode was the only one she kept owing to its personal significance and meaning in the life of Peggy’s character. ‘The Other Woman’ doesn’t just mark a culmination in her relationship with Don but a broader stepping out beyond the confines of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce into the wider world, now as a professional woman who backs herself to succeed and has anyway embraced full control over her career.
Peggy leaves Don’s office and gathers up a few of her things, composing herself before walking with just a hint of a swing or sashay down the corridor of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce to the elevator. But see how Joan in the midst of the Jaguar festivities catches sight of Peggy on her way out, and notices it yet doesn’t follow after her.
The decisions they have made will boost their status and earning power, furthering the course of their chosen careers but those same decisions won’t bring them closer to their fellow woman and in some ways will serve to entrench the male perspectives which have already built up around them. It is the start of 1967 and women are becoming more and more prevalent in the workforce. This is even evident at an old-school agency like Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, and maybe Peggy and Joan can feel a gust of wind at their backs carrying them along to the next opportunity or predicament. As she takes one look back at her home for the past seven years, a smile of delight flickers over Peggy’s face as the riff from ‘You Really Got Me’ by the Kinks begins to rev its engines in one of Mad Men‘s bravura credits sequences. But as they get going and sweep the corner or crest the summit of their own personal hills it’s still a lone trek for these and all those aspiring other women.
