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The Real Mad Men & Women of Washington
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In "Mad Men," aired on AMC and produced by Lionsgate, overt sexual harassment is an office sport and racial and religious castes are strictly enforced. But today's workplace is not free of such ugliness, noted Matthew Weiner, the show's creator.
"Most of the racist and sexist lines I've written for the show, I've overheard in my life," Weiner, 42, said in a recent interview, citing today's Hollywood, Wall Street and ad agencies as sources of the offensive dialogue.
At agencies in the early '60s, women generally rose no higher than secretary. Often, they were brought into pitch meetings to make male clients more comfortable, "to remind them of a domestic situation," Weiner said.
Cary Hatch, 52, president of Washington's MDB Communications, entered the ad industry in 1978 and largely avoided the almost-perfunctory lechery depicted on "Mad Men."
Even in 1978, however, almost all women still started at agencies as secretaries, she said, though she got lucky: Her talents landed her in the art department instead of behind a Selectric. For the photo accompanying this article, Hatch enjoyed dressing like an office vamp of the "Mad Men" era, all curves and cunning, complete with up-do and heavy eye makeup.
But she said she never had to be that kind of woman to succeed in the workplace, though she received her share of ogling as a young ad woman. She recalled one time when she and a male colleague had just pitched an idea to an advertiser.
"On the way out, I heard [the advertiser] tell my colleague, 'And when you come back, bring sweet cheeks with you,' " Hatch said. "So much for my good ideas. It was more about my view from the rear."
Ronald C. Owens, 69, who co-founded Arlington's Laughlin, Marinaccio & Owens, left the integrated U.S. Army as an officer in 1970 and entered an industry short on minorities. "I was the only fly in the buttermilk," he said.
Intrigued by advertising, Owens found the agency that held the then-tiny U.S. Army account. Playing a hunch, he convinced the firm that the Army account would grow if the draft ended and that the company could use a military man to help manage it. Three years later, when President Nixon established the all-volunteer Army, Owens was proved right. His firm, Philadelphia's N.W. Ayer & Son, crafted the legendary Army slogan "Be all you can be."
Had Owens left the Army 10 years earlier and landed a job at "Mad Men's" fictional Sterling Cooper agency, "I would have been in the mailroom or in some other menial position," he said. Black characters on the show either run the elevators or push a sandwich cart, something Owens witnessed at New York agencies in the '70s.
Before starting his own company, Owens passed up opportunities to go to the smaller, black-run firms that started to pop up in the late '70s and early '80s, as advertisers began to realize that niche ads aimed at minority buyers should no longer be overlooked.
Luis Vasquez-Ajmac and Wesley I. Combs have built their careers on just such niche markets.
