Source: GQ
Date: October 2010
By: Jonathan Heaf

As antihero adman Don Draper, he had us sold on Mad Men from the first pitch. Now, he’s moonlighting from Sterling Cooper to star in this month’s big-screen cop thriller The Town, and pick up a GQ gong.

“Who is Don Draper?”

For any one of the three million “Maddicts” who tuned into the stateside premiere of Mad Men series four on Sunday 25 July 2010, they’ll recognise this as the opening line in episode one – a question posed to Mr Draper by a chivvying reporter from Advertising Age in light of the new ad firm, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Don and his colleagues formed towards the end of series three.

But even for us poor television malcontents in Britain who must wait a further four months to bear witness to this box-fresh Mad Men material (and cable executives wonder why peer-to-peer piracy is still so fervent here in the UK) it’s a question recognised to be at the very core – the Martini-sodden heart – of the hit show’s popularity and, indeed, its propulsion into column inches, the quantity of which far exceed Mad Men’s moderate weekly audience figures.

Don Draper: fraudster, womaniser, drunk, creative genius, morally ambiguous letch, the office father figure, tortured soul, charlatan, traitor, Korean War vet, existentialist, the definitive self-made American archetype, the crown capitalist prince of Kennedy’s Sixties Camelot, a petulant has-been, a ballsy antihero, a dark star. Since Matthew Weiner now famously created the Sixties Madison Avenue character for a pilot back in 2000, which he later pitched while working on The Sopranos with David Chase, the adman – with his sharp suits, his whip-smart lasciviousness, his shady past, his manly, furrowed brow, the smouldering cherry at the tip of his Lucky – has ignited debate and caught TV audience imaginations like no other male television pin-up since, well, Tony Soprano.

“I’m into Jay Gatsby,” admits Weiner, when quizzed over the influences that effected the formation of Mad Men’s alpha male, “but it’s definitely an American archetype – as much drawn from Dick Diver [Tender Is The Night] as any one of those iconic males. I was also drawn to what influenced F Scott Fitzgerald himself – people like John D Rockefeller [the great American industrialist] and Sam Walton [the entrepreneur who founded Wal-Mart] who had such a huge impact on people’s lives commercially.”

Of course, deconstructing the script line for line and mining the chief architect of such an intelligently written series is always going to lead to some form of enlightenment. But what of the man who portrays Don Draper so fluently? What of the man who slips into Don’s shark-coloured, cotton two-piece with white pocket square as naturally as an Olympic swimmer slips into cool water? What of the man who, on auditioning for the part of Draper, prompted Matthew Weiner to turn to his casting director with absolute confidence and say, “That man was not raised by his parents”? Who does Jon Hamm – GQ’s International Man Of The Year 2010 – think Don Draper is?

The 39-year-old actor – on a rare break during filming series four, sitting in the Los Angeles home he shares with his girlfriend of 13 years, Jennifer Westfeldt, and Cora, their pit bull/German shepherd mix – laughs. “Personally,” he says, “I don’t get him.”

The road to success has been long and winding for Jon Hamm, specifically the route that connects his home town of St Louis, Missouri, to a bungalow in West Los Angeles where his uncle and aunt lived in the mid-Nineties. It was Thanksgiving weekend in 1995 when Hamm rolled into town in an old Corolla, his worldly possessions crammed into the boot and his life savings – “All of about 100 bucks; money has never been my thing” – stuffed into his jeans pocket. Make no bones about it: Hamm, then aged 24, was “looking for work, primarily – anything”, while also looking for a different life to the one he left behind.

Despite Hamm’s staunch loyalty to the St Louis baseball team (the Cardinals, formerly the Browns), the city back then held little appeal for a twentysomething young buck looking to wriggle his way out from an America in recession. His mother, Deborah, had moved to the city from Kansas aged 18, and after landing secretarial work had married an older widower, himself already with two daughters. Daniel Hamm, Jon’s father, made good money in the Seventies and Eighties, providing pack mules to haul goods from loaded boats up the banks of the Missouri River. As ship and barge technology overtook the need for literal horsepower, however, St Louis’ profitability began to fade, and with it Hamm Senior’s fortunes. Aged two, Jon’s parents divorced. And there was greater tragedy and sadness to come: eight years later, when Jon was just ten, his mother died suddenly of stomach cancer.

Sunk within the pages of a good book, clobbering a baseball bat on the sports field, even playing Winnie the Pooh while covered in yellow carpet fur on stage at a high-school play, was where an adolescent Jon Hamm found solace after his mother died. He loved sports, but as is so often the case, money – or rather a lack of it – was to define what Hamm did next. “I played both football and baseball at high school,” he explains, “but I excelled at academics also, and that’s the scholarship I ended up getting to the University of Texas. The problem with pursuing athletics was that you needed to go to the smaller, private, more expensive colleges – and I couldn’t afford to do that. Taking sports also would have meant a lot more time getting stacked up in the gym – my least favourite part of the whole process.”

While at university, however, Hamm’s home life would catch up and dent him once more. During his first term, his grandmother died, and during his second, on New Year’s Day 1991, his father was also found dead. The UT freshman was just 20.

If you’re looking for an influence into the dark kineticism of Don Draper, rather than refer to Fitzgerald or the capitalist mavericks of the early 20th century, you could do worse than look at Hamm’s father in his declining years, after his own prosperous company crumbled, and his wife past away. A widower, a proud, red-blooded male, 300lb and nicknamed “the Whale”, Daniel Hamm found himself engulfed and floundering within a rapidly changing world; a shifting, confidence-shunting culturequake. It doesn’t take a “Maddict” to join the dots. If that’s not enough, consider this: while looking for alternative employment, Hamm’s father spent a little time hawking second-hand cars, and a little time giving office life something of a moon shot. The line of business he dabbled in? Advertising, no less. “What every actor learns,” Hamm explains, “is that you should never tell any kind of intimate stories in front of a writer, because eventually, you’re going to see them pop up in the script somewhere.”

Today, the actor still keeps a photograph of his father pinned to the board in his office like some sort of talisman, or stimulus, should he ever forget the source of Don’s anxiety and hidden turmoil. “My dad was single for the last 20 years of his life and, you know, he was a sad guy. A very sad guy. And would look to me as one of the only good things in his life. It’s not so much direct inspiration as almost a signpost, a place I check into and think about while I’m telling stories. Because I had a very good relationship with my father; I got lots of attention and I was not a neglected child in any way, shape or form. But yeah, he was conflicted, tortured and a lonely guy. And I had a front row seat to that.”

Arriving in Los Angeles that Thanksgiving afternoon in 1995, his parents both dead, Jon Hamm did what every aspiring young actor would do – he got a job waiting tables, and he phoned a friend. That friend was Paul Rudd, the comedic actor who, at the time, was already meeting the right kind of people at the right kind of parties, and pressing the right kind of Hollywood exec flesh. Rudd and Hamm knew each other from back in Missouri through a mutual friend Rudd was bunking up with – getting stoned, eating chicken and playing Nintendo. “I didn’t know anybody out here back then,” says Hamm. “Paul was that great guy who I could call and say, ‘I’m only going to bother you once, I’m not going to keep asking you for favours, but could you put me in touch with…”

Rudd, the decent man he is, threw Hamm a lifeline – well, of sorts. “Paul put me in touch with his manager, who then hooked me up with my first agent at William Morris.” Signed up to the company’s television department, Hamm was looking forward to getting the calls and making the break. The result? Hamm didn’t get a single acting job for three years.

“Los Angeles is very big place by virtue of its size and scope,” adds Hamm, who sounds as wise as any man would, if he too had to learn what the important things in life were before his 21st birthday. “Even when you are working, you tend to find you have a lot of free time, so that can be kind of overwhelming, with the days blending into one another. You don’t really know what you’re doing and you can lose a lot of time. All that rejection, the castings, the waiting and waiting – it can be very demoralising.” Unquestionably Hamm’s lowest ebb was while working as a prop guy on a soft-porn film; he’s hesitant to use the word “fluffer” to describe the gig, but it wasn’t a million miles off. “Self-belief keeps you going at times like that. And your friends. That’s why actors tend to gravitate towards each other in these communities like LA – you meet actors in similar situations and it stokes a reassurance to know you’re not the only one out there floundering. You learn how to suck it up.”

Eventually, however, Hamm’s career jam began to creep. First, there was a multi-episode stretch he won on Providence, a show revolving around the life of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who ditched her job in the city to get all wise and philosophical in the countryside. Next came roles in shows such as Point Pleasant, The Division and The Unit – all decent-paid TV jobs but nothing that might be called a marquee release. In 2002 the work got bigger and more credible with a part starring alongside Mel Gibson in Vietnam epic We Were Soldiers ensuring Hamm’s CV was now in different piles on casting agents’ desks to all those television matinee actors.

Then, in 2006, a script from cable channel AMC turned up. “I was like, AMC? They don’t even make television drama – what is this going to be like?” says Hamm. “But I read it. I loved it. I went for it. And as I’ve said previously, I started at the bottom of everybody’s list for Don Draper. The very bottom. But, thankfully, Matt Weiner saw something in me that others perhaps didn’t.”

Nine Emmys, four Golden Globes, one GQ Men Of The Year award for Television Show Of The Year in 2009, four series and 52 episodes in the can and the world knows – or at least still seems to want to get to know – what Mad Men is all about, and who Don Draper is. Even the Most Powerful Man In The World, President Barack Obama, has come out as a “Maddict”, sending its creator a letter of adoration that takes pride of place above Weiner’s desk in LA. “Trust me, we all heard about that,” laughs Hamm. “Right around the inauguration I heard he was watching. In fact, there was a picture that ran in the New York Times Magazine at that time, showing the inside of Obama’s campaign jet, and in the background on the tray table was the DVD box set of season one. I thought that was so cool. That’s the kind of cultural penetration you can only dream of.”

The question now is, who – or what – does Jon Hamm want to be? As the success of Mad Men grows exponentially, Hamm is able to branch out. He’s looking for variety – any role that isn’t set in Sixties Manhattan, and requires him to shave twice a day, smoke herbal cigarettes like Bill Hicks while looking earnestly into the middle distance, and wear a two-piece grey suit. “See me in a suit – whatever I’m in – and you automatically assume, Don Draper. I could be speaking Spanish and it would be, ‘Oh it’s Spanish Don Draper – cool!’”

“I can’t believe that’s Don Draper” appearances have recently included hosting duties on Saturday Night Live and a cameo in Tina Fey’s 30 Rock, although he admits “funny” isn’t his natural gear. “Alec Baldwin had a great comment about the way he is funny versus the way [30 Rock co-star] Tracy Morgan is funny. He said, ‘I’m funny when I get funny things written for me. Tracy Morgan is funny just walking around on set.’”

However, with this month’s release of The Town, a heist movie directed by and starring Ben Affleck, Hamm has a chance to stretch his big-screen abilities. In a storyline that echoes all-time favourite cops’n'robbers movies such as Heat or Point Break, Hamm plays the by-the-book Boston detective out to foil Affleck’s maverick criminal. British actress Rebecca Hall plays the wronged love interest. “It’s a classic setup movie, and as such in today’s landscape – crowded with vampires and cartoon robots – it feels strangely innovative. I get to wear a flak jacket, and pump a shotgun – it felt like something else, something different to just that Sixties guy.”