Mad about the '60s

Mad Men is more than a series about an advertising agency, it sells us on today’s midcentury style

In this undated image released by AMC Don and Megan Draper's apartment from the current season's premiere of "Mad Men" arranged by set decorator Claudette Didul is seen. (AP Photo/AMC, Michael Yarish)
In this undated image released by AMC Don and Megan Draper's apartment from the current season's premiere of "Mad Men" arranged by set decorator Claudette Didul is seen. (AP Photo/AMC, Michael Yarish)

Mad Men is back for a last look at the series' midcentury house and office settings.

Cocktail carts, stereo cabinets, shag carpet and sunken living rooms: surroundings to make even despair look stylish.

The Sunday night AMC cable television series ends with the current season, the seventh. The last run of seven episodes started Sunday. But even if this means goodbye to advertising super-salesman Don Draper and the Sterling Cooper and Partners agency, it won't be the finish of retro style.

Nostalgia, as Don said, "is a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone."

Mad Men portrays an era of big-city sophistication and suburban dreams-come-true (even if they didn't) that never went away in appeal, only in pieces.

Some of yesterday's trendy furnishings have gone to the flea market. Don's smoking stand would stink in today's smoke-free office.

But suppose Don's agency had been in Little Rock. It probably would have been in Little Rock's Tower Building, the state's tallest building in the Mad Men era, and the window with the highest view still denotes power.

The rotary-dial wall phone dates the kitchen in Don and former wife Betty's house. The letter rack and bill organizer by the phone show that mail was a bigger part of the household operation than with today's email and automatic bill payments.

Visitors to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, N.Y., can see for themselves. The museum's current exhibit, "Matthew Weiner's Mad Men," through June 14, includes the show's kitchen set. Close up, the set reveals producer Weiner's attention to period detail -- and a truth about home decor. Today keeps hold on the past, and the past retains a deeper past.

The glass-top electric coffee percolator looks shiny-new on the clean counter, as it would have been to impress company. But the luster is gone from the everyday whistling tea kettle. The floral-patterned dish towel could have belonged to Betty's mother. The cast-iron trivets could have come from her grandmother's kitchen.

Today's brand-new kitchen is apt to look, in some ways, like Betty's. Refrigerator colors come and go, but Betty's is the same classic choice as now, white. The Ritz crackers on top of her refrigerator come in about the same box as today's, red.

Near the same-as-ever toaster, the fictional Betty Draper keeps a 1967 copy of the also fictional homemaker Betty Crocker's Hostess Cookbook. Yesterday's guides to entertaining encouraged such bold choices as rumaki (bacon-wrapped chicken livers, a hold-over from the 1950s' tiki craze), and the exotic idea of cold soup -- gazpacho.

The series' characters -- ne'er-do-well Roger Sterling, ambitious Peggy Olson and crafty Joan Harris -- face a new era, and so new surroundings. Changing times are

about to dispense with some of the home and office items they take for granted, but not everything.

Mad Men revived a certain part of the past, but great looks endure even without reminders. Here, for example -- an alphabetical array of timeless furnishings and decor from Mad Men, and how to have the same things now:

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"As dependable as they are good looking." -- Westclox ad, midcentury

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Alarm clock. The midcentury go-getter stepped smartly on time to his first meeting of the day thanks to an actual alarm clock. He made sure to wind it the night before.

Today's cellphone does the same job with a beep, but it can't equal the bed-stand flair of a retro-looking alarm with a black or red, metal or plastic case on legs -- sometimes, a pedestal.

Westclox is a past and current brand of such timepieces, including the Big Ben. Some of today's Big Ben alarm clocks evoke the decades even before Mad Men, the 1930s and '40s.

Ashtrays. Don pitches Lucky Strikes to a generation of heavy smokers. People flicked ashes and ground out cigarette butts all through the house. A functional glass tray would do for the nightstand, but the living room called for an object of art -- or several.

Prized among today's collectors, blue and amber, swirly curvy-sculptured Murano glass ashtrays from Italy. Online, the collectibles sell in a range from $25 and $50 to hundreds.

If the Japanese car-maker Nissan had come to Don for the name of a new car, he could have found the answer in his ashtray: the Nissan Murano.

Old ashtrays are good for holding everything from paperclips to after-diner mints.

Barware. Cocktail culture of the Mad Men era demanded not only high-class crystal, but also knowing what kind of drink properly goes in which exact kind of glass. Roger would sooner muss his silver hair than serve an Old Fashioned (whiskey) in a Tom Collins glass (gin).

AMC offers a Mad Men mixologist's guide to cocktail recipes with photos showing the appropriate glassware -- martini, Manhattan, gimlet -- at amctv.com.

• Cocktail cart. Glasses and liquor bottles go on a rolling cart of the kind that Betty could transport to a party gathering anywhere in the house. In case of the Betty-like hostess being cold as the ice in a gin rickey, the party gathered around the cart.

Housewares stores have serving carts in the $100 range. Dedicated cocktail carts are specially made to keep the bottles and glasses from rattling and falling off. Top-end Lakeside Geneva carts boast three tiers of maple, and sell for $1,000 and up.

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"The handiest Sheer Look beauty Frigidaire has ever made." -- candy pink refrigerator ad, midcentury

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Coo-coo colors. Midcentury decor went against the idea that carpet is brown and refrigerators are white. The brown Frigidaire ruled the kitchen, and the carpet was more likely burnt orange -- and shag -- or the polar opposite, white.

Roger takes note of the trend when he says, "Psychiatry is just this year's candy pink stove." He might have been wrong about discontented housewives and their analysts, but he was spot on with the pink stove as a reality of the times -- in fact, the whole pink kitchen.

Today's big-box store refrigerators: mostly white, black and stainless steel.

But today's don't have to rely on baked enamel to be colorful. The modern fridge doubles as an all-purpose bulletin board, cartoon repository and children's art gallery thanks to a gadget that caught on about the time that Mad Men depicts -- the refrigerator magnet.

Desk lamp. Bright computer screens make it easy to forget how dim the home or office desk surface used to be without a boost. Don's desk is equipped with a twin desk lamp and flanking floor lamps, besides. A desk lamp creates the nifty design element of a circle of light.

Legs. English fashion designer Mary Quant's mini-skirts showed legs, and so did the furniture in Don and new wife Megan's apartment. The sofa did the mini-skirt one better: It went skirt-less. Living room chairs showed their legs, too, and coffee and end tables perched on spindly limbs.

Case in point: the club chair, an upholstered chair that proudly shows its legs, long or stubby all the same. The name comes from the sort of chair a man might settle into at the club -- a bygone men's sanctuary. Playboy Clubs had club chairs.

Don tears the ads out of Playboy to stay current. The magazine offered bachelor pad decor advice as well: everything clean, angular.

The look endures. Today, the style is called midcentury modern. Bring it home with accent pillows made of geometric-patterned fabric.

Designers Charles and Ray Eames highly influenced the style, and the Eames lounge chair of rosewood and leather remains a treasure. Art museums house some of the originals, and even reproductions cost into thousands of dollars.

Media cabinets. The popularity of high fidelity sound equipment and hi-fi vinyl records created a substantial new piece of living room furniture: the low cabinet that held everything.

Hi-fi gave way to stereo, vinyl to compact disc, box-size speakers to shelf-top speakers -- a smaller-to-smaller progression en route to a sound system the size of a pack of Fruit Stripe gum, the iPod.

But the old gear retains a following of audiophiles who contend the sound is warmer, the listening experience better the way it was 50 years ago.

New vinyl releases and record players have come back. Bob Dylan's latest (Shadows in the Night) and the new one from The Who (Who's Next) cost about $20 on vinyl. A new record player can be had for less than $100.

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"A go-go." -- Olympia portable typewriter ad, midcentury

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• Typewriters. The clatter of keys, the ding of the carriage return. Norman Mailer wrote this way, and James Michener and Irving Wallace, and the typewriter endures as the symbol of being a writer -- a plastic keyboard just doesn't say it.

Yesterday's typewriter keys are today's earrings and necklaces, and some writers have gone back to the real thing.

Online sources offer reconditioned typewriters and ink ribbons for a chance to pound the keys like Ernest Hemingway did for a time in Piggott. And there's Hemingwrite -- a prototype word processor that looks like an old-fashioned typewriter at hemingwrite.com -- now preselling at $399. A white screen takes the place of paper, and cloud storage does the job of a file cabinet.

Hemingwrite is among several ideas that meld the look of a midcentury writing machine with computer technology. Another is the clack-and-ding Hanx Writer, a free iPad app developed by actor and typewriter devotee Tom Hanks.

Tufted headboard. No matter if Don and Betty's marriage hit the rocks, their bedroom looked comfy thanks to the era's fondness for all things tufted and quilted.

Even some box stores have tufted headboards these days. Prices vary from a few to several hundreds of dollars as the choice goes upscale.

Wall clock. Yesterday's office clock said the same as today's: Time is money. But yesterday's living room wall clock was something else, especially the signature piece of time decor -- the sunburst clock. Still a popular design, it features the clock face surrounded by varying kinds of lines and arrows that look like sunbeams.

Also enduring from decades back, the eye-rolling, tail-swinging Kit Cat Clock was a fixture of many a kitchen, and still is. Today's Cat is $50, still made by the California Clock Co. in Fountain Valley, Calif. The web site, www.kit-cat.com tells more than 80 years' history of the kind of product that never needed big advertising: one that sells itself.

Window blinds and wood paneling. Not even Sterling Cooper could sell today's decorator on some of the sock-to-the-eye wallpaper designs that were in style 50 years ago. But today's wall panel installer has a choice far beyond knotty pine: oak, distressed oak, cedar, white, swirled, patterned.

Blinds still do as always: They cast the coolest-looking shadows.

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"You have everything. And so much of it." -- Peggy to Don

HomeStyle on 04/11/2015

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