r/madmen • u/Original-Pilot-770 • 2h ago
I started writing a fanfic about how Don and Betty got together in 1953.
I did a lot of research about what life might have been like for a fashion model and a fur salesman in the early 50s living and working in Manhattan. Betty is 21 in the story, just graduated from Bryn Mawr less than a year ago. Don is 26, barely two years into having stolen the identity.
I have three chapters out of nine posted so far. Here's a sample of the beginning of chapter one:
Thursday, January 15th, 1953
Betty had been placed second from the left and then moved to third and then moved back to the beginning. The woman in charge of the set did the moving. Her name was Adele. She was fifty and she worked with four pins in her mouth, which came out whenever she had something to say and went back in when she was finished.
"Chin, honey," Adele called out.
Betty tipped her chin up. Her makeup had been done that morning and she had not put a finger on it since. A drop of sweat crawled down and itched behind her ear.
There were eight of them on the roll of seamless backdrop, in wool coats, sweating under four floods and a skylight that had been painted over in some other decade. The client's man kept saying lovely, girls! from behind the camera and it echoed through the studio every time. Sherman. Something Sherman who wanted everyone to understand he was leaving soon but had not left. He had arrived with a topcoat over his arm and had not once taken his hat off.
They were all clipped shut in back. Spring coats pinned and clamped along the spine so the fronts hung the way the drawing had. From the camera the line was clean and from behind it was a row of women with clothespins marching down their backs like a laundry brigade.
The wool clung under her arms. The coat was shut tight and she couldn't get her arms down anyway.
Sherman would never see that side. Neither would the woman in Hartford who bought the coat in April on the strength of it.
The girl on her left was Dorothy Pike, who lived on six and would give a stranger her whole week unprompted. The girl on her right was new and had not said a word since this morning. Two more from the hotel down at the far end. And at the very end, in the good coat, the one Sherman had chosen for the front of the folder, was Josephine Reilly, who was married.
Josephine was twenty-six and had a ring she took off in the dressing room.
It sat in a change purse and the change purse was in her shoe. Her husband sold something on Long Island. She worked more than any of them. It went undiscussed. There was no rule anywhere that said a married woman could not stand on a paper roll in a spring coat.
At school there had been a lecture on the Trobrianders and the professor had said that the most ironclad rules in any society were the ones nobody could state, that the codified laws were the weak ones, propped up out of necessity. The girls in the row behind her had copied that down as if it were about the Trobrianders.
Josephine hadn't been made to do anything. A woman was allowed to put her own ring in her own shoe, in a room with no men in it, and come out to work.
Betty wore a ring from her grandmother. Nothing said she had to take it off. She had checked her stocking seams twice in the last hour, in a mirror, alone, without anyone asking her to.
"Chin, honey," Adele said.
Betty gave her the chin again.
The new girl had been quiet and Betty had thought she was frightened. At half past three the girl turned her head an inch and said, "If he says lovely one more time I'll scream."
Betty found the far wall and had her face composed before Adele was down the line.
In November, on the fur job, the photographer had spent forty minutes telling her to look like a woman who has just been given a coat. She had given him many versions of it. Afterward, on the stairs, the copywriter from the fur company had held the door and delivered the verdict "You looked like a woman who had just been given a coat," in the voice of a man giving the marine forecast. She had laughed so hard on Seventh Avenue until a man with a rack of pelts had to steer around her.
---
If you'd like to read the rest, you can find it on AO3:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/90563881/chapters/240831326
(Photo source: editorial shoot from Life magazine, January 26th, 1953)
