A Mad Man is Born.
Skip is second from the right, with his ABC colleagues in 1963.
In the late summer of 1963, a young man named Skip Branch set off from Salt Lake City for Los Angeles with his wife. The couple temporarily left their one year-old toddler at home in Utah with his grandparents as Mom and Dad set off for the big city to pursue a new life. Skip was putting himself on a path that would land him squarely into the world of TV’s Mad Men.
At 21 years old, Skip was only a few years younger than the fictional advertising executives and creative staff of the hit AMC show. He had no job lined up, not even any interviews — just a notion that he would become a writer or an actor. Somebody mentioned advertising to him as a possible career so his job search expanded in that direction.
In a month, Skip landed a job with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network working in advertising sales. His starting salary was $400 per month. The family moved in to a basement apartment next to the freeway and they barely had enough money for food.
Skip Branch had arrived on the ground floor of an industry at a time in America that Skip says is faithfully captured by Mad Men’s creator Mathew Weiner. His office was at Hollywood and Vine. The famous Hollywood Brown Derby–a place where deals were made–was around the corner. Brooks Brothers suits were the uniform of the day. Skip had arrived.
His first day at work played out like a scene from Mad Men. “Two of the guys I worked with took me to lunch. When we arrived, the waitress already knew what they were drinking: a vodka gimlet and a vodka martini on the rocks. I ordered a vodka martini on the rocks. Before we ordered our food we had to have a second round. One of the guys was on to his third drink by the time our food arrived. By then my cheeks were getting numb and I think I was slurring my speech, so I stopped there. Back at the office I had a cup of coffee and went in to the bathroom and slapped my cheeks so I could face the rest of the day. By the time I drove home I had a hangover. All of this on my first day on the job!”
When asked if he continued to drink after that initial lunch, he didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely. I loved it. I drank vodka martinis on the rocks the whole time I was at ABC.
On Mad Men there is hardly a scene without someone dragging on a cigarette. Skip confirmed that this was indeed the way it was. Offices were filled with ash trays and “98% of the people smoked.” Skip began smoking when he was 16. “It was considered a rite of passage at the private school I attended. I continued smoking until 1966. At that time I was skiing with a friend at Mammoth Mountain. He told me he was going to quit smoking that weekend and I decided I should too. Cigarettes gave me headaches and I knew they weren’t good for me. While people generally knew smoking was bad for them by this time, not very many people were quitting yet. Back at the office I had to explain to people that I didn’t smoke anymore and to some extent I was the odd man out. This remained the case well into the 1970s.”
“Honey,” “sweetheart,” “cutie,” these are the nicknames of the professional women of Mad Men. Skip confirms that this was the norm of the day. From his perspective it wasn’t derogatory, it was just the way things were. The secretarial pool was where most women in the workplace could be found but there were exceptions.
As a 21 year-old starting out at ABC, Skip had his own secretary and it was a 33 year-old man. “This was very unusual.” Skip’s second secretary was a woman and somewhat like Mad Men’s Peggy Olson. “My new secretary was very good and was eager for the job. She would do anything to break in to the advertising business and this was her chance.”
In the 1960s there were “a few women who were executives and they were treated like executives. I didn’t notice that they had less power than a guy. One thing I did know, however, and it’s something that everyone, especially women, knew, is that a woman always made less than a man. This was just accepted and I never heard anyone complain about it (although they may have privately).”
During his ABC years he was sent on a sales trip to San Francisco to meet an advertiser who was “an old broad in the business—that was the term people used at the time.” He was told to be prepared to match her drink for drink when they met as well as the admonition that no matter how she looks and acts, she remembers everything. (For Mad Men fans, imagine someone like season two’s character Bobbie Barrett, but 15 years older, at least 10 pounds lighter after years of rough living, and still very much in the game.) At the lunch they started putting down the martinis. Skip began to slow down his consumption while she steamed ahead. “She began to totter in her seat, and her face finally made contact with her plate. She sat back up and had a piece of lettuce on her forehead that stayed there for the rest of our meeting. Luckily it got knocked off as she stood up to leave.”
Skip says that the feel of Mad Men and the way that the show portrays the social mores of that era are “spot on.” “I’m as much impressed with the set design, styling and wardrobe as anything else. The smoking looks overdone but it was that bad – enough to make you choke.”
In late 1966 Skip Branch returned to Salt Lake City. At the time ABC offered him a promotion with a good salary to take a job in New York. It was a great opportunity, but he missed the mountains and Alta, his favorite ski area. He was ready to return home. His first job in Salt Lake was as a copywriter. He quickly moved on to become an advertising sales manager at a Salt Lake City television station. In the early 1970s Skip opened his own advertising agency and has been on that side of the business ever since.
In the fourth season of Mad Men the show jumps forward a year from where it left off. The fictional agency from the first three seasons split apart and the show’s protagonist, Don Draper, just got divorced. With a new agency and a new life as a single man in New York this season opened with Don struggling to find his footing.
In 1963 a young Skip Branch found his footing with a start on the media side of the ad business. He had more children and his career flourished. The ABC experience was treated like an elite MBA when he returned to Utah. Skip remains actively engaged in the ad industry as a senior partner at RIESTER, a regional advertising agency with offices in Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Phoenix. To many of us the early sixties seem very far away. For Skip Branch, it was when he came of age and launched his career as a Mad Man.
