May 23--Within the space of 72 hours last week, a pair of aging alpha males, one real, one fictional, said goodbye for good. Both feel like the last of their breed. Both carried great symbolic weight. Both revealed a lot about the changing face of retirement -- actually the new terror thereof. Before their millions of fans, both the "Mad Men" character Don Draper and longtime talk show host David Letterman went out heaping scorn on late-in-life leisure and venerating the life-giving force of work.
On Sunday, there was Don meditating on some idyllic California cliff, acutely aware, as ever, of the existential angst that inevitably results from subsuming one's creative genius into the selling of baked beans (or its equivalent in all our lives). His had been a working lifetime of running away from truth, of self-obfuscation. And this was 1970, when a guy could drop out and be seen as a convert, not an eccentric or a failure. Heck, we knew Don was rich enough to have written a $1 million exit check to his second ex-wife. But what did Draper do, as his lips formed "Om" and a good portion of America wondered if he was soon about to take a leap into the Pacific?
Reinvent himself? Find God? Retire?
Perish the thought. He went back to work. So did his colleague Joan, who ditched a very comfortable late-in-life romance for sticky notes and a new project.
In fact, show creator Matthew Weiner's much-anticipated finale for "Mad Men" implied, the great ad-man hero maybe had conned us all. What had looked like a voyage of self discovery over the last several episodes was really a research trip, a way to create a feel-good, hippy ad for a multi-national corporation like Coca Cola that somehow felt authentic. Given how carefully Coke -- the great advertising nirvana of the final season of "Mad Men" -- had been foreshadowed and quietly planted into the final season, a constant smackdown of any notes of idealism, it was possible to construe that Don's entire cross-journey odyssey had merely been his greatest creative corporate act. Aging folks in the workplace know the perils of being associated with a lack of innovation, of resistance to change. Draper merely was figuring out how to stay ahead of the kids in the office.
And Letterman? He certainly did not go out looking forward to any golden years of leisure. To watch his final shows last week was to witness a ruthless series of parodies of retirement celebrations, exits, departures, victory laps, venerations, sails off into the sunset, whatever you want to call them. The 68-year-old Letterman began on Monday with self-mockery of his age, his situation and the triviality of his post-show life -- and it only intensified over the course of a week as he swatted away sentimentality on all sides.
When Bill Murray jumped out of a retirement cake on Tuesday, vodka ready to swill, it was not so much a comic version of a workplace farewell as an acerbic repudiation thereof, a disavowal of any aging. By Wednesday, Letterman was really on a roll: "I'll you something else, and I know you are people are well-meaning, but I am sick and tired -- maybe, Paul, you get a little of this -- 'What are you going to do now that you're retired? What are you going to do now that you're retired?' OK, all right, you want to know what I'm going to do when I retire? I hope to become the new face of Scientology."
By the time the inevitable online criticisms of Letterman's retro-geezer farewell started to appear, you knew he'd accomplish what he had set out to do.
Letterman's longtime staff, who had aged with their boss, certainly were nostalgic and, maybe, ready for a change. And like a lot of workers preparing to exit, they wanted to remind us of the cultural centrality of a show that was on the air for more than three decades. So there were presidents doing cameos, A-listers reduced to standing in a line of 10, and the mother of all memory montages. But although polite and (by Letterman's standards) grateful, Letterman did not seem to have his heart in much of that stuff, except perhaps for the kids blowing things up. Indeed, in Wednesday's final show, the most authentic moment was the most prosaic -- the seemingly unvarnished backstage look at the office of Worldwide Pants, where Letterman worked with his staffers on the grunt work of the show, the part that clearly they all most enjoyed.
The morning after Letterman's exit, a local media executive said to me that no show now could possibly last that long or achieve the Letterman level of saturation, an observation rooted not just in admiration for Letterman but awareness of how the landscape has changed. When Letterman trucked out his staff for an on-air appearance earlier in the week, you could imagine millions of viewers telling their spouses and friends how middle-aged they all seemed, how they all clearly had grown old in their job, their great job, their same job. Millennials everywhere were doubtless thinking that no such job ever will exist for them.
In that regard, Don and Dave were maybe the last of a more stable workplace era -- a moment when you may not always get the control you want or your dream job on the "Tonight Show," but when the basic gig could be trusted to be there in some form.
Draper, of course, was the alter-ego of Weiner, who, at 49, is nearly 20 years younger than Letterman. Clearly, he wants to keep working too. No "Om" for him.
Several years ago at a graduation at Columbia College in Chicago, the Second City pioneer Bernie Sahlins told some graduates in the cultural field that they were fortunate enough to have chosen a life that knew no separation between work and leisure. This, he said, was the key to happiness: live your work, work your life. Of course, you need to be lucky enough to be healthy and to enjoy what you do, and that probably mostly means that you have to be able to put up with the politics and the other downsides of the workplace. But as Don and Dave told us last week, staying relevant beats the golf course and any and all awards of lifetime achievement.
Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
