David Yurman “David Yurman” (***)

What does Betty Draper smell like?

So, added to the list of privations that the cold end of the year brings us, along with no more baseball or sunshine, there’s the mini-disaster that is the end of Mad Men for another season.

I’m a huge MM fanatic, and if you’re not, then this post isn’t going to make a lick of sense. Do yourself a favor: start with the first season and watch it all the way through. You CANNOT come in in the middle and appreciate it. It’s the best thing on television, however, and by a lot.

For those of you who do watch Mad Men—you know what I’m talking about.As a work of art, Mad Men, in my humble opinion, is a master study in the dynamics of discursive violence. Translated from crit-lit-ese, that means that from our modern viewpoint, some 60 years later, we see and understand the power of language and culture to control and delimit each individual’s life.

It means white men have offices with doors and windows and run things; white women type for them, sitting out exposed in vast undifferentiated spaces, on display and in use; black men, when they are visible at all, are tucked into corners as janitors and elevator operators. Black women, not in any way fit for this world of “real” work, are nannies and maids toiling away in affluent white suburban homes. Jews can navigate this terrain—but with peril. Homosexual men are stuffed so far back into the closet their sham marriages reek of mothballs. Everybody else—of any race, of any identity, of any construct—simply does not exist in this hermetically sealed world.

So how to behave under the bell-jar? There are three things that astound the sensibilities of the modern viewer when watching Mad Men: what goes into people’s mouths, what comes out of their mouths, and what never gets said at all.

Even if you’ve never watched a frame of Mad Men, surely you’ve heard about the cigarettes and the scary marshmallow-filled jello molds and the all-day drinking. (It’s 6:38 a.m. P.S.T., and I’m working on my second Cosmopolitan myself.) The spirit of the era can be summed up thusly: pregnant women smoking in elevators.

Then there’s the things people think to say. A man loses part of his foot in a tragic rider mower accident in the offices of Sterling Cooper. (Don’t ask….it happens…) He had been seen as a rising star, brought all the way from London to shake things up. Now, he is maimed, on the job no less, has nearly died, and is recovering in the hospital. What do the suits say about his impending uselessness as a client manager as they head in to let him go? “He’ll never…golf again.”

But if you ever doubted that the damage that silence can wreak is many times more powerful than any language, Mad Men is the proof.

At the center of Mad Men’s silent heart sits Betty, the cold collapsed dwarf star. Beautiful and useless, she occupies the space where a pampered upper-middle class hothouse flower meets a stifled, betrayed home-maker zombie.

Betty has been consistently my least favorite character on MM. (Other than that freak-weasel Campbell—God I hate that guy…) The two other main female characters, Joan and Peggy, invite us look deeper, to think harder, about what surfaces mean and what about the tiger hearts that beat beneath. But Betty, as a character, does not demonstrate that depth.

(***There are plot spoilers below. If you haven’t seen the latest season, skip down to the next set of these: ***)

Betty, as I read her, has been frozen and unchanging. Men who love her and want to make her happy offer her affairs, but with one drunken exception, she declines them. (Her transgression doesn’t change anything between her and the serially-unfaithful Don.)

She stumbles through one humiliation and betrayal after another, but never offers a positive vision for her marriage with Don, of how things might be. Instead she stews in her depression, bitter and unsatisfied. Even when she gets up the strength to leave her marriage, (with a man that she’s spent, maybe, 45 minutes of actual face-time with) she says to Don, “I could scream at you for ruining all this.” And then doesn’t scream.

None of this would matter much at all to me, and I would suffer Betty as a (weak) character taking up too much time on an otherwise phenomenal show, but for the shattering on-going portrait of the effect that her behavior has on her daughter, Sally.

Now, to be fair, Betty is limited: by her station in life, her upbringing, and her temperament. (I’m still traumatized by the fact that Don feels he can pick up the phone and call her therapist for details and updates on her treatment!?!??!?!? NIGHTMARE!!!!)

And there is absolutely no doubt that Don is to blame for a lot of the misery in his house. But his sins against his wife, as bad as they are, pale in comparison to the abandonment and betrayal that Betty demonstrates toward her children.

Vain and distant, always ready to punish if her children’s emotional needs infringe on her entitlement to be endlessly unhappy, Betty is the epitome of the Ice Queen mother.

It is the most striking portrait of emotional exile I’ve ever run across: Betty’s father has died, and Sally is distraught. She had a special bond with her grandfather, getting the love and attention that she’s been unable to get anywhere else. She storms into the kitchen and starts screaming that he is dead and is never coming back. Betty and Don react accordingly to their natures: Don retreats. (You can see him turn into a turtle, tucking his head back into his shell. He is so mostly useless…)

But Betty’s bubble of misery is under fire, challenged by the emotional demands of her daughter, and her rejection of her daughter’s pain is total annihilation: Shut up. Be quiet. Go to your room.

Then we see a (silent) tableau: In a long shot usually reserved only for scenes of the Sterling Cooper office, we see Don and Betty and other grown-ups sitting around the kitchen table, lit from above in warm light in the background. The foreground is dark: Sally has thrown herself down onto the living room floor to cry. She is lit only by the glow of the black-and-white television. On the evening news, we see a Buddhist monk has doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. Welcome to Sally’s world.

Her grief, rage, and subsequent emotional banishment now smells like gasoline and burning human flesh. And the world of Mad Men as we know it is about to go up in smoke as well.

Julie, a friend and fellow Mad Men maniac, says “Fear the Betty.” For a long time, I did not understand what she meant. I saw Betty as weak and uninteresting. But Julie is a mother, and I’m not. And what she spotted from a long way off that I didn’t see is the corrosive power of Betty’s devastating unhappiness. Fear the Betty, indeed.

****************
So what might Betty smell like? Well, “David Yurman,” to be sure. It may seem odd that I’m linking Betty to a scent I like a whole super lot, at least for a while, but I’m here to make my case.

First off, let’s just talk about surfaces: In general, I don’t pay that much attention to bottles, but the “David Yurman” bottle is gorgeous: great shape, bronze gold muted by frosted glass, the DY bottle manages to be both square and curved, gold and understated, textured and smooth all at once. And I’m not one much for blondes, but by any measure, Bets is a stunner: a Grace Kelly look-alike, the picture of a mid-century American beauty queen. So a golden bottle of juice for the golden girl.

David Yurman is a jeweler, which clearly influenced the bottle design. And Betty is a luxury adornment, the jewel in Don’s crown, the ultimate trophy wife. (Have you ever noticed how she treats her interactions with Don as though he is her job?) Her value as a woman, wife, and mother is measured solely by her looks and her willingness to stay tucked safely away in the suburbs, never intruding on Don’s “real” life.

But here’s the real connection. Betty was put down here on God’s green earth to do one thing better than anybody else: dress up for a night out on the town.

And how does “David Yurman” smell? Like champagne. But the nicest, happiest champagne ever. (I swear I can smell the yeast for the first few minutes before it blows off.) DY smells like a bottle of bubbly at the swankest, heppest night club in the world: there’s a green apple note that makes it lively, and I’ll bet the farm there’s acetate in it to make it sparkle.

For a few minutes, it smells of stars, but then it settles into a rose heart construction, flanked on one side by green apple, the other by happy fresh hay. (The scent notes say cassis and patchouli. Whatever-- it's my party, I'll smell what I want to...) The lightest wood imaginable—bamboo maybe?--holds it up.

After 15 minutes or so, it changes again: the water lily component steps up and becomes the dominant theme. In my opinion, it is the best use of water lily that I have smelled so far. It's journey is the same as pure water lily oil: first lively and spicy, then gardenia indolent, then the yolky creaminess of crème brûlée.

And finally, there’s an aquatic element which is what made me say “wow” to DY in the first place: while so many “rich-lady” scents have musks to ground them in the roof of your sinuses and the back of your throat, and powders that expand out to take up more and more space, in DY, that aquatic element has the strangest effect: your nose hits a wall. DY demonstrates a certain restraint. As in: I will smell so far and then smell no further. It is contained—a boundried scent shape which is a quality I deeply admire. It parallels Betty’s in-bred physical poise, and her endless emotional constraint.

But DY does disappoint after a while— like Betty’s and Don’s marriage, the more time you spend with it, the less there is. DY breaks down, shedding elements and growing less interesting. The drydown is muddled and collapsed-- no woods, no musks, no spices or incense-- and finally, no point of view. I've worn DY more than half-a-dozen times, trying to love it after much past an hour, but the best I can do is a Jolly Rancher green apple sucker in a french vanilla cream froth. And I can't justify that.

Like Betty, at first I say: "Gorgeous." Then I say: gorgeous, yes, but then what?

Betty has had three long seasons to be bitterly miserable. She’s made a break, to be sure, but it’s not clear she’s made a change. Hurry back, Mad Men—I’m dying to find out what happens next.

As for Bets—I hope she gets what she’s aiming for.

Image Credits here.