If it turns out that “Mad Men” has actually been a seven-season back story for the most mysterious real-life figure in modern history, it will rank as the most bravura achievement in entertainment history.
The series finale will air a week from Sunday on AMC, and growing speculation online among fans has it that the main character, the suave and troubled advertising legend, Don Draper, will turn out to be the skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper, who, clutching $200,000 in ransom money, parachuted from a commercial airplane in November 1971.
Like many outlandish theories, it makes some sense. (The discussion that follows contains some minor spoilers if you’re not current on the show.)
Though the series is ostensibly a high-tone soap opera about men and women in the advertising business in Manhattan in the 1960s, the issues of identity and reinvention are frequent undercurrents. “Don Draper” is, itself, an alias for a man born Dick Whitman.
The story has used news and cultural events of that tumultuous decade as signposts, and woven real people and actual advertising campaigns into the plot. A final scene in which fiction and nonfiction collide spectacularly would be both fitting and haunting.
Consider: The man in real life who identified himself as Dan Cooper when he bought a one-way ticket from Portland, Ore., to Seattle wore a business suit, smoked cigarettes, drank bourbon and was said to be in his mid-40s. This fits perfectly with Don Draper — played by Jon Hamm, 44 — who worked at a firm founded by a man with the last name Cooper.
The still-unknown skyjacker was calm and steely, like Draper, when he announced he had a bomb in his briefcase. But he was also considerate, like Draper, when he allowed passengers to disembark when the flight landed in Seattle for him to pick up the cash and parachutes he demanded.
Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, he bailed out of a rear exit. Neither he nor his parachute were ever found, though $5,800 of the ransom money was unearthed in Washington in 1980.
The opening title sequence showing a silhouetted male figure plunging downward against a backdrop of skyscrapers has long suggested that the series will end in Don’s suicide, but what if it’s simply meant to evoke a free fall?
Writer Lindsey Green predicted this surprise ending in “Where Don Draper ends, D.B. Cooper begins,” a June 2013 essay posted to Medium.com. In a passage that will make sense only to fans of the show, she wrote:
“From Mohawk to American, North American Aviation, and Ted’s own little two-seater, airlines and aviation are about as prevalent on the show as aliases and fake identities. Even when Joan was upset after being served divorce papers from Dr. Harris, it was a model airplane she grabbed and threw at the unassuming receptionist as Don stood in the doorway. ‘Mad Men’ has been telling us how the story ends from the very beginning. It ends on an airplane.”
I know, I know. It also sounded to me an awful lot like those “Paul (McCartney) is dead” theories from the early 1970s that combined meaningless coincidence with irrelevant fact to generate outlandish conclusions.
Green’s musings seemed like merely an opportunity to remember the D.B. Cooper mystery and to imagine the 24/7 frenzy with which cable news channels would have covered the story had they existed in 1971, nothing more.
After all, an earlier, similarly rococo prediction that Don’s ex-wife would be murdered by disciples of Charles Manson in the August 1969 massacre proved false as the main “Mad Men” characters safely entered the 1970s.
And Don Draper was still living and working in New York as the third-to-last episode began last Sunday. But then …
He spotted an airplane — ahem — out an office window, walked out of a meeting, got in his car and headed to Racine, Wis., in search of a former lover. When that search failed, rather than head back home, Draper picked up a hitchhiker who said he was headed to St. Paul — west, not east.
“I can go that way,” said Draper.
But will he go all the way? All the way to the Portland airport, where he will reinvent himself yet again?
If so, it will be a final plot twist for the ages, in retrospect turning “Mad Men” from a period drama into the most elaborate mystery story ever on screen.
If not, well, it was fun to think about.
Twitter @ericzorn
LINKS:
Wikipedia D.B. Cooper and Charles Manson
The Daily Beast: Did This Woman Predict ‘Mad Men’s Ending Two Years Ago?
Slate: Julia Turner interviews Geoffrey Gray, author of the 2012 book “Skyjack” all about the Cooper case and resulting phenomenon.
The second half of season 7 leading up to the finale May 17, began with an episode set in April, 1970.
Nothing yet has suggested the passage of enough time for Don’s extemporaneous car trip Sunday to end up on the West Coast in November, 1971. Betty appeared to be watching “McCloud” on TV last week, which simply establishes that the time is now September 16, 1970 or thereafter. Then again, it wasn’t until 1975 that Miller began selling Miller Lite,which was the product under discussion at the meeting that Don walked out of.
