In the opening episode of Mad Men’s second season, Don Draper read a mesmerizing passage from Frank O’Hara’s “” The result was an immediate and sustained jump in sales of the poet’s work — it seemed that, just as Frank O’Hara (along with other writers like John Cheever, Jane Jacobs, and Sherwood Anderson) directly influenced the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, so Weiner directly influenced a twenty-first century revival of O’Hara’s work.
It’s only fitting, then, that he is narrating a new edition of Frank O’Hara’s for Audible Studios. Weiner spoke with the audiobook’s producer, Susie Bright, about how the poet inspired him to create Mad Men, and particularly its iconic protagonist.
What it was like, as a person and as a writer, to discover Frank O’Hara
Matthew Weiner
Interview pt. 1
I read Frank O’Hara pretty late. I was already a writer and certainly wasn’t writing poetry anymore. I felt like there was someone standing next to me who was the wittiest and most sarcastic and most gloomy and beautiful writer that I had encountered in a long time.
As a writer, all I wanted to do was make sure I could be that honest, and that I could get in touch with that voice — whatever that voice was — and that I wasn’t afraid to be profane or grotesque, or self-loving and self-hating in my work. Frank O’Hara is about honesty. There is a voice there that is about honesty, about “this is who I am.”
I wrote a poem when I was in college that was for my college thesis, and it was about how I would never use a pen name and that I was basically a stripper, in some way. When I read Frank O’Hara, I was like oh, here it is; this guy is really a stripper.
What Frank O’Hara brought to the character of Don Draper
Matt Weiner
Interview Pt. 2
The reason why Frank O’Hara was such a good intersection with the character of Don Draper in Mad Men was because … not only the period that he’s writing, but also the voice he’s writing in; first of all, you are getting a New York that I couldn’t afford to shoot. Second of all, you are getting this very modern, contemporary sense of personhood that is existing inside Don, no matter what he looks like. I wanted to show that Don Draper is a curious person. His costume and his face are different than the person who is inside.
Then, when I actually started reading the poems the reason that it inspired me to use them at all was this voice of honesty. He is the . He is the observer and, for Don to feel this way inside … Frank is gay. He is a New Yorker. He is Irish. He has nothing in common with Don Draper in many ways, but the voice inside says there’s an artist here who is experiencing the world and is not necessarily jiving with it.
